Trailer
Plot summary
In 1945, World War II veteran Frank Harris is transported to Cool World, a cartoon-based alternate universe, after a traffic collision kills his mother. He becomes a detective there, partnered with a doodle named Nails, and keeps watch on the femme fatale Holli Would, who wants to leave the cartoon world for a human life. That is possible only if a doodle has sex with a human. Underground cartoonist Jack Deebs spent ten years in prison for killing his wife's lover, and filled them with comics called Cool World, drawn from recurring visions. Soon after his release he is pulled into Cool World, where Holli's henchmen, the Goons, smuggle him into a nightclub. Frank confronts him, saying Cool World existed long before the comics, that a pen is lethal to a doodle, and that Holli must be left alone.
Cast
- Stephen Worthas Bash (performance model) / Comic Store Patron
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- Murray Podwalas Store Patron
- Jenine Jenningsas Holli Would / Lonette (performance model) / Craps Bunny (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cool World (1992)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Paramount's marketing campaign altered the Hollywood Sign in July 1992 to include a 75-foot cutout of Holli Would, which the city allowed only after the studio gave $27,000 plus a further $27,000 for cleanup after the Los Angeles riots. Local residents launched a failed lawsuit over the sexualized image.
- Ralph Bakshi's 1990 concept was far darker than the finished film: a cartoonist has sex with a doodle named Debbie Dallas and fathers a half-cartoon, half-human child, who grows up resenting him and makes a pilgrimage to the real world to hunt down and kill his father.
- Bakshi originally intended to cast Brad Pitt and Drew Barrymore in the leading roles of Jack Deebs and Holli Would, but the studio insisted on bigger box office draws and cast Kim Basinger and Gabriel Byrne. The role of Frank Harris was created for Pitt.
- A long-running rumor held that Bakshi punched producer Frank Mancuso Jr. in the mouth after discovering his concept had been rewritten behind his back. In a 2022 interview with The Independent, Bakshi denied it: "I never punched Frank Mancuso Jr. [...] I yelled at him a couple of times."
- Bakshi claimed Kim Basinger approached him and Mancuso during production asking to rewrite the film herself so she could show it to sick children in hospitals. He said he replied, "Kim, I think that's wonderful, but you've got the wrong guy to do that with."
- The soundtrack included "Real Cool World" by David Bowie, written exclusively for the film and his first original solo material in roughly three years.
- Cool World opened sixth at the North American box office with $5.5 million, after which Paramount stunned exhibitors by immediately ceasing advertising. Its lifetime gross was $14.1 million, barely more than half its reported $28 million budget.
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