Film
923: Wreck it Ralph
Trivia: Unlike
most animated films, the principal actors regularly recorded audio sessions
together in the same room, a situation which led to a lot of improvising.
Disney
first began developing an animated film about the world of video game
characters in the 1980s. At that time the project was called "High
Score" and in the 1990s was titled "Joe Jump." In the 2000s,
when the movie was finally pushed forward, the first two months of story
development focused on Fix-It Felix Jr. as the main character.
Early in
production it was considered to keep all characters in their native graphic
quality, essentially making Ralph look 8-bit the entire time. This was deemed
too difficult for making Ralph a sympathetic, lovable character.
The
arcade owner character, Mr. Litwak, wears a referee's shirt as a reference to
real life personality Walter Day, owner of the Twin Galaxies Arcade in Ottumwa,
IA. Day is best know for appearing in the arcade documentaries Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade and The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.
King
Candy's voice and character design is modeled after Ed Wynn a popular comedian and voice artist, best known as
the voice of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland
and Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins.
The
bartender game which appears, "Tapper," was controversial in real
life. The game featured a bartender serving mugs of Budweiser beer. The game
was intended for adults to play in real life bars, but eventually made its way
into kid-friendly arcades where parents became upset at the content.
Consequently, Bally Midway recreated a nearly identical version called "Root
Beer Tapper," with a soda jerk character instead of a bartender. The
version in Wreck-It Ralph combines the bartender character of the original with
the root beer of the later version.
The
'glitch' shown in the Disney logo at the end (see Crazy Credits) is intended to
look like the infamous "Pac-Man Bomb Screen", a bug that manifests
itself when reaching the 256th level in the original Pac-Man arcade game.
There is
a piece of graffiti on the right side of the tunnel which reads
"Leerooooy", a nod to Leeroy Jenkins, a World of Warcraft player who
obtained Internet fame from a video of him running head-long into battle while
shouting his own name.
The DJ
at Fix-it Felix's 30th anniversary party is designed after Skrillex, a real
life dubstep artist, who also wrote the music from the scene in which Ralph
first goes into battle in Hero's Duty.
The
Guard for the Baking Factory is Beard Papa, the mascot for a Japanese cream
puff shop of the same name. While he is sleeping he is dreaming about cream
puffs.
The train
station of Nice Land shows that the population is 224x256, the common
resolution of an 8-Bit game.
In the
scene of Fix-It Felix Jr's party, Ralph is enraged by Gene and smashes the
cake. The cake splatter around the room and on Ralph resembles the shape of an
alien in "Space Invaders", an iconic arcade game released in 1978.
