Movies/Tv - Facts and Trivia

The Enterprise D which got destroyed in Star Trek Generations was originally supposed to be destroyed in the season 6 finale.

Special effects supremo Derek Meddings who had worked on Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and other Gerry Anderson productions created the Fortress of Solitude for the first SUPERMAN film at Pinewood Studios on the same sound stage which would later be renamed and used for the James Bond films(Albert R Broccoli(Cubby) 007 Sound studio)

Meddings also created the model helicopter sequence in For Your Eyes Only(with Roger Moore) using a real helicopter and a larger-scale model for the scene where it flies into a warehouse.

Season 7 of Star Trek The Next Generation and Star Trek Generations were filmed at the same time. The director of Star Trek Generations David Carson directed the next Ep titled “Yesterday’s Enterprise”.

The code in The Matrix comes from sushi recipes. Those green symbols trailing down in The Matrix aren’t complicated algorithms. A production designer scanned symbols from his wife’s sushi cookbooks, then manipulated them to create the iconic “code.”

One famous Pulp Fiction scene was filmed backward. When Uma Thurman’s character is having an overdose, it looks like John Travolta sticks a needle in her to revive her. Actually, Travolta pulled the needle out, and the film was run backward to reverse the action.

Some of the velociraptor noises in Jurassic Park are actually tortoises mating. At least that’s what the sound designer used when the raptors were communicating. Other scenes of the species used horse breathing and goose hisses

The troll that appears in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets also appears in the first Lord of the Rings trilogy of films.

E.T. and Poltergeist started from the same script. Steven Spielberg was going to produce filmmaker’s John Sayles’ Night Skies script about a rural family invaded by aliens that could kill with a touch of the finger but decided to go a more family-friendly route with the story by creating E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. Sayles wouldn’t rewrite the script, but Spielberg kept the idea for Poltergeist.

Michael Myers’ mask in Halloween is William Shatner’s face. or specifically, his Star Trek character, Captain Kirk. There wasn’t money in the 1978 horror film’s budget to create a custom mask, so the art director bought a clown and a Captain Kirk mask. The crew spray-painted it white and adjusted the eyes and hair to create the terrifying mask.

Toy Story’s Woody was originally a ventriloquist dummy. Even in later versions, he was written as a “sarcastic bully” trying to rally the other toys against Buzz. Luckily, the studio decided to transform him into a more lovable character.

O.J. Simpson was considered for the lead in The Terminator. Director James Cameron rejected the choice because he didn’t think the “this likable, goofy, kind of innocent guy” could pull off a cyborg assassin.

R2-D2 and C-3PO appear in Indiana Jones. Look closely at the scenery in Raiders of the Lost Ark and you’ll notice hieroglyphics with the robots’ likeness in two scenes.

Gone With the Wind’s fire scene is old sets being burned. The filmmakers had to get rid of the old sets to make room for the new movie’s scenery anyway, so burning them and filming it as “Atlanta” going down in flames accomplished both. The filmmakers are lucky it worked—they shot the blaze even before the movie’s cast was confirmed.

Actor Rufus Sewell's father was an animator and worked on the sequence for Lucy In the Sky(with Diamonds) in the Beatles film, 'Yellow Submarine.'

A Harry Potter stunt double was paralyzed on the job. David Holmes did the stunt doubles for Daniel Radcliffe in every Harry Potter movie, but an accident during a flying broomstick scene in the last movie left him paralyzed from the neck down. Radcliffe organized a celebrity charity auction to pay for his medical bills, and Holmes now runs a production company with two other quadriplegic friends.

Toto was paid more than the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. The Munchkin actors received $50 a week—which was a good wage at the time—while the dog earned $125 a week.

The set for The Ten Commandments was buried underground for decades. Cecil B. DeMille, director of the 1923 silent film The Ten Commandments, thought the movie set—including 21 Sphinx replicas—was too valuable to let other filmmakers get their hands on it. He figured it was cheaper to bury the set than to move it, and the artifacts remained underground near the California coast for 94 years before archaeologists found the 300-pound head in 2017.

Psycho was the first movie to show a toilet flushing. At the time, the Motion Picture Production Code banned flushing toilets because it was considered filthy. Psycho was a key to putting the censoring code to an end.

Leonardo DiCaprio really did cut his hand in Django Unchained. During one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s big scenes in Django Unchained, his racist rant is heightened when he slams down on a table and cuts his hand on a glass. It might look like special effects, but it wasn’t in the script. The actor really did hurt his hand without stopping the scene, and the blood you see is real.