The Mummy (1999): Everything You Didn't Know

Jordan and Alex crack open their sarcophagi for a deep-dive into one of the best popcorn flicks of the last century: The Mummy! THRILL as they trace the film's torturous development path through some of the biggest horror names of the era! CHILL as they recount the trials the cast faced from the climate, animals AND people of the remote filming location! GASP at Arnold Vosloo's body-shaving routine to play the titular character! JOIN the Brendan Fraserssance! It's Mummuary on Too Much Information!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio.

(00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Brendan Fraser Information. I mean
too much Frasier, I mean Brendan much. I mean for
I'm just pitching wild too much, too much Friend and Fraser.
There's never enough Brendan Fraser. Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known, fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite Frasier's, Brendan's movies, music,

(00:33):
TV shows, and more. Because that's what this show is
really about, living, laughing, loving. Brendan Fraser started Brendan Fraser Podcast.
I do really well these days, probably right where you're two,
Brendan Fraser's friend. In fact, I had Scared Beatles of

(00:56):
Behind the Seatles first Bad. We could work with that, Yeah,
can we a be it? Can you cut two different
versions of this market tests to check the traffic on both. Yeah, yeah,
we'll go with that and Jordan's Today we're gonna be
talking about one of the most beloved hits from those
waning days of the last millennium. We're talking about the Mummy.

(01:19):
I'm talking about the Mummy, not to be confused with
the Mummy or ninety two is the Mummy or even
nineteen fifty nine the Mummy. That's right, we're talking about
the Mummy parentheses, where so I could call it Mummy nine.
Can we make that a thing? Mummy? Just riffing wildly here.

(01:43):
You thought this was gonna be a short one. You're
recording this at eleven PM your time, and I'm just
riffing into the wind. You know, Jordan, what I think
about this time in my life? I think mostly about
being bitterly let down by Star Wars the Phantom Menace,
and then having my mind blown wide open by the Matrix.
But in between those two things, it was all about

(02:03):
the Mummy. Baby bing Bong PG. Thirteen horror movie. Quippy
but dashing lead performance from Brendan Fraser, who I didn't
know that dude is six four. Yeah, I didn't know
that until reading this too. Yeah, Big Fraser would wash
either of us in a fight with especially, would rocks

(02:28):
either of us in a fight. That's true. God, Um,
what do you think about Mommy Jordan's I liked it.
I mean I think I saw, in the best possible
scenario that anyone could ever see, Mummy nine. I saw
it at a drive in movie theater, which like, yeah,
I mean, that's that's all I have to say. I

(02:48):
you know what I will say. I was so enamored
by the fact that I was at a drive in
movie theater that I don't really remember paying much attention
to the movie, which is kind of in the grand
tradition of going to a drive in movie theater. But
I was just yeah, but we were like twelve, so
you wouldn't have been trying to get like a squeezer
or anything. No. I was just so happy that I
was at a drive in, and you know, I see

(03:09):
so many time, and I think it's my first time
I had to drive into That's awesome. That is just great.
I imagine that this scratched some of your your like
a like a like an Indiana Jones age for you though,
because you and I both love love Indiana Jones. Yeah,
I mean it's swashbuckling. It was literally pitched as swashbuckling.

(03:34):
You love them, you love when buckles are swashed. I've
heard you say this. What is the derivation of of
the phrase swashbuckling, No idea. I assume it has to
do something with like keeping a sword built up. Oh
that makes sense. Why is it called swashbuckling compound of
swash to swagger? Wow, I was wrong on both counts.

(03:54):
It is a compound of the archaic word swash to
swagger with a drawn sword and buckler a small shield
gripped in the fist, dating from the sixteenth century m
far out anyway, Yeah, I guess this is probably was
probably too spooky for you though you don't like spooky. Yeah.
And also, I mean I I love the old universal

(04:18):
Mummy stuff and the Abbott Costella Meet the Mummy and
all those kind of you know, the native of those
strong Yeah that was was first exposed to. So I
love that. Um, And yeah, I mean I loved Indiana
Jones more so that there were some of the elements
that felt a little too It crossed the line from
being a nod into being just like kind of pastiche

(04:40):
to me. But but it's so perfect, I I I mean,
it's so tightly edited, it's so funny, it's so he's
so good in it. I mean, I I don't really,
I don't know, I don't. We talked a lot. We
were talking about it's kind of depressing that the Rock
ended up being the biggest bank of action draw out
of this. Brendan Fraser should have had more. He would
have been like Harrison Ford. Honestly, I think they think

(05:03):
they tried to do it with a couple of films
and it didn't take. They were just like, you're too goofy.
They kept giving him comedies. Man, he could have been
like he should have been three hundred. He should have
been like Gerard. But Butler didn't have much of a
career after that either. Yeah, he could have been like
a He could have been a like a like a
Bruce Willis type. He could have just been playing you know,

(05:26):
sarcastic detectives for for forever. I mean some of his
comedies were good. So we were talking earlier. You've never
seen Blasts from the Past. Nope, Oh it's great. It's
about a guy who has lived in a in a
bomb shelter since the late fifties or early sixties and
then come out. Ah, it's a good bit. Is he

(05:50):
like you where he like Lee wishes that he lived
in the past because he also didn't see no man
where he was from the past? Right, And they also
did Dudley do right right after the same year as
The Mummy. Yeah, and he did be Dazzled, which is
remake of a sixties British comedy with Peter Cook and
Dudley Moore. Wow, maybe you know what set? Yeah, you guys,

(06:13):
you guys, Brenda Frasier and like Billy Joel. I think
the three of us was sit around and watch the
History Channel talk about Long Island. First Brandon and Frasier
from I'm gonna say California. I'm gonna say Indianapolis, Indiana
to Canadian parents. That is the least Californian thing you
can be. A Hoosier born of Cannex first of his name.

(06:39):
Who's your born of Cadocks first of his name? Oh boy,
I'm pretty sure he's going to win that Oscar. Is
it good? I haven't seen it. No, I've heard the
movie is like grotesque and kind of but it's the
narrative for him. I mean, you know, his whole thing
about getting molested and blacklisted and so, I mean, this
is they're going to make a biopic of Brendan Fraser

(07:03):
and this is or excuse me, a biopic as I
was yelled at, or so I saw it on Twitter?
Is that actually it? I just saw something being like
like a semi viral tweet that was like, biopic doesn't
rhyme with myopic bio because it's biographical pictures. Well that
makes sense, Okay, yeah, yeah. Anyway, in the arc of

(07:26):
Brendan Frasier's in the Brendan Fraser biopic that's gonna get
made MM in twenty years starring Austin Butler, the Mummy
is surely going to be like a first third high point.
It's gonna be that George of the Junk. Oh well,
from the Mummy's tortured path through the late eighties and

(07:47):
early nineties development hell, to the all too actually perilous
shooting conditions of the film, to the semi real life
Egyptology in the film. Here's everything you didn't know about
the Mummy. Way, do these people see how horny I

(08:08):
am for Brandon Fraser? Actually I think I'm a horny
here for my parents. Listen to this shows what is
my father in law story? The Mummy? Mummy story? Mum
really begins with a producer named and I cannot stop
saying this guy's name, James Jim Jack's James Jim Jacks.

(08:28):
His nickname is Jim Jim Jacks. Yeah, yeah, James Jim Jacks.
I mean he's dead, so no one's calling him anything,
but uh they starting Jim Jacks. That's the Mummy. No
this guy, Uh he was He was a producer for
ed Universal, then he started his own company. He was

(08:50):
attached to Days and Confused Tombstone, John Woo's first American film,
Hard Target, starring j C v D mall rats, but
like he worked with the Coen Brothers on Raising Arizona,
Barton Fink Miller's Crossing, so like three Bangers, and then
in Tolerable Cruelty so it warn't warn't. But he and
his producing part named Sean Daniel had started work on

(09:13):
a version of The Mommy in the late eighties, which
I think probably had something to do with it the
sort of mid to late eighties vogue of like Monster
teen movies, because eighties seven was Monster Squad, which basically
brings back like non contractually violating versions of the Universal
Monsters Crew and pits them against like the Goonies. That's

(09:36):
like the pitch of Monster Squad, and that was huge
hit in Universal still held all the rights, so people
started um started trying to develop the money, and the
money probably had the whole you know Indie and the
Jones adjacent thing going for it too. I imagine he
is unraveled to death in the Monster Squad. That's how
they like. They're like fleeing from in a car and
they snagged one of his bandages and he gets unraveled.

(10:00):
We do villain death. Oh yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible.
That's the film where they blow up the Wolfman that
since have you have you never seen Monster Squad? Monster Squads? Amazing? Yeah,
they have this whole there's this whole running gag about like, well,
like you have to shoot a werewolf with with a
silver bullet, but would dynamite work? And it does. It's

(10:20):
also probably more famously it's the movie where they kicked
the Wolfman and the nuts and then say Wolfman's got nords.
It's like the eighties Man. Anyway, based on the success
of that cinematic classic, they probably wanted to get the Mummy.
They were like, let's spin off this mummy guy. He's
got legs. This is wild to me. I did not
Another thing I didn't know this other than the fact

(10:42):
that Brandon Fraser was built like a brick house, was
the fact that they were like everybody in Hollywood was
attached to this thing. George Romero was originally of of
the of the Living deads yes to write and direct um,
well it's an my god. And then then Nick he
was just pushed into directing role. And this woman named

(11:05):
Abby Bernstein told us at Sine Fantastique, who had this
incredible making of article about the about the Mummy, that
they were going to do something that was like the
Terminator where they were just going to have like a mummy,
just like stalking through um. At one point it was
set in Beverly Hills. Uh, but this thing. Everyone was

(11:26):
attached this. Romero left the project and then the next
two people that were brought on were Clive Barker, who
had done the two hell Raisers and was about to
do Candy Man and was like the hot big thing
in horror of the of the mid to late eighties.
And then Mick Garris, who is uh guy Stephen King
Pale and very horror guy about Towne. They were brought

(11:51):
on to do this and I didn't realize this. The
pitch for hell Raiser three was going to be UM
was basically Clive Barker's really funny because he's been kind
of kicked around by Hollywood, and so he's sort of
discussed for the whole place is very funny. So I
guess what happened was he had written a treatment for
hell Raiser, for the third hell Razor movie that was

(12:12):
going to be um essentially the first center bite, like
the pinhead, the first demon that's in the hell Raising universe,
was going to have been a pharaoh. And then that
didn't get made. So he was like, so, now it's
a Mummy movie. And I took that to Universal and
I think they we're gonna make it. They were they
I was reading a little bit about this draft. It
was just very outre and very weird, and Universal was

(12:34):
literally like this is too weird to us, Like you can't,
We're not going to make this. And so then uh,
it went to a screenwriter named Alan Ormsby and Joe
Dante who is doing the who had done Gremlins and
was going to do Gremlins too, and has and has
a very deep love of this whole era of fifties
kind of monster making stuff. Because then he went on

(12:55):
to do matten Ae. Have you ever seen matten Ae?
That is William It's like a senda. It's starting John Goodman.
It's like a send up of like William Castle style
homegrown kind of budget d I y horse stuff. Um. Anyway,
that it was kicked back to George Romero and then
Mick Garris again. So if you're keeping track, that's like

(13:18):
five different iconic horror directors who were all attached to
this thing in like three years. Joe Dante's version had
Daniel day Lewis attached to star. Christopher Lee was going
to be in it because he had just been in
Gremlin's too. Christopher Lee was famously in the Hammer Horror
version of The Mummy back in the fifties Mummy fifty nine,
And it got as far Dante's version got as far

(13:39):
as because Joe Dante and Steven Spielberger buddies, because Dante
done Gremlin's and he got as far as Steven Spielberg
apparently talking this over with Sid Sheinberg, who is the
head of Universal at the time, and on the set
of Casper. Supposedly Joe Dante has told this interview where
he's like, yeah, so we went to the set where

(14:00):
they were making Casper, and Spielberg pitched this version of
Mummy to Sid Sheinberg, and Sheinberg was like, and you're
gonna make it a period piece, right, Like it's going
to be like set in the twenties or thirties, And
Joe Dante was like, no, it's gonna be set in
the modern day. And that scotched it. That that one
little detail ruined it. So by Mick Garris has a

(14:23):
version that he said was virtually greenlit, and then Universal
m c A was sold to Seagram's and Sid Sheiberg departed.
Part of his exit deal was that he could pick
whatever project in the works at Universal to take with him,
and he picked The Mummy, the version that was in
the works currently, and he over developed it. To hear

(14:45):
Mick Garris tell it, what happened was he was gonna
attract a much higher name writer and then he was
going to attract a bigger cast and then this basically
just kept driving the budget up and it just died
in development. Hell Um, even Nightmare Are on Elm Street.
Uh creator Wes Craven was was called in and offered
this thing at one point and it still didn't happen.

(15:07):
And then the next draft of this. Because you can
trace these back through the Writer's Guild, which is not
a thing that I knew. You can trace the development
of movies back through stuff that gets registered with the
writer's Guild. The next one is in the writer named
Kevin jar who wrote Tombstone and Glory, and it is
about this time that the film's actual and eventual director,

(15:29):
Stephen Summers gets involved. I'd always wanted to do a
version of the Mummy, he said to Entertainment Weekly. When
I was eight years old, I saw the old Boris
Karloff one. It took me to ancient Egypt and Cairo
of the twenties and thirties and scared the crap out
of me. The film's producers, Sean Daniel and Jim Jacks,
had been developing it for nine years. I was just

(15:52):
finishing Deep Rising and I'd heard they'd parted ways with
another writer director. They took me right into Universal. One
of the first things I said was, nobody wants to
see a guy wrapped in bandages. They're going to laugh
at it. I walked out and Jim was like, the
studio wants to do it for fifteen million. I said,
I'm going to need that for visual effects alone. The

(16:12):
hoot spa on this Stephen Summers guy is incredible. That
movie Deep Rising is like a sea monster picture. I
don't think did super Well stars treat starting treat Williams,
anybody star of the movie version of Hair, the Broadway
musical Hair. It gets worse. That movie Deep Rising released

(16:33):
on February gross eleven mill on a forty million budget.
So this guy is going into meetings with Universally going,
I want to make The Mummy, this movie that's been
in development hell for ten years at this point, and
I want to do it for more money, for just
the VFX budget. Then my last film grossed totally. One

(16:56):
thing that actually helped him making this case Bay Pig
in the City not a sentence I ever thought. I
was gonna say, nine million budget gross sixty nine million.
So a flop, and the studio and its new leadership
needed a hit, and new chairwoman Stacy Snyder sent out
a list of scripts and properties that Universal owned, and

(17:19):
Summers jumped on it, and Jim Jacks told The l
A Times at the time that his vision for The
Mummy was quote the most expensive version we'd had. It
was also the biggest. It was a period piece and
so all everyone lined up on this and Uh. Summers
took an eighteen page pitch to the studio. They gave
him eighty million to make this. He spent six months

(17:42):
researching it, eight weeks writing the screenplay. Production designer Alan Cameron,
who worked with Summers on The Jungle Book, the live
action Jungle Book, Remember that movie? I have no memory
of that whatsoever. This is a big era for live
action Disney movies. Though. Wasn't the have action under one Dalmatians? Yes,

(18:02):
it was. Production designer Alan Cameron, who worked with Summers
on The Jungle Book, went to the British Museum where
he spent hours researching Egyptology. He turned a book commissioned
by Napoleon Bonaparte. When Napoleon invaded Egypt. He commissioned a
book that included etchings, drawings, and catalogings of everything they
that the French found in the tombs they rated, and

(18:24):
that became the film's production bible. Uh. They initially wanted
to shoot it in Arizona and California, all the usual
probably out in Utah, the places that usually stand in
for the desert when they're shooting in the States. But
they decided to shoot in Morocco in Marrakech and out
in the desert and a place called air Food, and

(18:46):
then eight weeks at Shepperton Studios in England. And there's
some interesting real life nods to uh, this era of
Egyptology in this film. I didn't know this, but when
you if you're the scene when evis in the library,
if you zoom in really really close, mostly on the
binders that are on those shelves, they contain the real
life seal of the egypt Exploration Society. He spent six

(19:09):
months research in this, he got those details. Yeah, yeah.
And the book that Ev is reading on the boat
in that scene when the boat is attacked and they
all have to jump off, is called The Dwellers on
the Nile by a guy named E. A. Wallace, budget
published in five It's been since discredited, but it would
have been an appropriate thing for a budding Egyptologists to
be reading the twenties. So some nice little uh, some

(19:32):
nice little Oh, here's a fun side note that I
didn't think to bring this up before, you know. Bram
Stoker also wrote a famous novel about mummies. Bram Stoker
wrote of the of the Dracula, of of of the Dracula. Yes, uh.
He he wrote a novel called The Jewel of Seven
Stars that it features a mummified Egyptian queen. So you

(19:56):
have Bram Stoker batting two thousand per scent for creating
universal monsters. Did they base any of the mummy properties
on that book or no? Nope. But it was extremely
controversial when it was published in nineteen o three because
it was so violent, and he tried to republish it

(20:16):
in nineteen twelve and they told him to change the
ending or they wouldn't publish it. What was the ending?
I don't know. I didn't read that far. M I
can find out for you if you're really interested. I mean, if, if,
if that was really the sticking point in a book
that was supposedly that violent. Now I'm curious. Well, you
have to understand this was occurring during the backdrop of

(20:38):
egypt Omania, as Wikipedia is calling it, the peak of
British fascination in Egypt between eighteen sixty and nineteen fourteen,
teenage women screaming at mummies. Ah, that's really funny, uh

(21:01):
something just a bunch of people dying. I guess they
didn't like that. Yeah, it just says in the second version,
no one is harmed, so they were basically just like, yeah,
you you can't have this books insane. There's a mummified cat.
There's a theory that the ancient Egyptians had discovered radium,

(21:23):
the invention of electricity. Yeah, sort of a charity to
the gods thing Egypt, Domania bram Stoker Jordan brings us
back to whatever the hell we were talking about before
comesting Mommy casting. Supposedly, the lead role of Rick O'Connell
was offered to, of course, Tom Cruise. I feel like

(21:46):
every action movie in the nineties had Tom Cruise in
the running at some point, but he was busy filming
Eyes Wide Shut. Notably not an action movie. Well it
was action in it, but not that kind of action. Brad,
thank you. H Brad Pitt was considered, as was Matt
Damon ben Affleck. I can't see ben Affleck. He would

(22:06):
have been coming off Army Gedton, Oh yeah, I guess,
and phantoms and he's I can't be in Brunette. Honestly,
that's like kind of the big thing, I don't you know,
Like in the desert, you gotta have the sandy blonde,
you gotta have the Brendan Frasier. I'm taking that out
of context. Next time I need to cancel you. I

(22:27):
just can't imagine the lead guy being a brunette and
Leonardo DiCaprio, although he would have been too small, I
feel like I wasn't actually would have that. This is
like one of those things that's on like I amdbing everywhere.
Leonardo DiCaprio desperately wanted to be in the Mummy, even
tried even tried to suppose that. The thing that I

(22:48):
kept reading was that he tried to get he tried
to like weasel out of filming the beach so that
he could film the Mummy. But I wasn't able to
actually find that and like verify that from any primary
source stuff. So if anyone out there has a line
on Leo, and if you or a twenty three year
old that you know is currently dating Leonardo, tweet at

(23:11):
Jordan and I using the hashtag Mummy and we'll venmo
you five bucks. I mean, it seems like he wouldn't
want to do this for the same reason they didn't
want to do Titanic initially, Whereas it's just like a
one dimensional, you know, cardboard honky character. Maybe he just
loves mummies man, Oh yeah, maybe, or maybe he knew
it was just gonna be physically grueling being out in

(23:31):
the desert and that's kind of his thing. It's like, well,
if the characters lamb, can I at least suffer physically
for it? And then that's true. Yeah, although Brendan hasn't
beat because he died, right, that's true. We'll get to
that later. Director Stephen Summers told sinape Can say this
cinemon pastique, that is quite a name for their incredible

(23:54):
article about the making of Mummy. Pretty early on, I
wrote the lead guy as a macho action hero because
he was involved with a lot of physical conflict and
I wanted him to be able to respond. But I
also wanted the story to have an element of humor
and fun. At six four and close to two hundred
pounds solid rock, Brendan Fraser was a big, strong guy

(24:14):
who could throw a punch and shoot a gun, and
he could also make you laugh and laugh at himself.
He has that kind of charm. Stephen Somers continue The
Entertainment Weekly, my editor and producing partner. As soon as
he read the script, he said, this is Brendan Fraser
and Brandon Frasier. At the time, he just come off
George to the jungle, where he spent the entire movie
oiled up in a loincloth. I believe I'm missing something

(24:37):
that good, which grossed a hundred and seventy four point
five million dollars worldwide. I don't know is that big
of a hit. Wow. Brendan Fraser was a little more
muted about his first impressions to the Mummy. He told
Entertainment Weekly simply, I liked the script very much. Narrator voice,

(24:58):
he did not. I mean, I don't think he knew
it would have. In his defense, I don't think he
knew it was going to kill him, right, Yes, yes, yes, yes, Okay,
we're putting the cart ahead of the horse here. We'll
get to the Brenda Fraser almost died story later. We're
going to take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more. Too much information in just a moment

(25:32):
pole of Evie Carnahan. Stephen Somers told Entertainment Weekly, the
studio started throwing up all these American actresses. Nobody knew
who Rachel Weiss was. She auditioned four or five times
and The character Evie Carnahan was named in honor of
the explorer Evelyn Karnavn Carton Carnivan. Well. I know this

(25:52):
because he's the daughter of George Herbert, who's the fifth
Earl of Carnarvon, who I know as the guy who
bankrolled the king discovery of King Tut's tomb uh And
he notably died soon after He's supposed to be the
one of the first victims of the supposed King Tut's
curse when he got bitten by a mosquito and then

(26:15):
cut the bite when he was shaving and it became infected,
and he died fairly soon after the discovery of the tomb.
I think it's a real freaky way to die. So anyway,
that's how the female lead in The Mummy got her name,
Evi knar Hand Rachel Weiss wasn't as well known as
Brendan Frasier or even the rest of the cast for
that matter, but she would return for the Mummy returns,

(26:38):
but not the third one. I guess Mummy returns kind
of slaps. It's got a dirigible and it has the
rock and rock you know, now I'm getting my my
Mummy's confused. Was the Rock not in the first one? No, No,
he's the Scorpion King who, yes, he earns his own film. Ah,
he is the titular Scorpion King. Apparently he was. He

(27:00):
filmed everything from Mummy Returns in a day because he
had like horrific food poisoning. So he was like sweating
and pooping and puking in like a hundred and thirty
degree heat, and Stephen Summers had him for a day.
He was like he'd be under this blanket and then
we'd be like call, I'd be like action and then
and the Rock would like throw himself in like and

(27:22):
nail all the all the physicality and stuff and then
just like collapse in a pile of food poisoning when
the cameras stopped rolling. He's a pro, what can you say?
He pops. M Original Vice trained six to eight hours
a day for three months to do her fight scenes
with Returns. You remember that scene where they're like fighting

(27:43):
with size. For some reason, they have like Japanese weapons
in ancient Egypt and they're like bikini fighting seen rules.
But as she said, she did not return for the
third Mummy. Vice told the Birmingham Post i don't normally
like horror films. I get really scared. I was petrified
watching Gremlin's which I don't recall is being that scary. Uh,

(28:05):
But I don't think that this is a horror movie.
It's Hocum a comic book Worlds for the titular role
of not the Scorpion King but the Mummy. Production cast
Arnold Vosslu a stage train South African actor, but on Broadway.
He's probably best known in Hollywood at this point though,
for being the bad guy in A Hard Target, which,

(28:27):
as I mentioned before, is John Wou's legendary Hong Kong
action director John wouse first American film starring Jean called
Vandam and His mullet Um. It's a loose adaptation of
the Most Dangerous Game set in Louisiana. So you get
John Cod Vandam doing a Cajun accent and it rules.

(28:48):
And then he took over the role of dark Man
from Liam Neeson for dark Man's two and three. Uh,
those are wild movies, Sam Rami anyone dark Man anyway.
Apparently they auditioned a boatload of people for the role.
Somers told Sina Fantastique that we were kind of at
our wits end for im Hootep, and then suddenly Arnold

(29:11):
Vosslo walked in. It was funny at first. There was
something kind of intimidating about him. I can't explain it.
He's Shakespearean, he's serious, he's very commanding. Within thirty seconds
I knew he was going to be the guy, and
I never do that. But there was an adjustment period
for Arnold Voslow. He said, they go, all right, here's

(29:31):
your wardrobe. He's talking to e W and it's like
a g string. I liked my beer as he continued.
I had a bit of a paunch still do. Steve
told me afterwards that the wardrobe master said, we've got
a problem. We've got a fat mummy, so mean produce
to Jim Jack's told Cinefestique Arnold was only about ten

(29:52):
or fifteen pounds overweight, but he had to put on
this little skirt, and boy did every ounce of its show.
I told him he had a month to loose the weight,
and I suggested he take a look at the Ten
Commandments movie to see how Yo Brenner looked back. Then
both Lew added to cinevest they inflicted a trainer on me.
That's a great way to phrase that. Who am I

(30:13):
tried to avoid at all costs. He cut out alcohol
and sugar from his diet and that helped him lose
the weight, but it was less easy being hairless for
the role. He had had a bad experience with waxing ones,
so instead he committed to daily shaves to get the
requisite uh smooth look for the character. He said he

(30:35):
was doing research for it and he was like, I
found out that the priests shaved their head, so I
went ahead and shaved everything. That's right. He looks like
a Kendall. And also in order to nail the Egyptian
required for the role, he worked with Dr Stuart Smith
of the Institute of Archaeology at u C l A,
who supervised Stephen Summer's script, and vastly worked with Smith

(30:58):
over the phone for hours, times at three am because
of the time difference between Morocco where they're shooting in
l A to learn these lines phonetically. The rest of
the film's casting, well, well, the all the entirety of
the film's casting. I shouldn't even say the rest. It's troublesome.
In three there's no Egyptian people in any of the

(31:19):
film's major roles. The guy playing director Terence Bay, who
is the chief curator at the museum, is Indian American
actor Eric alvary Oh did Fear, who plays r Def Bay,
is Israeli. The guy who plays Seti, the Pharaoh at
the beginning of the film is also Israeli. Aaron a
pal uh Imhotep is played by South African dude, and

(31:41):
the next Suna Moon is played by Petrist Velasquez, who
is Venezuelan. I always wonder if it were happening today,
would I get the part, Vassilo told Entertainment Weekly in
twenty nineteen. I mean, here, I am white, South African.
They'd probably cast a real Egyptian. Omid Jali, who plays
the warden, is one of the only who brings up
having any sensitivities around this. At the time, he told

(32:03):
e W I have an Iranian background, so I was
very aware that if I ever did film roles, I
had to represent Middle Eastern culture. This was at a
time when there were very few Middle Eastern roles at
all that weren't terrorists. Steve said, we're looking for kind
of riff key from Midnight Express, and that was a
Turkish warden who was really evil. I said, look, why
don't we play him differently, because, with all due respect
to you, what you've written is not even one dimensional.

(32:26):
I can possibly get this to a two dimensional stereotype,
which is a great line. So I did this piece
to the camera. It had nothing to do with the script,
and he said, that's great. Does it have to be
so funny? And I said, the only way I can
do this without being lynched by my own people is
to make it slightly humorous. Uh not. A lot of
reviews pointed this out at the time. Um Ciskel and
Ebert had a guest reviewer named David Anson on the

(32:48):
show who said the error bashing of this movie is
quote kind of unforgivable, adding that it was evidence of
the kind of condescension and contempt that Hollywood would not
dare with any other group. Though uh Cisco nib ultimately
both gave it thumbs up. In his New Yorker review,
Anthony Lane claimed that he could scarcely believe what he

(33:08):
was seeing, suggesting a party game for Hollywood producers that reads,
try replacing one submitted group with another Jews instead of Arabs,
and then listened for the laugh okay bud Uh. Former
Associated Press writer Michael Hoffman called it a racist masterpiece
and a consummate example of bigotry that depicts Arab characters

(33:30):
as either filthy, greedy, slimy pigs or mindless, murderous zombies.
And Raina Shannawani at Cornell University directly wrote universal and
got the response from them, the Mummy is escapist entertainment
and as such is not intended in any way to
be perceived as a realistic depiction of any group of people.

(33:51):
Or is I like to call it the Aladdin excuse? Oh?
You think they would have learned a lesson from the
backlash from Aladdin? Do you would? You? The real monster
of this story, though, was shooting on location at the
time that The Mommy was being produced. At the time
the Momy was being produced Egypt. Politically, real monster was

(34:12):
us in the sun. Shooting Uh in Cairo at the
time would have been a difficult because the city is
modern uh, you know, it had been modernized and didn't
have the requisite looks, and also because of the political
instability in Egypt at the time, it would have not
made sense for them to shoot it there. Uh. And
so they shot the city scenes in Marrakesh, which was

(34:34):
easier for them to kind of fake being in the twenties,
although they did have to rip down a bunch of
street lights and power poles and stuff. Uh. And then
also in the Sahara Desert, where the set of Habanaptra
was built in a dormant volcano. On the film's production
blog on the official site, Summers said, a city hidden

(34:55):
in the crater of an extinct volcano made perfect sense.
Out in the middle of the desert. You would never
see it. You would never even think of it during
the crater unless you knew it was inside that volcano.
They built the Homonacha set out there over the course
of sixteen weeks, which included columns that were rigged to
collapse at the climactic moment. But as if building all
of this wasn't enough, they also had to house and

(35:17):
feed a cast and crew of over eight hundred people,
including two hundred Torregg horse riders. Uh. And this is
a outside of the tiny village of air Food, which
was like not even a tourist destination at the time. Uh.
Fortunately they had an expert in the form of co
producer Patricia Carr, who had extensive remote location shooting. She

(35:39):
had done work on Return of the Jedi, which was
wasn't the Star Wars. They were filmed in Tunisia. I
want to say Raiders are the Lost Arc Temple of Doom. Uh.
She said. We had to do a great amount of
work in a relatively small amount of time, but after
meeting with local city officials, we were able to get
medical cover in place, as well as arrange all the
catering and transportation and have everything completed in record time.

(36:02):
Summer's told w it was a British crew and I
was this young American and everyone was like, who is
this guy, and not in a good way. I told
everybody we have a six week shoot in Morocco. They
looked at the pages. Cinematographer Adrian Biddle, the camera crew
in the grips, I think they thought, there's no way
in hell we're getting out of here in six weeks.
The temperature during the hottest part in the day went

(36:25):
up to a hundred and thirty degrees and the local
flora and fauna made shooting an absolute nightmare. Josh Hannah,
who played Evie's brother in the movie, said the biggest
challenge was maintaining the energy level right up to the
start of the scene. It was really hot out there,
and the snakes and scorpions and the spiders made it
difficult to keep focused and your enthusiasm. And Brendan Fraser

(36:48):
told e W. We got a lot of B twelve
shots in the ass, whether we wanted them or not. Oh,
I don't know. It's being involuntarily given a B twelve shot.
They just sneak up behind you other like and I
guess production created a special beverage that everyone drank every
two hours the battle of the dehydration. The crew would
often begin their days shooting in the desert at two

(37:10):
thirty in the morning to get the first rays of
the morning light, and they'd work until midday when it
became too hot and not to mention, you know, the
sun making it way too blinding to shoot before picking
back up again in the evening. When did these guys sleep?
Were it cooled down enough? They sent out a memo.
Brendan Frazier's great line to the e W. They send

(37:31):
out a memo describing a type of snake and fun fact,
forever shooting a movie and you get a memo about
the type of snake. Maybe it's not your kind of movie.
I think it had yellow dots on it, he continued.
They said, if you see this kind of snake, do
not go near it because if it bites you, at
best they'll amputate your limb. Anyway, there I was pissing

(37:55):
down a rock and I looked down and there's the
yellow dots snake. I was like, I just ran for it.
I don't like to hear how miserable brend Of Fraser
was during the production of this movie. The number of
times he almost died. Yeah, yeah, but worth it. Yeah.

(38:18):
Rachel Vice told the Birmingham Post. Quite a few people
were airlifted out after they've been bitten by scorpions. They
used to have a scorpion wrangler who we collect them
an empty avion bottles and then shake them in front
of your face, going look what we found. Fortunately, she explained,
there was the scene in which a rat runs over
while she's tied to an altar. The rat was a

(38:38):
professional actor racked now professional after frat they have them
they're sag I'm uh not a wild rat. And that
scene apparently it took nine days to film because of
the amount of effects in it, which meant Rachel Weiss
was strapped to that altar for a long time. Let's
put it that way. The scare of beatles they keep

(39:00):
popping up are actually a composite of several real insects.
But the sound, though, it's the rainstick, which is charming, charming,
low tech kindergarten music class of them. Yes, they use
rubber ones as stand ins on the set though, thankfully,
and not real life insects. This amazing behind the scenes

(39:21):
thing where they show how they did the um the
shot of when they mummify him Hotep at the beginning
and they pour all the scarabs into his coffin, and
before they're showing how they composited it right where they
have like first like him and then a CG version
of him that's being layered by computers. And in the end,
in the bare bones version, they just dump this thing

(39:45):
like the big thing out over him and it's like
three or four rubber bugs full out. It's so underwhelming,
but he's still like squirming around in the mummy rappings,
like his eyes wide with tear. They actually wrapped him
up in that. That's not a stunned person arnoldus really
what the extra mile after being body shamed and shaved

(40:10):
to day every day. Now we've gotta talk about the camels,
which all the actors apparently hated. According to the film's
commentary track, Kevin J. O'Connor, who plays Benny, said that
his camel took a special disliking to him and O'Connor,
who had worked with Stephen Summers on Deep Impact Is
Really one of the film's m v ps. He had

(40:31):
lived multiple lines, including the I love the whole wall
of sand trick. You have to do it. In his
weird voice, he did, I love the whole wall of
sand trick the other one and he's like when Rick's
beating up my little buddy Benny, when Rick peats him off,

(40:52):
and he's he's like, please think of my children, And
you don't have any children. The line he had lived
some day I might by Oh God, all looks like
I've got all the horses. Hey, Betty, looks like you're
on the wrong side of the river. Yeah, movies. Movie

(41:15):
is great. We didn't like the Mummy, I guess. He
specifically asked the costume department for pants that didn't fit
any grew a pencil mustache just to make him look
even more ridiculous. That lie. I have never laughed maybe
as hard as ever in that movie when he's he's
being approached by the Mummy and he starts praying, and

(41:36):
then he rips open his shirt and he's got religious
icons from every religion, starts reciting prayers in like like
Mongolian and ancient Hebrew. So good. But back to the
Onset miseries. There were also sandstorms that would blow up

(41:57):
and wreck equipment, hurling sand around with enough worse to
strip the paint off of trailers. Imagine what that does
your skin, as well as other human threats. Brandon Fraser
totally w Jim Jacks. The producers said, I took out
million dollar kidnapping insurance policies on you. We were like, so, basically,

(42:17):
you put a bounty on our head. He's like, that's
one way of looking at it. I'll never forget. Kevin
j O'Connor goes, how much insurance did you take out
on me? Fifty thousand? That should do it was the reply.
He didn't tell them that until after they were done filming. Either.
They were like, I guess all like that sitting around
talking about how about the shooting, and Stephen Summers like, yeah,

(42:40):
I had to take out kidnapping insurance on you guys.
But thankfully the film had the support of the Royal
Moroccan Army, presumably to guard against any near do wells
We're gonna try to kidnap their star. Yeah, you know,
it's good to have an army. Well, whence when's it?
When's that never backfired? Yeah? Most of the cast and

(43:04):
the Mummy excuse me, most of the cast in The
Mummy nine, I should say, did their own stunts, including
Rachel Weiss, who revealed to the Birmingham Post that there
was quote one bad one where I had to turn
around to shoot a rider on a horse. He was
on a pully that yanked him off and he broke
both his arms. They still used the shot, though this
is not a charitable indicit vice has scene in which

(43:28):
the library shelves topple over was achieved by spinning a
single camera around three sixty degrees in one take, which
meant Weiss had the duck out of its line of
sight as the whole thing happened and pop back up
at the end, which is risky. There were twelve thousand
books on those shelves, and the whole thing had to
be done in one take because it would have taken

(43:48):
another complete day. This is set up the shot you
know that scene right the Domino, the Domino library scene.
That is wild. That is I think I always assumed
I was computers. I had no idea that was for real. Yeah,
it's the only thing about that that's aged poorly, is
they when they do they go to a wide shot
of her on the ladder. Balancing between the two shows
is very clearly not a particularly slight man in a

(44:11):
wig and address. But yeah, all those shows man one
take Wow and well, the exterior of the Museum of
Antiquities in Cairo is actually in Marrakech. Its interiors that
of the meant More Towers and the village of meant Moore,
buckingham shere, England, built in the eighteen fifties for the
Rothchild family. That Rothchild family. Wow. The house was seen

(44:35):
also in Terry Gilliams, Brazil. All that makes sense, and
its exteriors used the Sandy Kubick's Wise Wide Shut and
perhaps most famously, it's the Wayne Manner and Christopher Nolan's
Batman begins, it's our second nice wide shot wife referenced
this episode. One of the sad things that Brendan Fraser
has talked about recently is how these movies destroyed his body.

(44:58):
By the time he was filming the third one, he
told g Q, I was put together with tape and ice.
I just got like really nerdy and fetishousy about ice packs,
screw cap ice packs and downhill mountain biking paths because
they're small in their light, they could fit under your clothes.
I was building an exoskeleton for myself daily. He needed

(45:20):
back surgery twice. He had a lambin ectomy which didn't
fix his lumbar spine, so he had to have it again,
needed a partial need replacement. He had to have spinal
pads fused together, and he needed to have his vocal
cords repaired, which I don't even know how you do that.
I guess just yelling and now. And then of course
he almost died making this film. In the scene where

(45:41):
his character is hung at the prison, uh he you know.
In I think the the urban legend started in this basically.
I think with that Birmingham Post interview that that Rachel
Vice gave she was one of the first people who
talked about it, but in twenty nineteen he gave a
very detailed explanation. Um he was saying that. He said,

(46:04):
I did get fully choked out. It was scary, and
then E. W. Immediately cuts to Stephen Summers, who says
it was Brendan's fault. Uh. Fraser explained, there was a
hangman's gallows and there was a hemp rope tied into
a noose placed around my neck. The first take, I'm
doing my best choking acting. Steve says, can we go

(46:24):
for another one and take up the tension on your rope?
I said, all right, one more, one more take, because
a noose around your neck is going to choke you
in the arteries no matter what. I remember seeing the
camera start to pan around and then it was like
a black iris. At the end of the silent film,
he's talking about going unconscious. I regained consciousness to one
of the E M T s saying my name, there

(46:47):
was gravel in my ear. Oh. Compounding this is the
fact that the rest of this cast all said that
Summers would say the same thing before every take, which
was ready, don't suck act shin. So that was the
last thing Brendan Fraser heard before he almost choked to death.
Uh memories. As you meditate on that, We'll be right

(47:13):
back with more too much information. After these messages, production
picked up at Shepperdton Studios in England for the interiors,

(47:35):
with some exteriors shot not and about in the UK.
For example, the scene that is supposed to take place
on the Nile was actually the Thames. The port of
Giza where they all board the ship was a massive
set built at the historic dockyard in Chatham, about thirty
five miles southeast of London and Kent, has also been

(47:55):
seen in Leams and Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes. The set
they built was six hundred feet in length to portray
the dockyard area. It had a steam train attraction engine,
three cranes, an open two horse carriage, four horse drawn carts,
five dressing horses with grooms, nine pack donkeys and mules,

(48:16):
as well as a market, stalls and for vendors. This
whole thing eventually was filmed with three hundred extras in it.
Um Steven Summers said in the DVD commentary that some
of the extras local extras they picked up were not
particularly experienced in the film industry. There's a scene in
which one of the gentleman's eyes had to be c

(48:38):
g I closed because he couldn't stop looking directly into
the camera at every take and they just got tired
of reshooting it. They also had to c g I
some of rachel Vices parts away because her white nightgown
got wet and they had to preserve a p G
three teen rating. But the biggest challenge for this stage

(48:58):
production was I l M S motion capture work. UM
Industrial Light and Magic was working on this and The
Star Wars The Phantom Menace at the same time. Ah
there was a VFX supervisor there named John Burton, who
Somers had worked with on Deep Rising, and they basically
planned out their vision of u Demotepe in the mom

(49:21):
of the character of the Mummy. They said they didn't
want the guy in bandages, so they wanted him to
be a corpse, or first they wanted him as a human,
and then a full corpse, and then a human again
with all the stages in between. And so they planned
these five stages of him as fully human, gross mummy,
and then just sort of a guy who you can
see his guts. Uh. We wanted to create a photo

(49:45):
realistic living corpse that was obviously not a man in
a suit, obviously not an animatronic, and obviously alive. Burton
told Cina fantastique, and they were constantly walking the line
and doing these character creations of something that was creepy
but not gory because they had this PG three team
rating in mind the whole time, so he couldn't be
bloody or like obviously gooey, so they were like, well,

(50:08):
he's got to be desiccated, but we still need to
see his guts. And this concept would be fleshed out
pun intended by Burton, along with a team of nearly
one hundred artists, took them five months of research and development,
two months of shooting, and then ten months of post
production VFX work. The technology that they used to motion
capture and replace the parts of Arnold Voslo's body was

(50:32):
a refinement of some of the technology that they used
on The Phantom Menace, but on that film they were
using it to replace a character's entire head. I'm pretty
sure it was jar jar um, not just portions of
their face. So what they basically had to do was
create prosthetics for him that would motion capture parts of
his face, but they had to be applicable as makeup

(50:54):
and let him act through it. So they had to
create like these led should capture things but still and
and all that technology, but it had to be like
two millimeters thick arnive. Also, his entire body I believe
probably hairless at this point, was laser scanned. Uh. And
then they also had to do the classic plaster cast

(51:16):
thing to get to get his torso and head captured
some of his mummy powers like the dust storms and
and and the plagues that he summons. Our particle tech
like particle animation stuff that I l M had developed
for Twister, which is really funny, um, but others were
much more low tech. The hail storm is dog food

(51:39):
painted white and belted at the cast. The boils and sores,
though the plague of boils and sores were those were prosthetics. UM.
A six person makeup crew applied one and forty seven
prosthetics two extras in three hours, which is some thing

(52:00):
like one at the rate of seven and a half minutes.
They crunched the numbers in Sinda fantastique, which thankfully they
shot that at night, so they didn't have to deal
with that doing that in a hundred thirty degree temperatures.
Another fun thing that I l M was tasked with
was creating digital gunfire because I guess maintaining all the
prop guns in this heat and sand was such a
nightmare that at some point while they were shooting, they

(52:20):
were like, uh, yeah, just to have I l M
digitalized all the gunshots. Later um for Frasier's big fight
with the mummy, the soldier mummies at the end, that's
the scene that Rachel Weiss is strapped to the altar
for nine days at a clip. That was because basically
they had a motion capture camera that he told Entertainment
Weekly was the size of a very large industrial refrigerator

(52:43):
that was on rails and programmed to make the same
set of moves take after takeofter take. Uh. And he
had to learn all of his choreography for that fight
scene where he's like chopping mummies in half and like
batting their heads around like baseballs. Um, he had to
do all of that himself over and over and over again,
and he had to learn that in two days. He

(53:05):
said it on the on the commentary track. It's he said,
it's one big mind fight with Rachel and I and
we ended up doing it all in one take. And
the compositing technology that they were doing at this point
is really really interesting. Um, they basically built all of
these creations like real humans. Like. They built them with
skeletons first and then animated the musculature over it. Um.

(53:28):
The mummies in that scene are supposed to look like
the nineteen thirties, like universal mummies. They're supposed to be
like dusty and raggedy. So they did uh, wire frame
versions of their skeletons, and then another layer of all
their clothing, and then the third layer of this particle
technology to get the dust that's flying off of them. Um.
Really wild. One thing that I've been unable to confirm

(53:50):
but that could be accurate is that mummies from Toby
Hooper's movie Life Force were reused. In Life Force is
about a movie about a sexy space vampire lady who
drains the titular life force from people and and and
leaves them as um like desiccated corpses. It was like

(54:14):
digital media. Ah heyo, Uh, this is where you do
your golf swing anyway. Yeah, that movie was shot in England,
so possibly some of it at Shepperton, so that sounds
plausible to me, but confirmed by the BBC of all people.

(54:36):
In one of the shots in this film, you can
see an extra wearing the robe that Sir Alec Guinness
war as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars A New
hope that you know what I have to say about
that it does belong in. I believe it is in
a museum because what happened was they after they filmed it,
because no one thought. No one knew that first Star

(54:57):
Wars was gonna be a hit, so they just sent
all this stuff back to the costumer called Burman's at
the time, and since they didn't, he didn't by the
time he was a forced ghost in the next ones,
they just found a different cloak for him because they
didn't need the same one, so this cloak kept getting
loaned out to other movies there. The BBC article says
it may have also been in um Uh in the

(55:19):
Name of the Rose starring Sean Connery, because it was
labeled as like a monk's robe. And then that company, Burman's,
was bought by another company called Angels, and all of
their costumes were moved from Camden to Herndon, but this
stuff just kept getting loaned out, and then finally in
two thousand five they identified it as Sir Alec Guinness's

(55:40):
Obi Wan cloak and took it out of active circulation
and put it in a museum. I am reasonably sure
that the Beatles got their Sergeant Pepper outfits from Burman's. Okay,
I believe you. I think that's right. That's off top
of my head. That fits right. The original spokeswoman for

(56:02):
the costumer said that an original person original costumer verified
it was the same cloak. One of the guys was
sorting through this pile of monks robes and saw this
brown one with an odd shaped hood. He put it
on and the manager said, oh my god, it's Alec
Gits his cloak from Star Wars. All this time we've
been renting it out to customers wanting to hire a

(56:22):
monk's outfit for a fancy dress party. So it's probably
has like smudges of MS on it from some like,
and it's in the Mummy in one shot one crowd
shot in the Mummy. Yeah. I was on display at
Herod's after they found it Angels. The costumer has had
an auction in two thousand seventeen, and you know what

(56:44):
it went for? Okay, I mean we wan Kenobi's robe.
I mean that's got to be I'm gonna say like
one point two million. Oh so far over, I'm so sorry,
really just over a hundred thousand? What do you know?
How much like v prop though? Also well, also at
this auction Sean Connery's dinner jacket from Thunderball. I mean,

(57:09):
I don't know, I feel like that's not of the
Connery bonds. That's like not one of the bigger ones.
I mean fifty six thousand close seven? Uh, the hat
and suit he wore in Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade.
What do you think that went for? Um, I'm gonna
say forty six Thousanday? In two thousand six, what do

(57:36):
you think that Givon Si dress worn by Audrey Heppurn
and Breakfast at Tiffany's went for in the opening scene
she's eating the Danish in front of Tiffany's oh Man.
In two thousands six, I'm gonna say thousand. Good thing
you're not doing this nine hundred grand. I can't believe
that's sold that much more than Alec And this is

(57:56):
Obi wan Kenobi robe. What can I say? There you go,
there's your there's your auction auction corner, t m I
auction corner. Yeah. Anyway, Sorry, I didn't mean to cut
you off talking about the historical accuracies of inaccuracies of
the Mummy. Mummy ninety nine. Excuse me because we didn't
do Mummy thirty two or Mummy Mummy seventeen. Well, folks,

(58:21):
January was Titanic month. February is Mummy Month here on
t m I. We're gonna do every Mummy movie to
a week the rest of this month. It's a short month,
but damn it, we're gonna make it count anyway. This
brings us to the most important question in this episode.
How historically accurate is the Mummy? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly not

(58:43):
very for starters. The film opens with a panoramic view
of the Pyramids and Giza, featuring the Sphinx on their construction,
so the narration refers to Thebes City of the Living,
which is actually several hundred miles away. Also, city's royal
palace is in the film located next to the Pyramids,
but considering the modern conception of the Pyramids is basically

(59:04):
giant cemeteries. Palaces wouldn't have been anywhere near them. You're
an egyptologist, can you confirm that. I'm not a huge expert.
I just I think that's true though. Yeah, that sounds right,
uh Hamadopta. The City of the Dead in the movie
in the burial place of the Pharaohs was actually not real.
The city of the Dead would probably be more akin
to the Valley of the King's where you know a

(59:27):
lot of the famous mummies have been found. And Imhotep,
the real person, was not a high priest, but was
actually the architect under the pharaoh. Jo's er, I think
that's how you say that Set the first, the pharaoh
he betrays at the beginning of the film actually ruled
around b c E, which is actually about years after

(59:47):
im Hotep died, so they never overlapped. And as Sunaman
comes from Aksunmun, as he says it in the film Moons,
Suna Moon comes from a similarly named person. A similarly
named person I can't pronounce who was the wife of
Tutonka Moon or King tut from the late fourteenth century BC,

(01:00:10):
but both she and im Hotep are taken directly from
the two film Mummy, better known as Mummy thirty two. Now,
certain mummification details in The Mummy are incorrect. There's no
such ritual as the Home Die. The horrifying faith that
him Hotep suffers in the film remind us what home

(01:00:31):
die is. Uh. They cut out his tongue, wrap him up,
and pour the scarabs over him, and then they chisel
the Uh. They supposedly chiseled the blessings off the outside
of the sarcophagus, which damns him in both life and
the afterlife. Although you know that's a bit of a

(01:00:52):
plot hole because if they ripped his tongue out with
hot pincers, he couldn't speak as the Mummy, and he
talks a lot. He's a talks He's a real talker.
Emotep was his bits dying, keep going. No, I was trying.
I'm trying to find a find a joke. There's not

(01:01:14):
there's not been there. Uh. The canopic jars containing him
Hotep's organs are somewhat accurate to the actual momification process
where they would remove uh what was it, lungs liver. Oh,
you wrote it down, lungs liver and testines and stomachs,
also known as a divorce. It's good, that's good. They

(01:01:37):
would not have removed the heart from the body because
weighing the heart, overseen by the god Anibus, was an
important part of the path to the afterlife, so they
kept the heart in the body. The Ancian agypsist believed
that the heart recorded all the good and all of
the bad deeds of a person's lives, what like a
a person's inner black box if you will, or your

(01:01:58):
browser history are your browser history, and this was needed
for judgment in the afterlife. After person died, the heart
was weighed against the feather of Mott, the goddess of
truth and justice, and the scales were watched by Anubis,
the jackal headed god of embalming, and the results were
recorded by Thoth, the ibbisheaded god of writing. And if

(01:02:23):
a person had led a decent life, the heart balanced
with the feather and the person was rendered worthy to
live forever in paradise with Osiris. However, the heart was
heavier than the feather. The mystical creature Ammet, which is
part lyon part crocodile and part hippopotamus, devours them. Hell yeah,
that's a good myth. I was always more of a

(01:02:46):
Greek and Roman guy than but I love the animal gods.
I love the animal headed gods. It's a it's a
good it's a good conceit. They have had cooler momnsters,
you know. I like minyturs, I like hydras. I like, uh,
what's the one with like Griffin's Greek like. I just

(01:03:09):
like monsters. They cool. They cool monsters. But you know
Anubis mummies. Uh, there's also Artist Bay, who is the
super hot goth guy with the face tattoos. That funny
fun fact, Artist Bay is what Boris Karlov's character goes
by in the Original Mummy. It's he's like human alias.

(01:03:31):
That's what Emo teps fake name. It's an anagram for
death by raw. Isn't that cool? And that's spooky who anyway,
he's uh, he's he's a member of the secret Society
of the Medgi, who are devoted to preventing Imo Teps return.
That they were a real group, they were. They appear
in Egyptian archaeological records from the Middle Kingdom to the

(01:03:55):
Early New Kingdom era um. Some records suggest that they
might have been mercenary ease other than they were basically
like pastoral itinerant farmers, but they were a real group
um and by the time of the New Kingdom they
were in charge of protecting the royal tombs, so that
was somewhat accurate. The guy uh that the hot dude

(01:04:17):
playing uh our des Bay did fair who's later induced
bigelow male gigglo, right, I think he's the like training
gigglow who trains s Douce Biggelow. I'm pretty sure we
double check that ah. I was close. He's induced Biggelow
European giggolo. The second one really gotta get your deuced bigelows.

(01:04:41):
We pride ourselves on accuracy on the show, and if
you can't get your duced bigelows right, you lose the
trust of the audience. So that the forehead tattoo that
he has is actually Egyptian characters that transliterate to Imhotep
the letters of his name, and across his cheek Uh
is a word that's mot which it translates to like

(01:05:03):
truth or justice or something. So those are real Egyptian
characters that he has tattooed. And apparently Stephen Summers was
like um. He wanted him to be completely covered like
head to toe and tattoos, and then was like, I
gotta look at him, and was like, well, I cannot,
I can't throw soup on this mona Lisa I am.

(01:05:23):
And there are there are, there's a lot of facial
tattooing that happens in that part of the world, the
Berbers different places in Algeria, but you see it actually
a lot more with women tribeswomen or have facial tattoos,
but the Medgi did not, So that's a w. And lastly,
there is no such thing as an actual bound copy
of the Book of the Dead. That is a cinematic conflation.

(01:05:45):
Probably has something to do with the necronomicon, like the
Book of the Dead from the Evil Dead movies. UM.
The closest thing to that would have been a series
of texts that were found written down a bunch of
different tombs, um. But they were more of a They
were a series of of guidances to people who who

(01:06:07):
had died. It was essentially the handbook for the recently
deceased from beetlejuice that they buried people with. They were
It wasn't like how to raise the dead, It was
like Hey, since you're going to the eternal afterlife, here's
all the stuff that you're gonna need. We're gonna write
it down and bury you with it. So I mean.
The Beatles song, the last track on Revolver Tomorrow Never Knows,

(01:06:29):
was based on a book, The Psychedelic Experienced by Timothy
Leary that was based on Spettan Book of the Dead.
You know, turn off your mind like stream, it's kind
of traces its origins back roughly to this type of thing. Yeah,
it's Buddhist versus you know, different, but but sure wedge

(01:06:53):
the Beatles in there. Yeah, I need that. Let me
have this. Sorry, so mean you. We really should have
been reading a lot of your section headings on this
because they're they're very good. We've had h what's mum
got to do with it? The momsters? Uh, Mummy dearest?
Is my fav is too easy? Uh? Mom's the word

(01:07:16):
under wraps? Yeah, there's some really good ones. Now for
the ride out, we've got mom want did he did he? Mum?
Did he do? It's good? Thank you? All right, just
a little treat for you. Yeah, I like that. I
want everyone else to share. Test audiences did not respond
well to Mummy nine, and they were put off by

(01:07:38):
the vague title. What more do you need? It's descriptive. Yeah,
I don't know. The president of domestic marketing for Universal,
Mark Smudger, told Entertainment Weekly at the time they saw
it as ikey horror stuff, this musty old guy in bandages.
We debated changing the name to Raiders of the Lost
Mummy or something like that, presumably Stevens Pilvert, the season's assists,

(01:08:02):
but in the end we decided to go with just
the Mummy. We decided we would redefine the myth with
the film, which I would argue it did. The studio
sent cash into a Super Bowl ad, which Stephen Summers
told DW helped drum up interest in the film, and
the movie May release date up to give the film
room against Star Wars the Phantom Menace, which it probably needed,

(01:08:22):
and it worked. The Mummy was the number one film
in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend,
grossing forty three million dollars, the highest non holiday May
opening and the ninth biggest opening of all time. Yeah,
I remember this movie being huge. It went on to
gross over four hundred and sixteen point four million dollars
worldwide and obviously spanned a franchise what two sequels plus

(01:08:47):
the movie Two Scorpion Kings Three Scorpions, also an animated
TV show that I remember nothing about about that um
it ran for two seasons. Alma Julie, who played the Warden,
told e W. The Universal representatives said the film's opening
was so strong it saved the studio. Universal had a

(01:09:08):
number of flops, and The Mummy literally saved the studio.
I had some family who worked at Universal at the time,
and I confirmed this. I was I was gonna say,
what did your aunt say about I don't remember any
specifics beyond like, you know, thank god you're okay, because
I remember Babe pigging the city being the bomb that
it was, and I remember the the Rocky and Bullwinkle

(01:09:31):
movie with Renee Russo and Bobby Baby right right right
that bombed Dudley do right bombs. Yeah, they really went
in with trying to do all that ward, all those
g ward stuff. Yeah, precipitated. You know what it might
have been. I mean it might have been the flint
Stones doing so well, although they did, you know what
they did Viva Rock Vegas, which I went to see

(01:09:55):
Amira of the head of Universal's house, and that was
another bomb, But I think it was I think they
really thought that if they just kept going hard on,
you know, I'm gonna get In the late eighties early nineties,
they were revamping all the comic book superheroes and stuff,
and then they kind of moved into the more family
friendly cartoon franchise, and I think they thought that they
would finally find one that hit man. But back to

(01:10:17):
the Mummy's video release in September sold seven million units
on VHS and one million on DVD. Very early DVD,
I would imagine, became the year's best selling live action
VHS and second best selling DVD behind the Matrix. And
it was figures like those that help Universal gross over
one billion dollars in home video sales that year. You

(01:10:41):
know what the first movies released on DVD were? Oh? Man,
I knew this trivia fact and I can't remember now.
What is it? Twister? Oh? That wasn't what I thought.
Would that have been Twister? Mars Attacks? That's in the US, though.
Do you know what they were? In ninety six? No?

(01:11:01):
In Japan? Blade Runner, the Arnold Schwartzeger movie, Eraser and
The Fugitive oh To Harrison Forward movies first released on
DVD in History Good for Him. Uh. Critics didn't love Mummy,
but mostly they agreed it was fun. Unsurprisingly, Roger Ebert

(01:11:23):
had a great line, There's hardly a thing I can
say in its favor except that I was cheered by
nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script,
the direction, the action, or even the Mummy. But I
can say that I was not bored, and sometimes I
was unreasonably pleased. Mariah Lewis wrote it junkie in on paper.

(01:11:44):
Nothing about the Mummy should have worked. It was an
earnest action adventure movie in a decade when three films
in that same genre had spectacularly failed back to back,
The Rocketeer, The Shadow starring Alec Baldwin, and The Fan
Him starring Billy Zane in do you remember any of those?

(01:12:06):
You have to remember Rocketeer, I bet you like the Rocket, Yeah,
I remember The Phantom because of Billy Zane. Yeah in
his purple suit. Uh. She continued. The film rested on
the shoulders of Brendon Frasier doing an Indiana Jones riff
after a string of comedies where he played a variation
of the dumb Blonde, and the filmmaker at the helm
was a guy whose last flick was about a tentacled

(01:12:26):
sea creature that eats a cruise ship. But the film
spawned an empire continues to be beloved by people today.
I found a Thrillist article from a few years back
that said The Mummy is the only perfect film, um
which you know, your mileage may vary. Obviously, I love it.
I'll still go to bad for it. I'm glad people

(01:12:47):
are coming back around on Brendan Fraser. I want to
give Roger Ebert, unsurprisingly the last word in this his
from his review that I love that sums up the
charms of this film. There is a little immaturity stuck
away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us,
and we should treasure it. That's beautiful. Hashtag Mummy. Folks,

(01:13:09):
thank you for listening. This has been too much information.
I'm Alex Hagel. I almost said I'm Brendan Fraser. I'm
Alex Brendan Fraser. Tonight, Heigel, you can be Brandon Fraser
and I'm Jordan Brendan Frasier Rachel Weiss. All four of
us will catch you next time. Too Much Information was

(01:13:36):
a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers
are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising
producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written,
and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with
original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
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(01:13:57):
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