Rasta Rockett: how Disney changed the accent, considered too Jamaican, of its cult film

Current champion of diversity and progressivism, Disney has not always adopted this line of action. In a long interview given to the British daily The Independent, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the cult sports comedy Rasta Rockett, its director Jon Turteltaub revealed the rather hectic behind the scenes of the production.

Loosely inspired by Jamaica's participation in the bobsleigh events at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada, the film tells how a group of Jamaican sprinters excluded from the national athletics selections for the Summer Olympics set out as a challenge to slip into the category... bobsleigh.

First imagined as a raw drama dealing head-on with racism and drug addiction, the plot was reworked to become a family comedy. That wasn't the only adjustment involved. Then-Disney boss Jeffrey Katzenberg insisted Jon Turteltaub drop the Jamaican accent. Jeffrey Katzenberg found it too marked and feared that it would not be understood by viewers in deep America.

"Jeffrey called me at 1 a.m. and said, 'If you can't bend these accents and make them understandable, I'll find another director who will do it,'" recalls Jon Turteltaub. Jeffrey Katzenberg suggested that the actors take inspiration from the phrasing and cadences of Sébastien, the famous crab and advisor-chaperone from the cartoon The Little Mermaid. His voice actor used a Trinidadian accent.

Jon Turteltaub has no choice but to lay his cards on the table with his actors: “The next day, I told them: 'I'm going to get fired if you don't speak like Sebastian the Crab.' Please don’t make me fired,” he says. In the end, the team accepted and adopted an Americanized version of the film “so that people around the world could understand it.”

“They wanted me to express myself like a black Aladdin,” confides lead actor Leon Robinson. “It was difficult because if anyone wants to be authentic, it’s me – but I’m a professional and I delivered.” “At that time, people had less access to cultural differences and didn't really know what the Jamaican accent sounded like,” notes his partner Malik Yoba. Despite this forceps delivery, Rasta Rockett was a box office success with more than 150 million receipts for a budget ten times smaller.