History Headscratchers / LittleShopOfHorrors

* Why is the the song "Mean Green Mother" not "Mean Green Monster"? Audrey II is singing a VillainSong, so monster would make more sense.

* I think the happy ending is a piece of shit. The reason I liked Little Shop of Horrors enough to go all fanboy-crazy and make my username Audrey II was because of the MORAL. Even with all the musical numbers, it simply boils down to a DealWithTheDevil story. I just wanted to make sure it was understood that I have some bias. Now that we have THAT out of the way... if Audrey II only grows after eating blood, how does it grow the pods in the happy ending rendition of Mean Green Mother? It makes sense in the original ending, because Two-ey had just eaten Audrey. Did Two-ey get some of Audrey's blood while she was in his mouth? Enough to create a dozen offsprings without mortally wounding Audrey? Suuuuure.

* Why does Seymour assume Audrey II needs human blood anyway? Although he asks "Does it have to be human? Does it have to be mine?" in "Feed Me," it only responds with "feed me." Obviously the blood doesn't have to be Seymour's, and the only reason it can't come from a blood bank is because it has to be fresh. We never even see him try to toss a pig in the thing's mouth.

** On the other hand, when Seymor makes it clear that he won't kill anymore and offers to go and get some "ground round", Audrey II reluctantly agrees to that. It's quite possible that the plant can feed on any kind of bloody, raw meat, but it just preffers it to be human because, well, it's evil.

----> '''Seymour:''' True the gun was never fired,
----> But the way events transpired,
----> I could finish him with simple laissez faire

* At the end of the movie musical, Audrey and Seymour are shown moving into their little house somewhere that's green and tra la la, happy ending, and then a little Audrey II bud is shown growing on the fence outside the house as a sort of OrIsIt to make up for the original DownerEnding being scrapped. But why is this supposed to be menacing ''at all''? The Audrey II bud is growing outside Seymour and Audrey's house! They're not going to be duped into the whole scenario all over again.

* At the end of the movie musical, Audrey and Seymour are shown moving into their little house somewhere that's green and tra la la, happy ending, and then a little Audrey II bud is shown growing on the fence outside the house as a sort of or is it to make up for the fact that the original DownerEnding was scrapped. But why is this supposed to be menacing ''at all''? The Audrey II bud is growing outside Seymour and Audrey's house! They're not going to be duped into the whole scenario all over again.

*** Only, if it's in Seymour and Audrey's yard, there's little chance that Seymour would sell the plant, and, if he discovered the plant, would likely just let it die.
*** Was [[CanvasWolfDoll I]] the only one to notice the SPORES that flew when Audrey II aploded? The ending implied that the plant did, in fact, manage to spread.
*** for the troper who said Seymour just let it die while we do know Audrey II needs humans what's to stop this one from feeding on stray cat's until it can get an actual human like say a child to eat?

*** I'd say its the same reason why certain animals create ''swarms'' of children: most of them wouldn't survive. Let's say the Audrey II makes a 100,000 clippings. 90,000 of those plants wither and die (or simply remain small and cute). 10,000 households realize that [=AIIs=] need blood to grow. 500 of those households don't go any farther than letting their AI suck on their finger occasionally. Out of 100,000 clippings, maybe 5-10 households would kill people and feed them to their plants for promised rewards. Since the [=AIIs=] were sure to be massive sellers, multiply these numbers by 10. 200-300 massive plants all over the Earth...

** People might also be willing to feed the plant if they lacked human relationships. Even before the plant gained the ability to talk it was capable of enough movement to feign affection had it wanted to. Once it got larger, you have something that can even give a vine "hug" and tell you what you want to hear. As in an abusive relationship, slowly making the person more and more dependent on the plant to fulfill his or her emotional needs could make that person willing to tolerate things that are clearly not okay in order to keep the relationship. With the added manipulation of "I'll die if you don't help me; I need you." Some plants could manipulate people who ''did'' have friends and family into becoming dependent on them, isolating them, then going with the old, "They abandoned you but ''I'' love you, I never will."
** It was implied that thousands upon thousands of Audrey II's were sold, but we only saw about half a dozen giant ones in the climax, suggesting that * most* of them didn't reach that size. Besides that, I think if you have a sapient creature living in your house, you'd be reluctant to let it starve to death. And note that the song said "got sweet-talked into feeding it blood". They never said what kind of blood. True, Audrey II prefers human flesh and doesn't like processed meat, but in a pinch, live animal meat would surely be just as good. And all that aside, a plant that eats humans whole would be an excellent corpse disposal, ensuring at least a couple criminals would want one.

*** Audrey II only kept Seymour around because Seymour kept feeding him. Also notice that Audrey II gets large enough to move, talk and devour an entire human being (albeit a chopped up one) after just feeding on drops of Seymour's blood. Once there's an Audrey II in every household in America, there's no worry about the species easily dying out, and as shown in the alternate ending, as soon as they're big enough, they start eating people. It's easier to convince the masses to feed a plant drops of blood, and by the time eating people comes into it, the masses don't have a choice.

* I think the happy ending is a piece of shit. The reason I liked Little Shop of Horrors enough to go all fanboy-crazy and make my username Audrey II was because of the MORAL. Even with all the musical numbers, it simply boils down to a DealWithTheDevil story. I just wanted to make sure it was understood that I have some bias. Now that we have THAT out of the way...if Audrey II only grows after eating blood, how does it grow the pods in the happy ending rendition of Mean Green Mother? It makes sense in the original ending, because Two-ey had just eaten Audrey. Did Two-ey get some of Audrey's blood while she was in his mouth? Enough to create a dozen offsprings without mortally wounding Audrey? Suuuuure.

** It makes more sense for the way Seymour is portrayed in the movie vs the play. In the movie, Seymour doesn't have much time to think about what's going on when he kills both Orin and Mushnik. Plus, they BOTH were portrayed as terrible people in the movie, what with Mushnik blackmailing Seymour into giving him the plant. If Seymour had let him live, things could have been even worse. In the play,however, Seymour thinks about it and makes a decision before killing both of them. There's an entire song where the Orin is begging for his life, and if you take the jokes out of it, it really is horrifying. Then there's no blackmail in the play. Mushnik is just doing his civic duty and keeping a probable murderer off the streets, and more importantly, out of his shop. Does he have ulterior motives? Sure, maybe, depending on how it's played. But it's still not likely that Seymour understands that intention. In fact, one could argue that Mushnik is the only male character who could ever be considered as a decent human being. After all, he took Seymour out of the orphanage and gave him a place to stay, even after he turned out to be a useless lump of a person AND he's the first person to tell Audrey that Orin is bad news. Despite him getting frustrated with them sometimes, he really did care for his employees and tried to help them whenever he could, so long as it didn't cost him anything. In spite of all he owes Mushnik, and the fact that Mushnik had done nothing wrong, Seymour stone cold killed the guy by tricking him into the plant. In the movie it looked almost like Seymour tried to stop him from going into the plant. The movie tried too hard to have Seymour be sympathetic and ended up changing the character to the point where he didn't deserve to die. After all, what did he do wrong? In the play, the only way for Seymour to atone for his sins is to sacrifice himself in an attempt to reverse his mistakes.
*** No no no, Mushnik is NOT a good person. Considering he took Seymour in as a kid, and Seymour says he never finished grade school, he couldn’t have been older than 10 when Mushnik took him in, seeing as we can fill in the blanks and assume he never finished school because Mushnik needed him to work. That doesn’t inherently mean bad parenting, but we can assume that the way Mushnik treats Seymour is how he’s ALWAYS treated him, and the lines “you always said that I was trash/I was joking” in Mushnik and a Son confirm that. And on top of being a verbally abuse foster parent, he neglected to care for Seymour’s physical needs as well, as Seymour says that Mushnik made him sleep under the counter and fed him crusts of bread—not to mention only getting every other Sunday off. That’s abusive parenting
* The thing that's always bothered me is, exactly what is Audrey II's gender? It has a masculine voice, but neither it nor Seymore ever lampshade its effeminate name. To top that off, it refers to itself as "A mean green mother", but is this meant to illustrate the dozens of new pods are its children, or is it just a polite way of saying "motherfucker"? I see people using either pronoun for it all the time. Or does the fact that it's a plant from another planet mean it doesn't even have a gender?

** Not that this really determines anything at all, but it did seem to favor the ladies. In the waiting room of the radio station, it tried to get a chomp out of the receptionist's backend, and when Audrey discovers it can talk, it tried to get a peak under her dress.

** Well, I agree that the probability of discovering that the plant needs blood to grow is pretty low, but it is smart enough that it, most likely, could have found ways to talk a large variety of people into killing for it. The main problem is that 1. When did it start being able to talk and 2. How many people would have let it drink their blood until it got to that point? As for it being taken down by Rick Moranis in the original ending it wasn't defeated and it was implied that the plants ''were'' surviving a lot of military force.

*** [[HoistByHisOwnPetard Seymour wouldn't have found the wire if Audrey II hadn't knocked the whole building down.]] It's still a DeusExMachina though; just one Audrey II caused.
** Regarding the blood-feeding, the Alls wouldn't even have to promise fame all the time- people can get very attached to their plants. A very lonely person with just a plant for company would probably be overjoyed when that plant started to react to him or her, certainly considering it worth a bit of blood. Once the plant reached the point where it could talk, well, if you felt like you had only one friend in the world, you might be willing to do some pretty extreme things to keep that friend. That might actually work better than the "fame and fortune" angle until the time came to spread more cuttings/seedlings/spores, since the human would be more likely to keep the plant a secret.
* Where do the people Audrey II eats ''go?'' If it swallows them, the only place for them to go would be down into it's pot, and it doesn't seem like there would be room there. Does it just have an incredibly fast digestive system? Is it part Yoshi?

** Perhaps it it's head since that's the biggest part about the plant.
*** This troper would have agreed, but during two scenes which involved it's feeding, there showed an open throat that was big enough to fit two people.
* Why does Seymour assume Audrey II need human blood anyway? Although he asks "Does it have to be human? Does it have to be mine?" in "Feed Me," it only responds with "feed me." Obviously the blood doesn't have to be Seymour's, and the only reason it can't come from a blood bank is because it has to be fresh. We never even see him try to toss a pig in the thing's mouth.
** Before the song starts he says he'll go down to the butcher's and get some sirloin, and Twoie says it "must be blood". Never explicitly says he needs human, no, but even if he doesn't, he implies it in a way that could "accidentally" give Seymour the wrong idea.

** The guy had enough time to help, at least in the stage musical- Orrin has two verses of pleading with him before dying- and flat out tells Mushnik to get uncomfortably close to a hungry man-eating plant in '''both''' versions, though there might be enough reasonable doubt in the movie.

** This is why I consider the happy ending to be way more appropriate for the film than the play's ending would have been, because in the film Seymour is ''so much'' less culpable that he no longer deserves to die in karmic punishment. Additionally, the tone of the first half doesn't come across as the brutally dark satire it needs to be for the ending to work ("Suddenly Seymour" for instance, becomes the saddest song ever sung in retrospect).

* In the movie, Seymour has to sneak across Audrey II's vines, trying to get away without waking the plant. He fails, and Audrey II wakes up. However when Seymour comes out of the Muschnik's before the song "Suddenly Seymour", he comes out from an ''outside set of steps, directly connected to his room in the basement''. Why didn't Seymour just sneak out ''that'' way at the end of the movie?

** The steps lead out to the same alleyway that Seymour used to drag Orrin's body back to the shop, where Mushnik saw him. Granted it would have been the ''smarter'' thing to do, to avoid having to cross Audrey II's path, but Seymour's a coward fleeing the scene of (at this point) several crimes. It mattered more to him to keep up appearances (dressing nicely to leave the store through the front, as opposed to sneaking around in a suit and leaving through a gross alley) and avoid suspicion. Keep in mind, he's not actually ''afraid'' of Audrey II yet, because he thinks Audrey II still depends on him for food and, perfectly in character, all he thinks he needs to do to kill it is to do nothing at all.
* During 'Da Doo' when he was explaining how he found the plant he says that "Suddenly without warning there was a solar eclipse." What does he mean, surely he would've noticed the moon in the sky all day, and a solar eclipse is rarely ever played down inthe media or newspaper.

** If it was really the moon it still doesn't make since for Seymore not to notice the moon in the sky next to the sun on a perfectly clear day. If the solar eclipse was really a space ship, then astronomers should've noted that it wasn't the moon that completely blocked the sun. Also, how big was this spaceship to block the sun and no astronomer notice. Or how close was it for no one to notice?

*** Actually people did notice. At the beginning of the movie Mushnik is reading a newspaper with its headline about the mysterious eclipse.

** People who prefer the stage ending to the film's ending tend to prefer the general arc of the stage version to the general arc of the film version. They find "guy kills people, and recieves the consequences for it" more satisfying than "guy sort-of-maybe-accidentally kills two people and then defeats the antagonist".

* "I swear on all my spores"...Hang on, Audrey II, you have ''spores?'' Then how come you waited around for some people to come in a truck and cut you to pieces before you invaded the world with your offspring? (Then again, it could be argued that nothing Audrey II says should be trusted.)

** Remember that Audrey II is very intelligent and meticulously planned out her quest for world domination. She first needed Seymour to help her grow big, and the bigger she grew, the more popular and sensational she became which would increase the anticipated demand for her offspring. So it was a matter of how beguiled people get with her offspring, not how quickly she can reproduce.

* Dr. Martin wants to give ''every household in America'' a tiny Audrey II, and he's going to have a huge ad campaign and market the little plants all across the country--despite having ''no idea'' what they eat? Wouldn't you think he'd try to find out so he wouldn't get sued by hundreds of angry people whose Audrey II s died on them? Who sells a plant without care instructions of any kind?

* If every household in America has an Audrey II, how can the plants "offer you fortune and fame"? The only reason Seymour made money off the original plant is that it was the only one of its kind and people came from far and wide to see it. What would the offspring entice their owners with? "I'll be a slightly bigger plant than the one the neighbor's have?"

** Would it have made more sense to burn it and stay on skid row forever? Regardless of how he got it, they money was there. They may as well use it to start a new life together.

** Hiring competent workers for an all-day job, assuming that the plumbing changes is just fixing leaks or replacing individual pipes and not refitting the entire building. A refrigerated display just means plugging in a cooler in front of the shop windows, retiling crappy linoleum is easy because in a dump like that, it's probably just stick-ons or cheap laminate instead of actual ceramic, and painting with a proper crew doesn't take more than a few hours.

* OK, so Audrey II is dead, Seymour and Audrey move into the suburbs and everything is nice and dandy... But what happened to all the contracts Seymour signed about the plant? If [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome reality ensued]], he'd be sued to his last cent for breach of contract, lose all the money and they'd have to move back to a CrapsackWorld like Skid Row.

** My two cents is that (a) Seymour invoked force majeur in his contracts so he can wriggle out of them without penalties, though he will have to return the balances of fees paid minus expenses, and (b) sued the estate of the late Mushnik to the ground for maintaining an unsafely wired and gas-leaky work place that incidentally also blew Mushnik and Orin into smithereens (except for some understandably small tissue traces) and collected big after the insurance companies paid up for the lost lives and ruined place. Audrey will be a co-plaintiff as an endangered employee plus an addition action to compensate her for the mental distress etc. for being so cruelly deprived of her dentist boyfriend who just so happen to be visiting that evening to admire her wedding gown tryout for their upcoming nuptials. There won't be a dry eye at that insurance adjucation, and she will collect a nice, fat sum too.

* OK, so Audrey II is dead, Seymour and Audrey move into the suburbs and everything is nice and dandy... But what happened to all the contracts Seymour signed about the plant? If [[RealityEnsues reality ensued]], he'd be sued to his last cent for breach of contract, lose all the money and they'd have to move back to a CrapsackWorld like Skid Row.

** The musical seems to imply that the plan has SOME sort of powers beyond being a cool plant, possibly some sort of reality warping or mind control. The sheer coincidence by which people happen to notice the strange and interesting plant at first, or the way that Audrey hears a voice in her head saying to go back to the shop and talk to Seymour, eventually leading to her getting eaten, would imply that the plant has some sort of power.

*** Some People are into getting etten [[JustEatHim Vore]]

** Some lawyers work cheap or even free.

** Remember that Audrey II is very intelligent and meticulously planned out her quest for world domination. She first needed Seymour to help her grow big, and the bigger she grew, the more popular and sensational she became which would increase the anticipated demand for her offspring.

** It's possible that the consumers so excited about buying their own Audrey II offspring were stupid enough to forget about or even disregard the logic that making money was only possible off of the original plant.

** She's an alien plant who sings and consumes humans, her biology is different from earth plants.

** She's an alien plant, her biology might differ from earth plants.

** Audrey II was singing just for the fun of it, she just needed to find words that can rhyme.

*** That makes sense when there is only one plant. But when there are millions? What would the offspring entice their owners with? "I'll be a slightly bigger plant than the one the neighbor's have?"

* If every household in America has an Audrey II, how can the plants "offer you fortune and fame"? The only reason Seymour made money off the original plant is that it was the only one of its kind and people came from far and wide to see it.

** Audrey II when she grabs human Audrey and mockingly asks her to come join her "dentist dream" and Mushnik, as "They're right inside!". So the answer is, they've got nowhere to go, they'll stay there forever.