More Foodfight! Material DISCOVERED
That's right, I'm back. Just like I prophesized in my last post, yet another treasure trove of Foodfight! goodness has been uncovered, and this might be one of the strangest to date...that's right, official Foodfight! Cinnamon Sleuth Cereal was sold at Albertsons back in 2007, over five years before the movie finally came out!
Okay, not really, but I had you going for a second, right? So, this IS a proposed packaging design for actual Cinnamon Sleuth cereal, but it never went into production, it never made it to stores and there was certainly never any actual cereal to be eaten. This, among several other designs and a collection of behind the scenes material, was sent in recently by a Foodfight! crewmember, who explained they were mockups created to show off possible tie-in products. I'm not sure why they chose Albertsons for these mockups but it's likely they were in talks with them at the time and wanted to show off designs including their branding. In any case, I just had the Cinnamon Sleuth box printed because I thought it'd look cool next to my collection of Foodfight! merchandise, and I wanted to see if anyone would be convinced this really existed.
I've included all the designs above in case you want to print your own- there are several more including another cereal, brownie packaging and milk cartons. Curiously, the milk cartons have Farmland Dairy logos on them, with Farmland Milk actually appearing in the finished film at several points. I'd say this confirms my theory these mockups were created to show to companies they were already actively working on deals with, but I can't say for certain that was the case.
Equally curious are these character sheets from 2002, seemingly showing off almost every model created during early production. There are so many fascinating layers to this- Sunshine is still a human instead of a catgirl, showcasing a very different model to the one seen in the initial trailer, and Maximilius Moose is still a dog named Panzer Pup, both aspects that were changed once the decision was made to change Dex to a dog. However, it may be that Dex's human design was edited out and replaced after the fact, given Dex's model here appears to be the one from the finished film (you can tell by the weird hands). In any case, it's fascinating to get a closer look at all these characters- while the majority of the models for the main cast were found recently (see my last post for more on this), there are a bunch of side characters here we've only seen brief glimpses of before, including the Pringles man and the scantily-clad Cherry Waifer. The most fascinating to me however are the Red and Yellow M&Ms- I've read through their scene in the movie's script, I've seen multiple versions of the storyboard, even rough layout animation in the workprint, and it's only now I'm FINALLY getting to see their actual character models and how they would've looked in the Foodfight! artstyle. Sure, they more or less look exactly as they did in M&M commercials that aired around the same time, but it's still amazing to actually see these characters modelled and rendered after analyzing so many different iterations of the scene as it went through development.
The crewmember in question also sent a folder containing over a hundred stills which while at first glance appear to be from the finished movie, are actually subtly different in multiple ways- usually lighting, facial expressions, or background textures like the sky or color of a hill. A lot of these are labelled "fix" which makes me speculate if after the movie was completed, the crew went back and tried to touch up the animation to make it look more appealing before release. Is there a slightly better looking version of Foodfight! somewhere out there in the world? Who knows, but really it would've been like trying to polish a turd. The movie was already ruined by then, and I don't think any number small changes would've done much to salvage it. However, that does bring me to my next interesting point...
There are also storyboards dated May 2011, depicting an alternate opening to the movie giving a much more cinematic introduction to the main characters. It's crazy to think they were still working on storyboards so late in production, but there IS actually a reason for this. I unfortunately can't upload the entire sequence due to this site's image limit, but what you might notice are a lot of characters being described as "flying over the audience", "flying into the camera" or knocking things "into the audience", with some of the boards having "(3D)" written in parenthesis next to them. It's my belief that very late into production, Kasanoff wanted the movie to be 3D, made popular by the then-recent Avatar, and this new opening sequence full of flashy 3D effects was drawn up to show off what they could do with the technology. It's not clear if any of this was ever actually animated, but imagine going to see a movie that advertises itself as 3D but only the first minute contains any 3D elements. Of course, Kasanoff requesting this is only speculation on my part, but given how the movie was ruined by the crew having to cater to his whim of directing the whole thing with motion capture (made popular by the then-recent Polar Express) it's no stretch to assume the 3D opening sequence was a similar situation.
There's a ton more that was sent to us as well, so much so that I could never hope to talk about all of it. However, it should be on archive.org at the time of writing this if it isn't already, and you can now access everything Foodfight! related through the official Foodfight! collection on there!
That's right, so much Foodfight! material has been uploaded over the past year that the Internet Archive gave it its own archive, allowing you to find everything in one convenient place (including my scans of the novelization and Deluxe Sound Storybook). It'll also be updated periodically whenever something new is found, so it'll always be the home to all things Foodfight!. Whether you're wanting to take a look at some concept art shown in ROTTEN: Behind The Foodfight, read through an early draft of the script, or check out something I've talked about on my blog, it's all here at your fingertips.
I don't think there's ever really going to be an end to the depth of the Foodfight! rabbithole. I thought I was done a year ago when I finished analyzing the novelization, and look at everything that's been found since then. Every time I think I'm out, this movie pulls me back in. So...in my next post I'll FINALLY show off my collection of Foodfight! merchandise and talk about what this movie means to me, but that doesn't mean it's the end for this blog. Whenever I say I'm done with Foodfight! I end up jinxing it, so if I try to conclude things now in a few months some CD will show up with a bunch of lost footage on it, I'll get mailed concept art of a bunch of characters we've never seen before, or it'll turn out Larry Kasanoff was actually D.B. Cooper the whole time. So as long as there's something new to discuss, as long as there's a Foodfight to be fought, I'll keep updating this blog from now until forever. You better duck when they launch the cream pies!
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