The INSIDER Summary:
• In "Finding Dory," a group of fish called the Tank Gang show up in a post-credits scene.
• An earlier vision for the movie had them helping Marlin and Nemo to find Dory.
• A deleted scene on the film's Blu-Ray shows what might have been.
2003's "Finding Nemo" ends with Marlin and his son Nemo reunited. But it also ends with a mini cliffhanger: the Tank Gang, a posse of fish stuck with Nemo in a dentist's office, makes it to the ocean stuck in plastic bags.
What happened to them? Did they ever get out of the bags?
In "Finding Dory," this year's sequel to "Nemo," the gang shows up in a short post-credits scene. They're still in their plastic bags, now encrusted with algae, and end up at the Marine Life Institute in California, where Dory, Nemo, and the rest of the crew just left.
So how did they get there?
In the early stages of "Finding Dory," the Tang Gang were going to have their own subplot, co-director Angus MacLane told INSIDER. Ultimately, it was decided they distracted too much from Dory's story.
"We ended up having to cut it out because it was serving a B-storyline about Marlin and Nemo’s changing relationship," said MacLane. "That was something that was tremendously entertaining but we had to cut it from the movie because it was disrupting the audience’s understanding of what was important in the movie."
An extensive 15-minute series of deleted scenes, which can be found on the movie's Blu-Ray and DVD extras, shows what might have been. In this vision of the movie, the Tank Gang joins up with Marlin and Nemo to track down Dory.
In a short snippet released online, the gang are free of their individual plastic bags — they're now trapped in a water jug — and work as a team to pull off a heist and take over a ship so that they could reach the Marine Life Institute, where they would eventually find Dory.
It doesn't go too well. But it demonstrates a totally different approach to the movie, where more of the emphasis was on Marlin and Nemo finding Dory, and less on Dory having her own journey of self-discovery.
Check out a clip from the Blu-Ray feature below: