History Trivia / TheIronGiant

* OldShame: Not for the film itself, but Warner Bros. is aware they screwed up big time with the film's theatrical release and that the film's AcclaimedFlop status is their fault. They've given the film better treatment in the years since to make up for it.

* BoxOfficeBomb: Even on a relatively small budget of $48 million (with another $32 million for prints and advertising), its original theatrical run grossed barely half of that amount. It would later go on to earn over $100 million in video sales, making it profitable from there.

* TroubledProduction: As described in the documentary, ''A Giant's Dream,'' and on Wiki/ThisVeryWiki: an extremely short turnaround time, a crew consisting mostly of first-time feature film artists, and an apathetic studio who waited too long to decide whether or not to advertise it.

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* ImageSource:
** GentleGiant
** InterruptedCooldownHug

* QuoteSource:
** RuleOfCool

** Denmark: ''The Boy and the Iron Giant''

** The movie was originally conceived as an AnimatedAdaptation of [[Music/TheWho Pete Townshend]]'s RockOpera based on the original book, but Brad Bird didn't want to put out yet another AnimatedMusical in a market already so saturated with them.

* DoingItForTheArt:
** A new rendering software was created specifically for the CGI giant to give him small imperfections so as to blend better with the 2D characters.
** The montage of Mansley grilling Hogarth about the Giant required new layouts and backgrounds to be created for every single cut, many of which last ''less than a second!''

* FanNickname: "Hog Hug", used by some fans to refer to Hogarth because of one scene.

* ApprovalOfGod: Ted Hughes, the author of the book this movie is based on, absolutely adored the movie, despite its lack of resemblance to the book. Sadly, [[AuthorExistenceFailure he suffered a fatal heart attack a year before it was completed]]. The film was dedicated to his memory.

* AdaptationDisplacement: It was based on a book by Ted Hughes, who dies the year before the movie was released.

* ApprovalOfGod: Ted Hughes, the author of the book this movie is based on, absolutely adored the movie. Sadly, [[AuthorExistenceFailure he suffered a fatal heart attack a year before it was completed]]. The film was dedicated to his memory.

* ApprovalOfGod: Ted Hughes, author of book this movie is based on, absolutely adored the movie. Sadly, [[AuthorExistenceFailure he suffered a fatal heart attack a year before it was completed]]. The film was dedicated to his memory.

* InMemoriam: A dedication of Ted Hughes, author of the original novel, appears in the ending credits. There's also one of Susan Bird, Brad Bird's sister who was murdered at gun point and influenced Brad's staunch opinions on gun control.

* VanillaEdition: [[DefiedTrope Defied]] by Brad Bird regarding the release of the film on Blu-ray. He said on Twitter:
--> '''Brad Bird:''' WB & I have been talking. But they want a bare bones disc. I want better.

* DuelingMovies: With Disney's entry for its [[Franchise/DisneyAnimatedCanon canon]] that year, ''WesternAnimation/{{Tarzan}}'', though [[DavidVersusGoliath it was hardly a duel]]: the Disney film had a year's worth of hype, not to mention notoriety out the wazoo, which this scrappy little film made by a tentative subsidiary of Warner Bros. and only saw a few weeks of advertisement couldn't compete with. ''The Iron Giant'' won out in the long run, though, for ''Tarzan'' has since faded into a footnote on Disney's history while ''Giant'' is now called one of the greatest animated features ever.[[note]]At the film's wrap party, Brad Bird bragged about how their film finished all its animation three months before the ''Tarzan'' animators and jokingly called them "pussies."[[/note]]

* RealitySubtext: After being hired to direct the film, Brad Bird read the original Ted Hughes novel and was surprised to discover that Hughes had written to as a way to cope with his wife's suicide. Bird, in turn, decided that he would change the story for the film to an anti-gun allegory as a way of coping with his sister's murder at gunpoint a decade prior, making the titular Giant "a gun with a soul who didn't want to be a gun."

** Animator Teddy Newton jokingly pitched a sequence of the film that would've had Mansley taking Hogarth to a seedy stripper's club, years later animator Bert Klein suggested to Newton to take his idea and make it into it's own short, which ended up becoming the short Boys Night Out.

** Creator/JohnTravolta, Sylvester Stallone, Hugh Jackman, Matthew Broderick, Steve Martin and John Cusack were considered to voice Dean.