Jackie Legs was the centerpiece of an ad campaign for a movie that wasn’t a blockbuster but wasn’t a flop either. Test audiences loved the film’s new direction. Bruckheimer was going to do everything in his power to ensure that children saw a movie that was not made for them and wasn’t particularly family-friendly even after extensive cuts. Bruckheimer could have aimed for a PG-13 but he wasn’t taking any chances. To fit the new family and animal focus the movie was re-titled Kangaroo Jack and edited down from an R to a PG. Evil impersonation but the film’s advertising made it seem like he spends the film joyfully jabbering away. Jackie Legs, the sticky-fingered kangaroo at the center of the action, only talks during a dream sequence and during an end credit showcase where he breaks the fourth wall and favors us with a Dr. So Bruckheimer ordered ten million dollars worth of re-shoots involving an expressive, anthropomorphic CGI marsupial who not only talks and does impressions but also performs “Rapper’s Delight”, a landmark jam made famous by the Rapping Granny from Wedding Singer and, to a lesser extent, the Sugarhill Gang. Bruckheimer figured that if he could similarly trick audiences into thinking that Kangaroo Jack was about talking animals with attitude then he could prevent certain disaster. Snow Dogs was based on a true story but commercials made it look like a zany fantasy involving talking dogs. In a fit of mercenary inspiration Bruckheimer decided that if audiences hated his R-rated crime comedy and wanted a family-friendly PG movie about a sassy anthropomorphic rapping marsupial then dammit, they were going to get a family-friendly PG movie about a sassy anthropomorphic rapping marsupial.īruckheimer was inspired by the ad campaign for Disney’s recent hit Snow Dogs. They unsurprisingly liked the cute, exotic, and mischievous animal even if they weren’t crazy about the Animatronics used to bring it to life. Everybody dug the kangaroo that absconded with the ill-gotten loot. Test audiences hated the film but there was an element of it that they liked. Bruckheimer realized that he had a loser on his hands. Max Frye ( Something Wild, Foxcatcher) to punch up the script. The Top Gun producer then paid a battery of big-name screenwriters like the Farrelly Brothers, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel ( Splash, Parenthood), Gary Ross ( Dave, Pleasantville), and E. Bruckheimer had paid a fortune for a broad comedy pitch for an R-rated comedy called Down and Under about a pair of American losers in Australia who put a jacket on a seemingly dead kangaroo as a gag and then watch in horror as the extremely non-dead kangaroo hops away with fifty thousand dollars worth of mob money in the jacket pocket. Produced by Hollywood power broker Jerry Bruckheimer, Kangaroo Jack had a very big problem. This strange fate is probably because it never was supposed to be a kid’s movie at all. Twenty years ago, on January 17, 2003, Kangaroo Jack was hit with horrible reviews and became the opposite of a beloved children’s movie. How do you turn a raunchy comedy about a dead kangaroo into a kids' movie? The answer to that unlikely question produced one of the strangest children’s films of all time.
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