Now here’s an oddity. For years a bootleg audio-tape has circulated of Orson Welles berating the directors of an advertisement for frozen peas, complaining about the script and the quality of their direction. It was a strange little curio, mentioned in David Thomson’s Welles biography Rosebud, and one of those little pop-culture artifacts with its own tiny infamy – witness the existence of its own Wikipedia article. (Just thinking about it now, I wonder if it wasn’t also the inspiration for the routine in Tootsie where Dustin Hoffman’s Michael Dorsey complains about the script for an ad in which he played a tomato.)
Anyway, that bootleg was the inspiration for a sequence in the nineties TV cartoon Pinky and the Brain where a slightly cleaned-up version of the dialogue was performed by the mice. (Maurice La Marche, who voiced the Brain, is known for his Welles impression: he overdubbed Vincent D’Onofrio as Welles in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood). And now someone has gone and reunited the original Welles audio with the Pinky and the Brain animation. The result is, well, an even stranger little pop culture oddity. (This was brought to my attention, as so many of these kind of things are, by Jaime J. Weinman over at Something Old, Nothing New).
Incidentally, I asked over at the the original post what The Brain had said instead of “I’ll go down on you,” and apparently it was “I’ll make cheese for you.” Which is a fortuitous substitution, as it preserves the lip-synch.
If nothing else, the existence of the original Pinky and The Brain animation is a testament to the strange kinds of things that get slipped on to kids television when nobody at head office is paying attention. What on earth did the 99% of people who’d never heard of the “Frozen Peas” tape make of this?