One of the funniest scenes in Peyton Reed's "Ant-Man" film has definitely got to be Ant-Man's battle scene with Yellowjacket inside his daughter's room. Given their sizes, it was hilarious when they were hauling some Thomas the Tank Engine sets all over the room.
It was even funnier when they managed to blow up Thomas the Tank Engine, much to the shock of the police who are waiting outside of the house.
While discussing the scene with Film School Rejects, Reed said that it was very important for them not to portray Thomas the Tank Engine in a bad light, since toy company Mattel values Thomas the Tank Engine's wholesome image to the kids.
"I believe in Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish's original drafts it was a train set. At some point in the process that predated my involvement it became Thomas. As I came on, they had not secured the rights to Thomas. We had to do this whole thing where we did this presentation for the people who own the rights to Thomas. Thank God they agreed and found it funny, but there were definite stipulations," he said.
One of the stipulations was that nobody could be tied to the tracks and run over by Thomas the Tank Engine. At the same time, Thomas the Tank Engine is not allowed to be doing anything that could be perceived by children as "evil," so it was essential for them to keep the toy character "neutral" throughout Ant-Man's fight scene with Yellowjacket.
"Like anybody, they're protective of their brand. I didn't know what we were going to do if we didn't get the rights to that. There are certain things I was going to be devastated about if we couldn't have them. Thomas was one, because...you could do any kind of toy train, but the personality of that thing and the eyes moving back and forth give it a whole vibe and took it to another level," the director explained.
In another fight scene, Ant-Man and Yellowjacket were trapped inside a briefcase. They even managed to make light of that scenario by having iPhone play The Cure's song "Plainsong."
"In the briefcase battle, we knew we wanted to have an iPhone joke," Reed said. "We had all these different versions of jokes, like, Yellow Jacket saying, 'You're going to end up dead!' and then you'd hear 'Searching for the nearest Panera Bread.' There were some funny jokes and some not-so-funny jokes, but, at the end of the day, they were just jokes."
Since the director is such a huge fan of The Cure, they went with "Plainsong," which is the first song out of the band's "Disintegration" album.
