Trivia / We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story

• Box Office Bomb: Budget: $20 million. Box office: $9.3 million ($20.6 million adjusted for inflation). Despite the huge marketing Universal did at the time, the movie's financial failure and its problematic production led to Amblimation closing its doors in 1997.
• Children Voicing Children: Joey Shea (more well known by his real name, J.D. Daniels), a child actor at the time, provides the voice of Louie.
• Christmas Rushed: According to animator Rodolphe Guenoden, the film was rushed down the pipeline in order to directly coincide with the release of Jurassic Park (1993) as a family-friendly alternative to it, and lamented that there was no time to make the film better.
• Creator Backlash: Yeardley Smith is not too keen on the movie, which she only did to break away from the Lisa Simpson image. In general, everyone who worked on it had this reaction, especially animator Rodolphe Guenoden, who said We're Back! was the most difficult movie he ever had to work on his entire career in animation due to its messy, rushed production and the tight deadline keeping them from making the film better, and he said the final product reflects its turbulent creation.
• Creator Killer: This was only Amblimation's second movie, and its lackluster performance ensured that they would only produce one more movie, Balto, before folding. By that point, Spielberg had formed DreamWorks SKG with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, and the three men absorbed most of Amblimation's staff into DreamWorks Animation, leaving the older label stranded.
• Creator's Oddball: This was written by John Patrick Shanley, of all people.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Blaze Berdahl plays Buster the young bird boy.
• Defictionalization: Remember Rex's big "Roll Back the Rock" song sequence in the in-universe Macy's Parade? One of the promotional stunts for this film was a balloon of Rex in the actual Macy's Parade. Unfortunately, his head got popped by a street lamp due to high winds (the rest of him remained intact), forcing Universal's future parent, NBC, to throw on test flight footage. Video here.
• Deleted Scene: A scene in which Screweyes cages and chains the dinosaurs, explains how he lost his eye, and blasts Brain Drain down their throats with actual cannons was fully animated, but cut from the film. Bits and pieces of it can still be found in a Recursive Adaptation book.
• Development Hell: To say it had a bad production history would be a massive understatement. While production started around 1990, and Spielberg had a solid team to back it up, the main issue is that he had too many projects that he was working at the same time, most notably, Schindler's List, as well as other Amblimation films like An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, Balto, and the eventually cancelled Cats animated adaptation. Because of him being too busy on other projects, the sheer chaos of We're Back!'s production continued to increase as the deadline kept closer, to the point that everything had to be rushed so it can be a family friendly alternative to Jurassic Park, Spielberg would remove whatever scary content was in the film to make sure to not make the movie "too scary for children".
• Direct to Video: This has the (dis)honor of being the only movie in recent memory with Spielberg's name on the credits to meet this fate in Britain^note Ironically, where Amblimation was based.
• The Other Marty: John Malkovich was originally cast as Screweyes but was replaced because Steven Spielberg thought his performance was too dark and scary. Christopher Lloyd then recorded a performance which director Phil Nibbelink loved, but Spielberg rejected that too. Kenneth Mars was eventually chosen for the role instead.
• Playing Against Type: Kenneth Mars as the evil, menacing and completely psychotic Professor Screweyes, a far cry from the much gentler animated roles he'd had prior like King Triton and Grandpa Longneck. The closest role he'd had to this before was as the Affably Evil Franz Leibkind.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: There is a widely attested rumor that John Malkovich left the film due to constant rewrites and dumbing down his originally more complex character to a shallow villain, and that the film's Executive Meddling also caused him to leave Hollywood and only do international productions for a few years. While it's true that scenes which would have given more depth to Screweyes were taken out and Malkovich had recorded those scenes, Malkovich did not drop out, but was let go from the production. In an interview with Syfy, director Phil Nibbelink said Spielberg had them have another actor because Malkovich's performance was too dark and scary. The source of the story is an unsourced quote which journalists at AVclub tried and failed to find on the internet beyond IMDB's trivia page. They also noted that the entry bore similarities with a 2009 thread on the Channel Awesome message boards, but that one was about Sean Penn.

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