“We don’t call them hunchbacks anymore” – notes from a Disney pitch meeting.

Dedicated to Ben.

Ok, so, next Disney masterpiece.

Well, we have got this one idea. You’re gonna love it.

We’re thinking about basing it on one of the most depressing novels ever written. No no it’s ok! No-one’s actually read it because it was written in 1831. Also it’s really boring, despite being about gypsies and deformed people and sexual deviancy.

The protagonist? Oh, you’re gonna love him. He’s got this name no one can pronounce… it sounds like a cross between a motor scooter and an acquired brain injury. Oh and he’s super ugly. Seriously, really ew. Not ‘oh sure he’s The Beast but he’s still kind of hot in a lion/big cat way’ ugly. Proper ‘Jesus Christ did David Lynch do art design on this film!?’ ugly.

So ugly dude meets a Gypsy ‘dancer’ (coughprostitutecough) with a pretentious name, and she saves him from a mob of peasants who tie him to a big wheel and through shit at him. Did we mention he’s disabled? Yeah, he is.

And we’re thinking ugly dude can be voiced by an actor who has a IMDB board topic titled ‘YAY!!!! He’s still alive!’ (This is true. Poor Tom Hulce.)

Oh and the ugly dude’s ‘father’ is this crazy dude called Freddo or Frotting or something. He killed ugly dude’s mother and then tried to drown ugly dude in a well which people would then drink from and get dead baby bits in. Ew ew ew ew gross.

Froggy doesn’t kill ugly dude but instead makes him ring bells all day so he’s probably deaf now too, but when the ‘dancer’ seems to be macking on ugly dude (she’s actually just being polite), Frodo gets all crazy jealous and goes into this ‘I want to fuck you because you’re the devil’ routine. Oh and he sniffs her hair in a reeeeaaaallllllyyyy creepy way. In case the kids aren’t gnawing their own lips off in bewildered terror yet, we have this scene:

Oh, there’s a knight guy called Sir Pheobe who’s going to be voiced by… yep, you guessed it! KEVIN KLINE! Kind of obvious I know, but there’s just something so… what’s the word—chivalric? Yeah that’s the word— about those dulcet tones. Mmm. Manly.

Pheobe also wants to bone the ‘dancer’ but then some serfs get burned in a hut and there’s some musical numbers in the catacombs involving sewerage and human corpses, and the ‘dancer’ gets burned at the stake (it’s ok she comes back to life later. Is she a zombie? We’ll let the audience decide.), then ugly dude pours molten lead all over innocent passers-by, Ferrero, tries to rape stab the ‘dancer’ while screaming scripture but the he dies so PHEW.

Anyway it all ends happily when the ‘dancer’ tells ugly dude she JUST WANTS TO BE FRIENDS and arranges for a chinless peasant girl to feel ugly dude’s face (she’s hardly going to be fussy about what constitutes a ‘normal’ face) and then the mob of peasants carry ugly dude off into the sunset (probably to eat) and Pheobe and the ‘dancer’  get sacrilegious all over that Cathedral, baby.

Oh, we nearly forgot! Jason Alexander is going to be in it! You know, GEORGE!