The Thing - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of The Thing or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to The Thing

[javier]

Clark is shown to care deeply for the sled dogs, as during the Kennel he interrupts the other members by grabbing their shotguns when they suggest killing the dogs and later goes back to the kennel and is seen staring at the dead bodies of the sled dogs that were unscathed by the Thing but were killed by Blair.

[leo]

Two characters in the movie are nicknamed "Mac" (MacReady's shorthand nickname) and "Windows" (a nickname inspired by the fact that the character always wears glasses). Since the film was made in 1982, this is purely coincidental and has nothing to do with Apple's and Microsoft's famous rival tech brands.

[bernice]

Blair's revolver is a, 3rd Generation Colt Detective Special from his desk drawer.

[carl]

John Carpenter's film is a much more faithful adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s original novella "Who Goes There?" than The Thing from Another World (1951). For example, the 1951 version introduced female characters including a "love interest" for the hero. This film, like the original story, has no roles for women. Also, the use of a hot needle, to check the blood of the characters to see if they were still human or not, was taken directly from the original novella, and was not used in the 1951 movie.

[kenneth]

Many have theorized about the film's ambiguous ending, with people debating over whether Childs is a thing or not. The most popular piece of "evidence" is the bottle of scotch MacReady hands Childs at the end. MacReady had been throwing Molatav Cocktails throughout the camp earlier, and it's said that this bottle is filled with gasoline as well, not scotch. The Thing, not knowing what alcohol tastes like or knowing the difference between it and gasoline, drinks it while Childs would have spit it out. Going further, the music swells as Childs drinks, the music having been an indicator of the Thing's presence throughout the rest of the film. Exhausted and having already accepted his fate, MacReady watches the camp burn, unable to fight. Detractors of this theory point out the 2011 prequel, which says that the Thing cannot recreate inorganic materials, and Childs still has his earring in at the end of the movie. John Carpenter has acknowledged this theory, with most saying that he does not believe either of them are a Thing at the end of the film, though some have said he's reported otherwise. Whichever side you choose to believe, the ending is pretty bleak either way.

[jessica]

(at around 1h 17 mins) David Clennon's line, "You've got to be fucking kidding." is Kurt Russell's favorite and never fails to make him crack up.

[kim]

(at around 26 mins) The quiz show featured on the TV in Palmer's room is Let's Make a Deal (1963) hosted by Monty Hall.

[lena]

For the final revelation of the Blair-Thing, several shots were animated using stop-motion techniques. However, John Carpenter considered them not convincing enough, so these ended up being deleted. They can still be seen on the bonus material of the Blu-ray edition, though.

[marc]

Carbopole is a powdery substance used in hair gels and when mixed with water was used as the Thing slime.

[kristen]

The helicopter featured in the opening scene is a Bell 206.

[maureen]

Executives believed refrigerating their own sound stages would be far too expensive and so offered to fund shooting the sets inside massive cold storage lockers, but after the producers saw the cramped conditions and low ceilings they abandoned the idea.

[wallace]

In 1982 before its release, Fangoria magazine had a contest: people were asked to 'draw the Thing' to see if anyone could guess what it was going to look like. The winner won a trip to Universal Studios.

[morris]

The man leaning out of the helicopter in the opening scene is Larry Franco, who also served as associate producer on the film, first assistant director, and is Kurt Russell's brother-in-law.

[addison]

There has been a debate among fans whether or not that Blair's computer program's projection on the Thing is actually accurate since it certainly isn't accurate in the sense that a biologist would not be working on computer animations as part of his investigations, especially under the pressing circumstances like we see in the film. This scene is obviously meant to be an aid to the audience to understand the Thing's life-cycle, not a realistic portrayal of a biologist's studies. And how well does the simulation work, unfortunately, it leads to more questions than answers. We see dog cells being devoured, one by one, by a single Thing cell and this seems to contradict what we've already seen of the Thing's behavior. Never does the simulation show that the Thing cells divide to replace canine cells, which is what would make more sense. So, the animation should be taken with a grain of salt. On the DVD commentary track, John Carpenter comments that they "didn't get it quite right" regarding the Thing's life cycle but that "it doesn't matter." From this it may be concluded that the goal with the computer sequence was not truly accomplished, so it must therefore be regarded with skepticism. It's clear that the Blair computer simulation was meant to replace a similar scene in the script and novel. Alan Dean Foster's description of the Thing's cells seems to be better: Fuchs was preparing new slides, which Blair studied under the microscope. Two cells were visible through the eyepiece. They were active, neither quiescent nor dead. One looked quite normal. Its companion looked anything but. At the moment the two were joined together by a thin stream of protoplasm. Material from the larger cell, which was long and thin, flowed into the smaller, spherical cell. As it did so the smaller cell swelled visibly, until the cell wall fractured in three places. Immediately the smaller cell assumed a flattened shape like the other and three new streams of material began to flow outward from its interior. Neither cell appeared to have lost any mass. Blair pulled away from the eyepiece and frowned as he checked his watch. It was running in stopwatch mode. He turned it off. The resulting readout was very puzzling.

[duane]

The kennel dog was required to raise its head and squeal at the camera. In this excerpt from The Winston Effect by Jody Duncan, Stan Winston revealed that time constraints dictated his approach to creating the character: With no time to engineer sophisticated mechanical components, Winston designed the dog-thing essentially as a hand puppet. He started by taking a photograph of himself standing with his arm raised, as if in a puppeteering position, and then drew a dog-thing shape that would fit over the silhouette of his head and arm. "I designed the character to fit the puppeteer," said Winston.

[lonnie]

Part of the fear instilled into The Thing came from the AIDS epidemic that was making itself known at the time of filming. The idea that you couldn't tell who was infected just by looking at them, only blood tests would reveal it, was not lost on John Carpenter.

[jessica]

There is a surviving photo that depicts an alternative death scene for Fuchs (Joel Polis), where he is impaled upon a door with a shovel. This would prove that he was killed, whereas in the finished film his burned remains are found, creating doubt over whether he was burned by himself, or the Thing.

[carl]

The second of two movies with Kurt Russell that had a character with a last name of "Fuchs", the first was Used Cars (1980).

[willard]

This is the first of John Carpenter's films which he did not score himself. The film's original choice of composer was Jerry Goldsmith, but he passed and Ennio Morricone composed a very low-key Carpenter-like score filled with brooding, menacing bass chords.