Production Flaws.

[BTM]

Here's one I noticed, and it's a really glaring one...

In Super Mario Bros, when they go up the evelator in the unforms that look like what they wear in the video games, they're both wearing Stompers (that is, the boots that you click your heels together and they allow you to jump really high) but then, a few scenes later, when they come across a large gap they need to get across, they're wearing regular shoes (which is convinent plotwise because the stompers would have came in handy at that point.)

Here's one I can't BELIEVE I never caught (a friend of mine pointed it out while we were watching the film together) in John Woo's The Killer, the hospital has a sign out front that says, "Scared Heart".  I believe that's SUPPOSED to be "Sacred Heart".  I dunno if that's a goof on the movie production team, or if that's a goof from the hospital itself, but still, it was kind of funny once I saw it.

[Jim H]

Yeah, the Scared Heart one is I noticed.  I'd guess it is a movie error, but signs like that in Asia are hardly rare even today, especially in more outlying areas.

Moviemistakes.com..  I see a lot of goofs reported on there that aren't really mistakes at all.  So, I don't go there too often.  They usually get taken care of eventually, but it's not as quick as the goof section on IMDB.  For example, there were several "mistakes" reported on Avatar that were clearly explained within the films logic, or just weren't mistakes at all.

It can be fascinating to look at all the misreported errors for films though, followed by explanations.

http://www.moviemistakes.com/film8157/corrections

In particular, it's a little baffling how many people don't understand what a pressurized cabin is.

[BTM]

It can be fascinating to look at all the misreported errors for films though, followed by explanations.

http://www.moviemistakes.com/film8157/corrections

Yeah, those can be interesting.  I remember one "mistake" (not sure if was reported on MM or not) from the film Independence Day where someone nitpicked the idea that Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum could be smoking cigars when they meet up with their respective family/loved ones at the end of the film, because they had lit the cigars earlier while in the alien ship.  Thing is though, cigars, unlike cigarettes, will go out if don't keep puffing on them.  So they could have just thrown the cigars onto the floor of the ship, where they went out, and then picked them up later and re-lit them.

Course, this leads me to another possible mistake from a different film.  In the movie Sahara, a guy uses a cigar as a fuse to blow up a gas tank on board a boat (never mind the debate on whether or not the gas tank would have enough oxygen in it to blow up).  The cigar should have went out since no one was using it.  BUT some people have told me since the character who owns the cigar usually just leaves cheaply made ones on the boat (cause he knows his crewmates like to steal them), then that cigar may not have been packed tightly enough to go out.

Now, I can't really say either way, I don't smoke, so I don't know a hell of a lot about cigars or cigarettes.

[Jim H]

That's an interesting point.  I do smoke cigars, so maybe I can offer a bit of insight. 

It might be worth noting that good quality cigars, you can smoke them for like two hours.  It's not like they were on the alien mothership for THAT long.  But yeah, they could also have relit them pretty easily.  Tastes a little gross for a while, but it's not bad eventually.

As far as the fuse thing..  I see them do that with both cigars and cigarettes.  And yes, a cheap crappy cigar will often stay lit - not just because it is loosely packed, either.  Cheapest cigars don't use whole tobacco leaf, they use chopped tobacco like cigarettes.  And sometimes, they have stuff added so they burn faster, in the hopes of getting people to smoke more.

But, still not so sure there's enough of a flame to ignite things the way they always do in movies.  Just movie magic I guess.

[BTM]

That's an interesting point.  I do smoke cigars, so maybe I can offer a bit of insight. 

Oh, cool, thanks for the info!

As for the gas tank explosion stuff, there's a neat page on that at Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics if you're interested. 

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/mpmain.html

[retrorussell]

Heh.. just noticed one from Hell Night.  A girl gets dragged into a cellar room or something of the sort while walking outside of a mansion.  Just before she's beheaded the killer swings the blade and you can see it hit her chin and the fake body falls.  Good attempt at an effect, as the actress has stuck her head through a hole while the killer grabs her hair, so she can facially react as the cleaver approaches.  Too bad the aim was off. :)

[Raffine]

As for the second goof, I think it was probably a badly cropped print that got sent to theatres by mistake, not a production goof.  Apparently this happens sometimes (it recently happened to the SEX & THE CITY movie, the bad prints got recalled).  Some idiot was supposed to frame the film in the proper aspect ratio after shooting was complete but screwed up.  More a quality control issue than anything else.  

If you watched non-letterboxed movies on broadcast tv or on vhs you could catch a lot of these misframed accidents. A glaring one I remember is in PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE. When Pee Wee is pulling the endless chain out of his bike bag in the full frame version you can see the chain feeding up through the bottom of the bag very clearly.

[Chainsawmidget]

In the Wizard of Oz, Dorthy's hair style and length change several times.

[Trekkie313]

I remember some 80's Italian horror film where a Volkswagen changes to a different model after being totaled. Was it Demons 2?

[BTM]

Check out any Uwe Boll film, there's usually several of these in each one.

Neat example: In Alone in the Dark, the "dead" trooper played by Françoise Yip raises her head as Steven Doriff's character steps over her.