Trivia / Delgo

• All-Star Cast: Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Louis Gossett Jr., Malcolm McDowell, Val Kilmer, Burt Reynolds, Chris Kattan, John Vernon, and Anne Bancroft. The film being the final performances for the later two, no less.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $40 million. Box office, $915,840. You read that right—less than one million dollars, making it the lowest grossing 3-D animated film of all time. It also had the worst opening week for any film to open in more than 2,000 theatres at the time, until the record was broken by The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, and was tossed out of theatres immediately afterwards.
• Creator Killer: Neither of the film's directors has any credit to their name on IMDb after the utterly disastrous release of Delgo.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Young Delgo was voiced by a girl.
• Development Hell: From 1999 to 2008. Even this wasn't enough to draw in the crowds.
• Died During Production: Anne Bancroft and John Vernon both died in 2005 at age 75 and 72 respectively—three years before the film's release.
• Doing It for the Art: Director Marc Adler spent years scraping up funds outside the studio system, constantly refining technology and establishing his own studio in Atlanta. When it came time for distribution, he chose distributor-for-hire Freestyle Releasing and the film was all set to become an indie success story, with Adler possibly being a new Ralph Bakshi. Going by the abysmally low gross, this was certainly not the case.
• Dueling Movies:
  • Avatar, as mentioned on the main page. This is quite possibly the most lopsided duel in cinematic history — so much so, in fact, that you probably weren't even aware Delgo was on the other side.
  • It also dueled with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, another CGI sci-fi/fantasy movie. Once again, it lost resoundingly.
• Invisible Advertising: Probably the biggest reason for the film's failure, even above the merit, or lack thereof of the thing.
• Troubled Production: During the film's production, Anne Bancroft had to record in a studio in New York, but due to the poor and cramped quality of the booths, they had to record with the door open. This resulted in her voice recordings having buzzsaw and toilet noises in certain scenes, regardless of the editors trying to clean it up. She recorded 75% of her lines before her death.

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