The Fly

Trivia: The film's director, David Cronenberg, has a cameo in this film as the doctor who helps Ronnie deliver her maggot baby.

Trivia: Tim Burton was offered the chance to direct.

Trivia: At least 20 different versions of the 'space bug' (Brundle's final mutated form) were produced, many of them bearing a mostly symmetrical design so as to facilitate the building and operating of animatronics and puppets. One by one they were duly turned down until the special effects department finally in frustration came up with a totally unfeasible asymmetrical look that would take months to construct and be an absolute nightmare to work on set. The producers loved it from the first sight and that's what appears in the final film.

Trivia: An extended ending showed Geena Davis dream about giving birth to a baby with butterfly wings. This was cut from the film to emphasize the drama of Seth's death.

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Suggested correction: Actually, the 'butterfly baby' endings were cut for two primary reasons: the stop-motion animation of said baby was a rushed job that didn't look particularly great, and both test audiences and the crew alike voted against the two endings where Veronica ended up with Stathis (even Stathis' actor stated, 'there's no way she'd get back together with him after that'), while the two where she ends up alone but happy felt at odds with the rest of the movie's tone.

Trivia: Two additional deaths for Brundle were proposed in addition to the filmed version where Veronica shoots him with the shotgun. One involved him trying to attack her one last time, only for Stathis to grab the power cable seen trailing from Brundle's telepod-fused body and shove it into a nearby outlet, thereby electrocuting the creature. The other involved Brundle crawling towards Veronica and then expiring from his injuries, sparing her from having to kill him.

Trivia: Originally the steak experiment scene had one additional line of dialogue from Ronnie in which she replied to Seth's declaration of teaching his computer about flesh by quipping "What are you going to do? Read it 'Naked Lunch'?" Cronenberg intended for this to be a little nod to the fact that he was planning to do a film adaptation of 'Naked Lunch' but eventually decided it was too allusive.

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Mistakes

Plot hole: The whole problem with the teleporter occurs when fly DNA is mixed in with Seth Brundle's DNA, starting his transformation into the Brundlefly. Brundle is on a hiding to nothing from the word go, and the fly is irrelevant. Humans are a walking talking mass of foreign DNA - we are host to one trillion bacteria all of which has a complete complement of DNA, as do various tiny mites that live in our hair follicles and all sorts of single cell organisms in our gut. If the transporter serves to mix the DNA of all living creatures which are in the transporter pod at the time Brundle would turn into a half-man, half-bacteria. Incidentally, DNA from a bacteria, an amoeba or a hair follicle mite would be just as 'compatible' with human DNA as that from an insect. It's quite a simple chemical, really.

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Suggested correction: Being as how the bacteria and mites and such were IN or ON Seth, the machine was able to organize those symbiotic relationships accordingly as teleporting one would teleport all. The fly was separate, not touching. The machine was not programmed to anticipate two separated entities and so combined them into one on the other side.

Phixius ★

We leave behind a vapour trail of bacteria and viruses (among other things) as we walk, in our breath and emanations from pores in our skin, and Brundle isn't trapping any in his clothes as he isn't wearing any. Brundle has an invisible cloud of DNA floating around him in that teleportation chamber and as far as the machine is concerned their DNA has exactly the same status as that of the fly.

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Quotes

Seth Brundle: I was not pure. The teleporter insists on inner pure. I was not pure.
Ronnie: I don't know what you mean.
Seth Brundle: A fly... got into the... transmitter pod with me that first time, when I was alone. The computer... got confused - there weren't supposed to be two separate genetic patterns - and it decided to... uhh... splice us together. It mated us, me and the fly. We hadn't even been properly introduced.

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Questions

Question: Well into the movie, Seth's computer, which uses voice recognition, can no longer recognize his voice due to his transformation. How then, did he hook up the three telepods and execute the final sequence if he couldn't get into his computer?

William Bergquist

Chosen answer: He just used the keyboard. We see him typing on it several times before this scene, so the computer is not voice command only.

Grumpy Scot

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