Detective Pikachu is a movie about an electric mouse, voiced by Two Guys and a Girl (and for a time, a Pizza Place)’s Ryan Reynolds, working as a detective. Wait, that doesn’t make any sense: it’s not a movie; it’s a cinematic event, the likes of which haven’t been seen before. (That’s technically true, it’s the first live-action Pokémon movie.) Pikachu is obviously the star of the thing, and yet ever since the first teaser came out, people can’t get enough of Mr. Mime, the least Pokémon-like Pokémon out there. His Pokédex entries have changed over the years, but two things have stayed the same: he’s a mime, obviously, and he slaps his enemies. Maybe not the best fighter against a rock turtle.
Mr. Mime is such an oddball in the Pokémon universe that it took director and co-writer Rob Letterman two years to fit him into Detective Pikachu. And even then, the scene almost didn’t make the final cut. “Full disclosure, I thought no way in a million years would [the Mr. Mime scene] work. Honestly. It was so weird. I wanted to cut it at one point, because I was like this can’t possibly work. It’s insane,” Letterman told IGN. “Then we just started showing it to people and people were losing their minds… It became one of the standout scenes.”
The people have spoken: they love Mr. Mime. But will they love him once they know he was inspired by Se7en, David Fincher’s 1995 classic about a serial killer who kills in the name of the Seven Deadly Sins? (I love him even more.) From IGN:
In the [Detective Pikachu video game], the player must interact with a Mr. Mime to obtain an item, and Letterman had just been watching Se7en where they interrogate the bad guy, so it gave him an idea. “I thought it would be really funny if we played that classic film noir detective interrogation scene, but with Mr. Mime,” Letterman recalled.
[extremely Brad Pitt voice] What’s in the Poké Ball?!?
It’s going to be really weird in Detective Pikachu when Pikachu finds Snorlax with his face down in a plate of spaghetti. Died the way he lived, I suppose.
(Via IGN)
