LITTLE SHOP - Weird & Exotic Cuttings

Here's a collection of some of the rarely seen Little Shop stills I have collected, including scenes from the deleted ending and storyboards which have never, to my knowledge, been published before. Enjoy!

This is the concept model of Audrey II built by Lyle Conway. Notice the saliva bubbles on the tongue and vines.


STORYBOARDS
Marvel Comics artist Mike Ploog storyboarded all the Audrey II sequences, allowing the film-makers to get a clear idea of what puppets and what sets would be needed for each angle. These "Mean Green Mother" panels are the only storyboards I've ever seen - I got them on eBay from one of the original puppeteers. That's a story for another time, however. Needless to say, I would love to see these presented on a re-release DVD!







CUT SCENES


This might have earned Little Shop an "R"!


Seymour wrestles with his conscience in the deleted dream sequence from "The Meek Shall Inherit." The full song can be heard on the soundtrack album. Let's hope this shows up on DVD sometime!


Audrey sings the "Somewhere That's Green" reprise.


Seymour prepares to sacrifice Audrey. This is apparently a rehearsal shot, as the plant's trap is closed.



Audrey II says "bye bye" to poor Seymour.





The chorus girls foretell America's doom.


Audrey II stomps down Fifth Avenue. Notice the little Yellow Cab in the lower-right. In the sequence as seen on the DVD, the plant kicks this out of the way and it goes flying! You can just barely see a second Audrey II behind the first one.

The model sequences were filmed at high speed, so when projected normally they'd go more slowly and have a sense of weight and scale. This meant that the plant movements had to be very fast, with some scenes taking mere seconds. This is the opposite of how the full-sized plants were filmed. They were performed slowly, while the camera also filmed at a slower rate which made everything "real time" when projected normally.





Check out the little car being waved around in the plant's tentacle!


The only model footage in the final film is the cityscape behind Steve Martin in the opening bars of "Dentist!"

Fun fact -Richard Conway filmed a great model sequence featuring a giant, talking, tentacled, carnivorous plant for a 1976 episode of Doctor Who. The creature attacks a very detailed model of an English country house in "The Seeds of Doom," episode 6, before being defeated by Tom Baker. Of course!




The sets created by miniature effects supervisor Richard Conway were truly incredible, with more detail than I've ever seen in a miniatures sequence, including walls that crumbled into individual bricks as the plants crashed through. Here, a plant demolishes a theater showing "Jason & the Argonauts," a landmark fantasy film with stop-motion effects by Ray Harryhausen. The effects for this sequence, however, were all computer-controlled movements, not stop-motion.


The Brooklyn Bridge - Shot #1 (Between this film, Cloverfield and I Am Legend, Hollywood has not been kind to the Brooklyn Bridge!)


The Brooklyn Bridge - Shot #2 (Notice a 2nd plant poking into the frame in the lower left.)


The Brooklyn Bridge - Shot #3 (I believe this shot demonstrates the most accurate color balance out of the three Bridge images presented here.)


The final shots of the "Don't Feed the Plants" sequence showed plants clinging to the Statue of Liberty. This was filmed against a blue screen - I have added a fiery background in Photoshop.