8. Hoping to find a comedy star to voice Mulan’s fast-talking dragon sidekick Mushu similar to Aladdin casting Robin Williams as Genie, the filmmakers considered Joe Pesci, Steve Martin and Sinbad for the role before Eddie Murphy signed on.
9. However, Murphy almost passed on the movie when he was initially asked to do his recordings for the voice of Mushu in an actual studio. “We can record it in my basement,” Murphy recalled telling Disney in a interview with The Chicago Sun-Times. Ultimately, Murphy recorded his part at his home in Englewood, New Jersey.
10. Mushu had his own song in the initial script, but the tune was scrapped after Murphy was cast, according to lyricist David Zippel.
“We wrote three different versions of it,” Zippel told Entertainment Weekly. “But that’s because we didn’t understand at that point that it wasn’t that [Eddie Murphy] wasn’t liking our songs, he just didn’t want to sing in the film.”
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