Flushed Away (partially found Gilbert and Sullivan scenes from DreamWorks/Aardman animated film; 2006)

A poster for the film.

Status: Partially Found

Flushed Away is a 2006 CGI-animated comedy film produced by stop-motion studio Aardman and DreamWorks Animation, it would be their final film collaboration after Chicken Run in 2000 and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit in 2005. The film follows Roddy, a pet rat living in London who gets flushed down their owner's toilet by Sid, a sewer rat who ends up finding his way to Roddy's home during the film's beginning, due to him realizing that he was attempting to get rid of him by describing the toilet as a "jacuzzi" as a way to lure him into getting flushed by it. Roddy travels down the sewers and ends up in Rattropolis, a city made of junk where he meets Rita, a resident of Rattropolis, who accompanies Roddy in his journey to get back to his home. After its release, the film received positive reviews from critics however it underperformed at the box office, gaining $178 million from its budget of $149 million, which in turn ended Aardman and DreamWorks collaboration.

Like most other film productions, scenes which were originally going to be included in the film ended up getting excluded from the film's final cut, interestingly enough, these scenes included characters which were completely removed from the film's original cut.

The Deleted Scenes

Originally, Roddy was meant to be accompanied by two additional characters in his home, with them being butler hamsters named Gilbert and Sullivan, voiced by Geoffrey Palmer and Simon Cowell. They were meant to be first shown in the film's opening, with them being part of Roddy's various activities around the house, such as taking a bath in a bowl and playing horse polo, which isn't seen in the finalized film, they were additionally going to accompany Roddy during Sid's arrival^[1] and appear in other scenes during the movie, such as a scene where Roddy calls Gilbert on the phone while driving the Jammy Dodger.

While it was believed that the reasoning for the removal of the characters was to make Roddy more alone to have a stronger connection to Rita, this wasn't the case, as in an SYFY interview with the film's director, David Bowers, the real reasoning was due to the original concept being that Roddy was completely alone and that his butlers weren't necessarily friends due to their class structure, which got replaced with him simply being physically alone. He also stated that the characters had 20 minutes of completed footage removed from the film.^[2]

Availability

After the film's theatrical release, the deleted scenes have never received any type of home media release as a bonus feature, with only a single trailer, which features Gilbert and Sullivan, being included in the DVD release for the DreamWorks film Over The Hedge. Since then, various unfinished variants of the deleted scenes have made their way onto YouTube and the Internet Archive, including a tweet from the film's director, showcasing a pre-rendered scene with the cut characters shared a few weeks after Geoffrey Palmer's death in November of 2020.^[3] No other completed footage is known to be available.

There have been rumours and claims of the film's deleted scenes being leaked through bootleg DVD and VCD releases, however, these claims have little to no proof to validate them outside of some users online claiming to have seen them through these alleged bootlegs.