11 Fun Facts About BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA
Earlier this week, Funko announced the Big Trouble in Little China line of Pop! toys, and that inspired my next Fun Facts list. I watched this movie all of the time when I was a kid. I swear it was on a constant loop in my house for a little while there. The John Carpenter-directed movie stars Kurt Russell, and it was just such an incredibly fun movie, with great characters. I think it's about that time to show it to my own kids. Here are 11 Fun Facts about the movie that you may or may not know. It was hard to find decent clips from this film on YouTube to show you certain things, but I posted the original trailer, a supercut of Russell's best lines in the movie, and the most ridiculous death scene ever.
- The story was originally written as a western but Carpenter thought it would be better to set it during modern times. The script even included a scene where Jack Burton's horse was stolen instead of his truck. As a fan of westerns, it would have been great to see this story told in the old west!
- The Chinese writing that we see in the main title translates to "Evil Spirits Make a Big Scene in Little Spiritual State".
- This was the last studio film Carpenter directed at the end of the 1980s because of the bad experience he had with studio head Lawrence Gordon. Apparently Gordon interfered with everything about the film up until its release date. Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987) and They Live (1988) were made independently through Alive Films without any studio interference and distributed by Universal Pictures.
- There's a scene in which Russell is attempting to infiltrate a brothel. In it he is wearing the same outfit that he wore in the 1980 film Used Cars.
- The test screening for the movie was so overwhelmingly positive that Russell and Carpenter thought the movie was going to be a huge hit. Unfortunately 20th Century Fox hardly put any effort into marketing and promoting the movie, so it was a box office bomb. Apparently the studio didn't know how to market this kind of film.
- Russell suffered a bad case of the flu during shooting, so due to the fever a lot of the crazy sweat we saw on his body was real.
- Russell was Carpenter's only choice to play the lead, but the studio wanted Jack Nicholson or Clint Eastwood instead. Both actors were unavailable by the time shooting started so Carpenter got to keep Russell. Which is great, because Russell was awesome!
- Before the end credits roll, Russell's character is driving his truck and talking on the CB Radio, and he says, "You just listen to the old Pork-Chop Express here now and take his advice on a dark and stormy night when the lightning's crashing and the thunder's rollin' and the rain's coming down..." This statement pays tribute to the names of the 3 Storms, who were Lo Pan's bodyguards.
- During the wedding scene where the villain Lo Pan is sticking the Needle of Love in Miao Yin, actor James Hong actually jabbed Suzee Pai too hard. You can see her flinch from the pain.
- Carpenter wanted Jackie Chan in the role of Wang Chi, but he wasn't cast because his English wasn't good enough. Dennis Dun ended up in the role. Chan does make a cameo though, during the fight scene between the Chang Sings and Wing Kong Tong.
- As the villainous Lightning character is crushed to death, some of the lightning he emits forms a small Chinese symbol as it disappears. The symbol translates as "carpenter".
Info collected from Imdb.
