Read Me, Seymour!
Disney owes much to Little Shop of Horrors, as the documentary Howard makes clear.
Howard Ashman and Alan Menken adapted the 1960 Roger Corman movie into an off-Broadway musical, which was then adapted into a movie musical directed by Frank Oz. Ashman and Menken went on to work for Disney, where they brought a Broadway style of songwriting to animated musicals.
They understood that each song should advance plot or character, something that Disney songs didn’t always accomplish (think of the yodeling song from Snow White or “Following the Leader” from Peter Pan). By unifying song and story, Ashman and Menken enhanced the quality of Disney animated musicals, giving us timeless classics: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. That should have been just the start. Ashman died of AIDS in 1991 when he was only 40.
I can’t recall if I had ever seen Little Shop of Horrors in its entirety before, though I had some familiarity with it. In any case, I recently watched the movie with fresh eyes.
In Little Shop of Horrors, Ashman and Menken give us another tale as old as time, in which a man succumbs to temptation, gets in over his head, and jeopardizes the fate of the entire planet Earth.
It’s an exceptionally well-plotted musical. Every song drives the story forward in some way. “Grow for Me” shows us Seymour (Rick Moranis) realizing that his strange plant, Audrey II, needs human blood to grow and thrive. “Dentist!” introduces Steven Martin’s psychotic character, a dentist who loves inflicting pain. This dentist happens to be the boyfriend of the original Audrey (Ellen Greene), whom Seymour is secretly in love with. Seymour sees how the dentist abuses Audrey, which allows Audrey II (voiced by the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs) to convince Seymour to kill the dentist in “Feed Me.” (“The guy sure looks like plant food to me,” they sing.) Once the dentist is out of the way, Seymour and Audrey can profess their love in “Suddenly, Seymour.”
In an amusing moment later, Seymour proposes to Audrey, and she replies, “Seymour! This is so sudden!” That’s good attention to detail right there.
However, there was one key part where the plotting felt off. During the climactic confrontation between Seymour and Audrey II (“Mean Green Mother from Outer Space”), Audrey II buries Seymour under a bunch of rubble. But then, suddenly, Seymour rises from apparent death, now armed with a live electrical wire, and he zaps Audrey II and offspring into oblivion.
Using the offspring as backup singers was a stroke of genius, I must say. Nevertheless, the resolution bordered on Deus Ex Machina territory, which seemed odd for a movie that was otherwise so carefully plotted. But then I learned what had happened off screen.
Originally, the movie was supposed to end like the off-Broadway musical did. Audrey II kills Seymour, and man-eating plants conquer the world.
Test audiences didn’t like this, though, so the filmmakers scrapped the horror movie ending and replaced it with a happy musical movie ending.
I can see it both ways. The horror ending probably worked better in an off-Broadway play. It goes all in on the idea that succumbing to temptation can cause events to spiral dangerously out of control, and it presents a message about how greed and consumerism can destroy us all if left unchecked. But the script conveys this message in a ridiculous, wild, zany way. If you’re going to wag your finger at the audience, do it while giant plant monsters rampage through a city.
So, the original ending makes sense, but it’s kind of a downer and not what general audiences are looking for when choosing to watch a musical movie. Plus, who doesn’t want to see Rick Moranis triumph over a carnivorous alien plant?
Ultimately, the happy ending feels more satisfying. It provides the catharsis of making things right after majorly screwing up. The movie avoids showing Seymour directly killing anyone—he’s an accomplice, and he certainly reaches a dark place, but he never becomes irredeemably evil himself. We want to see him come back from the brink.
The filmmakers probably needed to revise a bit more of “Mean Green Mother” to better set up Seymour’s victory, but budgets are finite, and I suspect they had already thrown enough away to produce considerable executive agitation.
I think the original finale song still could have worked during the end credits of the theatrical cut. Lyrics such as “Whatever they offer you, don’t feed the plants” are simply too good to go to waste. Howard Ashman was a talent we lost far, far too soon.
One other thing started bugging me, though. The title is Little Shop of Horrors, plural, but the shop has only the one monstrous plant.
But then, after watching Seymour chop up the dentist’s body, I realized what they were going for: The horrors were inside him all along.
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