I’m tired of all the BS, so some trivia for y’all, and of course it’s NAVY trivia…
Well, kinda sorta…
From Top Gun…
-The Kawasaki Ninja 900 was then the fastest bike in production. Top Gun made it famous.
-Charlie’s car is a 1957 Porsche 356 Speedster. 356s also appear in 48 Hrs. and Bullitt.
-One scene was filmed six months after the movie wrapped. Kelly McGillis’s hat is hiding her different hairstyle. Tom Cruise’s hair was different, too. That’s why he’s just leaving the shower.
-Top Gun transformed Cruise from a young actor to an international star. He was only 23.
-From the very beginning, the filmmakers wanted Cruise for Maverick. He kept turning it down until Jerry Bruckheimer arranged for a ride along with the Blue Angels.
-Did you catch a glimpse of Merlin? That was Tim Robbins.
-Producers knew Top Gun was big when leather jackets and white shirts came back in fashion again. Ray-Ban sunglasses also had a spike in sales following the films release. The same thing happened three years earlier, with Risky Business.
-Top Gun was the No. 1 movie of 1986, making over $170 million in the U.S. alone. It was so popular it stayed in some theatres for an entire year.
-In 1986, jet fuel was pretty cheap – about $1 a gallon. Paramount still paid $10,000 an hour every time they went up to film an F-14, though.
-An F-14 costs at least $18 million.
-The Officers’ Club was the place to go in San Diego for local girls to meet fighter pilots. Until the mid-eighties, some of those local girls were actually strippers.
-The story of Maverick’s father is based on an actual WWII and Korean War pilot killed in an F-9 crash. The pilot’s son, call sign Wizard, was also a Topgun fighter pilot like Maverick.
-Topgun was established to curb the high casualty rates of American fighter pilots during Vietnam.
-Instructors wouldn’t score oceanfront property anymore. Topgun moved to Nevada in 1996.
-There were two historical incidents in the eighties that are similar to the final deployment. Both involved American F-14 clashes with Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra.
-In 1986, the F-14 was the best fighter jet in the world. The U.S. Navy used it from 1970 to 2006. Today, Topgun pilots fly the F/A-18 Hornet and F/A-18 Super Hornet.
-Maverick and Charlie have chemistry, but in real life McGillis fell for Wolfman (Barry Tubb).
-For the decade after Vietnam, war movies were anti-military. Top Gun reversed that. It helped that Reagan was in the White House and America was feeling patriotic again.
-At Topgun today, there’s a $5 fine for anyone on staff who references or quotes the movie.
-Yahoo! Movies calls Top Gun the nineteenth-best action film ever.
-In 2011, the Chinese government broadcast Top Gun footage, claiming it was the Chinese air force.
-Kilmer: “The only egos bigger than actors are rock stars. And the only people beyond that are fighter pilots”.
-Top Gun songwriter Kenny Loggins says the movie has an “eighties John Wayne attitude”.
-The original idea for Top Gun came from a magazine article about fighter pilots. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer says the goal was to make “Star Wars on earth”.
-There isn’t really a Topgun plaque. It was created to give the characters a competition.
-Producers based Charlie on a civilian who worked for the Center for Naval Analyses. She was originally going to be in the Navy, but they don’t allow dating between officers.
-Iceman’s cough was totally improvised on the spot by Kilmer.
-All of the actors playing pilots went on actual F-14 hops except for Kilmer, who refused. Anthony Edwards (Goose) was the only one who made it through without getting sick.
-Director Tony Scott wanted all visual effects in the movie to have a “documentary realism”. So they hired documentary cameramen to film all the effects footage. Scott loved to film the jets at dawn so he could capture the beautiful natural light. Producer Don Simpson said the first cut of the movie “felt like one long sunset”.
-No pilot in the history of Miramar had actually buzzed the tower.
-Cruise and Kilmer never interacted off set. So their onscreen tension came naturally.
-Cruise and co-star Kelly McGillis almost never stand side by side in Top Gun. McGillis is taller, so she acted mostly in bare feet while Cruise wore lifts.
-Anthony Edwards had no idea he was going to sing and pretend to play piano in one scene. Scott was listening to Lee Lewis that morning and added it in last minute.
-Cruise was the only actor to get his actual flying footage in the final cut of the film. In his F-14 hops, Cruise went twice the speed of sound, or 1,536 miles per hour.
-The production built an almost-perfect F-14 cockpit just from photocopies of the manual.
-The MiG pilots were played by actual Topgun instructors.
-Maverick is both literally and figuratively boxes up his memories of Goose. Compartmentalization is the way the Navy teaches pilots to stay focused on their missions.
-One sequence was filmed using F-14 models being dropped from a ladder. Some were literally bought off the shelves at a nearby store.
-Top Gun would have been impossible to film without the Navy’s jets, carriers, and cooperation. It paid off for them. The Navy set up booths outside theatres, and recruitment went up 500 percent.
-MiG is a Russian aircraft company similar to Boeing or Lockheed Martin in the U.S. The MiG-28 isn’t a real MiG jet, though. They were actually F-5s, chosen because they look sinister. The movie never mentions where the MiGs are from because the Navy didn’t want to upset any nation.
-Air-to-air combat usually takes place in an egg-shaped fighting arena around five miles wide. Topgun pilots attack in pairs, which is an old dogfighting move called “loose deuce”.
-Real Topgun doesn’t hold classes in hangars. They have classrooms for that.
-The locker-room scenes were added to drive home that this is really a sport movie.
-A flat spin creates a low-pressure area and stalls the canopy when ejected. Producers wanted a mid-air crash but based the accident on a real-life one instead.
-Approximately 48 students graduate from Topgun every year.
-Topgun doesn’t deploy pilots. They’d get that info from their squadrons after they left.
-The Navy doesn’t have that many planes, so they’re usually outnumbered by enemy aircraft. The Air Force might send in twenty airplanes whereas the Navy could send in only four.
-The odds of taking machine-gun fire and continuing to fly are pretty slim.
-There aren’t many MiG kills, so when a pilot shoots down an enemy it’s a big deal. Tech adviser Pete Pettigrew: “It’s just like this. Everybody’s screaming. It’s really wonderful”.
And a couple more- NAS Miramar, at the time Top Gun’s home, is dry, flat, and ugly… TOO ugly for the movie, so the base gate pictures were actually filmed at the Navy’s Boot Camp at Point Loma.
During the filming of the ejection and water survival, Cruise actually panicked and almost drowned… He actually HAD to be rescued by a real SAR swimmer.
Art Scholl, one of the great stunt pilots was killed filming the flat spin sequence in the movie, and the movie is dedicated to him.
