Putting aside the terrible sequel, the ridiculous video game tie-in and the awkward fan conventions, the original 1980 film The Blues Brothers is still very good, mostly thanks to the performances from true music legends like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway.
Plus, there’s that iconic car chase through an Illinois shopping mall, which, admittedly, is a lot less fun to watch if you know that the mall in question was being used by a school until Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi trashed the place and didn’t bother to clean their mess up.
Interestingly, the version of the movie that we’ve all seen is a lot different than how it was originally conceived.
So Landis cut 15 minutes out, but still planned to retain the epic roadshow packaging. He screened the slightly shorter cut for “theater owners and bookers.” But then one racist theater owner ruined everything. As recounted in the book The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Film Classic by Daniel de Visé, Ted Mann, who owned some of the top theaters in L.A.’s Westwood neighborhood, refused to book the film, telling Landis, “I don’t want Blacks in Westwood.”
As a result, Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal at the time, ordered Landis to make yet more cuts. “Well John,” Wasserman said, “we’re gonna have trouble booking it, so we can’t have a road show. You’ve gotta take the intermission out of there.” So the movie was whittled down to 133 minutes, resulting in a cut that Landis calls “lopsided.”
Per Landis, in 1985, someone at Universal threw out the negatives of all the extra scenes. The studio had invited him to restore the missing footage for a home video release, only to discover that the Blues Brothers film had been scrapped and replaced with footage from The New Leave It to Beaver.
While the original roadshow version is still lost, the second “preview cut” and all of its additional scenes were eventually recovered by the FBI.
Around the time that Blues Brothers 2000 was released, the feds — presumably their Deleted Scenes from ‘80s Comedies Division – contacted Universal, notifying them that a “mystery print” of The Blues Brothers was listed for sale on eBay. The FBI ended up seizing the 70mm print, which turned out to be the preview cut. Landis revealed that it had been “stolen” by the son of a theater manager following the 1980 previews. The longer cut (containing an extra 20 minutes) was eventually released on Blu-Ray as the “Extended Version.”
But they would have sold a lot more copies had they called it the “Seized By The FBI After Two Decades of Sitting in A Thief’s Garage Version.”