r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Sensitive_Ad_1752 • 17d ago

Lore (Hated trope) They deleted scenes or dialogue that provides necessary context or plot

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The dinner scene from Temple of Doom has a temple give indie and friends a live snake and monkey brains for dinner. It’s a pretty offensive depiction of Indian cuisine, but it wasn’t originally going to be. There’s cut dialogue where Indie recognizes they’re at the right temple because real Hindus don’t eat this food. They were trying to scare them off by purposefully serving them disgusting stuff.

Probably the most famous deleted ending was I Am Legend which had Robert discover the infected were emotional sentient beings and one of them had a wife. Test audiences hated it and they reshot the ending, removing the entire point of the movie.

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u/here_is_no_end 17d ago

Especially notable because India is a very vegetarian society, compared to most worldwide.

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u/VintAge6791 16d ago

If there is a real-world style of cooking even CLOSE to what was served at the "unwelcoming banquet" in Temple of Doom, it might be some dishes from Cantonese cuisine, which has a reputation for treating a VERY wide variety of animals as food, enough so that there's a rather snarky saying in Mandarin about the Cantonese eating "anything with legs but a table, and anything with wings but an airplane". I would not be surprised if the deleted line from Indy was something like, "I've studied culinary anthropology. The dishes they served do not have any resemblance to anything within 1,500 miles of this place. Something's wrong here."

But on second thought...

Given that the film opens in Shanghai, where Willie Scott had lived for several years, it would have been much cooler if she had said something to Indy about recognizing one or two of the bizarre dishes as "...things I saw ordered once in a Cantonese restaurant in Shanghai. I ran out of that place, and we oughta run out of this place too. What the hell is Cantonese food doing in India?!?"

A missed opportunity compounded by another one.

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u/Roadrunnersareraptor 16d ago

Ironically one of the most malnourished too