Trivia / Ice Age

• Accidentally Correct Zoology:
  • An extinct mammal that looked just like Scrat, named Cronopio dentiacutus, was discovered some time after the first film was released.
  • The Gastornis from the sequels don't appear to invoke the same Carnivore Confusion among herbivores as other carnivores in the series do. Skip ahead several years and it's discovered that Gastornis was actually a herbivore.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Blue Sky Studios produced thirteen features, five of which are Ice Age films; of their six short films, three of them are Ice Age spinoffs. And in spite of increasingly poorer reviews, they've earned progressively more money, at least until Collision Course.
• Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Alan Tudyk, Jack Black, Queen Latifah, Josh Peck, Seann William Scott, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Peter Dinklage, Jennifer Lopez, Kunal Nayyar and Patrick Stewart.
  • For the European French dub, there's Gérard Lanvin as Manny, Élie Semoun as Sid and Vincent Cassel as Diego.
  • For the Japanese dub, Sid is voiced by the famous comedian Hikari Ōta and Diego is voiced by veteran actor Naoto Takenaka for the first three films.
  • The Latin American Spanish dubs have actor Jesús Ochoa as Manny, actor/comedian Carlos Espejel as Sid, and actress/singer Angélica Vale as Ellie. The first film also has Sergio Sendel as Diego.
  • The Brazilian Portuguese dubs of all five movies have Diogo Vilela as Manny, Tadeu Mello as Sid and Marcio Garcia as Diego, with The Meltdown and Dawn of the Dinosaurs having Cláudia Jimenez as Ellie, while Collision Course has Ingrid Guimarães as Brooke and Whindersson Nunes as Roger.
  • In the Finnish dub of the Ice Age sequels, Crash and Eddie were voiced by Jukka Hildén and Jarppi Leppälä from The Dudesons.
• Channel Hop: Before it was given to Blue Sky, Fox actually offered Disney the chance to make the film, but they turned the project down. If Disney had said yes then not only would Ice Age be entirely different, but Blue Sky Studios as we know it most likely wouldn't exist. Ironically, Ice Age technically is Disney now as a result of Disney buying Fox in 2019. The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild has the Disney logo instead of the 20th Century logo.
• Creator Backlash: While Alex Gradet, the story/editorial production assistant of the first movie, doesn't quite think of the movie as a bad movie as a whole per se, in this podcast, he's admitted to having a "love/hate relationship" with it as he's said he can't help but cringe at some things the movie did like some of the more politically incorrect elements^note for instance giving the villains Latino names like Soto and Diego, making the female sloths rather sexist stereotypes, or having slightly homophobic jokes, the rushed way Diego was brought back from the dead, and having Toilet Humor in an admittedly dark story. That being said he does say there were a lot of great sequences and the movie as a whole, to him, picked up in the second half, especially during the montage scene^note a scene he helped come up with.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Crash and Eddie are both voiced by women in the Japanese dub.
• Deleted Role: The first movie was originally going to feature a female sloth named Sylvia, voiced by Kristen Johnston (Sally on 3rd Rock from the Sun), a Clingy Jealous Girl whom Sid was trying to get rid of. She was cut for various reasons, mainly because she made Sid come off as a Jerkass. Deleted footage with her can be found on the DVD release. For instance, the scene where Sid provokes Diego into pretending to bite him to scare off the two rhinos Carl and Frank used to involve Sylvia instead. Interestingly, Sylvia still turned up on some of the hanging mobiles and other promotional items for the original film, cluing viewers in to her existence long before the DVD release.
• Descended Creator:
  • Blue Sky founder Chris Wedge, who directed the first film and executive produced the sequels, voices Scrat in all media. He also voices one of the dodos in the first movie.
  • In the third movie, story artist and producer Karen Disher voices Scratte, and director Carlos Saldanha voices the baby dinos.
• DVD Commentary: With director Chris Wedge and co-director Carlos Saldahna.
• Exiled from Continuity: Starting with The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, Scrat is no longer allowed to appear in any installment of the franchise. This is because Ivy Supersonic, a cartoonist and fashion designer, has claimed for 18 years to be the one who created Scrat (or "Sqrat" as he was originally called) and managed to win her lawsuit against Disney in 2020. Thus, the company cannot use the character anymore, excluding April 2022’s Ice Age Scrat Tales, which were produced by Blue Sky Studios before the buyout but were not released until well after the studio’s closure.
• Focus Group Ending: Diego was going to die at the end of the first film, but he survived in the final cut because it was too depressing for the kids in the test audiences. Denis Leary actually warned the producers that this would happen. When it proved true, he got his wish and Diego remained alive.
• Franchise Zombie: While the films have done fairly well financially, critical consensus is that this movie should have remained a standalone film and that every succeeding sequel is less creative than the previous one.
• Genre-Killer: If Monsters, Inc. and Shrek weren't enough to make studios believe that 2D animated films were unprofitable, this movie would pound the belief further. Its huge success was the signal to other animation studios that traditional animation was no longer profitable (for instance, Disney cited this film after Treasure Planet bombed big time), leading to the art form almost entirely disappearing from American feature films.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Peter Dinklage, a 4'5'' tall actor is voicing a Gigantopithecus, a 10-foot-tall ape.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Non-acting example: John Powell replaced David Newman (who wrote the score for the original film) to compose the score for the first three sequels. Surprisingly, Powell did not return to score the fifth film, with John Debney taking over instead.
  • Squint the rabbit was originally voiced by Aziz Ansari in the fourth film. In the Great Egg-scapade Easter special, he was voiced by Seth Green instead for unknown reasons.
  • In the Latin American Spanish dub, Sergio Sendel, who voiced Diego in the original film, rejected an offer to return for the second film because the producers didn't want to pay him the offer he expected. As a result, he was replaced by regular VA Sebastián Llapur for the rest of the franchise.
  • In the Japanese dub of the fourth and fifth films, Unshō Ishizuka replaced Naoto Takenaka as Diego. He was recast once again for Adventures of Buck Wild due to Ishizuka's 2018 death.
  • The Brazilian Portuguese dubs of Continental Drift and Collision Course have regular voice actress Carla Pompílio replacing Cláudia Jimenez as the voice of Ellie.
  • Zigzagged in video games. John Leguizamo always comes back to come in and do Sid while Chris Wedge always voices Scrat. Denis Leary reprises his role as Diego for each game except the Dawn of the Dinosaurs one, where Rick Pasqualone fills in. Debra Wilson fills in for Queen Latifah as Ellie in the video game for The Meltdown, but Queen Latifah reprised her role for the others. And Ray Romano reprised his role as Manny for all of the video games except Ice Age: Continental Drift - Arctic Games, where Keith Ferguson fills in, and Ice Age: Arctic Blast, where Jeff Bergman fills in.
  • With the exception of Simon Pegg as Buck, every returning character is recast in Adventures of Buck Wild.
• Playing with Character Type: Denis Leary as Diego. Like most characters played by Leary, Diego is not always the nicest guy who is also afraid to show his emotions in fears of being seen as "unmanly". Unlike most characters played by Leary, though, he prefers to stay calm and collected while most of Leary's characters have a Hair-Trigger Temper.
• Pop Culture Urban Legends: Rumor has it that the original plan for the fourth movie was to have it take place in modern times with Manny, Sid, Diego, and Ellie being defrosted in a museum. It would've apparently been called "Ice Age: TH4W". So far, no evidence has emerged to substantiate this claim.
• Promoted Fanboy: Josh Peck was a fan of Ice Age before being cast as Eddie in the sequel. He was very excited to be a part of the saga. Queen Latifah was also a fan of the original film before she was cast as Ellie in the same film.
• Real Song Theme Tune: Rusted Root's "Send Me On My Way", which was used rather prominently in the film during the Travel Montage. Chances are if you know the song you've heard it from either this movie or Matilda.
• Spared by the Cut: Diego originally died near the end of the film. This caused the test audience of children to burst into tears, so it was re-done.
• Those Two Actors: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost!... get separated between the third and fourth movies...
• Throw It In: John Leguizamo tried about thirty different voices for Sid. After viewing a documentary about sloths, he learned that they store food in their mouths; this led to him wondering what he would sound like with food in his mouth. With this, along with seeing the character model, he developed the lisp and decided that it was the perfect voice for Sid.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The first movie was originally going to be directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, and would have been traditionally animated and more of a full-on drama. After Titan A.E. bombed, however, Fox Animation Studios was disbanded, and the film was given over to Blue Sky (who had worked on AE, specifically the scene where New Earth is created) and turned into a Dramedy.
  • Before this film was in production, the first CGI animated feature by Blue Sky was meant to be "Santa Calls" based on the children's book by William Joyce, but due to production problems, the project was scrapped. They would later work with Joyce again on Robots and to adapt The Leaf Men into Epic (2013).
  • The original cut of the first film had a character that was completely removed in the final cut, Sylvia, a female Megalonyx voiced by comedian Kristen Johnson. She was cut very late in production with one scene that would have involved her altered.
  • In this original ending of the first film, Diego actually dies and does not return to Sid and Manny, leaving Sid and Manny to travel South alone. They reach the beach where all of the mammals have ended up in, and Sid meets Sylvia(the scrapped character) there. Sid grows more mature after witnessing the death of Diego, and acts much nicer to her, asking to be her mate. This idea was scrapped when the voice actor who played Diego (Denis Leary) said this was a bad idea to kill off the character, So the ending was changed to have Diego live and scrap the rest of what would have been character development for Sid mainly due to time restraints.
  • Audio commentary for the second movie explained how there was going to be a third predator that was frozen and freed alongside Cretaceous and Maelstrom and that he'd be the comedic relief of the group as they were originally going to talk. He got scrapped and instead the two remained voiceless so to make them more threatening.
  • Buck was originally supposed to have been voiced by Harrison Ford, but he said no due to scheduling conflicts with the fourth Indiana Jones movie.
  • Gutt was originally conceived as a tiny rabbit (which would later be transplanted to Squint), and also as a bear, but the designers had trouble designing the character. Someone hit on the idea that a primate would be right at home swinging through the rigging of a pirate ship, and thus Gutt became an ape.
  • James Earl Jones and Ving Rhames were considered for the role of Manny, but they sounded too obvious and Wedge wanted more comedy.
  • Albert Brooks was offered the role of Manny.
  • Philip Seymour Hoffman was considered to voice Diego.
  • The second film was going to feature a second sabertooth character named "Joe Junior". He was probably cut to focus on the development of Manny and Ellie's relationship. [1]
• The Wiki Rule: The Ice Age Wiki.

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