Casper: Lucky Enough To Be A Ghost

Earlier this year I got very hung up on the topic of musical numbers that were at one point destined for big screen glory but were ultimately deemed luxuries and abandoned on the cutting room floor. Well, Casper also has one of those, and fortunately this one hasn't stayed sealed away inside a vault for the past quarter-century. The excised song, "Lucky Enough To Be A Ghost", was to have been performed by The Ghostly Trio about midway through the film, during one of Harvey's attempted therapy sessions. It looks as if it would have been an enjoyable sequence, but it wound up being jettisoned purely because the animation required would have been so complicated as to risk putting the film over-budget. The sequence was filmed, with Bill Pullman doing his bit, but animation for Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso was only created for the initial, non-musical portion, which director Brad Silberling had still hoped to incorporate into the final edit. In the end, everything within the sequence was given the axe - although, if you are particularly eagle-eyed, you can still pick out a couple of moments from it in the theatrical trailer. I'd note that there are also two call-backs to the sequence that survive in the final cut:

• During the scene where Kat goes outside to talk to Vic, she mentions that her dad "kind of hit the ceiling" when she asked him about the party. As it turns out, she meant that literally.
• Later, when Harvey is at the end of his tether, Stinkie observes that the situation "calls for drastic measures", to which Fatso responds, "You think we should break into a song?" (Of course, if you were unaware of the excised musical sequence, you might assume that this was a callback to an earlier moment where the Trio taunted Kat with a corrupted version of "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore).

The unfinished "Lucky Enough To Be A Ghost" sequence has since shown up as an extra on DVD releases of the film (where you can watch two different versions - one with just Pullman, the other an animators' reference with stand-ins for Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso), with Silberling explaining that it was eventually deemed that the movie could get by without it, as the Trio's penchant for pranking Harvey had already been established from the earlier moment where they pretend to have summoned Amelia. From a strictly narrative standpoint, this sequence is entirely dispensable, since it doesn't tell us anything important and/or that we don't already know. It's also not as though the Trio shed any light on their own personal backstories (something that goes untouched on in the film), they just make psychotherapy puns (among the most questionable of which is Fatso's claim to be bulimic - unless he is indeed getting at the fact that ghosts automatically lose whatever food they ingest), although obviously it saddens me that we missed out on a whole extra sequence with Harvey and the poltergeists. It isn't essential to the story, but it does further expand on our sense of the Trio coming around to Harvey (at this point, they are plainly tormenting him because they like him, and what a willful target he is for their shenanigans), while simultaneously grinding down his every last speck of resolve. Its greatest narrative function, though, is in foreshadowing Harvey's own encounter with the perks of being a ghost, and the release it potentially offers him from his living DEATH. After all, the Trio opens the song by turning Harvey's therapeutic posturing back on him ("Too bad about your wife!"), a reminder that the assumptions he makes about ghosts are all thinly-veiled expressions of his own deepest despairs. (Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso, meanwhile, couldn't give a toss about the judgements of the outside world.)

Although we'll never get to see the "Lucky Enough To Be A Ghost" sequence fully animated, the above version with only Pullman has value all of its own in that it provides insight into just how deranged the acting process was on this film - when you keep in mind that Pullman and Ricci spent much of their screen time interacting with non-existent co-stars. It's why I don't think the work in Casper is anything to be sniffed at - they had me willing to believe that the ghosts and humans were rubbing shoulders within the same physical space, and that takes more than just cutting edge technology. All of the flashiest visual trickery in the world wouldn't have meant anything if the human cast weren't willing to act their hearts out into the void.