Azrael the cat
Arcane
Did'ja know in the original ending the last guy just lets the zombies take him and the woman decapitates herself with the helicopter blades? Then the credits roll and the 'copter sputters out just as they finish (assuring that they would have had no hope regardless). Bleak, bleak, bleak yet still so funny.(arguably you could take the last scene, where the 2 characters who have resisted both external threats ad moral corruption/greed, escape to the chopter, as symbolic that the best of humanity can still rise and create a better world, while the corrupt euther kill each other or get devoured).
Yeah I know. I also kind of wish that right after realising 'yeah, that ending would be shit', Romero also realised 'you know, I really don't need to have a voice-over for the character's thoughts as he fires the shot that starts the 'war' with the bikers, just so that the 3 cretins in the audience who still didn't get the theme of the film after 120 minutes of 'CONSUMERISM CONSUMERISM ZOMBIES PUSHING SHOPPING TROLLEYS AROUND SUPERMARKETS CONSUMERISM' could have it spelt out to them'
I forgive the voice-over simply because it was a much newer theme at the time, and was presented in moral rather than political terms. But yeah, the original ending would have been both shit and hilarious at the same time - I really really wish they had filmed it and kept it on a special edition somewhere. Thing is, even reading about their reasoning for changing the ending, it wasn't just to please the audience - they realised that the original ending signified the idea that humanity as a whole was fucked, and they needed to decide whether they wanted that to be the ending theme (in which case, keep the original ending except try to come up with something less...humorous....than the woman getting her head cut off by the chopper) or whether they wanted to end it with the idea that humanity could outlive this, but in a radically changed form - which I think the eventual ending carried pretty well.
The original idea was also probably a little too similar to NotD as well - the 'black hero main character survives til dawn, rescue squad arrives and sees a black guy with a gun surrounded by a bunch of dead bodies and shoot him' had a dark humour that worked in the original - but again, with the rescue squads arriving etc it wasn't really presented as an apocalypse.