Late night talk show host Craig Ferguson apparently did a bit of ad-libbing while voicing Gobber in the highly anticipated summer sequel How to Train Your Dragon 2. Writer/Director Dean DeBlois told FOX411 that Ferguson made the one-handed Gobber the Belch gay.
“It wasn’t that deliberate. It was an ad-lib that Craig Ferguson added,” DeBlois told FOX411. “I’d written the line ‘This is why I never married.’ And then he had tagged that on to it.”
The line could be a throw-away gag, but DeBlois says he might expand on it in further sequels.
“It does make for an interesting revelation because now, what does that mean, do we shed a little more light on Gobber’s love life?” DeBlois told Fox.
This begs the question what impact Gobber’s coming out will have on the box office of How to Train Your Dragon 2 and future movies among the more conservative families. The answer: Probably not at all. This summer has been a dead zone for quality family entertainment. Maleficent might be too scary for youngsters and Legends of Oz has underwhelmed and looks to be headed out of theaters in short order. So any controversy this revelation would cause is likely to have no effect on family’s rushing their kids to the theaters and what many project will be the biggest movie of the summer. And if Ferguson’s ad-libbing is as innocuous as he makes it sounds, there’s a high chance it will just fly over youngsters’ heads. A similar joke came in the 2012 movie “ParaNorman,” which broke ground as the first mainstream animated film to mention homosexuality, also as a throwaway line.
How to Train Your Dragon 2 opens June 13, but has already screened at Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim as strong as the beloved first film from 2010.
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