An alternate character design for Moses from an early test animation.
The Prince of Egypt
What Could Have Been in this series.Examples
- It was planned to combine the voices of a man, a woman, and a child for the voice of God. But they had Kilmer voice God instead because it was thought some might have problems with God sounding female. That and the fact that their synthesized composite voices apparently sounded much more demonic than Godly. There are elements of this in the film itself, as the backing chorus of "The Plagues" are from His perspective.
- Originally there was a servant that would serve as a major character where Moses and Rameses would talk to their staff in the same way the characters in Downton Abbey would. The character was scrapped to focus more on the relationship between Moses and Rameses, though does appear in a few brief scenes and is humorously referred to by the film's staff as “You There”.
- A scene with a talking camel was scrapped and Rameses was originally supposed to have two evil cats. Granted, these and the camel would have run counter-current to the mood of the film as a whole. Curiously, the camel did eventually show up in the form of a piece of merchandise for the film, as a little beanbag doll. Bizarrely, there is some historical evidence since Ramses II was an avid cat person — he had hundreds imported from other countries to Egypt and had a lion as a personal pet who fought alongside him at Kadesh.
- Moses also originally had two dogs as his side-kicks. Though they were later scrapped from the film as a whole, you still see them two times, first when Moses finds them and one of the servants tied up in his room, and again during "All I Ever Wanted." Ironically, the dog and cat ideas would be used in the Mock Buster "Moses: Egypt's Great Prince".
- Jeffrey Katzenberg pitched this idea to Disney several times during his tenure there, but CEO Michael Eisner kept rejecting it (their relationship was starting to crumble, plus the idea did not fit Disney's animated MO at all; they have never really been comfortable with material involving God also bearing the Disney name outside of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which didn't push it too heavily).
- Rameses was much more sympathetic in the original script, until the crew realized this made Moses look like a jerk for refusing to work with him to help the situation.
- At one point, Miriam was going to be the Hebrew slave beaten by the taskmaster whom Moses accidentally kills, in order to give Moses a more personal reason for defending her. But eventually the writers realized it would be more meaningful for Moses to defend a stranger, so a random man took Miriam’s place.
- During the moment in which Rameses shoots Moses a Death Glare during the aftermath of the tenth plague, he was originally going to also reach for a knife. There was also meant to be a scene of Rameses preparing his army to chase after the Hebrews. Both scenes were cut due to being too cliche.
- This early test animation reel
shows early designs of some characters.- At the 0:10 to 0:24 mark shows an early design of both Moses and partially Rameses.
- It also shows an early design of Seti at the 1:51 to 2:08 mark
- An early design of Hotep and Huy at the 2:10 to 2:24 and 2:33 to 2:46 mark.
- And an early design of Jethro at the 2:26 to 2:32 mark.
- Many other actors were considered for roles in the film:
- Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Dennis Quaid and Mark Wahlberg for Moses.
- James Earl Jones, Keith David, Vernon Wells and Mel Brooks for Jethro.
- Jeremy Irons and Ian McKellen for Seti.
- Michael J. Fox, Dave Foley and Scott Bakula for Aaron.
- Ellen DeGeneres, Juliette Binoche and Mary McDonnell for Miriam.
- Jennifer Aniston for Tzipporah.
- Richard Schliff and Cheech Marin for Hotep.
- Tom Waits and Tommy Chong for Huy.
- Robert De Niro and Gary Oldman for Rameses.
- Carol Burnett for Tuya.
