/Film’s Shania Russell recently spoke with Stephen J. Anderson, who is credited as a story supervisor on “The Emperor’s New Groove,” as part of her extensive oral history of a totally different Disney film — “Meet the Robinsons,” which he wrote and co-directed. But we should know by now that the legend of Kuzco and co. never stops growing, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Anderson shared yet another little-known anecdote from the making of that movie. Namely, the filmmaker says that a scrapped version of it had a role for none other than former “Batman” TV show star Adam West and that he hired the actor for “Meet the Robinsons” after witnessing his hysterical voice acting firsthand on the earlier project.
“When I was working on ‘Emperor’s New Groove,’ one of the iterations of the movie that didn’t obviously didn’t make it was that Kuzco spent a lot of time in the second act of that movie in Pacha’s village,” Anderson revealed. “And he met weird characters and one of them was this crazy conspiracy theorist whose name was Mochi.” In the version of the film we see, pompous emperor Kuzco, turned into a llama, spends time with Pacha’s (John Goodman) family and traverses the hillside he lives on, but we don’t get to meet too many of the locals from his village.