– In the film Die Hard: With a Vengeance, a madman has placed a bomb at an elementary school and threatens to detonate it if Bruce Willis refuses to travel to Harlem and wear a sign he had hidden there. In the “theatrical version” of the film, the sign Bruce is forced to wear says “I hate niggers”; in the “broadcast version”, the sign says “I hate everybody”. Because that part of the film was shot on location in Harlem, the producers feared a riot would break out if Bruce wore the “theatrical version” of the sign… so he wore the “broadcast version”. So the TV version of the film has been left unedited, while the version shown in theatres was edited. As you know, it’s usually the other way around.
– Pride of the Yankees is a 1942 film starring Gary Cooper as New York Yankee legend Lou Gehrig. One problem with casting Cooper was immediately obvious: Cooper was right-handed, while Gehrig was left-handed. Since the film was released only a year after Gehrig’s death, the producers were certain that the moviegoing public would notice the inconsistency. To solve the problem, everything in the game scenes – all of the uniform numbers and logos, the billboards and scoreboard – were printed in reverse, and when Cooper hit the ball, he’d run to third base, not first. The producers then simply flipped the film over, and Cooper now appeared to be left-handed, and all of the text on the uniforms, billboards, etc. appeared to be correct.
I’m not one of those people that “instantly” likes new music. Sure, there’s the occasional song that I instantly fall in love with… but more often than not, I have to listen to a song or album a couple of times before I really start to like it. This was especially true in the case of Japan, a British New Wave band from the late 70s and early 80s.