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Disney's beloved sports comedy “Cool Runnings” recently marked its 30th anniversary, and to commemorate the occasion, director Jon Turteltaub and the cast sat down for an interview with The Independent. During the interview, they revealed their struggle with Disney over the film's Jamaican accents.
“Cool Runnings” is loosely based on the story of the Jamaican national bobsleigh team's debut at the 1988 Winter Olympics. However, the film's origins were far from Disney-friendly, as cast member Rawle D. Lewis recalled that the original script contained elements like drugs, racism, and explicit character relationships.
“I saw it morph into the movie that it is now,” Lewis said. “It was something that had never been told before – Jamaicans in tights? People were like, ‘How's this going to go under the Disney umbrella?'”
Leon Robinson, known professionally as “Leon,” revealed that Disney's then-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted the Jamaican accents to sound like “a Black Aladdin.” This meant creating a “Disney version” of the accent, which was a challenging task for the cast. Despite the difficulty, Leon noted, “I'm a professional, and I had to do the job.”
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According to The Independent, tensions reached a boiling point when Katzenberg threatened to fire director Jon Turteltaub if the accents couldn't be made more understandable. He apparently wanted the accents to resemble Sebastian The Crab's voice from “The Little Mermaid,” which has a Trinidadian accent.
Turteltaub explained, “The next day, I told the cast, ‘I'm going to get fired if you don't sound like Sebastian the Crab. Please don't get me fired.' They understood that we needed to create an Americanized version of the movie that people around the world could understand.”
In the end, the cast and crew adapted the accents to a more understandable version, allowing “Cool Runnings” to become the beloved film it is today.
