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Harry Potter
  • Hagrid is said to be twice the height of a human but in the films he is mentioned to be 8 feet 6 inches.
  • Hermione’s cat Crookshanks is no ordinary cat as he is half-kneazle. Kneazles are intelligent cat-like creatures who can sniff out suspicious characters and if a kneazle takes a liking to a witch or wizard, they make for excellent pets.
  • Members of the Order of the Pheonix are the only wizards who know how to communicate using their patronuses. A wizard’s patronus is the individual’s unique spirit guardian and is effective in use against the dark arts.
  • Dementors don’t breed. They grow where there’s decay, like fungus.
  • The tattoos on Sirius Black’s body are borrowed from Russian prison gangs. These are to identify a person as one to be feared and respected.
  • The command that makes the Dark Mark (the mark of the Dark Lord) appear is “Morsmorde” which appropriately means ‘take a bite out of death in French.
  • Harry’s middle name is James, Hermione’s is Jane and Ron’s is unfortunately, Bilius.
  • Garden gnomes are considered to be pests in the wizarding community because they eat the roots of plants and make little piles of earth, very much like moles.
  • The ghost Nearly-Headless Nick was beheaded because a botched dentistry job. He was trying to straighten Lady Grieve’s teeth but instead she sprouted a tusk.
  • Dumbledore has a scar in the shape of the London Underground above his knee.
  • The secret code Arthur Weasley must dial into a telephone keypad to access the Ministry of Magic is 62442. The letters underneath those numbers on a standard phone spell out the word ‘magic’.
  • You can only see a thestral when you can appreciate what death really means. This is why Harry could not see them until he witnessed the death of Cedric Diggory.
  • The original snitch used in early Quidditch matches was actually a fat bird called a snidget. When some wizards thought this to be too cruel, the wizard Bowman Wright invented the Golden Snitch.
  • Hogwarts’ school motto is ‘Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus’ which is Latin for ‘Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon’.
  • Harry Potter, JK Rowling and the actor Daniel Radcliffe all share the same birthday – July 31st

Willy Wonka
  • Wonka’s chocolate room used enough fake chocolate to fill a swimming pool
  • 1850 real chocolate bars were made by Nestle for the film- A special walk-in trailer was acquired to hold all the chocolate.  It was kept at a certain humidity to preserve and safe guard the chocolate.  All chocolate was made with real ingredients.
  • Other real candy made for the film included:All the lollipops on the trees, the giant pink sugar canes, the giant humbugs and the red & white swirls of the sweeping tree were all real
  • The Nut Room- Animal trainer Michael Alexander and his team spent 19 weeks training 40 squirrels for the squirrel room scene.  The squirrels were trained to sit on stools while they opened nut shells and dropped the nuts onto a conveyor belt

Sound of Music, The
  • A theater manager in Seoul, Korea felt that The Sound of Music was too long, so he shortened it by cutting out all the songs

James Bond 007
  • James Bond Casino Royale is actually based on Ian Flemming’s first Bond novel
  • There have been seven American Bond Girls, four English , three French, two Swedish and one each from Japan, Malaysia, Switzerland , Italy, and Poland
  • Bond was born in Germany
  • Roger Moore was the oldest Bond actor at 58
  • The Bond franchise has raked in almost $4 billion dollars
  • Sean Connery’s wife doubled for actress Mie Hama in a water-dive scene for You Only Live Twice

Ultraman
  • The actor who played the monsters in Ultraman was a martial arts expert (Nakajima) and his apprentice acted as Ultraman instead
  • In the Ultraman series, the monster costumes would often be complete except for the feet. This was to allow the actors to balance themselves for the fights
  • At the end of the series, the English dub is incorrect. In the English dub, Ultraman stated he would return, and this was different to the original script

Chaplin, Charlie
  • Charlie Chaplin once won 3rd place in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest

shrek
  • The voice of Shrek (by Mike Myers) came from the accent that his mother would use when telling him bedtime stories

Greece
  • In Greece, the climate is so warm that many of the cinemas do not even have roofs

Oz, Frank
  • Frank OZ provides the voice of Yoda, also the Cookie Monster, Fozzie Bear and Ms. Piggy

World War II
  • Despite what Hollywood claims in the film U-571, the Germans’ wartime Enigma code machine was actually captured by the British 6 months before the USA joined World War 2
  • When World War II began, the U.S. government declared platinum as a strategic metal and its use in non-military applications, including jewelry was disallowed. To appease consumers who preferred platinum’s white luster, gold was substituted in platinum’s absence
  • In a poll taken during World War II, Americans rated Jews four times less favorably than Germans or Japanese (both whom they were fighting the war against)
  • In World War II, Penicillin is said to be “one of the war effort’s highest priorities, second only to development of the atomic bomb.”[Krebs, Brian. "How a Lowly Fungus Saves Human Lives." Washington Post. March 11, 1998.]
  • The German Super Battleship Bismarck was like the Titanic… it sank on it’s maiden voyage. It was sunk on its first mission after taking out the British navy’s capital ship
  • At Pearl Harbor, the top US Navy command was called CINCUS (”sink us”), the shoulder patch of the US Army’s 45th Infantry division was the Swastika, and Hitler’s private train was named “Amerika”
  • Japanese ace pilot Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes, but ironically died while a passenger on a cargo plane
  • The Aleutian island of Kiska proved deadly for both sides. 200 Allied troops were killed by friendly fire while attacking the island, only to realize that the Japanese had abandoned it the night before. As for the Japanese, while abandoning the island, the Japanese Navy thought they were being engaged by Americans and began bombarding the island while their troops were still on it
  • A bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed every animal in the Berlin Zoo except the elephant, which escaped and roamed the city. When a Russian commander saw hungry Germans chasing the elephant and trying to kill it, he ordered his troops to protect it and shoot anyone who tried to kill it.
  • The first German serviceman killed was by the Japanese
  • The first American serviceman killed was by the Russians. They were allies.
  • The highest ranking American killed was Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, killed by the US Army Air Corps
  • It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th found with a tracer round to aid in aiming. That was a mistake. The tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target, 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet, the tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. That was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.
  • A number of air crewmen died of farts. (ascending to 20,000 ft. in an un-pressurized aircraft causes intestinal gas to expand 300%!)
  • When allied armies reached the Rhine, the first thing men did was pee in it.