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Wreck-It Ralph's Skrillex cameo revealed
And Disney producer Clark Spencer discusses Sonic and Mario…
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Wreck-It Ralph won't be hitting UK cinemas until February, so the 30 minutes of footage we saw this morning was so super-advanced, some scenes weren't even finished.
But actually, it's out in the States in November, isn't it? Which means the Disney team are going to have a lot of late nights between now and then…
But, from what we saw, they should take comfort from the fact they're working on a potential classic.
Wreck-It-Ralph is warm, genuinely funny, features distinctively lovely vocal work from John C Reilly, and is PACKED with great cameos from a really wide-range of videogames.
We'll get to those in a minute, but first we want to discuss a very different cameo we spotted in the footage this morning - dubstep DJ, Skrillex. Yes, that Skrillex.
We already knew that Skrillex would be contributing to the soundtrack - that was revealed at Comic Con - what we didn't know was that he was actually going to be in the movie.
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We asked producer Clark Spencer how the Skrillex cameo came about…
"We asked him if we could do it," Spencer said. "We went to him first and said, 'Hey, we have this party scene in the world of Fix It Felix Jr, and we have a DJ and we think it would make a nice cameo if we put you into it.' And he was ecstatic.
We built his model, we put on his look, and we sent it to him to have him give us comments. And he said he would never wear non-black tennis shoes. He said "My tennis shoes will always be black." So we changed the tennis shoes to black.
You don't see them in the film, as he's behind the DJ booth, but they were in the model. He has seen the animation, and he's very, very excited about it."
Why isn't Mario in the film?
"The hard thing was, we were trying to work out the right way to use a character like Mario.
It had to be organic to the film, we didn't want to just paste him in there.
For Bowser, it made perfect sense for him to be a member of the Bad Anon group.
For Mario himself we couldn't think of the right way to incorporate him into the film, and so we didn't do it.
How specific were the game companies about how you could use their characters?
The games companies were very specific - there's a scene in which Bowser drinks a cup of coffee, and they were very specific about how Bowser would drink coffee.
The other thing that was fascinating to me was that all of the companies know how tall their characters are.
There was lots of conversation about which character would be the biggest character in that Bad Anon scene. Even to the specifics of centimeters.
But that was helpful, because we wanted it to be authentic.
We had a scene where we wanted the rings to come out of Sonic, and SEGA said the only way that happens is if he falls over, and we didn't have him fall over in the scene, so we actually went back and re-animated it."
What was it like negotiating all of those different cameos?
"It was interesting part of the process, we talked early on about making the film authentic and the only way to do that was to have real game characters in the film as well as the characters we'd created, otherwise it would fell like an artificial environment.
But when you do that, you don't know the reality of what characters you're going to be able to license for the film.
Rich [Moore, director] and I went to E3, and pitched the movie to all the different game companies, talking about the concept.
What was great about that was we developed a one-on-one relationship [with the people at the game companies], and people warmed to the idea.
So they felt like it could be something interesting, but they were still a little skeptical, as they were giving their own creative characters over to Wreck-It Ralph .
And so we said we'd keep them involved in the process, and give them the script pages. We showed them the models, we showed them the early animation tests, and even the final animations.
We brought them along the entire way, and it made companies willing to participate, because they felt like we were going to be true to their characters.
As a result we got pretty much almost anything we wanted, because the companies started feeling the momentum and everybody pretty much said yes to us."
Wreck-It Ralph will smash into UK cinemas on 15 February.
Sam Ashurst is a London-based film maker, journalist, and podcast host. He's the director of Frankenstein's Creature, A Little More Flesh + A Little More Flesh 2, and co-hosts the Arrow Podcast. His words have appeared on HuffPost, MSN, The Independent, Yahoo, Cosmopolitan, and many more, as well as of course for us here at GamesRadar+.
