Lilo & Stitch (2002) / Trivia

Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
- The ʻohana motto is often misquoted as "Family means No One Gets Left Behind"; while the last five words are the name of the trope, in the motto those words are actually "nobody gets left behind".
  - The "Or forgotten" suffix regularly gets forgotten.
  - Additionally, the full motto has never been spoken by just one character. The first time, when Nani was about to bring Stitch back to the shelter before Lilo stopped her, Lilo made Nani finish the motto. The second time, when Stitch decides to run away from home during what would be Lilo's last night living with Nani, Lilo does not say the "or forgotten" part. Finally, when Stitch comforts Nani after Lilo gets kidnapped by saying the motto to her, Nani says the "nobody gets left behind" part while Stitch says the rest (and "nobody" at the same time as Nani).
- People believe that, due to Stitch's broken English, he said in his little speech about his family, "Is little, and broken, but still good." In actuality, he said the more grammatically correct "It's" in that sentence, not "Is".
Cast the Expert:
- Tia Carrere and Jason Scott Lee, who play Nani and David, respectively, are both from Hawaii and were often approached for advice on how to make their dialogue sound more authentically Hawaiian.
- Kunewa Mook, who plays kumu hula Moses Puloki, is a kumu hula in real life and helped the animators to make sure that the hula performed in the film was authentic.
The Danza: According to Lilo's adoption paper, the rescue lady's real name is Susan Hegarty, which is the name of her voice actress.
Deleted Role: As mentioned under What Could Have Been below, Ricardo Montalbán fully voiced a character who would have been a member of Stitch's crime gang and the directors enjoyed working with him. But after the entire gang element was removed from the story, all of Montalbán's recorded lines had to be cut. They remain unreleased to this day.
Deleted Scene:
- One scene openly criticizes white America's bigotry towards indigenous Hawaiians, showing Lilo deliberately giving wrong directions to a tourist and an American soldier before tricking a group of tourists into believing that a tsunami is coming, causing them to flee in terror. Right afterwards, Lilo gets caught by Bubbles, who only glares at her in disapproval as she solemnly says "if you lived here, you'd understand." All the while, the white characters patronize her and her culture, botching Hawaiian words, looking down on her as a "little girl," and expressing patronizingly Orientalist awe at seeing "a real native." The scene was later adapted into one of the Disney Adventures Comic Zone prequels, "Sue-Whatsi?!?"
- There was also an alternate version of the opening trial where Stitch was declared "Public Nuisance Number One" on the planet Piston.
  - It served as an Early Draft Tie-In since the planet was shown in Stitch: Experiment 626.
- There was also this alternate version of Jumba attacking the Pelekai's house, because it was deemed too violent for younger audiences. Notably, Jumba received an interesting Art Shift in the reworked scene, looking much smaller, cuter, and less threatening.
- This bedtime story scene was cut because it confused test audiences into thinking Nani was Lilo's mother rather than sister.
- This infamous deleted scene shows Lilo being attacked by seagulls as she tries to show Pudge the fish to Stitch, who was still a Jerkass then and just watches the scene in amusement. When Pudge dies from asphyxiation and presumably being pecked by seagulls, Lilo gets mad at Stitch for letting Pudge die and takes the fish to bury him next to her parents' graves, leading to Stitch having a Heel Realization moment. Although the scene was fully voiced, it thankfully never got past storyboards and was cut for its dark tone. (That also means that Pudge stays alive in the franchise's canon, as he later appears in Lilo & Stitch: The Series.)
- Probably the most infamous one would have to be the original showdown between the heroes and Gantu, in which the former chase the latter down with a hijacked 747 through Honolulu, both aircrafts weaving through, and coming within dangerous proximity to, tall buildings. The scene was finalized at the worst possible time: mere days before the September 11th attacks occurred, after which the filmmakers wisely decided to alter it for having too many eerie similarities to the real-life event.
Dueling Movies: With Men in Black II, which also dealt with aliens with rules and featured the other musical King, Michael Jackson. Disney won. It also went up against (and had a better fight with) the live-action Scooby-Doo (2002) movie. It also debuted on the same day as another sci-fi film, Minority Report, with which it had a close battle on opening weekend at the domestic box office. (Minority Report earned less than $500,000 more money, but Lilo & Stitch sold more tickets because many of the attendees were children, who pay lower ticket prices.)
DVD Commentary: With writers and directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois and producer Clark Spencer. It was only available on disc one of the two-disc DVD Big Wave Edition (which was also included with the first Blu-ray release) until 2022, when a new re-release of the Blu-ray 2-Movie Collection put Lilo & Stitch on its own Blu-ray disc and had its old bonus features transferred to it, including the commentary.
Executive Meddling: During the development of this film was that Stitch's experiment number was originally supposed to be "666", but Disney told Sanders to change it, so he changed the tens digit to 2.
Extremely Lengthy Creation: The first seeds for the film were sown all the way back in 1985 via Chris Sanders' idea for a children's book about a mischievous forest creature. Sanders then brought up the character as a potential film pitch in 1997 before being incrementally worked on all the way up to its 2002 release.
Orphaned Reference:
- Lilo taking and adorning her wall with photos of sunbathers might come off as just one of her quirks, but it was initially intended to be her way of dealing with racist white tourists, who would regularly stop her and ask if she was "going to do a hula dance" for them. This (understandably) made her feel like a caged animal, and the photos were her way of doing it right back to them.
- Tsunami Air, the airline brand shown in the original climax, is shown as a logo at the very end.
Revival by Commercialization: Many, many kids were introduced to Elvis Presley thanks to this film.
Serendipity Writes the Plot:
- The film's low budget compared to past Disney films meant that the team had to be very economical; the animation was based on 2D work as the team couldn't incorporate expensive CGI, clothing details like designs and pockets were avoided, and they had to limit the use of shadows to only certain important scenes, so much of the scenes took place in shaded areas.
- As mentioned above, the original climax had to be hastily re-animated due to the scene's resemblance to the then-recent September 11 attacks. Fortunately, after Sanders' discussions with Schumacher and Roy E. Disney, DeBlois came up with the idea to remodel the 747 into Jumba's spaceship. (The ship still maintains certain elements from the airplane such as the jet engines.)
- Additionally, thanks to the aforementioned re-animation of the climax, they only had enough of a budget left for about two more minutes of footage. This led to the creation of the epilogue montage that showed how Lilo and Nani managed to successfully adjust their lives with Stitch, Jumba, and Pleakley being part of their new family.
  Chris Sanders: I can't imagine the film without that now. Like you get to see what their life was, because Stitch arrived, destroyed their lives, tore things apart, but then reassembled it more strongly.
Short Run in Peru: In 2004, Walt Disney Home Video released a 2-Disc Lilo & Stitch DVD in Europe and Australia, but not the U.S. While they did originally announce that America would also get it in '04, the date got repeatedly pushed back. It ended up reaching stores in 2009, on the same day Bolt^note came to DVD.
Spared by the Cut: In a deleted scene, Lilo takes Stitch to meet her "other best friend" Pudge, an orange tropical fish who she believes controls the weather. However, Lilo and Pudge get attacked by seagulls while Stitch, still a jerkass by then, watches in amusement, which leads to Pudge's death by asphyxiation and presumably being pecked by seagulls. Lilo gets angry at Stitch for letting Pudge die and later buries the fish next to her parents' graves, which leads to Stitch having a Heel Realization moment. The fully-voiced scene was cut for being too dark and because its message of mortality was superfluous to the overall story. In the final film, Pudge only makes a brief appearance in the opening just before the title card appears, and the later Lilo & Stitch: The Series confirms that he is still alive.
Spin-Off Cookbook: Received one that was published on May 23, 2023, simply titled Lilo & Stitch: The Official Cookbook. It features recipes based on the film's Hawaiian setting, some of which are given "an extraterrestrial twist" and names after the various characters and elements from the film (and some of the sequel material).^e.g.
Technology Marches On:
- Despite the film trying its very best to avoid being dated by this trope, Lilo & Stitch is still clearly dated to the early 2000s by the facts that the tourists are using film cameras and Cobra uses a flip cell phone. Today's tourists would be using smartphones and tablets to take snapshots, and CIA agents would be using smartphones themselves.
- The design of Pleakley's communicator is also affected by this trope; while the device's touch screen and live video chatting capabilities are certainly ahead of its time when the film was made,^note those features are now standard on today's Earth smartphones. Not only that, but it has a thick casing and bezel^note and the antenna on the device has to be pulled out in order to use it.^note And as for the round body... well, the Microsoft Kin ONE^note says, "Hi!"
- The scene where Nani tries to get a job at a luxury hotel briefly shows a late-90s/early-2000s CRT computer monitor off to the side of the concierge counter.
What Could Have Been:
- Chris Sanders' original pitch involved Stitch living alone in a forest in the Midwest and having the ability to imitate nature sounds, as the weather was the only thing that didn't run away from him in terror. Then-president of Walt Disney Feature Animation Thomas Schumacher suggested putting Stitch among humans, as the forest would already be "alien" for most viewers. The idea of Stitch being a Voice Changeling would later be reworked for the series proper with Experiment 258, Sample.
- Early in development, the social worker was planned to be a slim Caucasian man with glasses, with Jeff Goldblum being approached to voice before it was decided he should be a threatening-looking former CIA agent.
- The climactic aerial spaceship battle was originally planned to feature Jumba, Pleakley, Nani, and Stitch hijacking a Boeing 747. A good chunk of it was also supposed to happen in a city area with tall buildings. Guess why it was axed from a film released the very summer after the 9/11 attacks.
- Director's commentary on the DVD gives some insight about previous drafts of the movie.
  - Jumba was originally envisioned as a bounty hunter hired to hunt down Stitch. After the writers realized that he needed to be an expert on Stitch, they changed this to an ex-member of Stitch's gang who had been in prison for years after being left behind after a bank robbery, and much like in the finished movie he was promised his freedom in exchange for hunting down Stitch.
  - The version of the story where Jumba was a gang member, Stitch was revealed in the end to actually be a 35-year-old gangster, and had three other gang members (including one voiced by Ricardo Montalbán) attempting to find him. After a test screening, this gang was removed because they were deemed to be extraneous and make the story hard to follow, and Roy E. Disney was disappointed when he found out that cute, babylike Stitch was actually an adult gang leader.
  - Gantu was originally just a minor character piloting the prison ship Stitch was being transported on. After Stitch was changed from a gang leader to a bio-weapon, he received the more prominent antagonist role he has in the finished product.
  - In one version of the film, the scene where Stitch throws a book at Cobra Bubbles would be followed with Cobra throwing books from his briefcase back at a fleeing Stitch. Nani was later going to clean up these books and see that they had titles like Life After the CIA: What to Do with All That Time to Kill and Finding the Gentler Side of You.
  - Chugag would have bagged up Lilo instead of Gantu, with him still at Turo.
  - In the scene where Stitch first comes to Lilo's room, Nani was originally going to come in when she heard them fighting and see that Stitch had bit Lilo. This was cut for being too dark.
  - The scene where Stitch gives a performance dressed as Elvis on the beach originally had Lilo making a deal with David that if she could clear the beach of tourists so he could surf by himself, he'd ask Nani out. She would accomplish this by telling people that the tsunami warning siren going off meant a tsunami was on its way, right before the siren had its monthly test.
- This siren scene was animated into a deleted scene where Lilo scared the tourists from the beach because they were being rude to her and because she was bored.

Trivia / Lilo & Stitch (2002)

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