Giorgio

You'right! Maybe she bought it back for half of half of half the price she sold it for. In the cauldron there's also the hammer that Guybrush used to try to open the chest.

If I'm not wrong, you see Elaine and Guybrush together if you DON'T even pick up the key to the Secret and get back under the Monkey Head. If you pick up the key but don't open the chest and then get back under the Monkey Head, you see see LeChuck and Lila fighting. As a third option, if you pick up the key, open the chest and then get back under the Monkey Head, you see the Vodoo Lady returning to her store in a mess and saying that she won't take a long lunch break anynmore.

Four details I really appreciated:

Two things that caught my interest: 1) the possibility of controlling Elaine as a playable character for a game section was considered; 2) the sections of ReMI seem to be called acts (as in EMI) rather than parts (as in the first three games).

New post by Ron Gilbert about ReMI: https://grumpygamer.com/dev_diary

It impressed me somewhat, because in the past Ron Gilbert said that the ending of MI2 wasn’t meant to be a cliffhanger. He wrote it in the live chat of a MI2 SE stream, on May 4th, 2013: (Source: https://pastebin.com/XrL69Psy).

I can’t agree more! @Marius, thank you very much for sharing this detail with us! I didn’t know you worked on that VGHF event. Wow, well done! I think that is the best thing happened to Monkey Island fans since July 2010 until March 31st, 2022!

Thank you very much, @Marius Your profile pic is very nice too! I also like the idea of Big Whoop as something independent, that goes beyond the relationship between LeChuck and Guybrush. About the relevance of the anachronisms in the first two games – another “secret”! –, I think that what Ron says in an interview published in «The Adventurer» first issue (fall 1990) is very eloquent: Bearing this in mind, the fact that in MI2 the broken grog machine from MI1 is in the Disneyland-like tunnels, where LeChuck seems to wear a theme-park-character costume, is another point in favor of the Monkey Island world interpreted as an amusement park, together with the many other elements that bring to this interpretation (the elevator that leads Guybrush from the tunnels under Dinky Island to the alley of Mêlée Island, the “Employees only” door, the “under construction” section of Mêlée Island, etc.).

Yes, it seems that way to me. I also agree with what Vainamoinen smartly wrote about the secret and the meaning. It is a very good question, since we can speculate, make assumptions and still not have the answer. This is one of the nicest things in MI2: it creates a world that can be interpreted by the player in a number of ways and on a variety of levels, without one way or level contradicting necessarily the others. So, if it is all a fantasy, we could also think this: Guybrush imagines that LeChuck doesn’t want him to find Big Whoop, so that the game doesn’t end, while Chuckie on the contrary has to find Guybrush, put an end to the game and take his brother back to their parents. But this is just one of a thousand hypothesis. We could also assume that nothing that happens after the rope breaks and Guybrush falls down into the dark is strictly real (maybe Guybrush dies after his fall and that’s why the original idea for MI3 was ‘Guybrush chases the demon pirate LeChuck to hell and Stan is there’? Who knows). I’d like to point out that if we take the Star-Wars-parodying ending for real, then we must suppose not only that Guybrush and LeChuck/Chuckie are brothers, but also that the entire world of Monkey Island is a masquerade, a play in which the actor who was given the role of LeChuck wears a costume not very different from the Mardi Gras costume worn by the woman that guards Elaine’s mansion on Booty Island.

I agree. Those Voodoo Lady’s sentences are all quite specific: for example, “You will learn things better left unlearned” refers to Guybrush discovering the catacombs under Monkey Island, that might be the very secret of Monkey Island. Almost the same phrase pronounced by Voodoo Lady can be read in the Mutiny on Monkey Island document written by Ron Gilbert: I believe that both the secret of Monkey Island and Big Whoop could revolve around these two Ron Gilbert’s ideas: 1) Monkey Island is the place where the enter of Hell is hidden; 2) all the world in which Monkey Island is set could be a child’s fantasy. In CMI Ackley and Ahern tried to link heavily Big Whoop to the first point, because in MI2 there are clues which let you think that Big Whoop “is not a thing. It is a place”. Do you remember what LeChuck tells to Largo in the cutscene that was cut from the final game but stil exists in the source code? Talking about Guybrush’s quest for Big Whoop, Largo says: “What good can a chest full of money do him?” and LeChuck’s answer is: “It is not the treasure that is important. It is what is buried beneath the treasure that concerns me. He must not find the treasure of Big Whoop”. However, in MI2 there are of course other clues that bring you straight to the second point. All this is to say that, even without precise planning, the seeds of MI1 growing into MI2 and the strong connections between the first two games can be due mostly to the persistence of those two ideas (and others like those) in Ron Gilbert’s head.