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Ice Age: The Meltdown

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Ice Age: The Meltdown

Directed by	Carlos Saldanha
Written by	Jon Vitti
Starring	Ray Romano John Leguizamo Denis Leary Queen Latifah Jay Leno Seann William Scott Josh Peck Will Arnett Debi Derryberry
Produced by	Lori Forte
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date	March 29, 2006 March 31, 2006 April 7, 2006 April 22, 2006
Runtime	91 min
Language	English
Budget	$80,000,000
*IMDb page (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0438097/)* preceded_by = Ice Age (2002) followed_by = Ice Age: A New Beginning (2009)

Ice Age: The Meltdown, also known as Ice Age 2: The Meltdown in some international releases, or simply as Ice Age 2, is the 2006 film sequel to the computer-animated 2002 film Ice Age. It was produced by Blue Sky Studios for 20th Century Fox, and was released in movie theatres around March 31, 2006. It was directed by Carlos Saldanha, co-director of the original Ice Age, and the music is done by Robots composer, John Powell.

This film was originally rated G by the MPAA, but was re-rated PG by the MPAA for some mild language and innuendo. The working title was Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, but for the movie's final release, the creators decided to remove the number 2, calling it Ice Age: The Meltdown, as the movie follows the same characters as the first one, starting where the first ended. However, in the UK, Ireland, Mexico, and Australia, its title is promoted as Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. Also, most of the sponsors of the movie had the 2 in their packaging after the name change (they however did edit the 2 out of their TV ads).

The BD and DVD were released in the United States and Canada on November 21, 2006 according to the official web store [1] (http://www.foxstore.com/detail?item=2608). It was released in Mexico and Latin America in mid-June 2006 and released in the UK on October 23, 2006. They both includes a brand new Scrat short, No Time For Nuts and Columbia Torch Lady also has her own short film Columbia Torch Lady's Travel Time Adventure.

Contents

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Characters

Just as in the original, prehistoric animals are the focus of the story. Returning in their original roles are:

Manfred (Manny) the woolly mammoth - Ray Romano
Sid the Synocnus - John Leguizamo
Diego the Smilodon - Denis Leary
Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel - Chris Wedge
Columbia Torch Lady (Miss Liberty) - Sigourney Weaver

Joining Manny, Sid, Diego and Scrat this time in their adventures are:

Ellie the female woolly mammoth - Queen Latifah
Crash and Eddie the opossums - Seann William Scott and Josh Peck

Some characters that they meet along the way are:

Fast Tony the armadillo - Jay Leno
Stu the Glyptodon
James the aardvark
A Vulture known as the Lone Gunslinger - Will Arnett
Cholly the Chalicotherium - Alan Tudyk

and attempting to stop them from their goals are:

Cretaceous, an altered Metriorhynchus ^{Citation needed}
Maelstrom, an altered Placodus ^{Citation needed}
... and, in Scrat's case, a school of piranhas, a condor chick, its mother and dodos that appear in squirrel heaven.

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Plot

In the opening scene, Scrat, the prehistoric fictional saber-toothed squirrel (that has a rat's long snout) who is desperate for his acorn, climbs up a glacier side, hoping to take back his acorn. He pulls it out with significant force, but unknowingly also opens a hole in the glacier, which water soon leaks out of. Scrat tries to plug up the hole, but it cracks more open, so he tries drinking the water but lost his grip on the glacier, revealing that the ice which the animals live near is slowly melting away.

In the next shot, the Ice Age animals are having a ball in their new world full of water slides made of ice, naturally caused whirlpools and hot springs. Sid opens a camp called "Campo del Sid". He thinks the kids look up to him, but they actually torture him in many ways, such as using him as a pinata, and burying him. However, soon Manny the mammoth, Sid the ground sloth, and Diego the saber-toothed cat enjoy themselves as well, all but Sid, who wishes for more respect among his fellow animals. Sid tails off to prove his worth in some way or the other. Manny tells a story about a burro, which a little elk calls the burro a wild ass. Soon, the trio discover, by Fast Tony and Stu, a pair of local con artists trying to sell off products for surviving underwater, that the global warming had caused a flood and caused the ice of the valley to melt (as demonstrated by Scrat in the beginning of the film, when trying to recover his acorn), and it is kept from destroying the valley only by the glaciers, which have formed a dam. Manny first dismisses the idea. But soon enough, he is forced to change his views after he rescues the impulsive Sid from jumping off the glacier to earn respect; where he sees a threatening expanse of water beyond the glacier. Time is running out, and as soon as a vulture known as the Lone Gunslinger tells the animals that a boat (which is actually a giant piece of a fallen tree) can lead them to safety, they set off in a rush to find it.

As this happens, the trio accidentally breaks off a piece of the glacier, which contains two sea reptiles from the Mesozoic era, a Metriorhynhus named Cretaceous and a Placodus named Maelstrom, while Manny appears to be the only one who sees something wrong with the chunk of ice, while not knowing exactly what it is. Stu the glyptodont is an example of these reptiles as he is soon eaten, leaving behind his shell alone.

In the next shot, Scrat is shown pining for his acorn, which has landed from his fall under a sheet of ice; Scrat tries to break through the ice, but gets trapped under a sheet of ice. He uses his teeth to cut out a ring, but the ring is stuck around his head and he rolls around, arguably discovering the wheel. Eventually, by his rolling he pushes the acorn onto a beam, and soon afterwards falls on the opposite side and catapults the acorn onto a high ledge by mistake.

Along the way, Manny becomes depressed when other animals (especially Sid) tease him about being the last mammoth alive. After following a trumpeting sound not unlike a mammoth's call, Manny, Sid, and Diego encounter Cholly, who produced loud flatulence which sounded like the call. Manny wishes to be alone, leaving Diego and Sid alone, unknowingly to be heckled by two opossums, Crash and Eddie. The opossums proceed to torture Sid and Diego with peashooters made from reeds, and by ducking in and out of sight in a manner not unlike Whack-A-Mole and Twister (game), their nimble attacks were enough to leave Sid and Diego in a pile. Meanwhile, Manny comes across the opossums' “sister”, a female mammoth named Ellie who believes she is an opossum. Manny has a hard time convincing her she is a mammoth, a task he must perform if they are to save the species from extinction. Sid invites her to tag along with the group to escape the flood, and she brings her brothers, who aren't exactly on good terms with Sid and Diego.

Scrat tries to catch his acorn by sliding off an icy slide, and falls into the water with his acorn. He is then confronted by piranhas, which he does battle with using kung-fu and knocks the piranhas senseless, not knowing that a condor would come along and take his acorn. In the night, Scrat makes his way into the condor's nest, and fights a baby condor over his acorn, which he soon loses when he was booted out of the nest by the mother, which soon came back, none too happy at the intruder of her nest.

After a perilous ordeal with the sea reptiles, Sid finds out that Diego is afraid of water. Later Crash asks Manny to catapult him out of a tree into a pond but instead made a painful collision with a tree and to Eddie's delight miraculously survives unharmed. Ellie is playing with her brothers and gets stuck under a log. Manny lifts it off her and it opens up an area which Ellie recalls from her childhood as the place where she was adopted by her brothers' mother when she was all alone and isolated from her herd. She finally realizes she is a mammoth and starts getting along with Manny but soon grows apart from him when he suggests "saving their species". In time, when the situation calls for it, to save them all from falling into a gorge of pointed rocks, they make up. During the night, while all are asleep, Sid is kidnapped by a tribe of mini-sloths (they are likely modern-day three-toed sloths, though they also share traits with ground sloths) who call him the Fire King (a reference to the first Ice Age, when Sid lights a fire during the journey and proclaims himself to be "Lord of the Flames") and attempt to sacrifice him to a volcano to save themselves from the meltdown. As luck would have it, Sid shot out of the volcano's vent unintentionally by means of the vines which bound his feet acting like bungee cords.

The next morning, the group of animals regroups with Sid, who claims himself to be taken by "a tribe of mini-sloths", but is stopped when the group finds out that they had overslept and that the ice was melting. They therefore rush off to try and reach the boat, and are waylaid by some hot geysers, which separate Manny, Sid, and Diego from Ellie and her brothers.

In time, Manny saves Ellie from drowning when she was trapped in a grotto of rocks, while Diego overcomes his fear of water to save Sid. All is about to be ruined when Cretaceous and Maelstrom come about attempting to eat the animals, but, due to Manny's quick thinking, are finished off by a rock which falls on them. While all this happens, the other animals are taken on a death ride on the "boat" as it floats about, and are off at the mercy of the water currents.

Meanwhile, Scrat climbs up the glacier, and at the top sticks the acorn he has into the ice. This forms a crack in the glacier, which widens into a fissure, diverting the flood and saving the animals.

In the final scene, a herd of mammoths shows up, removing the need for Manny and Ellie to mate and proving to other animals that mammoths are not extinct; however, love triumphs and they decide to remain together anyway, taking Sid, Diego, and the opossum brothers along.

The epilogue shows Scrat having a near death experience after falling into the fissure he accidentally opened which diverted the flood and saved the animals. He enters a heaven full of acorns, amazed completely. He sees a gigantic acorn, reaches for it and nearly grabs it. Suddenly, he finds himself torn away from heaven. He wakes up in the arms of Sid the sloth, who had resuscitated him. Taken from his heavenly, giant acorn, Scrat is enraged and proceeds to attack his savior.

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Trivia/Goofs

Template:Too much trivia

In the beginning of the movie, Scrat is seen climbing a glacier. This is a reference to Mission Impossible 2, when Tom Cruise is climbing a mountain in a similar fashion.
The movie contains biblical references, such as the animals going onto the "boat" to escape the flood, which is likely a reference to Noah's Ark. Scrat dying to save the valley and "coming back" to life again may be a reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Scrat act of parting the glaciers, that saves the other animals, may be a reference to Moses parting the Red Sea.
The breaking glacial dam is likely a reference to the Missoula Floods of the late Pleistocene.
Many people found the film's plot about a flood coming, and walls of glaciers breaking inappropriate, since the movie was released seven months after Hurricane Katrina, which broke levees in New Orleans in a similar fashion. Many people at Blue Sky after Katrina's landfall wanted to delay the movie's release from March 2006 to November 2006, but could not. <ref>http://www.zap2it.com/movies/reviews/zap-iceagethemeltdown-review,0,5345841.story?coll=zap-movies-recent-reviews</ref><ref>http://www.austin360.com/movies/movies/etc/getCriticReview.jspd?criticReviewId=215</ref>.
The vultures originally had a role in the previous Ice Age, but their roles were scrapped. Their original designs can be seen in the special features on the DVD.
The movie contains a spoof of Saving Private Ryan, when Manny is hit by a geyser and temporarily loses his hearing. Incidentally, the German voice for Manny, Arne Elsholtz, also synchronizes Tom Hanks, who also stars in that movie, which creates an insider joke by happenstance in the German version.
The ultimate ending of Cretaceous and Malestrom, the two reptiles, remains dubious. The essential guide says that they were later eaten by mini-sloths, while the storybook maintains that they were picked off by vultures. The mini-sloths eating the bodies of these two creatures seems unlikely, as sloths of any species are traditionally vegetarian (though some species of ground sloths do sometimes eat meat) and the vultures picking the sea reptiles off seems more likely as the vultures were singing on how they'd wanted their meals.
Manny mockingly refers to Sid as a platypus. Syd the platypus was one of the three mascots chosen for the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
The sequences in which Scrat battles a group of pirahnas and fighting a baby condor for the acorn were originally considered for the opening of the movie and teaser trailer.<ref>Crew Commentary, Ice Age: The Meltdown DVD Special Feature </ref>
The reason why Roshan, the baby from the first movie and other humans are not featured in this movie is because the makers felt the idea was too predictable, considering the many story pitches from other screenwriters the filmmakers recieved, all including Roshan.<ref>Crew Commentary, Ice Age: The Meltdown DVD Special Feature </ref>
Sid gave the name of his camp Campo del Sid, which supposedly is translated as Camp of Sid, however it would actually be "Field of Sid". The correct Spanish for Camp of Sid is "Campamento de Sid".
The piranha that bites the acorn (and Scrat's arm) is flung to the right by Scrat when he gets angry, and is lying almost off-screen, although, when he finishes beating up the rest of the pirahnas, the acorn is in another piranha, closer to him. The acorn could not move from one piranha to another.
On the "Ice Age 2 Factoid Meltdown" quiz feature on the DVD game, one question is "How many possums are seen in the movie?" and on the quiz "2" is the answer. But actually, that is untrue, as you also see Crash and Eddie's mother in Ellie's flashback, making the answer actually "3".
In the first Ice Age movie it was made out that ice age was beginning, but in this movie it is ending. This is attributed to the fact that throughout ancient history there was more than one ice age.
Also in the first Ice Age movie, Scrat was shown to have been frozen in a block of ice and have washed up to a tropical beach, unfreezing 20,000 years later. However, he reappears in this movie. It would be thought that he freezes after this movie, but Scrat is shown to have frozen in the cave chase in the first movie.
When Ellie says that Manny was fat and Manny just says that his hair was poofy, it is very similar to Manny and Sid's talk in the first movie.

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Promotions

As an additional marketing ploy a special "anti-cell" spot was created with Sid complaining to the audience about a ringing cellular phone. The same was done for Brother Bear, I, Robot, and Robots (another Blue Sky Studios film).
On Family Guy's episode "Sibling Rivalry," Scrat is shown trying to take three nuts out of a side of a glacier; Peter shows up and tries to stop him, admonishing the squirrel for stealing, which drives Scrat to subsequently attack Peter. Apart from Peter, the scene was rendered in 3D (Family Guy is normally drawn in 2D), and Scrat was voiced by Chris Wedge who voices him in the films. The episode originally aired the week before the film opened. Fox aired promotions for the movie throughout the evening.
During the same evening of Scrat's Family Guy cameo, Sid was hosting the entire FOX line-up, showing up in intermittent times between commercials.
A teaser trailer for The Simpsons Movie was attached to every print of the movie, despite rumors that it was only on some prints.
Re-edited scenes of Ice Age: The Meltdown were shown in Airhead candy commercials on several kids' channels and programs, such as the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, ABC Kids on ABC, and more. It shows, in part, that after Scrat defeats a school of piranha, he proudly displays an Airhead packet (replaced by an acorn in the actual movie), when suddenly an eagle comes over and swipes it from him.

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Box Office

Ice Age: The Meltdown opened on March 31, 2006. Though critical reviews were mainly mixed, the film exceeded expectations by opening with an $68.7 million in its first weekend [2] (http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808751386/user). This was the second biggest opening for a non-summer, non-holiday release, since the The Passion of the Christ. The film grossed a total of $195,330,621 at United States box offices, making it the first movie in 2006 to pass the $100 million mark.

In the Netherlands, the film grossed €152,262 in its first week, not enough to enter the top 10. In its second week (March 30 - April 5), the film moved up to #1, grossing €1,350,375, kicking Inside Man from its #1 position there. The film has accomplished an amazing job by remaining in the top 3 for 9 weeks. In total, the film grossed € 6,108,685 in the Netherlands.

As of January 12, 2007, the film grossed a massive $647,260,749 worldwide according to boxofficemojo.com, surpassing all expectations and netting the film a massive profit given the moderate budget of $75 million. At time of writing, it holds the 28th spot on the list of highest-grossing films.

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Piracy

The film has become the first Blu-ray disc released film to be pirated, meaning the copy protection has been cracked .The full uncompressed Blu-ray disk image was made available online in areas such as Bittorrent soon after the film Serenity, which was also the first film to be pirated in the competing high definition disc format.

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Soundtrack

The score is by John Powell; the soundtrack also features the song "Food Glorious Food" from the musical Oliver!. He composes brand new music for the film that replaced the theme songs from the previous film.

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Animals featured

Aardvark (the doubting aardvark father which maintains that mammoths have truly gone extinct and several others)
Baptornis (seen going down the waterslides in formation)*
Brontops (seen in waterpark questioning Manny's storytelling, referred to as "rhino" in script)*
Chalicotherium (Cholly, as well as several others seen on the "boat")*
Condor (young hatchling fights with Scrat over the acorn and then in the Food Glorious Food scene)
Dodo (seen being killed by the hot geysers, and then in the squirrel heaven)

Elk (seen in migration, one making way down waterslide and poking a Paleocastor in the rear with his horns, appropriately referred to as "elk" in script, the younger individuals acted like gazelles)
Fly (seen when Cholly breaks wind)
Dung beetle (seen in migration complaining about toting a mound of dung along)
Gastornis (seen in migration getting her children in a moving nest, referred to as "Diatryma" in script)*
Giant Armadillo (Fast Tony)
Glyptodon (Stu, and many of them in the migration)
Hawk (seen when Crash and Eddie play dead)
Hedgehog (seen in migration, children trying to get their grandfather out of the burrow, referred to as "molehog" in script)
Mammuthus (Manny and Ellie)
Macrauchenia (seen in migration and in waterpark, one individual getting stuck in a waterslide, referred to as "freaky mammal" in script)
Metriorhynchus (Cretaceous)*
Moeritherium (seen in migration and discrediting Fast Tony's selling of bark, referred to as "start"in script)*
Musk Ox (seen in migration and accused of being fat by Fast Tony)
Opossum (Crash and Eddie)
Palaeocastor (seen in migration, exclaiming "Dam!" when the ice was cracking, referred to as "beaver" in script)*
Piranha (school of piranha fight with Scrat for life and his acorn, some were shown eaten by some Baptornis in the opening)
Platybelodon (seen in herd and openly laughing at Fast Tony, referred to as "shovelmouth" in script)*
Placodus (Maelstrom)*
Saber-toothed squirrel (a fictional animal) (Scrat)
Songbird (seen with younger animals questioning Manny on his family)
Smilodon (Diego)
Synocnus (Sid and the tribe of mini-sloths)
Vulture (seen singing "Food, Glorious Food" from Oliver! when in pursuit of their prey)
Mosasaur (seen trying to hunt Manny, Sid, Diego, Ellie, Crash, and Eddie)

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Inaccuracies

The opossums are referred to as "possum" throughout the film. Scientifically speaking, the term "possum" is usually reserved for a group of Australian squirrel-like tree dwelling marsupials. However, the name was derived from opossums of North America, which they resemble.
Sid claims tigers are the only animals that can not swim while they are infants. In fact, tigers are one of the few cats that take to water (but Sid was referring to Smilodon, whose appropriate name is "saber-toothed cat").
Both the Metriorhynchus and the Placodus in the film differ greatly from the true animals, in that neither is the appropriate size and both have superfluous fins.
Armadillos cannot retract into their "shell," they roll up instead.
Baptornis did not live at the time of the ice age. And those shown do not seem to have come from melted ice like Cretaceous and Maelstrom, though since many of the creatures in the film did not live during the same time period. This is a matter of artistic license.
Macrauchenia in the first film were comparatively taller than the mammoths, but have been shrunk down for their role in this film, in order to provide a measure of factual accuracy and to aid the story's continuity.
It's worth noting that neither Placodus or Metriorhynchus (Maelstrom and Cretaceous) would have survived in a glacier. During their time period, the world's temperature was still too high for ice to form anywhere, ergo they could not have survived through the millions of years of being frozen, because they would never have been frozen at all. They would have been extinct long before the world cooled down that much. Plus, since the water was icy, and they were both reptiles and therefor cold-blooded, they couldn't survive in such presumably cold temperatures.
The snow-covered trees in Ellie's flashback scene would probably not have survived to the point at which they were seen in the grove in which the flashback occurred.
Ice melts from the outside, not from the inside, but if the ice melted from the outside the animals might have had more time to escape.
Ironically, Manny's species is actually said to be the last of the valley's prehistoric species to become extinct, the rest (especially Sid's and Diego's species) are supposed to be extinct first.
Dung beetles do not have horns on their "faces".
Glyptodonts and armadillos don't have a shell on their stomachs.
No tree species can grow big enough to accommodate thousands of animals.