Trivia / Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge

• Acting for Two: In the Special Edition, we hear Largo LaGrande berate Mad Marty after the Bucket of Mud incident, where both characters are voiced by James Arnold Taylor.
• Dummied Out: In the Special Edition, the Lite mode is not selectable (CD versions removed it in the 90s too), but the content is there and can be made fully playable with some user patching. All the unique dialogue in easy mode is voice acted, and the new graphics are in high-res.
• DVD Commentary: The special edition features a track by all the three fathers of the series.
• Playing Against Type: James Arnold Taylor typically portrays heroic young men, but in the Special Edition version, portrays Largo LaGrande, an older man who is LeChuck's right hand, and firmly on the side of the villains.
• Refitted for Sequel: Ron Gilbert's original pitch for The Secret Of Monkey Island (at this point called Mutiny On Monkey Island) had Melee being led by the dictator Governor Fat [sic]. He was dropped in favour of Elaine Marley, but when it came to doing LeChuck's Revenge, Fat was brought back (under the new name of Phatt) and runs an island he has named after himself. Much like the original idea, he is an aging dictator who once struck fear in the hearts of inhabitants but now is too lazy to do anything and thus gets his inept right hand man to do his dirty work. There are still a few things in Secret that are probably remnants from when he was intended - the campaign poster slogan of "When there's only one candidate, there's only one choice", Otis being imprisoned for petty reasons (like a political opponent), and said right hand man character in the form of Fester Shinetop (who Elaine seems too nice to want to employ).
• Shrug of God: Ron Gilbert has stalwartly refused to give a clear answer to what the meaning of the infamous ending was, the closest he has come to this was stating that one of the theories he has heard about the matter was "closer than the others — but not much," without specifying which theory. The other only two people who might know the answer, Gilbert's co-writers, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer, also prefer to stay ambiguous when asked about the subject.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The carnival tune briefly sounds like "Take Me Out To The Ball Game."
• Troubled Production: The game as a whole did not suffer from this, but it did feature the premiere of iMUSE, a newly-developed sound system that allowed the audio engineers to not only set the game to music, but also have the soundtrack dynamically adjust to what was happening in-game, be it adding gradual instrumentation, speeding or slowing the tempo, and timing note stings to in-game happenings. It was clear from the outset they really wanted to show what it was truly capable of at the beginning of the game, which led to them choosing to make Woodtick so that every time you entered and exited a building, no matter where the music was at that point, it would smoothly segue to the next theme as opposed to abruptly cutting. However, this proved to be a case of biting more than one could chew — since Woodtick has five buildings, plus a sub-theme in two of them, this meant they had to hire two full time employees just to work on this one small part of the game. As detailed in the DVD Commentary, the law of diminishing returns proved to rear its ugly head in at release too — despite all the work that went into making this possible, very few players actually noticed it when they played. While iMUSE continued to see use in future LucasArts adventures, its scope was dialed way back to much simpler and more practical tricks.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Quite a bit of stuff was removed before release. For instance, after Guybrush blows up LeChuck's fortress, he and Wally were going to land on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Wally loses his monocle and falls into the sea. The scene was cut because even in a game chock-full of sociopathically cruel yet absurdly hilarious puzzle solutions, this was felt to be beyond the pale. The background which was to feature the raft was entirely redrawn and reused for another scene, but the game files still refer to it as the "raft" room.
  • Also of note are several rooms cut from LeChuck's Fortress, which presumably contained extra puzzles, including a voodoo shrine/potions laboratory, closeups of the desk and throne in LeChuck's office, and a closeup shot of Zombie LeChuck in all his g(l)ory. There was also a much more elaborate alternate version◊ of the underground tunnels beneath Phatt Island. The filenames of these unused rooms were embedded in a pre-release demo of MI2, but their art assets were not revealed until the 2010 Updated Re-release included some of this cut material in its Concept Art gallery.