Cut Song / Disney

Disney is well-known for their musical numbers. Most of their films and various other works go through various songs before the soundtrack is finalized.

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Direct-to-Video Animated Films

• A verse was scrapped from the The Lion King 1 ½ song "Diggah Tunnah". It was about a legendary meerkat character named "Fearless Buzz". It was removed because the film had enough characters as is.
• The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea has Morgana's cut Villain Song "Gonna Get My Wish Tonight".
• Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams had an overhaul somewhere in development. Belle's short was removed and replaced with a Jasmine short. As a result, Belle and Mrs. Potts' song "You'll Never Lose This Love" ended up scrapped.

Disney Animated Canon

• Two in Mulan, as revealed on the DVD:
  • "Keep 'Em Guessing", originally intended to be Mushu's introduction song, and an opening number filled the Chinese equivalent of Ominous Latin Chanting.
  • Mulan's "I Want" Song "Reflection" was originally much longer but had two verses cut out of it. Lea Salonga performs the full version at her concerts.
• Beauty and the Beast:
  • "Human Again" was cut from the film before it reached the animation stage (as the filmmakers felt it was too long a sequence), but it was newly recorded and animated for insertion into the 10th anniversary theatrical re-release and subsequent special edition DVD. Prior to this, it was incorporated into the Screen-to-Stage Adaptation.
  • The Beast had at least one song in production that never even made it to the demo stage before it was cut. The stage version made up for this by giving him several songs.
  • The alternate version of "Be Our Guest", which is exactly like the final version of the song but has Lumiere and the enchanted furniture sing to Maurice instead of Belle.
• Pocahontas:
  • A love duet for the heroine and John Smith, "If I Never Knew You", was cut when it bombed with kids in test screenings, though a pop version did appear over the end credits and it's a key motif in the underscore. It was later animated and restored to the film for its anniversary DVD.
  • Also, the song "In the Middle of the River".
  • There was also a brief Dark Reprise of "Just Around the Riverbend" and an early version of "Steady as the Beating Drum" called "Dancing to the Wedding Drum".
  • The 2015 Legacy Edition of the movie's soundtrack includes two more cut songs:
    • "Different Drummer", a song that may date back to when Pocahontas was a younger, more Tiger Lily-like character. It has Pocahontas wishing she could be less flighty, someone her father could be proud of. It also has a woman who seems to be her mother telling her to Be Yourself, and Pocahontas mentions having a brother whom she wishes she could be more like.
    • "First to Dance", a song sung by Grandmother Willow and Pocahontas about how peace can be achieved if someone just dares to take the first step.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
  • "Someday", an alternative to "God Help The Outcasts". However, the Rewritten Pop Version could be heard in the credits, and the original version later appeared in both the English and German stage productions.
    • Speaking of the Rewritten Pop Version, it had two English versions; the song was performed by All-4-One for North American markets and by Eternal for the UK version.
    • The Latin American Spanish version, "Sueña", performed by Luis Miguel, became a major hit and reached the number 1 spot on Billboard's US Latin Pop Songs chart in 1996.
  • There was also originally going to be a song called "As Long As There's a Moon", which involves Clopin marrying Phoebus to Esmeralda in what is supposed to be their wedding, but said wedding is immediately interrupted by the intervention of Frollo and his henchmen, who now has Esmeralda finally cornered.
  • Before "As Long As There's a Moon", we had the similar "In a Place of Miracles", also restored in the stage adaptation.
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had many songs written for it, such as a number in which the dwarfs recount a story about the man in the moon, that were replaced by more effective ones. The ones that survive as recordings were "Music In Your Soup" and "You're Never Too Old To Be Young"; the former made it to full pencil-test animation and voice tracks as part of the dinner sequence that would have followed "The Washing Song", but was cut for pacing and budget reasons.
• The Emperor's New Groove:
  • Thanks to a substantial Retool from its Kingdom of the Sun origins, almost every song was cut, with the exception of "Perfect World". All the songs are still on the soundtrack, though — and "My Funny Friend and Me" still appears over the end credits.
  • Yzma's Villain Song, "Snuff Out the Light" was cut early on when the direction changed from a serious drama to a comedy.
  • Another cut song was the love duet "One Day She'll Love Me".
• Peter Pan:
  • "Never Smile at a Crocodile". Only the instrumental version is heard, as background music for the crocodile. It also resurfaced in a Disney Sing-Along Songs video.
  • Another cut number was "The Boatswain's Song".
• Disney's Alice in Wonderland had quite a few cut songs, including "Beyond the Laughing Sky" (which was later used as the basis for "Second Star to the Right" in Peter Pan), "Beware the Jabberwocky" (cut because it was thought to be too scary or simply because the scene went on for too long), and "I'm Odd", sung by the Cheshire Cat, and later included as an extra on the Masterpiece Edition DVD.
• Many songs were written for Pinocchio but not used, including "Jiminy Cricket (Is My Name)", "Honest John", "Monstro The Whale", "Turn On The Music Box", and "Three Cheers For Anything". One of Jiminy Cricket's Cut Songs, "I'm a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow", resurfaced in the short "Bongo" from Fun and Fancy Free, where it was sung by the cricket himself. The demo for "Honest John" is included in the 70th Anniversary Platinum Edition.
• The Lion King (1994):
  • The reprise of "Be Prepared".
  • On the soundtrack, "Be Prepared" starts with a soliloquy by Scar, who says, "I never thought hyenas essential. They're crude and unspeakably plain. But maybe they've a glimmer of potential if allied to my vision and brain." In the film, this is cut and the song begins immediately. This was removed because the soliloquy had Scar considering using the hyenas for his plot, but in the final version of the film, he had already used the hyenas in his plans before the song. The soliloquy is, however, included in the Broadway version.
  • "Warthog Rhapsody", which made it into a spinoff CD and the bonus features in said special edition DVD; it was replaced with the catchier "Hakuna Matata".
  • "Hakuna Matata" originally had verses for Timon's backstory as well.
  • The Broadway musical's "Morning Report" was cut from some later productions, but it still shows up on the official soundtrack for the musical. It was later animated and added into 2003-2005 releases of the film, featuring new singing voices for Zazu and Simba.
  • "The Lion On The Moon" was a cut lullaby that Sarabi was meant to sing to Simba after he was frightened due to his encounter with the hyenas. It was about the lions' God, the Lion On The Moon.
• Aladdin:
  • The song "Arabian Nights" was actually going to be at least 4 verses long, with each verse being sung during different parts of the film, but in the final version, only the first verse was used. Two verses were still used later: one for the opening of Aladdin: The Return of Jafar — and subsequently as the opening theme for the TV series - and the one that would end the film at the ending of Aladdin and the King of Thieves as Book Ends.
  • Another cut song was "Proud of Your Boy", which was cut when Aladdin's mother was dropped from the story. It and "Why Me", "Call Me a Princess", "Babkak, Omar, Aladdin, Kassim", and "High Adventure", as well as the additional verses of "Arabian Nights", were restored in the 2011 Screen-to-Stage Adaptation.
  • In addition to "Why Me", Jafar's plotting and assumption of power had another song and sequence, "Humiliate the Boy", created for it and then rejected.
• Tangled:
  • The song "When Does My Life Begin" actually has two reprises. Only the second reprise made it into the film; the first reprise is actually soundtrack-exclusive.
  • While not completely cut, "Mother Knows Best" had an entire verse cut out.
    Go ahead, get trampled by a rhino!
    Go ahead, get mugged and left for dead!
    Me, I'm just your mother, what do I know?
    I only bathed and changed and nursed you!
    Go ahead and leave me. I deserve it.
    Let me die alone here. Be my guest.
    When it's too late you'll see, just wait.
    Mother knows best!
• The Little Mermaid (1989):
  • The Disney version had a song for Eric called "Her Voice" that was a companion piece to "Part of Your World". Parts of the song can still be heard throughout the score as Eric's leitmotif, after a fashion. The stage musical ended up reinstating it. The opening song "Fathoms Below" was also originally a full length number, detailing the history of Atlantica - as well as revealing that Ursula was actually Triton's sister. It was re-extended to full length in the stage musical, but with different lyrics.
  • "Silence is Golden", Ursula's original Villain Song, was rejected because the creators felt it didn't fit her character.
  • The film was originally going to end with Ariel singing a Triumphant Reprise of "Part of Your World" as Triton turned her back into a human — and would segue into the wedding scene. The film uses a choir rendition of the song instead.
• Sleeping Beauty had a few numbers for the fairies, the kings, and a Villain Song for Maleficent.
• The Aristocats:
  • "She Never Felt Alone" is a song that came in two parts: the first section, "Pourquoi", was sung at the start of the film. Madame comes in with a recording of hers and sings along to the gramophone about how she loves her cat family and why she's so happy. The cats repeat "Pourquoi?" and Madame explains her reasoning. The latter part is "She Never Felt Alone". Duchess actually sings to her kittens and Thomas O'Malley about her owner Madame on their way back to Paris, and that Madame will become extremely worried if she found out that her cats are gone. In the final version of the film, this scene is spoken instead of sung, and the scene where Madame learns about her cats' disappearance is now a scene before Thomas O'Malley is introduced, where Madame is seen climbing out of her bed in the middle of the night and discovering that her cats are gone after checking on their basket where said cats sleep, causing her to go crazy and run around the hallways of her mansion screaming.
  • Scat Cat was written with Louis Armstrong in mind. He originally had a song named "Le Jazz Hot", which was replaced with "Everybody Wants To Be A Cat" when Armstrong couldn't voice Scat Cat.
• Many are aware that Frozen (2013) went through a lot of concepts, and several of these concepts had songs written for them. Therefore, there's a lot of songs that were scrapped when their concepts were, along with songs scrapped for other reasons or replaced:
  • Most obvious first: Elsa was originally the villain, and several songs were written for her. One was an early Villain Song, "Cool With Me", in which Elsa kidnaps Anna from her wedding, attacks the guests, and intentionally freezes Anna's heart (in order for Anna to understand her plight, not to kill her) set to a peppy tune (with a rap section) about how she wants to rule over Arendelle as a tyrant in revenge for being ostracized for her powers.
  • "We Know Better". It is supposed to start when is Elsa is three years old and seeing baby Anna for the first time, and bonding with her. The song would then cut to the girls at different ages - Elsa at 7, 9, 12, 15, 18, and 22 years old, and Anna at 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 19 years old. It takes the form of a duet, in which young Anna and Elsa complain about all the things they are expected to do as princesses, claiming they know better. This song was the first written by the songwriters, and is from a draft where Elsa would be villainous, which starts showing in the second half wherein the townspeople of Arendelle start to distrust 12-year-old Elsa due to her powers and unprincessy personality, so the King and Queen tell 9-year-old Anna to try and be more lady-like to set a better example for her sister, resulting in the rest of the song showing the two girls becoming more distant. The song's concept showing the two girls growing up and becoming more distant through a musical montage was retooled for "Do You Want To Build A Snowman?". Parts of "We Know Better", notably the piano ostinato and Elsa and Anna's "One, two, three together, clap together, snap together" chant, were incorporated into the Broadway musical's opening number, "Let the Sun Shine On".
  • The love song "Love Can't Be Denied" predates Frozen as we know it. It was cut after Alan Menken left an early 2000s attempt at adapting The Snow Queen.
  • "Spring Pageant": Instead of "Frozen Heart", the opening would have been this song, which is done in the form of a rehearsal for a troll children's pageant run by a snooty and uptight director. It would have the performers reveal a prophecy that Arendelle will get a "ruler with a frozen heart" and the kingdom will be cursed with an eternal winter, which will only be broken with a sword sacrifice. While that happens, all the stuff you might expect to have happen in a school play happens: one kid gets caught chewing gum on stage and the performers giggle through what are supposed to be serious lines. Reportedly, the "troll prophecy" was a plot element that persisted through several drafts of the script. The final version of the movie indicates that it would have been a Prophecy Twist: the "ruler with a frozen heart" is Hans, not Elsa, and the "sword sacrifice" is Anna's self-sacrifice to save Elsa from Hans' sword.
  • "More Than Just The Spare" - A song in which the gates are open and Elsa is beloved by the townspeople and revered as the "perfect" heir, a concept also seen in "Spring Pageant", and Anna is, in the words of the songwriters describing the context of the song, "the overlooked, not-needed spare" suffering from Successful Sibling Syndrome. The song was rewritten as "For the First Time in Forever", retaining parts of the old melody as well as the key changes.
    I'm not part of the town, not meant to be queen, just somebody hopelessly in-between
    She's the scholar, athlete, poet
    I'm the screwup... Don't I know it
    But then, who could ever compare?
    Of course they're gonna think I'm just the spare
    Well I won't care
  • Instead of "For the First Time In Forever (Reprise)" when Anna visits Elsa's ice palace, we almost had "Life's Too Short". It's about Anna trying to bring Elsa back to Arendelle, and the two sisters finally being friends now that Elsa's secret is revealed. Their opposite personalities keep them away from one another, though. Like what replaced it, the song ends with Elsa freezing Anna's heart. This song, while more upbeat than the "For the First Time in Forever (Reprise)", is more directly confrontational with Anna thinking all the problems will be solved if Elsa just puts her gloves back on, and Elsa refusing to even consider the option, insulting Anna and refusing to thaw the kingdom (in the final film, Anna telling her this sends Elsa into Heroic BSoD). The song also contains lines referring to the troll prophecy from "Spring Pageant", showing that the prophecy was removed very late into development. "Life's Too Short" lasted so long into production that Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell managed to make a recording of the song before it got cut.
  • "Life's Too Short" would have had a gutwrenching reprise, sung while Elsa is locked up in the dungeon and Anna starts to succumb to her frozen heart. They both begin to regret their actions and see things from the other's point of view. "Gutwrenching" is the proper way to describe it because as Anna's part ends, there's a pause between each of the last three words, as if she was gasping before dying, except then the music starts to instrumentally reprise "Do You Want To Build a Snowman?", which one assumes would start just as Olaf enters the room to relight the fireplace. Part of the melody for "Life's Too Short" was recycled, and appears in Frozen Fever in the first verse of "Making Today a Perfect Day".
  • "You're You" - Prior to "Love Is an Open Door", this was the love duet between Anna and Hans. It shows more Foreshadowing towards Han’s true colors, as his lyrics include hidden insults towards Anna.
  • "Reindeer(s) Remix": An extended, and utterly hilarious pop version of "Reindeers are Better Than People", the lullaby that Kristoff sings to Sven while they're sleeping in the shed outside Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna. Meant for the end credits, it was written because the songwriters realized they didn't record "anything substantial at all for the amazing Jonathan Groff (Kristoff's voice artist)." To elaborate, the song starts with the two verses of song that are sung by Kristoff in the shed, but there is also an extra verse where he talks about not needing a crown or a castle, and at the end, he breaks the fourth wall by asking why he never got a real song in the movie.
  • The trolls originally had a "boy band"-esque song but Disney didn't like it. Later they had a song named "Someone Else's Shoes" where the troll leader tells Anna and Kristoff to walk in each other's shoes. As in literally putting on each other's shoes. It was cut, and and replaced with "Fixer Upper", because of worries that non-English speaking countries wouldn't understand what "putting yourself in someone else's shoes" meant.
  • While not cut "Do You Wanna Build A Snowman?" had different lyrics but they were changed because they were deemed too depressing.
  • "Lose Control" was a song that was scrapped because it relied too heavily on puns, specifically a pun on "troll".
  • Olaf originally had a different song, however he came off as annoying rather than naive, so it was changed.
• Frozen II:
  • "Get This Right" is a song about Kristoff proposing to Anna. Unlike in the final film, Anna is the one who proposes to Kristoff.
  • "Home" is a cut song sung by Anna, featuring her love for her home and people and worries about letting them down.
  • "I Seek the Truth" is sung by Elsa in a cut scene where she begins to uncover secret messages from her mother.
  • "Unmeltable Me" is a brief funny song for Olaf, explaining how Elsa gave him his new permafrost coating.
• Originally Megara from Hercules had a love ballad named "I Can't Believe My Heart" about how she disliked men due to past heartbreak until she met Hercules. It was replaced with the much more upbeat and sassy "I Won't Say I'm In Love" because the writers didn't think Meg was the type to sing slow songs. Meg's voice actress Susan Egan agreed the song wasn't right for the character, but loved it so much anyway that she recorded it for her album "coffee house".
• Moana:
  • "Unstoppable" was about Maui and the islanders' past as voyagers.
  • "More" was replaced with "How Far I'll Go" (which reuses part of the lyrics and music). It's about Moana desiring to sail the sea but everyone else telling her not to. "More" also had a Broadway-esque Dark Reprise after Moana left the island.
  • "Warrior Face" was about Maui teaching Moana how to scare away monsters they encountered while searching for his hook.
• Inverted in Brother Bear where the song "No Way Out" was added very late in development, meaning that originally the viewers were going to hear Kenai's confession to Koda about him killing his mother and causing Koda to run away crying in full dialogue instead. Obviously, one has to guess which one of the two ended up being cut from the movie.

Live-Action Films

• Mary Poppins:
  • "The Land of Sand", a song from a cut sequence during the film's development. The melody of the song was later reused for "Trust In Me", Kaa's song from The Jungle Book.
  • Also cut was "Practically Perfect", whose melody was recycled for "Sister Suffragette", and whose lyrics were set to a different tune in the stage version.
  • Another cut song was "The Right Side". It was recycled nearly two decades later for the TV show Welcome to Pooh Corner as a song that is sung by Winnie the Pooh in some episodes.
• High School Musical:
  • The Humuhumunukunukuapuaa song and scene were cut from the televised version of High School Musical 2, possibly because Disney would lose any plausible deniability about Ryan's sexuality after airing it. They reinstated it on the DVD and in the stage adaptation.
  • There was also a song recorded for the 3rd movie called "Last Chance" that never made it into the movie apart from the reprise in the medley of most of the songs in the movie. A 40 second preview leaked in 2008 before the movie came out.
  • In the first movie, there were a few songs that didn't make the cut. "I Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" was recorded by the four main leads and ended up on the album and as a bonus music video on the DVD (it's made to look like they're all recording the song but Zac Efron is there instead of Drew Seeley who did most of the singing for Zac's character. It also made it into the play version of the movie as a duet between Troy and Gabriella, as did "Cellular Fusion" and "Counting on You" but the song between Mrs. Darbus and Coach Bolton seems to be lost forever.
• Rodrigo y Gabriela helped Hans Zimmer write the score for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and even recorded a video for a track, "The Pirate that Should Not Be". Guess if it appears in the movie?
• TRON: Legacy had "Computerized," which was Daft Punk collaborating with Jay-Z. It's obvious that the Daft Punk background music got recycled into Sam Flynn's Leitmotif.

Theatre

• In the early 2020's, Beauty and the Beast's stage version was revised, cutting "No Matter What" and "Maison des Lunes", both of which were originally written specifically for the musical. Licensed productions do have the option to restore the former, which is still included in the score's appendix, but the latter is now gone for good.
• In the stage adaptation of Mary Poppins, "Temper Temper" was eventually replaced with a new song titled "Playing the Game", as the former was deemed too scary for children. This change was first rolled out amongst all running productions in 2009, and took effect for all productions since then, including the licensed version.
• The Little Mermaid's stage version has its own share of cut songs: The villain songs "Wasting Away" and "All Good Things Must Come to an End", along with an alternate reprise of "Poor Unfortunate Souls" that would be sung when Ursula transformed into Vanessa, were dropped before the tryouts and could only be heard on a leaked demo tape. "Where I Belong" and Ursula's reprise of "Her Voice" were cut after the Denver tryout, though the former was reincorporated into later versions of "Fathoms Below". Glenn Casale's retool of the show replaced "I Want the Good Times Back" with "Daddy's Little Angel", giving Ursula a new backstory, replaced Triton's Dark Reprise of "The World Above" with "If Only (Triton's Lament)" and "If Only (Ariel's Lament)", and made "Human Stuff" a dialogue-only sequence.
• In Frozen (2018), Olaf had the solo number "When Everything Falls Apart", which was cut near the end of the pre-Broadway Denver run, though the dialog was retained. In the touring production, Anna's Act II solo "True Love" was dropped, and "For the First Time In Forever (Reprise)" was replaced with a new duet, "I Can't Lose You".

Theme Parks

• Country Bear Jamboree: When the Walt Disney World version was renovated in 2012, "Pretty Little Devilish Mary" and "Fractured Folk Song" were deleted for time along with much of the dialog between segments.
• The Enchanted Tiki Room: The instrumental "Barcarolle" by Jacques Offenbach was removed from the Disneyland and WDW versions in the 1990s to improve the pacing.
• Horizons: The original theme song for the attraction was written by The Sherman Brothers before being replaced by another song sharing the "New Horizons" title.
• Journey into Imagination:
  • Before settling on "One Little Spark" by The Sherman Brothers, the ride's theme song was originally a very different track written by Bob Moline (who has written several songs for Epcot attractions, such as "Golden Dreams" for The American Adventure and "Energy (You Make the World Go Round)" for Universe of Energy).
  • "One Little Spark" itself had one and a half verses cut from the original ride's soundtrack ^note said cut lyrics are included in the 1994 songbook A Souvenir Disney Songbook - Favorite Songs from Disneyland & Walt Disney World. The half verse that was kept was heard just before lightning flashes in the opening scene.
• "Sooner or Later" from Disneyland's version of Splash Mountain, originally heard during the rabbit warren segment, was replaced by "Burrow's Lament", a Dark Reprise of "Laughing Place". In turn, the Walt Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland versions of the ride skip the vocal part of "Burrow's Lament" and only use the alternate instrumental version, when Bre'r Rabbit is being tortured on the final conveyor belt lift. The instrumental of "Sooner or Later" can still be heard in the queue.

Western Animation

• Phineas and Ferb:
  • "The Ballad of Klimpaloon" from "Summer Belongs to You". The song is included on the soundtrack and later got used in a different episode.
  • Candace's song, "Some Mysterious Force" was cut from the movie. It's on the DVD with accompanying animation.
  • Several other songs never made it past the demo versions, such as "You're Wrong", "This is Our Inspirational Song"^note a much more tongue-in-cheek, lampshaded precursor to "I Believe We Can", and "The Elf Police", which was cut from the Holiday Favorites CD.
  • "What Does He Want?" from Phineas and Ferb Christmas Vacation!, although it returns in the extended version of the special.
• Gravity Falls: The Grand Finale was going to have a Villain Song for Bill Cipher called "It's Gonna Get Weird." A fan-made animatic for it can be seen here. (Spoiler warning.)