Continuity mistake: Chocolate Mousse and Deja Vu are playing darts on the plane at the end of the movie. In the next shot where Hillary is hugging her father, the darts change positions. (01:23:35)
Top Secret! (1984)
Directed by: David Zucker, Jim Abrahams
Starring: Val Kilmer, Peter Cushing, Jeremy Kemp, Lucy Gutteridge
Continuity mistake: When Nick is singing "Spend This Night with Me", he brings up a girl from the audience. Watch the background. When it shows another girl from the audience, in the next shot, you can see a speaker that wasn't there before. Moreover, when he picks the girl, we can see that there isn't anyone at her left side. But a few seconds earlier she was sitting between two girls (the one at her left was wearing a white shirt). (00:42:05)
Revealing mistake: When Chocolate Mousse throws the anchor with the rope attached into the air, if you watch the ground when they run away, you can see that there's suddenly a lot more rope there, revealing that it was filmed in two takes and the anchor wasn't really thrown directly above their heads. (01:11:20)
Trivia: Just in case some people don't know, most of the "German" in this movie is total gibberish. Some sentences are perfectly correct and properly spoken, as with the welcoming speech, the German soldiers and platform announces at the station, the "Ich liebe dich, mein Schatz", etc. But the learning tape, the conversations at the Culture Hall during dinner and the East Germany Anthem are just a bunch of "German-dutch sounding noises." Of course, it's even funnier to know that there are subtitles for all these with content that has nothing to do with it.
Trivia: Val Kilmer sang all of his own parts in this film. That fact was a contributing factor to his being offered the role of Jim Morrison in "The Doors."
Trivia: The soldiers bursting into the theater Prop Room are none other than the Zucker Bros. and Abrahams themselves.
Doctor Flamond: You see, a year ago, I was close to perfecting the first magnetic desalinization process so revolutionary, it was capable of removing the salt from over 500 million gallons of seawater a day. Do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the earth?
Nick Rivers: Wow. They'd have enough salt to last forever.
Nick Rivers: Hillary. That's an unusual name.
Hillary Flammond: It's a German name. It means 'she whose bosoms defy gravity'.
Nick Rivers: I'm pleased to meet you. My name's Nick.
Hillary Flammond: Nick? What does that mean?
Nick Rivers: Oh, nothing. My dad thought of it while he was shaving.
Hillary Flammond: I know a little German. He's sitting over there.
Question: How exactly did they make the whole underwater fight scene work?
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Chosen answer: The actors were weighted down with lead plates. Oxygen tanks were kept just out of picture, and the actors used them to breathe between takes. The takes were short enough to allow the actors to hold their breath through them. The short takes were then cut together to appear as one long fight. Sound effects were added post-production.