Cool Runnings director was told he'd be fired if the cast didn't “sound like Sebastian The Crab”

Jon Turteltaub says the characters' accents were a huge point of contention between him and Disney

By Sam Barsanti  |  October 4, 2023 | 1:09am
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Cool Runnings director was told he'd be fired if the cast didn't “sound like Sebastian The Crab”
Cool Runnings Screenshot: Disney+

The 1993 Disney classic Cool Runnings seems like the kind of thing that nobody should want to revisit here in the year 2023. It seemed like a lot of fun and very heartwarming at the time, but things have changed in the last 30 years. Surely the movie about John Candy training Jamaica’s first Olympic bobsled team can’t be wholly unproblematic… and it’s not, but the people who made it still seem to be enormously proud of the film—though things weren’t even wholly unproblematic back when they were shooting Cool Runnings.

Speaking with The Independent for a big piece on Cool Runnings’ 30th anniversary, director Jon Turteltaub talks about the movie’s transition from a harder-edged drama (with “drugs, racism, and the characters were getting laid a lot” according to star Rawle D. Lewis) to a family-friendly Disney movie, and he says that shift brought new expectations from then-Disney boss Jeffrey Katzenberg. Apparently, Katzenberg was concerned that American audiences wouldn’t be able to understand real Jamaican accents, which lead to “near-constant” fights with him, Turteltaub, and the actors.

Cast member Leon Robinson (known professionally as just “Leon”) said that Katzenberg wanted him to sound like “a Black Aladdin,” which is to say a “Disney version” of a Jamaican accent. He says it was “tough,” because it was important to him to be authentic to Jamaican people, but, he says, “I’m a professional and I had to do the job.” The Independent says it all “came to a head” early one morning when Katzenberg threatened to fire Turteltaub if he couldn’t “get these accents to where I can understand them clearly”—which apparently meant bringing them closer to the voice of Sebastian The Crab in The Little Mermaid (who The Independent notes has a Trinidadian accent).

So, with his job on the line, Turteltaub apparently just told his cast to do that: “The next day, I told the cast, ‘I’m going to get fired if you don’t sound like Sebastian The Crab. Please don’t get me fired.” He said they all “joked about it,” but they knew the stakes and ultimately landed on an “Americanized version” of the accents.

Cool Runnings Be Jamaican

Following the thread of those discussions, Turteltaub says that there’s a “zero chance” he’d get the job to make Cool Runnings today, adding, “and I probably shouldn’t get it.” He admits that he agrees with the people who think he probably shouldn’t have even been the one to do it at the time (Turteltaub is a white guy from New York), but they still ended up with a “pretty great movie.”

Turteltaub and the cast also talk about regularly hearing fans—including seven-time Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton, who apparently once called it life-changing—talk about what the movie means to them, with Leon saying he met a 12-year-old fan once who said he watched the movie over and over for 30 days after his dad died because of how comforting it is. As for whether or not there will ever be more Cool Runnings, Turteltaub just says that “there were discussions then and there are discussions now.”

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