Trivia for
Ice Age (2002) More at IMDbPro »

• Chris Wedge, director, is the voice of Scrat. The name 'Scrat' is a combination of the words 'squirrel' and 'rat', as Scrat has characteristics of both species.
  
  
• Movie signage and the book version include a female sloth named Sylvia, who is not seen in the released movie. In the book, Sid manages to avoid accompanying her on the migration south, because she is interested in a commitment.
  
  
• James Earl Jones and Ving Rhames were originally considered to play Manny.
  
  
• The film was originally intended as a drama but Fox would only accept it as a children's comedy.
  
  
• The first movie produced by Fox Animation since Titan A.E. (2000).
  
  
• The production team originally thought of turning the 20th Century Fox logo into ice when it appears before the film. Even though it can be seen in one of the trailers, they cut that out and placed the regular logo in the film.
  
  
• The first drawings seen in the cave (before entering the giant area with the mammoth drawings) are replicas of the earliest known cave drawings (found at Lascaux, in the south of France). They have been dated at somewhere between 15,000 and 17,000 years old.
  
  
• John Leguizamo tried 30 different voices for Sid. After viewing a documentary about sloths, he learned that they store food in their mouths; this led to him wondering what he would sound like with food in his mouth. After attempting to speak as if he had food in his mouth, he decided that it was the perfect voice for Sid.
  
  
• The baby's name is apparently Roshan.
  
  
• When Sid, Manny, Diego and the baby are walking through the ice cave, they walk past a UFO frozen in a block of ice, as they walk past, the baby does the Vulcan hand salute (from "Star Trek" (1966)). The UFO itself is a possible reference to the frozen UFO from The Thing (1982).
  
  
• All the actors were encouraged to improvise as much as possible to help keep the animation spontaneous.
  
  
• The human characters never talk in the film.
  
  
• Scrat was only supposed to appear in the film's opening few minutes, but he proved to be such a popular character with test audiences that he was given more scenes.
  
  
• Pre-production took over a year before any animation occurred.
  
  
• Scrat's opening adventure was inserted because, without it, the first real snow and ice sequence wouldn't take place until about 37 minutes into the film.
  
  
• A decision to make Scrat talk was quickly dropped as he worked better as a silent character for comedic effect.
  
  
• The drawings of characters during the end credit roll were all done by the children of the animators. The same is true of the picture that Sid draws of himself on a cave wall.
  
  
• The responsibility for animating Sid's snowboard sequence was given to animators who went snowboarding in real life.
  
  
• The film opened in March 2002. Within three weeks it had become the first film of that year to pass the $100 million milestone in box office takings.
  
  
• 20th Century Fox launched it on the home market with a marketing budget of $85 million, the largest amount they had spent up till then on a DVD release.
  
  
• The only stipulation that consulting anthropologists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York insisted on with the production was that there should be no dinosaurs. They would have been long gone 20,000 years ago, though a great deal of the animals shown in the film didn't live in the same eras or locations as the main characters. Dinosaurs were finally included in the second sequel, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), the explanation being that they survived extinction in underground caves.
  
  
• Some additional character names: the baby is Roshan, his mother is Nadia, his father is Runar. The sabers are Soto, Zeke, Oscar ("haughty saber") and Lenny ("fat saber"). The female sloths in the pool are Jennifer ("He's not much to look at...") and Rachel ("All the sensitive ones get eaten."). The "rhinos" are Carl (the one with thick horns) and Frank (the one with thin horns The source for this information is from an autographed original script purchased at auction. There is a signed COA from 20th Century Fox Archives, auction item number ICE0032.
  
  
• This was Blue Sky Studios' first all-CGI feature.
  
  
• In the movie, Manny is referred to as Manfred, Manny, that neeny weeny mammoth, Manny the Moody Mammoth, Manny the Melancholy, friend, Jumbo, the mammoth, and buddy.
  
  
• Chris Wedge regrets that he didn't get the bunny from his short Bunny (1998) into the film as an easter egg.
  
  
• "Scrat's Missing Adventure" was created exclusively for the DVD release.
  
  
• Director Chris Wedge refers to Scrat as a "saber-toothed squirrel".
  
  
• This feature is included in the first wave of Blu-Ray releases by Fox. A total of five movies were included in this, the others being Fantastic Four (2005), Behind Enemy Lines (2001), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and Kiss of the Dragon (2001).
  
  
• Blue Sky Animation has been developing improvements in computer-generated characters for over 15 years now. It was responsible for some of the aliens in Alien: Resurrection (1997) and the talking cockroaches in Joe's Apartment (1996).
  
  
• Blue Sky has engineers on its staff who understand the physics of sound and light and how these elements will affect movement in characters.
  
  
• Originally, Sid was supposed to be a con-sloth and a hustler, and there were even two finished scenes of the character conning some aardvark kids and a very suggestive scene with two female sloths later in the movie. Sid was also supposed to have a female sloth named Sylvia chasing after him, whom he despised and kept ditching. All the removed scenes can be seen on the "Super Cool Edition" DVD.
  
  
• The humans are not Homo-Sapiens, but Neanderthals.
  
  
• The "rhinos" in the movie are actually titanotheres, mammals from the Oligocene period and are no relation to modern rhinos as they went extinct.
  
  
• Despite the Dodo's less than brilliant survival instincts, they outlived all of the major character's species. Dodos were wiped out around the mid to late 17th century, whilst woolly mammoths (Manny) died out 10,000 years ago (a dwarf race existed until 1700 BC), ground sloths (Sid) are widely accepted to have become extinct some 2500 BC (although it has been proposed a small group survived till 1550 AD), and saber tooth tigers (Diego) were wiped out around 10,000 BC. Only humans like Roshan and his father survived the Dodo.
  
  

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