Trading Places - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

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

[ivan]

Ralph Bellamy (Randolph) and Don Ameche (Mortimer) make cameo appearances in Coming to America (1988); the two are homeless and Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy) gives them a large amount of money to get them back off the streets.

[norma]

Don Ameche's strong religious convictions made him uncomfortable with swearing. This proved to be a problem for the scene at the end of the movie, where he had to shout out "Fuck him!" to a group of Wall Street executives. When he did act out the scene, it had to be done in one take, because Ameche refused to do a second one.

[brent]

R & B legend Bo Diddley appears as the pawnbroker that buys Louis's watch.

[harry]

Sir John Gielgud and Ronnie Barker were offered the role of Coleman the butler.

[jesse]

The stationmaster - the man who refers to the care and feeding instructions for the gorilla - is played by Stephen Stucker. He may have gone unnoticed in this film but he is well-known to audiences for his stage-stealing wisecracks in the film Airplane! (1980) and its sequel.

[richard]

Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche "cheerfully admitted" they were unfamiliar with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd's work. The two also said that Murphy and Aykroyd acknowledged that they were unfamiliar with Bellamy and Ameche.

[jeffrey]

The story about the Dukes' cornering of the orange juice market was probably inspired by the "Silver Thursday" market crash of March 27, 1980, when the Hunt brothers of Texas tried to corner the silver market and subsequently failed to meet a one hundred million dollar margin call.

[jamie]

In a 2013 interview, co-writer Timothy Harris talked about Hollywood's reluctance to make comedies satirizing greed and social conventions: "Trading Places (1983) is a sort of throwback film that owed more to the films of the '40s and '50s than it does to anything that was going on [in Hollywood] at the time it was made. Brewster's Millions (1985) was a social comedy about money and greed and what it does to people, but after that, there were no films like that being made anymore. Comedies were being directed at a specific groups of kids - teenagers - and that seemed to take over a great deal. I think it's probably an American thing - they're not interested in looking at that stuff particularly. I don't think Hollywood is either - it's awkward for them. The important people in Hollywood are really, really, filthy rich. They don't want to see that made fun of particularly."

[morris]

The movie Jamie Lee Curtis is watching on Christmas morning is To Catch a Thief (1955), starring Cary Grant.

[edgar]

On the train near the end of the movie the same song is playing in every scene in the bar car

[harry]

The baggage handlers were supposed to be Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as the Mackenzie brothers from SCTV (1976). When they fell through, Dan Aykroyd or Eddie Murphy recommended Tom Davis and Al Franken from their Saturday Night Live (1975) days.

[kristen]

George Folsey Jr.: The executive producer appears as the first man to greet Winthorpe at Duke & Duke. (Dan Aykroyd refers to him by his real name with the line "Morning Folsey".)

[phyllis]

Clarence Beeks shares his name with a jazz musician, who recorded under the name "King Pleasure".

[morris]

Nicholas Guest: Jamie Lee Curtis' future brother-in-law appears as Harry.