Given this is the first of a series, I shall preface by stating that the opinions are those of the commentators, not mine. If I do feel the need to express an opinion, I will set it apart from the rest of the paragraph as a parenthetical aside or as a separate paragraph and set my thought or thoughts in italics. This series is a condensation of the opinions expressed in the commentary in real time and through human speech patterns into cohesive wholes that express inter-related themes.
The first section is the writers' commentary for the first movie, Night at the Museum, so the commentators whose opinions I'm grouping and condensing are Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant. The three main "groups" of sound bites I recognized were concerning the tablet, anything supporting the running gag, and the miscellany, or everything else.
The Tablet
It was the Staff of Ahkmenrah for a while, but also the tablet used to be a puzzle with eight pieces and nine spaces. Each piece had a hieroglyph on it, and only one could be moved around at any given time, like those puzzles that made pictures or sequences of numbers (I've got one at home which is numbered one through 24 and is a 5X5 grid), only this tablet could be made to say a variety of things, anywhere from "Everything in this tomb shall serve Ahkmenrah for eternity" to "Everything in this museum shall obey the guards of Ahkmenrah" to "The guards shall obey Ahkmenrah", and the idea was to have Cecil move the pieces around to say "All of the guards shall obey the holder of this tablet", so that Larry would have to magically do whatever he said. The idea was later simplified into a tablet with nine rotating pieces (I discuss on Night #4 that the tablet can still be made to state different things due to this property of the pieces), but the writers still think it's very, very cool.
The idea for an Egyptian artifact which brought everything to life in the museum made sense to the writers (this was not in the original children's book), and they felt it was based in "logical historical belief". "Egyptians would have created some sort of magical thing to keep everything alive in a tomb to keep a pharaoh company."
The Running Gag
The running gag is their explanation for why exactly certain things happen within the movie 'verse, which is "It's magic." They use this to explain how Rexy can move, how the Romans speak with English accents, and one even stated that this is his response for questions he cannot properly answer. They use this explanation for why the Huns can't or don't speak English, and also for the scene after the climax, where Teddy and Larry are taking inventory of the exhibits as they reenter the museum. In that case, they use the line to refer to anything which needs to be pulled out of someone's rear end and needs an explanation in case anyone asks. "It's magic."
Their second running gag is the notion that we as Americans "generously offered" to rescue the cultural artifacts of such places as Egypt, Easter Island (which is, in fact, deserted), and various places in Africa, put them in museums and charge people to come see them, taking the proceeds and sending them back to the countries of origin for these various artifacts.
Miscellany
They talk a lot about the Metropolitan museum, across Central Park from the Natural History Museum and which is home to half of the exhibits, including the Temple of Dendur (this is the actual spelling, I checked) upon which Ahkmenrah's temple was based, and essentially everything from the northeast wie afcng from the Met. Furthermore, there are corridors under the Met which are full of art. Apparently there is also a picture of a young Rockefeller relation who was eaten by cannibals. The mannequins the Civil War guys are based on are in the fashion wing of the Met, and were added because the writers wanted something cheap and not tremendously complicated to shoot or coordinate. (The mannequins in the Met fashion wing are based on Christie Turlington, as an aside.) The blue whale is also from the Met.
The writers admire a lot of the casting work that was done for this movie, and they are impressed that Dick Van Dyke is, perhaps for the first time, playing a villain (at about this point they go into the dark side of life as a Victorian-era chimney sweep).
Various aspects which remained intact throughout the revising process are: Cecil scaring Larry in the wicker outfit, Larry getting tied up in the Western diorama with a train getting ready to ram into his nose, everything involving Ahkmenrah, the My First Keys that Larry slips to Dexter, the "second morning" where Larry got fired, Cecil's escape on a stage coach, and the series of news reporters discussing the climax's aftermath.
Other points of note are that they think this movie is a good value (you pay for a night, but you get three), that there is no globe or wax Teddy in the real life museum, there are two dinosaurs fighting in the opening hall rather than just Rexy, the set is a huge contiguous system of hallways "some of which resemble the Natural History Museum a great deal", "you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Rockefeller wing of anything", Cecil's warning ("Don't let anything in...or out") was in the trailer, they really like their system of cranking out scripts, they feel the T-Rex chasing Larry around is "irresponsible", the actual museum is four stories tall and covers a city block, half the stuff they wrote they didn't think would actually make it into the final cut (they actually felt they could do whatever they wanted because "99.9% of movies don't get made"), monkeys are a complete mess to work with and sometimes come with dysfunctional couples who treat the monkey like it's their baby, also monkeys "pee all the way to the bank", they thought it was clever how they figured Ahkmenrah could speak English until someone decided he should speak Hun as well, and the writers have several other theories for why the Romans and Ahkmenrah use English accents: among them are importance/daddy issues and magic.
Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": The second section of Notes From the Commentary Underground, the director's commentary.
Countdown: 336 Days to NATM 3
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