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.

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.

Factual error: There is no possible method of "fusing" the genetic material of a common housefly (Musca domestica) and a human. The housefly has twelve chromosomes, humans forty six. There is no way to combine the two in order to produce a viable organism. Thirty four of the human chromosomes would have no matching chromosome to "fuse" with, meaning the physical characteristics coded by those genes would not form. The Brundlefly would be missing three quarters of his human body.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: There's no possible way of teleporting physical objects either, but it happens in this movie. This is science fiction. These kinds of "factual errors" are not valid.

Phaneron

The film presents no scientific explanation for "teleportation" but does for "genetic merging." Teleportation is possible in this film's universe, but "genetic merging" is impossible in any universe.

Genetic merging is possible in this film's universe; that's the whole point. It doesn't matter if the explanation doesn't stack up, it still works.

More mistakes in The Fly

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.

More quotes from The Fly

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

More questions & answers from The Fly

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