YMMV / Who Censored Roger Rabbit?

• Adaptation Displacement: Did you know there was a book of the film?
• Animation Age Ghetto: Gary Wolf had trouble getting Who Censored Roger Rabbit? published because of this, see What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids? below. One wonders what Ralph Bakshi would have done, since his specialty was edgy urban cartoons.
• Ass Pull: Eddie literally WISHES for conclusive proof (even though it's fake) that an already dead man was the sole murderer. Fortunately, the proof fits the crime - in fact, it's the only explanation that would work that didn't have Roger being the murderer. To be fair, however, Eddie already knew Roger was the murderer, and needed physical proof of the only thing that could get Roger off the hook.
• Tear Jerker
  I looked up at the sky. It was one of those rare days when the Earth revolves a little faster and shoos away the smog. You could see a long way, but not half as far as Roger had gone.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Unlike the film, every single character in the main cast is unlikable. Roger is a murderer who planned to frame Eddie, Jessica is a philandering porn star who never loved Roger at all. Carol is one of the few likeable characters, though even she is a murder suspect. However, it all goes part-and-parcel with being a '40s-style potboiler. Eddie is initially portrayed as a cynical bigot, but he does show he isn't as prejudiced as his friends are: he suffers a My God, What Have I Done? when Roger is killed, he shows genuine concern with Roger's doppel, proves to Carol he's not just in it for the money, and slowly begins to respect Roger (albeit via his doppel) and helps clear his name despite knowing Roger was the murderer. Part of this Character Development may be why the Genie's magic is a No-Sell, as only "the pure of heart" can resist it.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Though the film was not intended for children (at least, not entirely) and thus has a good deal of profanity and risque humor in it, it's still a fairly family-friendly ouvre in the vein of previous eighties hits such as Indiana Jones and Back to the Future. These books, however, are most certainly not for children, being full of sex, violence, oodles and oodles of betrayal (seriously, take a shot every time someone gets back-stabbed), and featuring a racist bigot as a main character (but to be fair, he does chill out and become more tolerant through the course of his adventures). The original pre-1985 plans for the film were faithful to the book, but new leadership at Disney made it go through over forty revisions before getting the final product.

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