Hey Good Lookin' (film) - Post-production and Release

Post-production and Release

During the post-production of the film, Bakshi found that the cost of the optical effect required to complete live-action scenes with animated characters was larger than the film's budget. In order to complete these scenes cost effectively, Bakshi and his camera man Ted C. Bemiller purchased a 35 mm camera to project the footage onto the glass under the animation camera, which was reflected onto where the animation was shot. The same technique was used for the rotoscoped scenes in The Lord of the Rings. According to Bakshi, "The illusion I attempted to create was that of a completely live-action film. Making it work almost drove us crazy."

A three-minute promo of the live-action version of Hey Good Lookin' was screened at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival; a print of this promo is owned by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The film was initially scheduled for a Christmas 1975 release, but was moved to the summers of 1976 and later 1977, before ultimately being postponed indefinitely. Warner Bros. was concerned about any controversy the film would encounter controversy as a result of the backlash over the film Coonskin, despite the fact that Hey Good Lookin' did not contain any political content. The studio also felt that the film was "unreleasable" because of its combination of live-action and animation, but would not spend further money on the project. Bakshi financed the film's completion himself out of the director's fees for other projects he headed from 1976 until 1982, such as: Wizards, The Lord of the Rings, and American Pop.

Warner Bros. president Frank Wells told film trades that Hey Good Lookin' needed to be "fine-tuned", claiming that Bakshi needed to revamp the dialogue and reshoot some scenes because they had not tested well with market research audiences. During production meetings, Wells told Bakshi that he had not fulfilled his contractual obligations and had used more live-action than he said he would; Bakshi's lawyer was able to convince the studio not to sue him.

The majority of the live action footage was deleted; because Bakshi wanted to keep the breakdancing sequences, he used rotoscoping to animate the footage, but did not animate all of the movements for budgetary reasons. Little dialogue from the 1974 cut of the film was retained in the animated version, which instead featured newly recorded dialogue by Proval, Romanus, and Philip Michael Thomas, who had starred in Coonskin.

Following the success of Heavy Metal and American Pop, Warner Bros. became excited about the second version of Hey Good Lookin', forming a specialty division for the film's distribution. The film opened in New York City on October 1, 1982, and was released in Los Angeles in January 1983. Although it went largely unnoticed by the American public, it received respectable business in foreign markets.