Spy Kids (partially found unreleased deleted scenes from spy family film; 2001)

US poster.

Status: Lost

Spy Kids is a 2001 American spy adventure comedy film directed, written, produced and edited by Robert Rodriguez, the creator of the Spy Kids franchise. The film was theatrically released in the United States on March 30, 2001 by Dimension Films. It was a surprise hit, grossing over $147 million worldwide. A special edition version was released in theatres on August 8, 2001. However it wasn’t included in the DVD release a month later, which included the theatrical version instead.

On the DVD commentary of the third film in the series, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Rodriguez teased a Special Edition DVD of Spy Kids to be released in 2004, but nothing came around. Then in 2005, Rodriguez was interviewed on the Latino Review website, where he talked about the same Special Edition DVD, saying that it will include “commentary for it and they did a whole bunch of interviews with the kids and I’ve got all kinds of deleted scenes which didn’t make it to the special edition” and believes it will be released around Christmas 2005. Since the Special Edition DVD never released both times, it is unknown what happened to the deleted scenes, if they still exist.

Only one deleted scene has ever been released; the Cave of Sleeping Sharks scene. It was a 3 minute scene always intended to be in the final cut, and it was Rodriguez's favourite scene in the movie. When Spy Kids was in post-production, Rodriguez had to take the scene out because the special effects he envisioned would break the budget (which was over $35 million), having at least 65 special effects shots just in the scene alone, and he ran out of time to finish it. Thus, in the theatrical release (and eventually the DVD release), it was replaced with a much-shorter, cut-down version of the scene that more people remember, shortening the film from 91 minutes to 88 minutes. The extended version was lost for ten years until it was reincluded in the Spy Kids Blu-ray rerelease in 2011 (which includes the Special Edition version), to coincide with the fourth film in the series, Spy Kids: All the Time in the World, and the tenth anniversary of the franchise. However, there is a Kellogg's DVD that supposedly contains the Sleepy Sharks scene too, but nothing has been confirmed so far.

Interestingly, the website Cinematic Intelligence Agency has reviewed an Australian Spy Kids DVD, and it mentioned to include deleted scenes and even outtakes, neither of which appear in the region 4 DVD when it released.

Gallery

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  Special Edition poster.

Clip of the Sleepy Sharks scene (starting at 2:11)