Red Hot Riding Hood (lost deleted scenes of animated short; 1943)

Still of the original ending.

Status: Lost

The famous MGM cartoon short Red Hot Riding Hood originally had two sets of scenes that were cut from the final version in demand from the censors.

The first set was from the scene where Woolfie makes extremely lustful cartoony reactions to Red Hot Riding Hood while she is singing on stage. Originally Woolfie had much racier wild takes that the censors considered too energetic and thus they saw to it that they were removed.

The second was the original alternate ending where instead of Woolfie swearing off of women and talking about how he'll kill himself if he ever sees another woman and then shooting himself into a continually howling ghost upon seeing Red Hot Riding Hood, the short would've end upon Grandma marrying Woolfie in a shotgun wedding, which has a caricature of Tex Avery as the Justice of Peace who marries them, and then Grandma and Woolfie with their half-human half-wolf offspring all attending Red's show. This original ending was removed at the decision of the censors because it not only implied bestiality but also made light of marriage, which was considered taboo in the days of the Hays Office Code.

The uncut version of the short is now widely considered lost, although it is stated that prints of it were shown to military audiences overseas during World War II, and at the request of Tex Avery to make MGM show it uncut overseas (which he had officially stated at one point), and possibly at the request of a soldier who had heard of the original ending and wanted to show it to his fellow soldiers in war, which meant that MGM would have given him at least one uncut print of the short. Tex Avery also said that the soldiers who did watch the short got a kick out of it.

However, to this day it is unknown if these prints, or if any prints of the uncut version still exist.

External Links

• Wikipedia page for the cartoon that references the cut scenes. Retrieved 01 May '21