Everything You Forgot About Look Who's Talking

Posted by Aldo Pusey on Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Heckerling stressed over the whole gambit. 
Specifically, she told the Los Angeles Times, she worried about giving voice to the unborn baby: "I didn't want to do a pro-life type of movie. I wanted to do something that was a fantasy. So I didn't want to make a statement that when a baby is conceived it's talking," she explained. "A number of my girlfriends said, 'Why don't you wait until the fetus is 3 months old before he starts to talk?' But I felt like, if you're setting up a gimmick, you have to do it immediately. And then I decided I could avoid the whole issue if I made the sperm talk too."

The special effects were gnarly. 
With computerized effects still in their early days back in the late eighties, production relied on some creative engineering to show the images of an unborn Mikey. Todd Masters, who'd later work on True Blood, was called on to create five different puppets, from zygote to full-term baby, plus tiny vinyl sperm attached to fishing weights. "They were dumped in a tank and they kind of cascaded through the water and picked up by the underwater camera," he recalled to The Wrap.

The hardest shot took 115 takes: "It was little Mikey playing with his placenta," he remembered. "It required 12 puppeteers, people were hanging upside down." And it was eventually cut from the film. 

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