So, I’m gonna take a few minutes to organize my thoughts about all the crossover and confusion between Candlehead and Minty Zaki that I’ve got in my head.

First and foremost, lets take a look at Candlehead as she appears in the movie and some concept art for her design. You’ll notice the main differences are that her concept included chocolate chips sprinkled in her mint colored hair symbolizing Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream(like the wheels on her cart) and that her track jacket was originally mint colored as well. GOSH. That SURE IS a LOT of MINTYNESS isn’t it?!

Let’s move on.

Now let’s take a look at Minty Zaki. As you can see, Minty looks pretty much exactly the same as in her concept. but something I’ve noticed is that there really isn’t anything minty at all about Minty’s design. When I first saw her I thought of maybe lemon lime…. or sour apple.

OH WAIT.

Now, the Disney Store has these adorable scented plushies of all the Sugar Rush racers. The key word here, for our purposes, is scented. Take the Minty plush for example. I personally expected her to smell, well, minty. She does not. This dear, adorable darling is in fact Green Apple scented. Odd, wouldn’t you say? I would.

Then lets take a look at the scented Candlehead plushie, shall we? Now, one might assume with her and her cart’s obvious birthday cake theme she might be cake scented. no? Hmmmm… Well she couldn’t possibly be MINT scented… Could she?

Apparently. This precious baby is deliciously Mint Chocolate Chip scented.

You know, Candlehead is a silly sounding name too. It really isn’t much of a name at all actually. It almost feels like Minty would have been a better name for her. Too bad the crew over at Disney didn’t think of that.

……………………………………oh. wait.

Hey wait *squints* whats that?

Well would you look at that? The stands that Candlehead’s fans cheer her on from inexplicably says “MINTY” at the top.

These are OBVIOUSLY Candlehead’s grandstands, you can tell from the color scheme, theme, and the #7 on the front matches her car number.

If all of this isn’t proof enough that Candlehead’s name was originally Minty here’s some extra evidence:

These are both scans from the One Sweet Race storybook that was released before Wreck It Ralph came out and it was written and illustrated by members of the creative team that worked on the film. Originally I figured this was a mistake, but looking again I noticed that Minty Zaki is nowhere to be found in the book and I doubt that members of the team that has been devoted to the film for so long would make such a clumsy mistake.

Now back to Minty Zaki(if that IS her real name)

I’m not trying to say that MZ wasn’t a character that they were working on, especially since this is almost definitely meant to be her grandstands

The thing that becomes really obvious about MZ after looking at all of this is that her name was definitely not Minty Zaki and that she was definitely meant to be a sour apple themed racer but that the streams got crossed somewhere along the line. I kind of feel like they had a hard time making up their minds about some things. I mean, notice how there’s a really obvious peppermint/spearmint looking candy on the front of the grandstand? That kind of candy could easily be apple flavored rather than mint but its confusing to the eye. Even MZ’s cart(not pictured cause I’m lazy) looks like a giant green apple jolly rancher.

I get that things change during the production of a movie, but I can’t help wondering why the awkward name swap. It probably only bothers me so much because Candlehead is pretty much my favorite racer other than Vanellope, but I’ve just got to know the reasoning behind it all. I was rather hoping for the art book to make mention of it, but it didn’t :C

I was also gonna talk about Minty’s replacement/Candlehead doppelganger from the Japanese Version of WIR(Sugar Rush) but I’m getting tired and losing steam. Perhaps I’ll talk about that a bit tomorrow.