Last month, IGN and several other outlets were invited to the editing bay of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues to screen two extended scenes from the film along with director Adam McKay. [Warning: Some minorto follow, but nothing that hasn't been seen in the latest trailer below.]

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The first scene we screened was of Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell), Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) and Champ Kind (David Koechner) reunited and en route to New York City, where they've been recruited to join the Global News Network. Traveling in an old Winnebago, the guys reminisce over old times -- a concept which Brick fails to grasp. As seen in the trailer, the guys eventually realize that no one is at the wheel, and the Winnie spirals out of control... in super slow motion.

Ron Burgundy Makes an Anti-Piracy Announcement

For McKay, this was one of the most challenging and VFX-heavy sequences to film and involved a huge gimbal on set and a ton of extra work in post -- an impressive feat for a comedy. "It turned out to be a giant pain in the ass," McKay said with a chuckle. "We wrote it just at two in the morning, laughing like idiots. Suddenly, the reality of it was like, 'Oh God, we've gotta do all this.' So it was a huge gimbal with the Winnebago, it was them hanging in front of green screen, it was stunt doubles inside the Winnebago, it was then the plates we had to get from the inside, then it was all the objects we had to get, then we had to have fake bowling balls and real bowling balls... I mean, it was probably a total of three days of shooting to get that silly little sequence."

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Meagan Good as Linda Jackson

From there, McKay showed us the guys' first meeting with the manager of GNN, Linda Jackson (played by Meagan Good). "She's an ass-kicker, she's brilliant, she went to Columbia School of Journalism -- typical kind of thing in the sense that she's overqualified for the job," McKay said of Good's character. "But of course because she's a woman, because she's a minority, these idiots can't get around that at first... Seeing Burgundy struggle with the issue of race was just really fun."When asked how much the film dives into the race issue, McKay added, "We were aware there was a fine line. I mean, these guys are so dopey that the subject of race isn't like we experience it in the news now. They're so innocent and stupid about it that it's never really mean or pointed. You'll see in the whole movie that they really just don't get it. They never fully get anything, but they a-little-bit get it by the end of the movie."For the Linda Jackson meeting scene, we actually got to watch a couple different versions with the guys improvising lines and trying out bits. As McKay explained, each take had numerous variations that were cataloged in a custom-made digital filing system developed by him and editor Brent White. Some scenes, McKay noted, had up to five different cuts, each one with totally different jokes.

New Character Posters for Anchorman 2

The boys are back.

"There was one scene where Will gets punched, and we did five different versions of him reacting poorly to a punch," he said. "One version was, his whole sense of orientation was off, and he couldn't speak or even stand up -- so that was a whole version. The other version was, he tried to act tough about the punch and tells the guy who hit him like, 'That didn't bug me!' But while he's doing it, he's fighting back tears and his voice is cracking. Then there was another version where he goes at great length about all the other people that have hit him harder than that, and it's women and children... [Laughs] And I'm forgetting, like, two more [versions]. So that was a thing that in the script I think was literally one line of dialogue, and we ended up improvising on it for, like, an hour and were laughing so hard we had tears in our eyes -- and then it's not in the movie!"According to McKay, the cast and crew shot over a million feet of film during production, with the original rough cut clocking in at nearly four hours long. Since then, the movie's been trimmed down significantly, but only after frequent test screenings. Said McKay, "On this movie, which we've never done before, we did A and B screenings. So we were doing two screenings every night. So you had one whole rack of jokes in the A screening, and then you had a different rack of jokes in the B screening. The B screening was like the minor leagues. So if a joke got a big laugh in the B screening, we would then bring it up... we would move it into the A column."

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The crew has so much footage in fact that they've actually talked about putting together two entirely separate movies: same plot, but with different jokes. "Brent was on the first Anchorman with me, we did that together," he said. "We came into the editing room, and he told me, 'I think you have a whole second movie here.' So Brent actually cut the Wake Up, Ron Burgundy version ... So this time, I came to the editing room, and I go, 'Well, Brent, do we have a second movie?' Brent goes, 'You don't have a second movie, but you have a whole other movie with all new jokes.' I go, 'What do you mean?' He goes, 'You can replace every single joke with their quality alts.' So that was crazy, and sure enough, we're doing it right now. I think we're at 250 alt jokes."McKay continued, "The question is, does Paramount release it in the theaters? Do they do midnight screenings? Or is it just VOD and DVD? ...I hope they do it. It'd be really fun, even if they just did it on, like, 200 screens or something, just to see it play. We're actually going to test it. We're talking about putting it in front of a crowd."

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Before we left, McKay recalled one particular test screening, the friends-and-family screening, during which they recorded the laugh track audio for reference. The only problem? They invited Seth Rogen, who sat front and center."We had a hundred people there, and it was the two-and-a-half-hour cut," McKay told us. "The entire laugh track that we recorded was completely wrecked because Seth Rogen was there. [Imitating Seth Rogen's laugh] One of the great laughs of all time... I wish [Anchorman 2] would just play for 300 million Seth Rogens... He just laughs at everything we laugh at, that's basically it -- and with the loudest laugh you've ever heard. No better audience member than Seth Rogen... It should be a law for one whole year that all laugh tracks are Seth Rogen. The world would get ever so slightly better."

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues hits theaters stateside on December 20.Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_Nicholson on Twitter, or MaxNicholson on IGN.