It’s Saturday night and my wife and I have parked our lazy asses in front of a cable movie to pass the time. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, a real cinema classic. Like most unassuming Americans, we’ve seen this movie, or parts of it, dozens of times. It’s ubiquity on TBS and TNT around the late 1990′s and early 2000′s led to me using far too many quotes from this mid-level comedy.
“Laces out…”
“Allright-then!”
“Like a glove.”
“Dan Marino should die of gonorrhea and rot in hell.”
That last one has nothing to do with the movie, I just hate Dan Marino so very very much.*
So, we’re both well-versed, against our will, in all things Ace Ventura. Which makes it all the more unnerving when we noticed that, the last few time we’ve caught it, we’ve noticed added scenes that we don’t remember from the days when one of us (not me) had it on videotape. This movie came out fourteen years ago, you can’t do that.
It’s like if George Lucas decided to throw in a scene of Indy cuddling with his pet snake to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark or if Alfred Hitchcock added a slapstick ending to Psycho or if Steven Spielberg digitally removed all of the guns from E.T. (oh yeah, that actually happened…bastard). After seeing these movies so many times over the course of our lives, the shock of such a sudden change could potentially be too much to take.
These are the things that cause brain aneurysms in young adults.
For those in the know, here’s just two of the different, new footage that we caught, as well as a few that were cut out:
Added: A scene where Ace is confronted by a bunch of locals in a bar while trying to find Ray Finkle’s parents.
Cut: Ace’s trip to the mental hospital, where he pretends to be a tutu-wearing former NFL star in order to make a bunch of goofy faces and, oh yeah, find some “evidence.”
Added: Ace revisits his hippie friend, trying to find more info on Finkle and Einhorn’s connection, going through their credit reports.
Cut: The part of the scene where Ace originally finds the stone from the AFC Championship ring in Snowflake’s pool where he pretends to be Hans, the German dolphin trainer.
After a little research, I discovered that this is an actual phenomenon, but not the reason why. So, we now know that we’re not crazy for thinking that these scenes were new and not what we remembered from this unnecessarily unforgettable movie. Now, if I can just shake that feeling that I actually saw a version of The Goonies with the deleted octopus scene in it at a friend’s house when I was a kid, I’d be okay. I know that it exists, but have no proof that it was added to the movie for television syndication. It’s okay, I’ll work through it.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLqpxpvgVsg[/youtube]
