Trivia / Hot to Trot

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $9 million. Box office, $6.4 million.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Word of God says that John Candy ignored the script and improvised Don's lines.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The original version of the movie with Joan Rivers and Elliott Gould instead of Bobcat Goldthwait and John Candy respectively, which was screened to test audiences in 1987 and apparently received such poor reactions that the entire film was hastily re-written, reshot, and re-dubbed with the new cast. It's pretty safe to say that if this ended up being the film that Warner Bros. felt more confident releasing to the public, the original version will probably never surface through official means.
• Money, Dear Boy: In a 2011 interview, Bobcat Goldthwait said that he got the script for Hot to Trot and wrote "Why would I do this?" on the cover, to which his manager responded by writing a dollar sign.
• The Other Marty: The film was originally made with Joan Rivers as the lead human and Elliott Gould as the voice of Don, with their parts reshot/rerecorded after test screenings.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The original cut of the film was completed in 1987 and was scheduled for release that fall, but Warner Bros. pushed it back to Memorial Day weekend 1988 as a result of poor test screenings with the original lead roles filled by Joan Rivers and Elliott Gould. It ultimately opened on August 26, 1988, over a year after filming was completed.
• So My Kids Can Watch: Why Virginia Madsen agreed to be in the film, which is a bit ironic given the rather adult humor and themes.
• Troubled Production:
  • As mentioned above, the initial version of the movie with Elliott Gould's voicing Don and Joan Rivers playing the lead human was finished by 1987, but test audiences hated it so much that the movie was re-shot with Bobcat Goldthwait and all of Don's lines and segments in the script were completely re-written by executive producer Andy Breckman in an effort to make the film funnier, and John Candy was brought on to re-record it. John completely ignored the new script, however, and improvised all of his lines.
  • Also the case on the set itself, with the cast and crew supposedly being subjected to exhaustingly long shooting schedules in order to expedite the reshoots and get the revised version of the film out sooner. That's not even mentioning the rampant abuse of the many on-set animals, as Gilbert Gottfried revealed in an interview that the main horse was beaten and whipped in the mouth repeatedly before each take in order to get the lip movements that would be (poorly) dubbed over.
• What Could Have Been: Tim Burton was offered to direct, but turned it down.

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