'Redstone genius' Mumbo Jumbo was originally meant to make 'a bunch of crazy booby traps' for A Minecraft Movie, but they were all cut from the film
There are a few really neat references to Minecraft pop culture in A Minecraft Movie, including a tribute to Technoblade and a couple of DanTDM shoutouts. But there also seems to be quite a few cameos that were cut, including a scene featuring Valkyrae and several inventions from Mumbo Jumbo.
"Yeah, there were a ton of fun sequences we wanted to do," director Jared Hess says in an interview with TechRadar. "[Popular Minecraft YouTuber] Mumbo Jumbo, who's a redstone genius, was working on a great scene that we just couldn't do.
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"We had a sequence that involved a giant Piglin robot, which was a Trojan horse-type thing that worked via redstone. I storyboarded it, we had full animatics of it, and it was a really hilarious scene. But, we just weren't able to do it."
Mumbo Jumbo is a Minecraft YouTuber who specialises in creating redstone builds. Recently, he managed to make mechanical cogs and gears in vanilla Minecraft (no mods, just pure redstone) as well as a massive redstone fan.
These builds are all incredibly impressive. I love playing around with redstone, and have even gone to Mumbo Jumbo for inspiration for builds multiple times, but I could never come up with anything he makes on my own, my brain just isn't hardwired like that.
So it makes complete sense that when Hess wanted an expert to create some extraordinary redstone booby traps, he would turn to Mumbo Jumbo. "It would've been super fun to have that Mumbo Jumbo-designed sequence," Hess says. "But ultimately it didn't work out. He designed a bunch of crazy booby traps for us as well, but we couldn't make those work in the confines of our movie, too."
But even if Mumbo Jumbo's sequence didn't end up making it into the film, Hess and others working on A Minecraft Movie still tried to ensure that all the builds that were present worked just the way they should. "Everything we designed for the film, we wanted to make sure that you could actually go and make in the game," Hess continues. "So, even Steve's Lava Chicken Shack and all of those things, we'd be like 'Gosh, are we sure we can do this? Does it work? Okay, let's go to the game and build it right now. Right, it checks out. It's bulletproof."
So I guess that means my next job is to make a working Lava Chicken Shack in my Minecraft world. It's only small, so it shouldn't be too hard, plus it looks like it uses a pretty basic redstone pattern. And at the end of it all, I'll get some lava chicken, what's not to love?