It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Corrected entry: A boy tells Meyer that he can drive his car across the lake as the water is very shallow. Whilst the boy is saying "Come on, it's easy", he is shown standing in a part of the river that is filled with rocks and proceeds to walk across to prove how shallow it is. Meyer then begins to drive into the river thinking the water is shallow, but the area of the river he drives into is not the same area the boy walked across. The area the boy walked across had rocks on both sides of him, but the area Meyer drives into is left of that area. (01:31:00)

Casual Person

Correction: That's not a mistake. That was the whole point of the scene. Meyer thought the whole river would be just as shallow and didn't drive over the part the boy told him to, and suffered the consequences.

Bishop73

Corrected entry: The money in the suitcase is neatly bundled when the Captain takes it. When the suitcase bursts open on the fire escape, individual bills float out over the crowd.

Correction: The money in the suitcase is neatly stacked but it's not bundled - I zoomed in close with my 50" HDTV and could see loose bills fluttering in the breeze.

Correction: The vehicle he is driving could be a 3-speed on the column, in which the most common gear while driving on the freeway or at cruising speed would be third. To reach 3rd gear, you would push the column mounted shift lever away from you and upwards, which is a similar orientation to Park in a vehicle with automatic transmission. So it may look as if he's driving an automatic with the lever in Park, but he might also be driving a non-automatic in third gear.

Corrected entry: During the scenes when the airplane is out of control, the needles never move on the altimeters or airspeed indicators yet would likely be moving widly with the situation at hand.

Correction: They took off without doing a preflight check. Most likely they left the covers on the pitot tubes - the sensors on the outside of the aircraft which link to their instruments. Dumb thing to do, but you can still fly the plane. You just won't know how fast you are going nor how high you are. (Incidentally, this kind of thing is quite common).

Continuity mistake: In the wide-angle shots of the blue Willys (Jeep) wagon, the windshield is a 2-piece version with a vertical divider in the middle. The close-up shots don't have the divider.

More mistakes in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

J. Algernon Hawthorne: Jolly nasty accident there. Jolly lucky nobody was hurt.
Mrs. Marcus: Where did you get that funny accent? Are you from Harvard or something?
J. Algernon Hawthorne: Harvard? Rather not. I'm English.
Mrs. Marcus: Sounds so foreign.
J. Algernon Hawthorne: Really?

More quotes from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Trivia: Phil Silvers almost drowned whilst filming the scene when he drives his car into the river because he couldn't swim.

More trivia for It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.