Trivia / Flushed Away

• Acclaimed Flop: Was only a modest success in theaters, but was lauded by many fans and critics, particularly for its animation.
• Acting for Two: Steve Blum does Le Frog and Whitey in the game while Carlos Alazraqui does Spike and Sid.
• All-Star Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Bill Nighy, and Andy Serkis, to name a few. What more is there to ask for?
• Billing Displacement: Le Frog, appears third billed in the opening credits. But he does not appear until the last 37 minutes of the movie and barely appears in the trailers and pictures.
• Completely Different Title: The film's Japanese title is Mouse Town Rody and Rita's Great Adventure.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Some people have confused this movie with Ratatouille. It doesn't help that both films are CGI, involve rats and were out in theatres around the same time.
• Creator Backlash: The film got hit by this for the entire studio of Aardman, as the Executive Meddling the film underwent and its subsequent box office failure caused them to break off ties with Dreamworks and move to Sony.
• Direct to Video: This and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas were the only Dreamworks movies not to get a theatrical release in Japan, until the release of Megamind
• Executive Meddling: Slammed down on hard as a rock and the reason the two studios broke off their five-picture contract.
  • First was DreamWorks putting a kibosh on the pirate movie Peter Lord had wanted to follow up Chicken Run with, this being the time between Cutthroat Island and the Pirates of the Caribbean films when the pirate movie genre was at the low point of the Popularity Polynomial (Jeff Katzenberg also felt that "rape, pillaging and murder [didn't] really make for a good family film").
  • After some time in Development Hell, this film was Christmas Rushed so that it could be released with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit still fresh in audiences' minds. Because this left the production team very little time to figure out how to do a claymation film with that much water (real water would've damaged the puppets while digital compositing would've been too time-consuming and expensive), Aardman was forced to make an All-CGI Cartoon like Dreamworks' in-house films.
  • DreamWorks also insisted that Aardman tone down its trademark British stoicism in favor of the former's then-newfound Denser and Wackier style, something that had been attempted but fought on Were-Rabbit.
  • The Running Gag of the singing slugs reappearing was also imposed on the creative team, who had planned them as a One-Scene Wonder.
• Fake Brit: Roddy is voiced by Hugh Jackman, an Australian.
• Kids' Meal Toy: McDonald's released a set of six figures in their Happy Meals. They consisted of Roddy, Rita, Sid, the Toad, Le Frog, and Whitey. It was the first time Aardman teamed up with McDonald's.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The pair of Roddy's hamster butlers seen in the original trailer are nowhere to be found in the actual film itself. Even more grating in that the butlers do appear in the video game adaptations of the movie.
  • According to the Word of God, they were removed because they made no sense to the plot, and they wanted to stress the fact that Roddy is a loner; the song ''Dancing with Myself'' was added late in the production as well.
• No Export for You: Only the DS version of the video game was released in Japan.
• The Other Darrin: In the tie-in game, none of the actors from the movie reprised their roles.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Hugh Jackman is often type-cast as the street-wise tough character that Rita plays in the film, rather than the pampered and cowardly Roddy.
  • Bill Nighy is usually more intimidating and villainous in his roles than as the Affably Evil Dumb Muscle Whitey.
• Throw It In!: Roddy's 'Ice-Cold Rita' song was improvised on the spot by Hugh Jackman. Jackman was supposed to sing another song, but for whatever reason that song was unavailable.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As noted above, this was originally intended as a pirate movie, which DreamWorks dubbed "unmarketable" at the time, plus the technology was not yet up to speed to combine that much water with claymation. Unlike most cases, however, it has since been.
  • Sid was originally going to be voiced by Ricky Gervais but he left at some point during pre-production, giving the role to Shane Richie.
  • As mentioned above, Roddy also was supposed to have hamster butlers by the names of Gilbert and Sullivan, if what was expected in the trailer to be true. They're only in the video game. They were removed because it wouldn't make sense for them to be in the plot of Roddy being a loner.

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