Line #9 Trivia/WereBackADinosaursStory


1	* BoxOfficeBomb: Budget: $20 million. Box office: $9.3 million ($20.6 million adjusted for inflation). Despite the huge marketing Universal did at the time, the movie's financial failure and its problematic production led to Amblimation closing its doors in 1997.
2	* ChildrenVoicingChildren: Joey Shea (more well known by his real name, J.D. Daniels), a child actor at the time, provides the voice of Louie.
3	* ChristmasRushed: According to animator Rodolphe Guenoden, the film was rushed down the pipeline in order to directly coincide with the release of ''Film/JurassicPark1993'' as a family-friendly alternative to it, and [[CreatorBacklash lamented that there was no time to make the film better]].
4	* CreatorBacklash: Creator/YeardleySmith is not too keen on the movie, which she only did to break away from the [[WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons Lisa Simpson]] image. In general, everyone who worked on it had this reaction, especially animator Rodolphe Guenoden, who said ''We're Back!'' was the most difficult movie he ever had to work on his entire career in animation due to its [[TroubledProduction messy, rushed production]] and the [[ChristmasRushed tight deadline]] keeping them from making the film better, and he said the final product reflects its turbulent creation.
5	* CreatorKiller: This was only Amblimation's second movie, and its lackluster performance ensured that they would only produce one more movie, ''WesternAnimation/{{Balto}}'', before folding. By that point, Spielberg had formed Creator/DreamWorksSKG with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, and the three men absorbed most of Amblimation's staff into Creator/DreamWorksAnimation, leaving the older label stranded.
6	* CreatorsOddball: This was written by ''[[Film/{{Moonstruck}} John]] [[Film/JoeVersusTheVolcano Patrick]] [[Theatre/{{Doubt}} Shanley]]'', of all people.
7	* CrossDressingVoices: Blaze Berdahl plays Buster the young bird boy.
8	* {{Defictionalization}}: Remember Rex's big "Roll Back the Rock" song sequence in the in-universe [[UsefulNotes/MacysThanksgivingDayParade Macy's Parade]]? One of the promotional stunts for this film was a balloon of Rex in the ''actual'' Macy's Parade. Unfortunately, his head got popped by a street lamp due to high winds (the rest of him remained intact), [[WeAreExperiencingTechnicalDifficulties forcing Universal's future parent, NBC, to throw on test flight footage]]. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3DNo3NZoUk Video here]].
9	* DeletedScene: A scene in which Screweyes cages and chains the dinosaurs, explains how he lost his eye, and ''blasts Brain Drain down their throats with actual cannons'' was fully animated, but cut from the film. Bits and pieces of it can still be found in a RecursiveAdaptation book.
10	* DevelopmentHell: To say it had a bad production history would be a massive understatement. While production started around 1990, and Spielberg had a solid team to back it up, the main issue is that he had too many projects that he was working at the same time, most notably, Schindler's List, as well as other Amblimation films like An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, Balto, and the eventually cancelled Cats animated adaptation. Because of him being too busy on other projects, the sheer chaos of We're Back!'s production continued to increase as the deadline kept closer, to the point that everything had to be rushed so it can be a family friendly alternative to Jurassic Park, Spielberg would remove whatever scary content was in the film to make sure to not make the movie "too scary for children".
11	* DirectToVideo: This has the (dis)honor of being the only movie in recent memory with Spielberg's name on the credits to meet this fate in Britain[[note]]Ironically, where Amblimation was based[[/note]].
12	* TheOtherMarty: Creator/JohnMalkovich was originally cast as Screweyes but was replaced because Steven Spielberg thought his performance was too dark and scary. Creator/ChristopherLloyd then recorded a performance which director Phil Nibbelink loved, but Spielberg rejected that too. Creator/KennethMars was eventually chosen for the role instead.
13	* PlayingAgainstType: Creator/KennethMars as the evil, menacing and completely psychotic Professor Screweyes, a far cry from the much gentler animated roles he'd had prior like [[WesternAnimation/TheLittleMermaid1989 King Triton]] and [[WesternAnimation/TheLandBeforeTime Grandpa Longneck]]. The closest role he'd had to this before was as the AffablyEvil [[Film/TheProducers Franz Leibkind]].
14	* PopCultureUrbanLegends: There is a widely attested rumor that John Malkovich left the film due to constant rewrites and dumbing down his originally more complex character to a shallow villain, and that the film's ExecutiveMeddling also caused him to leave Hollywood and only do international productions for a few years. While it's true that scenes which would have given more depth to Screweyes were taken out and Malkovich had recorded those scenes, Malkovich did not drop out, but was let go from the production. [[https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/roll-back-the-rock-an-oral-history-of-were-back-a-dinosaurs-story-for-its-25th-birthday In an interview with Syfy]], director Phil Nibbelink said [[ExecutiveMeddling Spielberg had them have another actor]] because Malkovich's performance was too dark and scary. The source of the story is an unsourced quote which journalists at [=AVclub=] tried and failed to find on the internet beyond IMDB's trivia page. They also noted that the entry bore similarities with a 2009 thread on the Website/ChannelAwesome message boards, but that one was about Sean Penn.

Context Trivia / WereBackADinosaursStory