For a brief moment yesterday afternoon, YouTube viewers could catch a glimpse of the “original” ending to The Golden Compass. The Vulture bloggers at New York reported on a clip from the movie’s tie-in videogame featuring a scene in which, after the battle that ends the film, Lyra and Lord Asriel are reunited near the North Pole, ready to bust open the multiverse. Whoever wrote the post isn’t sorry the scene got cut; “it would have been as ham-handed and lame a treatment of the book as the rest of the movie was.” In any event, the studio’s attorneys quickly stepped in to pluck the footage off the net.
In other Philip Pullman news, there’s going to be another prequel to the His Dark Materials trilogy next year. According to an interview with Pullman in the Banbury Cake, the 20,000-word story, Once Upon a Time in the North, will feature “a separate story that takes place some time before Lyra was born involving the two characters Lee Scoresby, the balloonist, and Iorek Byrnison, the armoured bear,” including their first encounter. Personally, I’m hoping for a classic Marvel Comics-style team-up, where they immediately fight upon setting eyes on each other but then realize they’re both on the same side. I’m also hoping for evidence to confirm my theory that Lee Scoresby is the stranger who walks through the bowling alley in The Big Lebowski.