Bonus videos! The clever tricks hidden in the Little Shop end-of-the-world finale

I've loved Little Shop since it came out and didn't know it had an alternative ending until I heard it from you. It's incredible, but I think you're right that it just doesn't match the rest of the movie. I'm glad we can still see it since this stuff is so often lost.

I rewatched the Paul Lynde video and now I would love to hear you discuss two topics: Liberace and disco being popular with the gay people and the reactionary disco sucks movement!

Hey, I found a cool thing! It’s a 50s sitcom called My Little Margie. Margie, a young woman in her early 20s, lives with her single-parent father, Vern. Vern’s boss, Mr Honeywell, wears a ring on his little finger that does not, so far as I can tell, have an insignia on it. Other interesting stuff about Mr Honeywell: in S1E5, Costume Party, he tries to convince Vern to go to the party as a knight by telling him he’s got “a good figure for armour”. When Vern, understandably puzzled, asks what he means by that, Mr Honeywell says “I don’t know, it’s just the sort of thing one says to a fellow”. So… the sort of thing Mr Honeywell regularly says to other men includes telling them they have good figures? Then in S2E5, Blonde Margie, Vern wants to show a younger man how to seduce women and asks Mr Honeywell to play the woman. He makes no significant attempt to act feminine, but also does not object even a tiny bit to pretending to be a woman and letting another man act seductively towards him; and he is not someone who is in any way reluctant to say if he doesn’t like something. In S2E24, Young Vern, about ten minutes in, Mr Honeywell uses a French phrase that would sound romantic to a non-French speaker, and adds “you can’t imagine how many people I’ve impressed with it”. People, you notice; not women, or girls. In S2E32, Freddie’s Formula, Mr Honeywell takes Vern’s hand in his in quite a romantic way; he’s trying to show him how to seduce a potential female client, but again, it shows that he’s fine with behaving romantically towards men (and vice versa). In S3E1, we find out that Mr Honeywell never had a child; could be a number of reasons for that, but it’s certainly consistent with him being a gay man in a world where surrogacy and gay adoption weren’t really a thing yet. It's not that he never shows any sign of noticing attractive women; in S2E28, Vern’s New Girlfriend, he describes a pretty girl as a “humdinger” and wonders aloud if she might be interested in him. However, the only thing he seems to really like about her is her perfume; maybe he’s just into flowery, feminine scents? Also, bisexuality is a thing (though to be fair, the 50s did not always seem to be aware of this fact). And while Mr Honeywell isn’t exactly positively portrayed, he is something of an alpha male: not only does he run his company with an iron fist, we find out at the end of S2E30, Delinquent Margie, that he still has a pretty solid uppercut, in spite of his age. So if he is a gay man, he’s a pretty counter-stereotypical one. There are also a surprising number of other slightly queer moments: in the pilot episode, Vern tells Margie he’ll find her a boy who’s right for her; Margie sarcastically suggests that he should marry this hypothetical boy himself. In S2E8, Motorcycle Cop, Margie cross-dresses as a male police officer, then ends up kissing an actual male cop (who knows she’s a woman). The cop’s boss sees this and is horrified, clearly interpreting it as a gay kiss. S2E15, Homely Margie, ends with Margie making her devoted boyfriend Freddie wear drag in order to substitute for her on a date with a man she doesn’t like. S2E21, They Also Serve, involves a very camp hotel clerk and a line where one man tells another man to “keep pounding at Honeywell”. In S2E35, Double Trouble, Margie gets a pair of male twins to dress in various disguises to prank her father; at about 20 mins in, there’s a brief moment when we see one of them in drag. In S3E3, Margie’s elderly neighbour Mrs Odetts describes a young woman as “attractive”, then later, when Margie is worrying that Vern will “hang himself” by flirting with the same woman, Mrs Odetts says, “But what a way to go!” Anyway, early series 3 is as far as I got: I binged it till I got tired of it in the end, I think I’m gonna leave it, at least for now. BTW, I haven’t included links because you just need to search YouTube for My Little Margie and the episode name and they’ll all come up. Some are only available in a truly horrible colourised version, though – sorry about that! But the thing is, this means that Sidney Cole and Hannah Weinstein (and let’s face it, you knew it was going to come down to them in the end, didn’t you?) may not have been the first people to try to sneak gay people onto tv shows in the 50s; but I’d still argue that they did it more extensively than pretty much anyone else, and also were the only ones to raise it to the level of art (in The Buccaneers, natch).

My greatest desire is to find out if one of the big big Audrey IIs still exists somewhere, especially the Finale Ultimo/Mean Green Mother. I get that foam doesn't last forever but doesn't it seem like one deserves to be preserved in a museum somewhere?

I loved some of the little details establishing what year this is set In like Jason and The Argonauts at the theatre or Johnny Carson and his golf swing.

There are some really cool tricks there. I don't have anything against modern techniques, but I'm really impressed by the innovative approach that had to be taken to get such cool stuff with practical effects in older movies/shows.

If you squint your eyes just right, the little puppet guy looks like Statler (as in Statler and Waldorf, the curmudgeonly hecklers from the Muppet show). All he would need to do is have one line heckling Audrey II like he used to do to fozzie bear, and the effect would be complete.

When we did Little Shop in high school, I remember the drama teacher showing us the movie when we had some downtime and we were all APPALLED by the "happy ending" version of the movie lol Also remember that Audrey II had the line "Tough titty!" at some point when Seymour was complaining, which the school insisted we couldn't say (there were quite a few lines that were censored, actually). So even though it was technically illegal under copyright law, we had to replace it with "Tough toenail." Which is infinitely less funny.

Now I need to purchase the DVD so I can see this ending.

Great video Matt!. While I agree the unused ending is beautiful and incredibly well made, it really just doesn't work. A) it's too long a sequence. It's like 10 minutes of just Audrey II wrecking havok. B) All of the characters we cared about are already dead. It's just extras we've never seen before running from destruction. C), It needed a catchier tune. If Audrey II was singing something like Mean Green Mother From Outer Space during the rampage, it might have worked better, or a different song. The original movies ending was simpler, the buds open and we see all the victims that Audey II had eaten. Something more like that might have worked too. This was beautiful but SO over-produced! It's a scale we don't see in any other part of the movie so it doen't seem to fit with the rest of the film.

Love little shop of horrors. You know. I watched this movie years ago when I was a kid without any prior knowledge of the original musical and thought in my 20’s hey I want to get the movie about the talking plant that eats people and downloaded it via some random torrent. Well I downloaded the sad ending version and was absolutely gobsmacked when Seymour feeds audrey2 Audrey and then the world ends. I was showing a friend little shop of horrors and she was like “what is happening” it’s funny now because I know. But at the time I totally thought I had misremembered the movie. Or repressed this awful ending