The Beauty and the Beast remake brought back a lot of the songs featured in Disney's 1991 animated adaptation of the classic fairy tale, but the live action take also threw in some new songs to help distinguish it from its predecessor. One of the new tunes was "Days in the Sun," where Belle and the denizens of the enchanted castle reminisced about their past. However, the original version of this song was slightly different from what was shown in theaters, and with Beauty and the Beast's arriving on home media in a few weeks, you can now watch how this musical number first sounded (starting at the 0:48 mark).
In Beauty and the Beast's theatrical version of "Days in the Sun," the young Prince was seen singing to his mother as she laid in bed terminally ill before being taken away by his father. But in this alternate scene (provided by Movieclips Extra), the young Prince is the one in bed and his mother is singing to him. According to director Bill Condon, the reason for the switch was because during test screenings, some people mistakenly believed that Beast's mother was the enchantress who would curse him as an adult. Condon explained:
When we previewed the movie, there were people in the audience who got confused. They thought Harriet [Jones] was actually Hattie Morahan, who plays Agatha the enchantress. The actresses actually look very much alike, so sadly, when we did it again, even though it is once again Harriet, we had to put her in bed and with dark hair. Say it meant we had to recast the boy because in the new version it was now a singing part, and we needed someone with a trained voice.
Aside from shifting singing duties to the new boy playing the young Prince, the rest of "Days in the Sun" progressed as originally planned. One could argue that this change actually served the plot better. Since the live action Beauty and the Beast had more time for character exploration, audiences learned that one of the reasons why The Prince grew up to be so selfish and arrogant was because his mother died when he was young, leaving him to be raised by his cruel father. Without the singers in "Days in the Sun" changing, it's unclear how Beauty and the Beast would have revealed what happened to the Queen. Maybe there was an extra lyric in the original version of the song that passed along this information, or even a non-singing line of dialogue from the adult Beast. Regardless, now fans of the movie can enjoy the original "Days in the Sun" as one of the many special features attached to Beauty and the Beast's home release.
Beauty and the Beast will be available to buy on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital HD starting Tuesday, June 6.
