Yeah, I'm not surprised to learn it got screwed with. Joe Dante is a pretty cool guy and I know a lot of his ideas got shot down. He wanted to do the Roger Rabbit thing and include a few non-WB characters, but the studio wouldn't let him. The only ones he was allowed to use were Scooby and Shaggy, and only because WB was producing Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed at the time.
The movie doesn't end in Area 51, although they do end up there at one point. The movie ends with a showdown in space between Marvin the Martian and Daffy Duck (as Duck Dodgers). Bugs is incapacitated somehow, so Daffy finally gets to be the hero. He destroys whatever evil machine Steve Martin had built, the day is saved, etc, etc. And then it turns out they were just shooting a movie the whole time and Daffy didn't really the save day.
In a way, I guess it was kind of a clever ending. They hit so many cartoon and movie cliches (deliberately, of course) and then they avoided the biggest movie cliche of all by not giving us the happy ending where Daffy concedes that he needs Bugs Bunny and then Jenna Elfman and Brendan Fraser fall in love. On the other hand, it's a rather nasty swindle, because that's the way I wanted it to end.
The movie did have one of the best product placement jokes ever, surpassed only by Wayne's World and Talladega Nights.
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