Tim Allen Preferred The Original Santa Clause Script Where He Got To Murder Santa
In the years since its 1994 release, the trilogy-spawning '90s one-off "The Santa Clause" has become a holiday classic in countless households. Much of this is thanks to the performance of Tim Allen, who puts in a memorable turn as father and toy company marketing director Scott Calvin — the man who unexpectedly becomes the new Santa Claus. The original Santa (Steve Lucescu) is spotted by Calvin while scaling his roof and is startled when he's yelled at for doing so. In the blink of an eye, he slips, falls off the roof, and dies on Calvin's lawn, thus making him the new Santa.
Seeing as this is a family-oriented Disney production, the death of the original Santa is depicted as a total accident. Calvin isn't shown to be a cold-blooded killer seeking to ruin Christmas by killing Kris Kringle. However, there was a draft of "The Santa Clause" that very much skewed in that direction. Allen revealed as much during an appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," explaining that an early script had Calvin flat-out kill Santa. He recalled that Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to alter the scene, prompting the actor to fight to keep it in. "I go, 'No, no, no. That's the best script I've ever read,'" Allen said.
Ultimately, Katzenberg won the debate, and the version of the scene Allen preferred never made it past the early draft. Suffice to say, had it made it in, it would've been a rather brutal moment in an otherwise tame movie.
Scott Calvin shoots Santa in the original Santa Clause script
One has to imagine that if "The Santa Clause" were to see Scott Calvin kill Santa Claus, it would be done in a relatively kid-friendly way. Maybe Calvin would throw a snowball at him, causing him to lose his balance and fall, or perhaps he'd even scale the house and throw the apparent intruder off himself. As it turns out, the minds behind the original draft had something a little less tame in mind. According to Tim Allen himself, "The Santa Clause" nearly featured Calvin shooting Santa off of his roof. "The original script, actually, it was written by two comedians, and I shot Santa in the original script," Allen revealed during his "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" appearance.
Allen added that he was laughing to the point of tears when he read this version of the scene. This might seem like a rather inappropriate moment for a movie aimed at kids, but it's not as out there for a Disney production as one might think. As the actor pointed out, the studio has killed characters in brutal ways for decades, so it's more or less par for the course. Offering further critique, Allen found it odd that the elves in "The Santa Clause" didn't seem to care about Santa's death, and that it's never explained how his Mrs. Claus felt or what became of her after his demise.
If the original version of "The Santa Clause" made it to screen, and audiences witnessed Santa Claus' death come from a gunshot wound courtesy of Scott Calvin, it's safe to say the perception of the franchise as a whole would be very, very different.