The Parent Trap

Continuity mistake: In the cabin when they are coming up with the idea to swap places, Susan has on white sneakers in the beginning of the scene when she is on the bed, and Sharon has on the black Mary Janes. Later in the scene, with no time to change shoes, Susan is seen walking around the cabin wearing the black Mary Janes.

Continuity mistake: When the twins are in the cabin and Sharon offers Susan a Fig Newton, the cookies are is a jumble in the box. A moment later, the cookies are in a clean row.

Continuity mistake: In the camp cabin, the two girls are talking. It cuts away from one girl, and she has an ice cream cone in her hand, then cuts back and it's gone. This keeps happening.

Continuity mistake: When Mitch drives home from the airport, with 'Susan', the car's rear view mirror is gone in the close-ups, but reappears in wideshots of the car.

Super Grover

Continuity mistake: In Sharon and Susan's isolation cabin, the positions of Susan's celebrity photos on the wall change between shots, after being windblown.

Super Grover

Continuity mistake: When the girls in Sharon's cabin have been booby-trapped, they all wake up screaming to the sound of the bugle. There are shots of them in their beds and then one shot of a girl in the middle of the cabin getting a bucket of water dumped on her head. Considering that the cabin is covered in strings and stuff how could she have gotten there in just seconds?

Continuity mistake: When the girls are talking in the cabin after they find out they are sisters, Sharon is holding a cup of ice cream. When the shot alternates from rear to front views, the spoon is in her hand, then in the cup, then back in her hand again.

William Bergquist

Continuity mistake: Mitch drives "Susan" home from the airport. After he touches her face, he puts his hand down next to him, but when it cuts, his hand is on the steering wheel.

Continuity mistake: Watch the yellow float that falls into the lake with Mitch, when Mitch is straining to see Maggie. First you can barely see it floating towards the right of the lake. Next angle, and it's behind him to the left.

Continuity mistake: When Maggie and "Sharon" are having a picnic in the city park, they have a large wicker picnic basket. After they are done, and are walking home through the park, the picnic basket is no where to be seen. They have apparently just left it behind.

raywest

Continuity mistake: When driving home to Boston from camp, they would show her in the car and the street behind her was like a big city street, then when they show the car from the outside, the street is like a small neighborhood street with totally different buildings and totally different cars (even different colors) right behind her.

Continuity mistake: When Susan is playing guitar during the "Let's Get Together" song, three - and sometimes four - fingers of her left hand are over the neck of the guitar. In a close-up, only two fingers are shown, and they are barely touching the lower edge of the neck.

Steven Lee

Continuity mistake: At dinner, after the girls' performance, when explaining that the girls had tried to replicate their first date, Maggie mentions the "violin music" before it begins playing.

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Suggested correction: Hecky starts playing the violin (badly) before Sharon and Susan do their performance. That's the violin music that Maggie is referring to.

Continuity mistake: When the twins are in the cabin and Sharon offers Susan a Fig Newton, the cookies are is a jumble in the box. A moment later, the cookies are in a clean row.

More mistakes in The Parent Trap

Mitch Evers: Hey, Maggie, you look pretty good. What did you do to yourself?
Margaret 'Maggie' McKendrick: Do to myself?

More quotes from The Parent Trap

Trivia: For the scene when the camp girls are following the twins to the cabin Miss Inch was putting them in, the director wanted the girls to march like soldiers. The girls could not march very well, so he just decided to leave it as it was. The whistling the girls do is not the girls' whistling--its a recording of the march from Bridge on the River Kwai.

More trivia for The Parent Trap

Question: What kind of judge would agree to this kind of custody arrangement?

Answer: None. It's total fiction made up solely for the purpose of the movie. Even for a movie, it's far beyond the "suspension of disbelief" that siblings would ever be divided up between the two parents, and neither would have no contact with them, much less be prevented from knowing they had a brother or sister.

raywest

It was during the 1960s, the courts had no way of forcing parents to share children. They could have very easily just stayed away from each other out of the view of the judicial system.

This is what I always assumed as well. That this wasn't decided by court, the parents decided this on their own and did not bring it up to the court.

There has actually been a history of separating identical twins as babies, as there has been a fascination in studying what ways they'd be alike, and how they'd be different. During this time period, there were even agencies that would pay women who gave birth to identical twins to give them up for adoption, and have them be adopted in separate families. In today's world, this would not happen, but I wouldn't put it past a judge back in the 1960s.

More questions & answers from The Parent Trap

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