- All-Star Cast: Elijah Wood, Bruce Willis, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Lovitz, Dan Aykroyd, Reba McEntire, Kathy Bates...
- Billing Displacement: Jon Lovitz gets second billing despite having more of a lesser supporting role.
- Box Office Bomb: The film only earned $7,182,747 against a $40 million budget, being dwarfed by The Lion King (1994), Forrest Gump, and Jim Carrey's own comedy The Mask (which was released the week after North and distributed by that movie's production company New Line Cinema), among others.
- Completely Different Title:
- The Perfect Child (Denmark)
- Parents Wanted (Italy/Greece)
- Home, Sweet Home (Israel)
- The Guardian Angel (Brazil)
- Talk About Mischief (Sweden)
- Colbert Bump: Outside of Roger Ebert's famous review of the film ("I hated hated hated this movie"), the movie probably would not as be as well-known today had The Nostalgia Critic not reviewed it.
- Creator Killer: Surprisingly, Rob Reiner's career as a director recovered from this cinematic fiasco the following year with The American President; that said, the film derailed Reiner's critical hot streak that he'd had since This is Spın̈al Tap, and he has not had a critical hit since President (and only one box office hit with The Bucket List). The only careers this film might have permanently destroyed are that of writers Alan Zweibel (who had some words on the matter) and Andrew Scheinman, the former of whom also did not do another film until the end of the 90's (in Scheinman's case, it didn't help that 1994 also saw his directorial debut, the even bigger flop Little Big League).
- Cross-Dressing Voices: In the Japanese dub, the titular protagonist is voiced by Mayumi Tanaka, while Winchel is voiced by Akiko Yajima.
- Fake American: Canadian Dan Aykroyd plays Pa Tex, who is (as his name implies) Texan.
- Inspiration for the Work:
- Alan Zweibel said that by seeing his son "looking across the dinner table at my wife, Robin, and me, and from the expression on his face you could tell he was thinking, 'I can do better than these two.'" he decided to write a book about a boy wanting to get new parents.
- Reiner wanted to create a touching, personal fable; his very own The Wizard of Oz.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: This movie's notoriety convinced Sony to try everything in its power to keep it from getting released on DVD. This meant that one had to rely on the VHS release and the occasional television broadcasts just to get their hands on the movie. After almost two decades, Sony finally relented to pleas from preservationists and released it on DVD as part of the Sony Pictures Choice Collection manufacture-on-demand (MOD) line in 2012, followed five years later by a MOD Blu-ray.
- Magnum Opus Dissonance: Reiner considered this to be his Spiritual Successor to The Wizard of Oz while it was in production. However, many fans thought that Reiner had already made such a movie several years earlier.
- Self-Adaptation: Alan Zweibel, the author of the book the movie is based on, also wrote the screenplay.
- Shoot the Money: Dan Aykroyd and Reba McEntire appear as the stereotypical Texan family, and sing the film's only song, a parody of the Bonanza theme song, despite North not being a musical (and despite Bonanza actually being set in Nevada). And it's also possibly foreshadowing since the movie's All Just a Dream.
- What Could Have Been: John Candy was originally signed on to play as Pa Tex, but had to drop out for scheduling reasons.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/North
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