Trivia / The Incredible Melting Man

• The Cameo: Three-time Major League Baseball all-star Mickey Lolich as one of the security guards.
• Executive Meddling:
  • This was intended as a parody of horror films; the producers decided it would work better as a straight horror film and cut out many of the (intentionally) comedic scenes. The result was indeed hilarious, but not quite the way it was intended.
  • The scene with Judy's parents hints at what the comedic version would have been like. (It couldn't be cut because it was an important plot point.)
  • The scene at the end where the melted man is thrown away casually by a janitor also hints at what the comedic version would've been like.
• Follow the Leader: Rob Bottin stated that he took a LOT of inspiration from this film for the special effects in RoboCop (1987). Most notably seen in the part where a guy gets dunked in toxic waste, "melts", and gets hit (and exploded) by a car.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: Originally was going to be a spoof of horror films, until the executives told the director to play it straight. He wasn't amused.
• Parody Retcon: Inverted. The director has gone on record to say that he intended it from the start to be a parody of monster flicks (which considering its ridiculous premise and being made about 20 years after the heyday of such movies in the 1950s, isn't hard to believe — even more so given that he went on to do a sci-fi comedy with 1980's Galaxina), but that the final product isn't one. It ended up being a hot mess thanks to Executive Meddling, when the studio insisted that he play it all totally straight against his wishes. The elderly couple scene is an artifact from the original script, as the mood wildly clashes with the rest of the film.
• Real-Life Relative: the voice of Nora the police dispatcher, is provided by Rosemary Alexander (credited as Rosemary Lovell), then-future wife of Steve's voice actor Newell Alexander.
• Science Marches On: The impossibility of any human landing on Saturn was established by the Voyager space probes just a few years after this film came out.
• What Could Have Been: The special effects were originally planned (and prosthetics made) to show the eponymous melting man start off looking relatively normal, and slowly "melt" in stages. But the actor was very difficult to work with, and pretty much refused to deal with having the prosthetics changed, so they stuck with the same one throughout.
• Word of God: Originally Rob Bottin, when asked what the film's moral was, responded with "What moral?", but then gave the somewhat better answer of "If you're melting, don't sit next to a garbage can."

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