Hi there! My name is Calliope Avery, but just call me Callie! It's lovely to meet you :] My pronouns are he/him and I'm an adult!
My blog is not a welcome place for generative AI in any form or anything hateful, especially towards vulnerable minority groups. Free Palestine and Abolish ICE, always. On that note, you should buy an E-Sim! Use the Funds for Gaza linktree!
Here's a list of my posts that you should check out!!!!!
My research on the lost Orin Scrivello's severed head prop
Links to my LSoH Radio Edit Digitizations on the Internet Archive
An analysis on the album "He's a Rebel" and it's impact on LSoH
An analysis on Orin Scrivello's nitrous oxide usage
Here's a link to my Internet Archive account! You can find and download my digital recordings of the LSoH radio edits, and maybe some other stuff soon!
I have a sideblog called @calliemityganon thats for sillier posts and for more reblogging! Check it out if you want :]
You can also find me on Youtube as Calliope Avery! I have some longer video ideas that I might share there, but for now it's mainly LP archives and 1 Grace Chasity compilation video
More miscellaneous info about myself is available under the cut:
I'm aroallo! Or aromantic-allosexual, basically I'm aro but not ace. Not entirely sure what specific label the "allo" part is anymore, but I'm not too concerned with figuring it out. I'm also transgender, but my experience with being trans is very atypical compared to others, so you won't hear much about my own transness or experiences I have with it from me aside from a few "gender envy" remarks. I love all of my trans siblings no matter what and will always fight for them, though!
I'm also autistic! I apologize in advance if I misunderstand any social cues or if I seem generally strange ^^' And if anyone is like "Hmmm IDK Callie you might have a diagnosis" you are like, 10 years delayed this has been known. (Just for the record, I'm not self-diagnosed but I don't care if other people do.)
Outside of my labels, I'm a writer, theatre jack-of-all-trades, annoying film critic, LP and CD collector, self-proclaimed archivist, wannabe director, will settle for a soon-to-be Youtube essayist, and my diet consists of 99% boxed mac n cheese.
I am very deeply obsessed with Little Shop of Horrors, but I seperate the LSoH movie and stage musical from each other. I consider myself seperate fans of each one, if that makes sense? I also suck ass at normal fandom things, so my contributions are mainly long informal essays, memes I made in 5 minutes (which will now be on my sideblog), and small archival achievements.
I'm also a huge fan of Labyrinth, Pokémon, Starlight Express, Splatoon, Steve Martin in general, cheesy and/or gorey horror movies, farming games that are mean to me, dentistry, puppets, wet looking practical effects, heightened reality, pink characters who have controversial fandom reception, and mean characters who I want to hit with my car. Ask me about my generational curse!
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Two different Little Shop of Horrors metal pinback pins. Neither have confirmed origins, but the one of the left has a watermark for Dewyters. I suspect the left pin was created and distributed by Dewyters for the original Orpheum Theatre production, and the one on the right was created and distributed as merchandise for the 1986 movie. This would date the left pin as being made in 1982 at the earliest, and the right pin being made in late 1986 and early-mid 1987. Those are just my estimates, however.
Hey new mutual!! Out of curiosity (and a desire to start a conversation), which version of Orin is your favourite?
YAY AN ASK!!!! "Favorite" is an incredibly strong word, because I hate Orin and I need to hit him with my car and drop an anvil onto his head and push him out of a 20 story window and- *I'm smacked on the head with a Looney Tunes hammer and collapse motionless on the ground.*
Anyway... my favorite Orin performance ever of all time is Douglas Sills from the original Broadway cast! His version of the character is so unbelievably amazing, he just gets Orin in a way I haven't seen many others manage. The definitive Orin, in my opinion. His performance is so fantastic that it overrides my instinct to make physical threats!
I also like Steve Martin's a lot of course, but to me he's a different imagining of the character, he's almost a different guy entirely to me. Some of it is Martin's acting choices and some of it is that multiple vital scenes for his character were cut. If that performance was in the stage version I don't think I'd like it, but in the movie it's exactly the spark of life it needs!
That first point is very valid, it shocked me to suddenly realise that my favourite character had shifted from Seymour to Orin, despite still wanting to rip out each of his teeth individually
Douglas Sills is such a good choice!!! Admittedly I need to find more clips of performance, but what I’ve seen/heard so far is absolutely incredible. Absolutely better than all other versions I’ve seen.
And yeah, I get perceiving Steve Martin’s Orin as a different imagining of the character — I feel the same about Rick Moranis’ Seymour (my first time seeing the stage play’s Suppertime scene really shocked me, because. Stage!Seymour just does not give a shit. Into the plant Mushnik goes. Moranis is so baby instead).
In fact, the movie puts a spin on all of the major characters except Audrey, as far as I can tell (although I haven’t had the chance to see it live yet, I’ve only listened to some of recorded albums and seen clips of a few different performances). It’s very cool to compare movie to stage production, but that’s going off topic-
For better or for worse Orin has a sort of magnetic quality to him. Many have fallen. Countless lost souls. I have an excuse because of my generational curse but that's a different conversation...
The Little Shop of Horrors Archive Youtube channel has a few full recordings of the Broadway run! Both have issues recording-wise but if you watch both and fuse them if your mind you've seen it fine. I've seen the stage show actually live 4 times now, one of which I went out-of-state for! Not sure why I keep doing this because something scary always happens to me, I don't know why but Orin actors seem to love making eye contact with me and messing with me. Somehow it didn't happen when I was literally in the front row, but when I went back to the same production for its closing night it happened when I was several rows back. I can't understand it.
The movie changed a buuuunch of stuff, so much stuff, so much that I consider them different stories. But ultimately each stage version is different, each cast will make their own choices. I have a lot of fun comparing different productions to each other as well as comparing and contrasting the stage show (usually via its script for the sake of neutrality) and the movie. It's super fun!!!
Hey new mutual!! Out of curiosity (and a desire to start a conversation), which version of Orin is your favourite?
YAY AN ASK!!!! "Favorite" is an incredibly strong word, because I hate Orin and I need to hit him with my car and drop an anvil onto his head and push him out of a 20 story window and- *I'm smacked on the head with a Looney Tunes hammer and collapse motionless on the ground.*
Anyway... my favorite Orin performance ever of all time is Douglas Sills from the original Broadway cast! His version of the character is so unbelievably amazing, he just gets Orin in a way I haven't seen many others manage. The definitive Orin, in my opinion. His performance is so fantastic that it overrides my instinct to make physical threats!
I also like Steve Martin's a lot of course, but to me he's a different imagining of the character, he's almost a different guy entirely to me. Some of it is Martin's acting choices and some of it is that multiple vital scenes for his character were cut. If that performance was in the stage version I don't think I'd like it, but in the movie it's exactly the spark of life it needs!
Content Warning: Very very mild and low quality special effects gore, implied violence, uncanny valley stuff(?), Orin Scrivello's face.
Little Shop of Horrors (1986) has an unfortunate reputation of leaving a lot of really cool things on the cutting room floor. The most infamous would be the movie's original ending, a beautiful and impressive sequence of puppetry that ended up completely scrapped. However, today we're talking about a prop that never made it into the final movie in any form:
Orin Scrivello's Decapitated Head!!!
Pictured above are the only 2 photos of the prop in its original state that I can find at the moment. The left photo was taken for promotion and advertising purposes, and the right image is actually a Topps trading card! (Which I have a physical copy of, hehe!)
To put it bluntly, I am slightly (very) obsessed with this prop head. There's so much mystery around it, and everything I've managed to dig up both fascinates me and makes me very upset. So much thought and hard creative work was put into the creation of this thing, and it was left completely left out and forgotten! I desperately want more people to be aware of this, so here is my big and (hopefully) well organized masterpost on everything for your learning pleasure. Alright, let's talk about some heads!!!!!!!!!
Forming a Timeline
The earliest mention of the head can be found in an early draft of the movie script, dated February 14th, 1985. There's plenty of concepts in this script that never seemed to get past this draft, but the severed head concept was not one of them. Here, take a look!
source
This section, found on page 66 of the script, not only established the existence of the head, but also establishes the facial expression it will later take on! Clearly, this concept was good enough to be held onto once actual production started, which is good for us! If it wasn't, then this post would be a lot shorter.
Early production of the prop began after the actors were cast, as face molds of Steve Martin were created as bases for the head.
source for the left image - source for the right image
Oooo, check these guys out!!! The left one is made of plaster, and the right one is made of rubber. The website sourcing these images included a quote from Steve Martin about the casting process. Here's the full provided quote:
"These molds were taken of my head for Little Shop of Horrors. It was cast on the lot at Pinewood Studios outside of London, and I got exceedingly claustrophobic during the casting. My entire head was covered with plaster and two straws were placed in my nose for breathing. Argh." - Steve Martin
I unfortunately don't have much information about the crafting process of the prop. I'm currently trying to track down anyone who could've worked on it, but the few people I've managed to contact haven't responded to me yet. So I can't say anything concrete about who worked on it and what went into creating it. The only thing I can assume somewhat confidently is that the creation of the prop happened around the same time as filming for Orin's scenes. It would allow them to make the face molds and also match up Martin's post-mortem Orin face with the facial expression of the prop.
Here's where it starts going downhill. From what I've found, the prop was never filmed with its face toward the camera. In the workprint that I accessed from the Internet Archive, the prop appears for 2 shots, and both of them only show the back of the head. My best guess for this choice is maybe it isn't as convincing when filmed? In the photos it looks really well made and realistic, but perhaps it didn't come across that way during shooting. Regardless, the head was still in the film at this point, so that counts for something!
On March 27th, 2025, the Little Shop of Horrors Archive released what is believed to be the August 1986 test screening version of the film, shown to the audience that would infamously get the entire ending changed. And this version, to my delight, includes the exact same shots of the severed head from the workprint in a higher quality! Since this is believed to be from August 1986, and the movie came out in December of 1986, this essentially confirms that the severed head lasted a very long time before finally being scrapped. I've replaced the initial video I used with the version from this preview, since it's relatively cleaner looking and actually includes full sound! Here, take a look!
source - timestamp: 58:51
But as you and I both know, those 2 shots were left on the cutting room floor, completely removed from the final product. The prop was left completely unused and unspoken of... except for one instance.
Remember the trading card I mentioned at the beginning? It's a part of a full set of trading cards that were made and distributed by the brand Topps. Back when the movie first came out, you could buy a pack of 5 mystery Little Shop of Horrors themed trading cards, along with a stick of bubblegum. This 44-card set is notable for featuring a lot, and I mean a LOT of images from cut movie scenes. There's photos of the original ending, there's photos from the cut sequence The Meek Shall Inhereit, and of course there's also the card featuring the prop head! However, those 2 sequences would later be rediscovered, cleaned up, and then added into the Director's Cut rerelease of the movie. The prop head wouldn't get this treatment, staying obscured, unknown, and unmentioned.
Fast forward about 30 years. A certain unused movie prop would be offered in an auction, allowing us to not only see high-quality photos of said prop in its current state, but also to allow us to know the exact materials it was made of! Without further ado, I present Orin Scrivello's decapitated head, circa 2018:
source
This absolute freak of a guy was up for auction at the "Profiles in History: Icons and Legends of Hollywood" auction on June 5th, 2018. No one ended up buying it (I would. I need to buy it actually. Please sell it to me.), but the auction gives us some absolutely divine information about the prop, such as what it's made of and its dimensions! Here's a quote from the auction website describing its materials:
"Vintage original hollow cast resin character head painted in realistic flesh tones with brown eyebrows and eyes. The 13 x 8 x 9 in. head has been polyfoam filled for stability. Exhibiting cracks to the crown, which is brittle and with other wear and age. A striking likeness of Steve Martin. In vintage good condition."
How neat! The high-resolution images allow us to see the detailed sculpting of the prop, which is still evident and impressive with its age and missing parts! The creases on the forehead, and around the mouth and eyes, the realistically colored teeth, this was clearly sculpted with a lot of attention to detail. I would've loved to have an image like this back in the prop's prime, back when it still had hair and a fresh coat of paint.
Why Was it Scrapped?
This is entirely just me theorizing, but I have a feeling it's for the same reason the original ending got snubbed. If you take the time to watch the archived workprint, you'll find a lot of cuts and changes were made that changed the tone of the whole finished project. Orin's death and dismemberment scenes got edited down a lot. Shots of him struggling and knocking things down as he falls to the ground got cut, the voiceline where he begs Seymour for help is gone. The shot where Orin's legs jolt when Seymour brings down the axe is gone too.
It's not just Orin-related scenes either! Mushnik no longer cries out for Seymour when being killed and eaten, and that's ignoring how different the scene happens in the stage musical. And obviously, the entire ending got changed so that Audrey and Seymour survive, leading to the cut of the magnificent ending sequence where all the Audrey II's destroy New York. In a way, the film got murdered and gutted of any of its real horror, with attempts to cover up any of the blood they couldn't scrub out.
In the movie's later quest to rebrand as a softer version of itself, it only makes sense that 2 shots of a decapitated head wouldn't make it. The appearance of the dismembered leg made it through, probably because it's less gruesome, but a head is... different. I obviously think it should've been kept it in, along with almost everything they trimmed from the workprint, but alas.
Update as of March 28th, 2025: I consider this theory to be what probably happened. Upon viewing the test preview from August 1986, a lot of the darker aspects from the workprint are included, and this is all but confirmed to be the version shown to the audience that would react so badly that the entire ending would get changed. With the change of its ending came all the little cuts mentioned above, which were initially there during this preview, not even 5 months before the movie released. I firmly believe they wanted to make the whole movie less intense, once they saw the reaction from the test screening.
TLDR, they cut the head off of the movie because it wasn't funny enough.
Conclusion
This is where the information I have ends, unfortunately. I do have more research routes I would like to take, but one of them involves desperately contacting random people who I suspect could've been involved (I've tried this, I've gotten no responses from those who I've managed to find an email for), and the other route involves taking a road trip to the actual goddamn Library of Congress, which is not something I can do right now or even in the near future. So this is probably as far as I'm getting!
However! If I find anything new, this post will be updated and/or remade again, depending on how big or little the info is. For now, I think this is good enough to share, and maybe letting people know will encourage others to research this prop as well! It'll probably be easier if it's not just me, y'know.
I'll finish by saying that I think research and preservation of art like this is very important. While it's common for cool artistic things to end up cut from movies, I think preserving that those cool things existed in the first place is something worth doing. Even though this prop head was a very small part of the movie, it's clear a lot went into creating it! I feel bad that I'm not able to credit any person or people for their work, but I hope getting the word out about it will do some justice.
If you've read this whole thing, thank you so much! I appreciate your interest and I thank you for taking the time to read all this. I hope you found it as interesting and fascinating as I do!
Oh, by the way, if this post looks familiar at all, you've probably seen the original version of this post I made awhile ago. I wasn't happy with the formatting of that post, and I ended up making too many discoveries to just continue updating it. I'll keep the original up to preserve it, but reblogs will be off for it, as I want this version to be the one to go around. Thanks!
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So excited to hear the news about the just-announced remake of Little Shop of Horrors! The cast they just announced for it includes Timothée Chalamet as Seymour, Sydney Sweeney as Audrey, James Cordan as Mushnik, John Mulaney as Orin, and Adam Lambert as Audrey II! What a star-studded and definitely the best possible picks for this movie remake!
Apparently, they plan on using CGI for both the settings and background and the plant itself! Here's a link to the announcement article!
... April fools! Hope I didn't get you too badly, lmao
Words cannot describe how much stress this album put me under. I went through all 5 stages of grief multiple times throughout this nearly 3 month journey. But that's all in the past... because I can now offer you the May 19th 1990 live recording single of Theaer Basel's production of Little Shop of Horrors!
Here is a link to my Internet Archive upload of the mini-album!
This record was stuck in transit for about 2 months, and due to that amount of time in transit plus the very tightly packed grooves it already has (it somehow has 6 songs on a 7" record!) it arrived to me in a less than playable state. However, a few deep cleans and experiments with changing the counterweight on my turntable's needle did the trick, and I was able to get a fairly clean, skipless digital copy of all 6 songs!
This seems like an album and a production that had a lot of love behind it. The cover art, the performances... I'm very happy to have a part in preserving this production on a wider scale! Give it a listen and let me know what you think!
I also scanned the entire program it came with, if you're curious! (And ideally if you speak German)
I didn't find out about this until yesterday, but on March 18th, 2025, a paragraph about Orin's severed head prop was added to the Wikipedia page for Little Shop of Horrors (1986)! I don't want to be self-absorbed or anything, but the paragraph did seem reminiscent of the things I talked about in my essay on it, espesically the notes about why it ended up scrapped.
I don't want to cry plagiarism or anything, since I don't technically have any proof they were paraphrasing me. However, I was worried about the inclusion of speculative reasoning for the scene getting changed, so I did go ahead and fix the paragraph myself!
Regardless of if it was included thanks to me, speculative unsourced information probably shouldn't be on Wikipedia, espesically when so little info on this topic exists to help correct it. I don't want misinformation floating around about something I'm passionate about!
Either way, if this did have anything to do with me and my post... well, I'm a little conflicted, but I'm happy to have had an impact on the movie that's done a lot to shape who I am today! Even if it's just a blurb on Wikipedia!
Also read my post pleaseeeee flutters my eyelashes
It's December 19th!!!!!!!!!!!!! And that means today is the 39th anniversary of the Little Shop of Horrors movie!!!!!!!!!
It's just 1 more year until we hit the 40 year mark (and I'm hoping and praying we get a 4k rescan Bluray by then...) but for now, here's a compilation of my favorite bloopers from the movie's blooper reel ^_^
Hello everyone! ^_^ I finally got around to this, very much belated on my part... but my digital recordings of the LSoH radio edit songs are now available on the Internet Archive!
Above is a link to my profile itself, where you can access all of them, but below I'll provide links for each directly. I re-recorded both as my computer decided to eat the original .wav files, and I also updated their cover images with pictures I took myself! They're all available in 320kbps .mp3, .flac, and .wav, though IA seems to have created some alternative formats along with those! For the best flac and mp3 versions, download the file that ends like "FLAC.flac" or "MP3.mp3", as those versions have proper metadata!
Link to Dentist! (Edit) (feat. Bill Murray)
Link to Mean Green Mother From Outer Space (With Censors)
Link to Mean Green Mother From Outer Space (Without Censors)
The original Youtube uploads are still available on my Youtube channel, FYI!
Also it might just be easier to download them from my MEGA link, which I'll provide upon request!
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Okay here's the start of my mildy interesting cool stuff. Scans of a previously sealed LSoH movie VHS and its sleeve, dated as being from 1991. Sleeve design is very similar to the original VHS release in 1987, but it's not exact. Possibly deadstock/never purchased. My scanner sucks a little so I'll probably redo this post when I can get taken to a place with a scanner that's better. Posting for archival and historical reasons only
Okay so I'm not gonna get to do my Cool Stuff for a few more days at least. So. Here is a reminder that I have a cute and silly LSoH character quiz on uQuiz! Here's a fresh link to it, have fun and happy belated LSoH stage show and movie days!!!
What it says on the tin! I remade a lot of this quiz because I wasn't happy with it, and I've only become more (less) normal about this musi
I retook my own quiz basically blind and I got Crystal, Ronnette, and Chiffon.... my sweetiepoos
It's September 21st, Little Shop of Horrors Stage Musical day !!!!!!!!! I don't have anything cool to offer for today or the upcoming 23rd, however once I'm back home I will finish my preparations for some mildly cool stuff! Please believe me
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Today, May 17th, would be Howard Ashman's 75th birthday. If you aren't already aware, Howard Ashman worked with Alan Menken to create the wonderful musical Little Shop of Horrors, which has had an undeniable affect on myself and my life. Ashman would go on to work with Menken on multiple Disney films; The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and he even did a lot of early work for Aladdin. He sadly passed away in 1991, during the production of Beauty and the Beast.
Howard Ashman was primarily a lyricist, but he was also a very talented and passionate storyteller. He had such a strong grasp on what made a compelling musical, and in all of his work you can feel an earnest passion for what was created, I think. I personally have a lot of love for the stories him and Alan Menken have brought into the world.
I'd like to conclude my post with words posted today by Alan Menken himself:
Howard Ashman would have turned 75 today. And I'll always ponder what we might have shared and the new works we might have created together in those 35 extra years. Still I somehow know, deep in my heart, that his spirit has been an integral part of everything I've accomplished since his passing. Happy Birthday, Howard!
Content Warning: Very very mild and low quality special effects gore, implied violence, uncanny valley stuff(?), Orin Scrivello's face.
Little Shop of Horrors (1986) has an unfortunate reputation of leaving a lot of really cool things on the cutting room floor. The most infamous would be the movie's original ending, a beautiful and impressive sequence of puppetry that ended up completely scrapped. However, today we're talking about a prop that never made it into the final movie in any form:
Orin Scrivello's Decapitated Head!!!
Pictured above are the only 2 photos of the prop in its original state that I can find at the moment. The left photo was taken for promotion and advertising purposes, and the right image is actually a Topps trading card! (Which I have a physical copy of, hehe!)
To put it bluntly, I am slightly (very) obsessed with this prop head. There's so much mystery around it, and everything I've managed to dig up both fascinates me and makes me very upset. So much thought and hard creative work was put into the creation of this thing, and it was left completely left out and forgotten! I desperately want more people to be aware of this, so here is my big and (hopefully) well organized masterpost on everything for your learning pleasure. Alright, let's talk about some heads!!!!!!!!!
Forming a Timeline
The earliest mention of the head can be found in an early draft of the movie script, dated February 14th, 1985. There's plenty of concepts in this script that never seemed to get past this draft, but the severed head concept was not one of them. Here, take a look!
source
This section, found on page 66 of the script, not only established the existence of the head, but also establishes the facial expression it will later take on! Clearly, this concept was good enough to be held onto once actual production started, which is good for us! If it wasn't, then this post would be a lot shorter.
Early production of the prop began after the actors were cast, as face molds of Steve Martin were created as bases for the head.
source for the left image - source for the right image
Oooo, check these guys out!!! The left one is made of plaster, and the right one is made of rubber. The website sourcing these images included a quote from Steve Martin about the casting process. Here's the full provided quote:
"These molds were taken of my head for Little Shop of Horrors. It was cast on the lot at Pinewood Studios outside of London, and I got exceedingly claustrophobic during the casting. My entire head was covered with plaster and two straws were placed in my nose for breathing. Argh." - Steve Martin
I unfortunately don't have much information about the crafting process of the prop. I'm currently trying to track down anyone who could've worked on it, but the few people I've managed to contact haven't responded to me yet. So I can't say anything concrete about who worked on it and what went into creating it. The only thing I can assume somewhat confidently is that the creation of the prop happened around the same time as filming for Orin's scenes. It would allow them to make the face molds and also match up Martin's post-mortem Orin face with the facial expression of the prop.
Here's where it starts going downhill. From what I've found, the prop was never filmed with its face toward the camera. In the workprint that I accessed from the Internet Archive, the prop appears for 2 shots, and both of them only show the back of the head. My best guess for this choice is maybe it isn't as convincing when filmed? In the photos it looks really well made and realistic, but perhaps it didn't come across that way during shooting. Regardless, the head was still in the film at this point, so that counts for something!
On March 27th, 2025, the Little Shop of Horrors Archive released what is believed to be the August 1986 test screening version of the film, shown to the audience that would infamously get the entire ending changed. And this version, to my delight, includes the exact same shots of the severed head from the workprint in a higher quality! Since this is believed to be from August 1986, and the movie came out in December of 1986, this essentially confirms that the severed head lasted a very long time before finally being scrapped. I've replaced the initial video I used with the version from this preview, since it's relatively cleaner looking and actually includes full sound! Here, take a look!
source - timestamp: 58:51
But as you and I both know, those 2 shots were left on the cutting room floor, completely removed from the final product. The prop was left completely unused and unspoken of... except for one instance.
Remember the trading card I mentioned at the beginning? It's a part of a full set of trading cards that were made and distributed by the brand Topps. Back when the movie first came out, you could buy a pack of 5 mystery Little Shop of Horrors themed trading cards, along with a stick of bubblegum. This 44-card set is notable for featuring a lot, and I mean a LOT of images from cut movie scenes. There's photos of the original ending, there's photos from the cut sequence The Meek Shall Inhereit, and of course there's also the card featuring the prop head! However, those 2 sequences would later be rediscovered, cleaned up, and then added into the Director's Cut rerelease of the movie. The prop head wouldn't get this treatment, staying obscured, unknown, and unmentioned.
Fast forward about 30 years. A certain unused movie prop would be offered in an auction, allowing us to not only see high-quality photos of said prop in its current state, but also to allow us to know the exact materials it was made of! Without further ado, I present Orin Scrivello's decapitated head, circa 2018:
source
This absolute freak of a guy was up for auction at the "Profiles in History: Icons and Legends of Hollywood" auction on June 5th, 2018. No one ended up buying it (I would. I need to buy it actually. Please sell it to me.), but the auction gives us some absolutely divine information about the prop, such as what it's made of and its dimensions! Here's a quote from the auction website describing its materials:
"Vintage original hollow cast resin character head painted in realistic flesh tones with brown eyebrows and eyes. The 13 x 8 x 9 in. head has been polyfoam filled for stability. Exhibiting cracks to the crown, which is brittle and with other wear and age. A striking likeness of Steve Martin. In vintage good condition."
How neat! The high-resolution images allow us to see the detailed sculpting of the prop, which is still evident and impressive with its age and missing parts! The creases on the forehead, and around the mouth and eyes, the realistically colored teeth, this was clearly sculpted with a lot of attention to detail. I would've loved to have an image like this back in the prop's prime, back when it still had hair and a fresh coat of paint.
Why Was it Scrapped?
This is entirely just me theorizing, but I have a feeling it's for the same reason the original ending got snubbed. If you take the time to watch the archived workprint, you'll find a lot of cuts and changes were made that changed the tone of the whole finished project. Orin's death and dismemberment scenes got edited down a lot. Shots of him struggling and knocking things down as he falls to the ground got cut, the voiceline where he begs Seymour for help is gone. The shot where Orin's legs jolt when Seymour brings down the axe is gone too.
It's not just Orin-related scenes either! Mushnik no longer cries out for Seymour when being killed and eaten, and that's ignoring how different the scene happens in the stage musical. And obviously, the entire ending got changed so that Audrey and Seymour survive, leading to the cut of the magnificent ending sequence where all the Audrey II's destroy New York. In a way, the film got murdered and gutted of any of its real horror, with attempts to cover up any of the blood they couldn't scrub out.
In the movie's later quest to rebrand as a softer version of itself, it only makes sense that 2 shots of a decapitated head wouldn't make it. The appearance of the dismembered leg made it through, probably because it's less gruesome, but a head is... different. I obviously think it should've been kept it in, along with almost everything they trimmed from the workprint, but alas.
Update as of March 28th, 2025: I consider this theory to be what probably happened. Upon viewing the test preview from August 1986, a lot of the darker aspects from the workprint are included, and this is all but confirmed to be the version shown to the audience that would react so badly that the entire ending would get changed. With the change of its ending came all the little cuts mentioned above, which were initially there during this preview, not even 5 months before the movie released. I firmly believe they wanted to make the whole movie less intense, once they saw the reaction from the test screening.
TLDR, they cut the head off of the movie because it wasn't funny enough.
Conclusion
This is where the information I have ends, unfortunately. I do have more research routes I would like to take, but one of them involves desperately contacting random people who I suspect could've been involved (I've tried this, I've gotten no responses from those who I've managed to find an email for), and the other route involves taking a road trip to the actual goddamn Library of Congress, which is not something I can do right now or even in the near future. So this is probably as far as I'm getting!
However! If I find anything new, this post will be updated and/or remade again, depending on how big or little the info is. For now, I think this is good enough to share, and maybe letting people know will encourage others to research this prop as well! It'll probably be easier if it's not just me, y'know.
I'll finish by saying that I think research and preservation of art like this is very important. While it's common for cool artistic things to end up cut from movies, I think preserving that those cool things existed in the first place is something worth doing. Even though this prop head was a very small part of the movie, it's clear a lot went into creating it! I feel bad that I'm not able to credit any person or people for their work, but I hope getting the word out about it will do some justice.
If you've read this whole thing, thank you so much! I appreciate your interest and I thank you for taking the time to read all this. I hope you found it as interesting and fascinating as I do!
Oh, by the way, if this post looks familiar at all, you've probably seen the original version of this post I made awhile ago. I wasn't happy with the formatting of that post, and I ended up making too many discoveries to just continue updating it. I'll keep the original up to preserve it, but reblogs will be off for it, as I want this version to be the one to go around. Thanks!
I had to drop everything and make myself update this post, because we got some new severed head info! Courtesy of the Little Shop of Horrors Archive, of course! It's not enough to warrant a brand new post, but it's very cool and allows us more insight into the timeline for the prop. I'd love if you could give it a reread and a reblog so the updated versiom can get shared around, thank you!!!
The full August 1986 test preview can be viewed on the Internet Archive via this link!
