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Don Knotts' ''The Incredible Mr. Limpet'' was almost remade with Jim Carrey in the lead role
Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles, was signed on, too!
Back in December 2013, comedian Patton Oswalt was a guest on the music, call-in, and comedy Internet radio show/podcast The Best Show with Tom Scharpling. Throughout the program, Oswalt told stories about movies and Hollywood and regaled the host with a true tale of one movie that never came to be: A canceled remake of Don Knotts' 1964 The Incredible Mr. Limpet.
According to Oswalt, a Limpet reboot was in development in 1998, with the project set to star Jim Carrey, who was — at the time — an absolute box office behemoth.
Steve Odekerk, who directed the Jim Carrey smash Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, was brought on board to write and direct the Incredible Mr. Limpet remake, but backed out of the project in '99. That's when Pixar superstar-to-be director Brad Bird stepped in for a meeting to discuss directing the movie.
Here's Oswalt's recollection of a conversation he had with Bird about the project:
"They CG-animated a cartoony-looking fish that kinda looked like Jim Carrey. At that point, that's when you paid $25 million for Jim Carrey, period. That's what he costs. The studio realized, 'So, he's live-action for 10 minutes and then he's a cartoon and we just paid [$25 million]?'
'98-'99 era Jim Carrey was untouchable. For the first time in his career, his work was reaching a critical consensus that rivaled his commercial success. He was in the midst of a run that would reinvent him as a comedic actor who could do serious roles. First with The Truman Show, and then again with Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey was in a new, cerebral stage in his career. He could charge studios whatever he wanted.
Oswalt continues:
"They did this rig— remember in Monty Python's Meaning of Life, where they have the fish bodies? So they basically did that. It's a fish with just Jim Carrey's human face. They were showing Brad Bird 'cause they were like, "If we're paying for Jim Carrey, we're having his face the whole time no matter what.'
Bird, who worked with Patton Oswalt in Pixar's Ratatouille, confided to the comedian that the studio spent $10 million on the animation tests without ever making the eventual movie.
Cartoonist Bob Camp, who created sketches for the project, wrote on his website: "Lots of tests were done with Jim [Carrey] wearing a motion capture rig with several hundred mocap dots on his face to capture the expressiveness of his rubbery face." You can find many of those sketches here.
"This film was to be a remake of the '60s live-action/animated picture starring Don Knotts," wrote Camp. "Sadly, the film was never made."
37 Comments
Not a great movie, but hey, I was a kid, and it was a movie for kids.
Don Knotts had a weird sincerity about becoming a fish, and he did! How cool is that?
Jim Carrey never had a sincere moment in his life. His OTT histrionics would have ruined that story and the minds of young children who saw it.
As for remakes, they're typically terrible. If a movie was good, why remake it, and if it wasn't, why put fresh lipstick on a pig?
Of course, there are exceptions -- "His Girl Friday" comes to mind, and I prefer the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair". But a steady stream of recycled movies is a sign of real weakness in the industry.
But you already knew that.
