Line #3 Trivia/Scanners


1	* BillingDisplacement: Top-billed Jennifer O'Neill doesn't appear until the 37 minute mark and is more of a supporting character to Stephen Lack's character. Creator/MichaelIronside is billed fifth despite arguably playing the most memorable character of the film.
2	* BreakthroughHit: For Creator/DavidCronenberg.
3	* CaliforniaDoubling: It's brief, but Thunder Bay, Ontario is mentioned in passing. The film was shot in Montreal and Toronto.
4	* CastTheRunnerUp: Creator/MichaelIronside was originally hired for a bit part of one to two scenes and was paid $5300 CDN.
5	* TheDanza: From the credits:
6	--> Assistant to Mr Heroux.....Kim Obrist
7	* DawsonCasting: Dr. Ruth tells Vale that he founded Biocarbon Amalgamate in 1942. Creator/PatrickMcGoohan was 14 years old in 1942.
8	* DeletedScene: Production stills exist of shots in the final duel between Cameron and Revok, where the top of Cameron's head explodes, sending sparks into the air. Apparently this climax was filmed but Creator/DavidCronenberg chose to omit it from the final print.
9	* FranchiseZombie: Creator/DavidCronenberg only ever intended ''Scanners'' to be a single film (and it's amazing that film even saw the light of day, given its TroubledProduction). Christian Duguay took over and made ''Film/ScannersIITheNewOrder'' and ''Film/ScannersIIITheTakeover'' about a decade later. The protagonist of ''2'' is apparently the son of the protagonist of the first film, but that's where the connection ends; the third film onwards feature entirely unrelated characters. This spawned yet another duo of spinoff movies, ''Film/ScannerCop'' and ''Film/ScannerCopII''. Exploding heads and dueling telepaths are clearly just too awesome not to milk it for all it's worth.
10	* PropRecycling: For the scene where Darryl is set on fire and his head comes up, Creator/MichaelIronside wore a fake pair of eyes worn by Creator/DustinHoffman in ''Film/LittleBigMan''.
11	* RealitySubtext: A drug marketed to pregnant women as a painkiller that turns out to cause strange deformities in their unborn children; ephemerol bears an eerie similarity to the real-life scandal in the late 1950s as women who had taken thalidomide during pregnancy (marketed as relief for morning sickness) began to give birth to children suffering phocomelia or other physical deformities.
12	* RecycledScript: The four sequels follow different characters with variations of the first movie's plot. That plot being "a loner Scanner gets recruited by a shady organization to become one of their psychic enforcers and battle a psychopathic rogue Scanner, leading to hero and villain engaging in a brutal psychic duel that leads to the evil Scanner's bloody death."
13	* SpoilerCover: The original poster depicts [[spoiler:the moment Vale does a FreakyFridayFlip with Revok in the climactic scanner duel, killing Revok in the process]].
14	* TechnologyMarchesOn: The very ''idea'' that someone could intrude upon a computer system via its connection to the phone lines seems to be an alien concept to [=ConSec=]'s security director. He and the [=ConSec=] technicians ponder aloud exactly how it might work, presumably because audiences in 1981 would be equally confused by the notion.
15	* TroubledProduction: Creator/DavidCronenberg once called this the most frustrating film he'd ever made. The film was rushed through production - filming had to begin without a finished script and end within roughly two months so the financing would qualify as a tax write-off, forcing Cronenberg to [[WritingByTheSeatOfYourPants write and shoot at the same time]]. Cronenberg also cited difficulty with and antagonism between the leads, particularly Creator/PatrickMcGoohan and Jennifer O'Neill.
16	* WhatCouldHaveBeen: In the original screenplay, written back in 1976, the protagonist's name was going to be Harley Quinn (note that ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'' did not exist yet [[HilariousInHindsight and this was before]][[invoked]] Creator/MichaelIronside took up the other Franchise/DCAnimatedUniverse role of [[WesternAnimation/SupermanTheAnimatedSeries Dark]][[WesternAnimation/JusticeLeague seid]]) and he was going to be a [[VillainProtagonist much darker character]] than Vale - it was going to start with him [[MindRape Mind Raping]] a woman in a subway on purpose, as opposed to Vale's accidental crime in the opening scene of the completed film. Also, the original setup was more like a futuristic spy film, with the US government hiring a group of scanners to infiltrate a corporation called Cytodyne and stop its army of evil scanners.
17	* WritingByTheSeatOfYourPants: The film was written like this, which was forced upon Cronenberg because of the way the production had to be structured due to financing reasons. There was virtually no pre-production, so he had to start shooting with an unfinished script. He would write in the morning, and film the rest of the day, mostly out of order. On top of ''that'', they often had to drive around at random, looking for places to shoot scenes. So literally ''everything'' was done by the seat of their pants. He talks about it at some length in ''Cronenberg on Cronenberg''.
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Context Trivia / Scanners