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Context Trivia / TwoThousandTenTheYearWeMakeContact

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1* ApprovalOfGod: In a way. After he was hired, Creator/PeterHyams reached out to Kubrick to make sure he was all right with a sequel to ''2001'' being made. Kubrick said he didn't have a problem with it, and encouraged Hyams to pursue his own vision of the story instead of feeling obligated to replicate the style of the first film.
2** Played straight with Clarke, though; he and Hyams actually collaborated on the screenplay using email. ''In 1983.''
3* BTeamSequel: Creator/StanleyKubrick was offered the film but had zero interest in doing it.
4* CelebrityVoiceActor: Creator/CandiceBergen as SAL 9000; [[SubvertedTrope subverted]] as she was credited under a pseudonym, "Olga Mallsnerd".
5* CreatorPreferredAdaptation: Creator/ArthurCClarke's correspondence with Hyams was published in the 1985 book ''The Odyssey File'':
6-->"[T]he screenplay arrived this morning... I felt like playing a few tricks on you — like a message from my secretary saying that I was last seen heading for the airport carrying a gun. But being the day it is and the delicate condition you are in I'll say right away that it's a splendid job and you have brilliantly chiselled out the basic elements of the novel, besides adding quite a few of your own. I laughed — and cried — in all the right places."
7* FakeNationality:
8** Messed around with. Dr. Chandra is supposed to be Dr. Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai, originally from [[BollywoodNerd Madras]], but a naturalized US citizen at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. When they cast the Russian-Jewish American Creator/BobBalaban in the role, they dropped any reference to his Indian heritage (and changed his affiliation to the University of Chicago, to boot).
9** Dmitri Moiseivich was played by an American actor, and Captain Tanya Kirbuk by a third-generation Russian immigrant to the UK (see FakeRussian below). Kirbuk's name is, of course, [[Creator/StanleyKubrick Kubrick]] [[SdrawkcabName spelled backwards]] without the "c", but it's probably intended to resemble Ukrainian names that end in "-uk". The other Soviet characters were played by four Russians, one Latvian, one Ukrainian and one Czech.
10* FakeRussian: Creator/DanaElcar as Moiseievich has the most [[OohMeAccentsSlipping trouble with his accent]]; his Russian radio messages are dubbed. Creator/HelenMirren's grandfather was Russian (their family was originally named Mironov) and she can pull off the accent, even though she isn't fluent in the language. Jan Triska, who played the ''Leonov'''s communications officer Aleksandr Kovalev, was Czech; the rest of the Soviet crew were actually from the Soviet Union.
11* LifeImitatesArt: Around the year 2010, scientists began noticing the color of Jupiter's atmosphere is changing, just not as fast as it happens in the film.
12* TheOtherDarrin: Creator/RoyScheider as Heywood Floyd, replacing William Sylvester from ''2001''. (A still of Sylvester as Floyd, touching the monolith on the Moon, can be seen in the recap sequence in the beginning.) Averted by Creator/KeirDullea and Douglas Rain, who reprise their roles as Bowman and HAL.
13* PlayingAgainstType: Saveli Kramarov, who played Dr. Rudenko, was exclusively cast during his Soviet career as a particularly goofy comic type with certain CloudCuckooLander and ButtMonkey tendencies. Needless to say, he hated that and was more than happy to play in a serious Sci-Fi film instead.
14* PropRecycling:
15** The blue ''[[Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey 2001]]''-style spacesuit hanging in the ''Discovery'' pod bay ended up in the hands of the crew of ''Series/BabylonFive'' years later. (This is precisely the kind of thing that Creator/StanleyKubrick wanted to avoid by destroying all of ''2001'''s sets and props.) They did their best to change what they could on it, "[[Creator/JMichaelStraczynski though it was pretty much what it was regardless.]]" To make it further HilariousInHindsight, the episodes the suit appeared in both involved time travel, a lost astronaut appearing and disappearing, and a mild degree of MindScrew.
16** The space pod that appears in Watto's junkyard in ''Franchise/StarWars Episode I: Film/ThePhantomMenace'' may also have come from ''2010'''s ''Discovery'' pod bay, but this has not been confirmed.
17** Averted for the film itself, though. Specifically to avoid this trope, Kubrick had all props and sets from ''2001'' destroyed. Everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up using references from the original film.
18* RealitySubtext: In the film, Moiseivich explains to Floyd that their ship's name was changed from ''Titov'' to ''Leonov'' because Titov "fell out of favor". In real life, Gherman Titov was a bit of a rebel who was busted multiple times for drunk driving, fraternizing with women, and other misdemeanors. The Soviet Union considered officially kicking him out of the program more than once, and likely would have eventually if not for Yuri Gagarin's death in 1968. Titov died in 2000, while Alexei Leonov was still alive in 2010 (he died in 2019).
19* ScienceMarchesOn:
20** This was Clarke's motivation to keep writing sequels to ''2001''. The plot of ''2010'' was inspired by the Voyager probes' flybys of Jupiter, especially the possibility of life under Europa's icy crust, and he wrote ''2061'' in response to the 1986 observations of Halley's Comet.
21** This made Creator/StanleyKubrick's version of the plot, moving the mission in ''2001'' from Saturn to Jupiter, very fortuitous. The first novel sent ''Discovery'' to Saturn, with the Monolith found in the vicinity of Iapetus (spelled "Japetus" in the novel, a common British spelling for the moon). The most interesting feature on Iapetus is a ridge that gives it a walnut-like shape. The real-life idea that Europa is now considered more likely to harbor life than Mars makes this change downright fateful!
22** After Clarke died, the Cassini probe showed that it would now be possible to do a story about a monolith on Iapetus protecting emerging life on Enceladus, since it has even better evidence of liquid water under its crust than Europa does.
23* SequelGap: Set nine years after ''2001'', but made 16 years later.
24* WhatCouldHaveBeen:
25** Creator/ArthurCClarke suggested that Creator/PeterHyams try to get Creator/BenKingsley, who had just won his Oscar for ''Film/{{Gandhi}}'', to play Chandra. Twenty years later, Hyams would direct Kingsley in ''Film/ASoundOfThunder''.
26*** What's odd is that the film version of ''2001'' gave HAL's creator's name as "Mr Langley", rather than "Dr Chandra". You have to wonder why they didn't simply rename the character Langley when they cast a white guy...
27** Music/TonyBanks was connected to the soundtrack initially, but Hyams fired him because he didn't like the music he made for the film.

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