Accidentally-Correct Writing: Many parts of the B-52 were closely guarded secrets at the time of the film's production, including how the interior looked. Production designers came up with the interior sets by looking at photos and guessing how much space would be available and installing equipment they thought it should have based on publicly available information of other bombers. It turned out they were eerily close to the mark and US government officials panicked, thinking someone had leaked design details.
Acting for Two: Or rather three, with Peter Sellers as Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove. It was originally meant to be four, but Sellers had a strong aversion to playing the fourth role and a supposedly/conveniently sprained ankle prevented him from getting into and out of the B-52 set, so Slim Pickens was added to the cast to play "King" Kong instead.
Slim Pickens was not told that the movie was a comedy during filming and played his part straight. He's still hilarious, because Slim Pickens is just that funny, intentionally or not.
A slight variant with George C. Scott. While Stanley Kubrick wanted the character of Turgidson to be completely ridiculous, Scott wasn't comfortable playing the role that way and wanted him to be a tragic character instead...in a comedy. Kubrick got what he knew the film needed by telling Scott to ham it up for "practice" takes prior to the "real" takes, and then using all the "practice" takes in the final film. Scott was not happy, and vowed never to work with Kubrick again, although he did concede that the director's ruse was cleverly done.
Actor-Inspired Element: Dr. Strangelove's glove is from Stanley Kubrick's personal collection. Peter Sellers had seen Kubrick wearing them to handle hot lights on the set and thought they looked sinister. He wore one on his right hand (the one not under his control) to add to Strangelove's evil vibe and Nazi background.
Actor-Shared Background: Like Group-Captain Mandrake, Peter Sellers was in the RAF, although he was never a pilot due to his poor eyesight. His ability to impersonate officers led to his portrayal of Mandrake.
Peter Sellers was originally asked to play Maj. T.J. "King" Kong, and practiced intensely with the American screenwriter to get the American Accent right. After the first day of shooting, he sprained his ankle, and could no longer work in the cramped airplane set. So they recast the role with Slim Pickens.
According to some accounts, Sellers was also invited to play the part of General Buck Turgidson, but turned it down because it was too physically demanding.
Corpsing: If you look carefully, you can see Peter Bull (the Russian ambassador) shaking with barely controlled mirth and biting his own lip as Sellers fights with his Evil Hand.
Creator's Oddball: The only full blown comedy in Stanley Kubrick's filmography, albeit a dark one. While A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket have comedic elements sprinkled in, they're both considered dramas. Also one of only three films of his currently not owned by Warner Bros.. note The only ones that aren't are Fear and Desire, which is in the public domain, this by Columbia Pictures, and Spartacus by Universal. Everything else until A Clockwork Orange was acquired by Warner Bros in the 80s and beginning with Orange spent the rest of his career exclusively at Warner.
Defictionalization: In probably the most disturbing example of defictionalization, the Dead Hand system constructed by the Soviets in the '80s is essentially a real-life version of the Doomsday Device.
Disowned Adaptation: Author Peter George, who wrote Red Alert, detested the conversion of his book to a satire, but wrote a tie-in novelization of the film anyway.
Distanced from Current Events: The release date was slightly delayed after JFK's assassination due to the story involving a fictional president:
In the scene where Major Kong reads the description of a survival kit's contents out loud, he originally says "Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff!" Dallas was redubbed to Vegas because of the connotations carried by Dallas in a post JFK-assassination America. It actually worked out well, as Vegas makes more sense in this context, especially today — no-one would think of Dallas as a "party destination" any more, but Vegas is still the king of "What happens here stays here".
The original ending was to have everyone in the war room end up in a pie fight (don't ask). The President would be knocked down from the impact of the pie hitting him, with Gen. Turgidson saying "Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!" Despite it being filmed before the assassination... (That wasn't why the scene was deleted, though — they just couldn't film it with the necessary "gravity." It didn't help that the set was so utterly coated in whipped cream that there was no way to reset it afterwards.)
Dueling Movies: Fail Safe, a dead serious take on this Failsafe Failure premise, was also released in 1964 (and by the same studio to boot). The straight film is good (though it performed poorly at the box-office), but Kubrick's film has become iconic. Kubrick delayed the release of Fail Safe by filing a plagiarism lawsuit, which went nowhere, but did get Dr. Strangelove to theatres first, which was the entire point.
Kubrick wanted a "cowboy" actor to pilot the Leper Colony nuclear bomber, but all the ones he contacted refused because of the anti-war source material. So he finally decided to contact Slim Pickens, show him nothing but his parts, and never told him he was making a comedy, implying that his character was the hero of the film, "heroically" delivering the bomb that ends the world. Pickens was okay with it in the long run, spinning the publicity into a highly successful career.
On the other hand, George C. Scott wanted to play General Turgidson as a dignified Well-Intentioned Extremist, so Kubrick tricked him by telling him to do a few over the top takes as "practice" and that they would never be put into the real movie. Kubrick used all of them. Scott eventually admitted it was better that way and that he couldn't help but admire Kubrick's audacity, but nonetheless he vowed never to work with the director again.
Executive Meddling: The geniuses at Columbia Pictures were for some reason under the impression that the only reason Lolita was a success was the gimmick of Peter Sellers playing multiple roles. They would only greenlight Dr. Strangelove on the condition that Kubrick agree to cast Sellers in at least four roles. This is especially strange since in Lolita, Sellers does not actually play multiple roles. He plays a single elusive character who also pretends to be two additional persons. On the other hand, it certainly didn't hurt the film and Peter Sellers playing three roles is one of the most acclaimed parts of the film.
Fake Nationality: Played straight with British-born Peter Sellers as the American President Merkin Muffley, and with British-born Peter Sellers as the eponymous German scientist (also played straight with British-born Tracy Reed as the American secretary Miss Franklin). Averted, however, with British-born Peter Sellers as the British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake.
Harpo Does Something Funny: Many of the scenes with Peter Sellers were improvised, most famously the phone conversation with the Soviet premier and "Mein Führer, I can walk!" This is especially impressive when you consider this was a movie by Stanley Kubrick, one of the most infamously controlling directors of all time.
Looping Lines: There is a noticable scene where Major Kong is saying "Dallas" but you hear "Vegas", in order to put some distance from the recent assassination of JFK in Dallas.
For its opening theme tune, the film uses a lush arrangement of the old standard "Try a Little Tenderness" over B-52 aerial refueling footage, turning it into machine porn.
Closing the film with stock footage of nuclear explosions overlaid with Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again" is also quite memorable.
Recursive Adaptation: Peter George wrote the original book, Red Alert and a novelization that was closer to the movie.
The song "Slim Pickens Does The Right Thing And Rides The Bomb To Hell" by The Offspring refers the Riding the Bomb scene in both its title and chorus. In context, the reference to the scene is a metaphor meaning While Rome Burns (Major Kong cheering while riding a free fall atomic bomb being compaired to manking partying while climatic disasters caused by global warming are imminent).
Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 by Max Hastings makes a couple of references to Doctor Strangelove, and directly compares Curtis LeMay, Head of the US Air Force, to "Buck" Turgidson.
Self-Adaptation: Peter George wrote the original novel, the movie's screenplay and its novelization.
Self-Plagiarism: It is well-known that Peter Sellers improvised much of his dialogue through the film, under Kubrick's supervision. During his one-sided, strangely mindless telephone conversation with Premier Kissoff, he seemed to have dipped into his memory of dialogue originally scripted by Spike Milligan for an episode of The Goon Show in which they both appeared at the start of their careers: "The Lost Emperor", in their respective roles as the gormless idiot Eccles (Milligan) and neurotic boy scout Bluebottle (Sellers). Sellers' conversation with Kissoff begins:
Muffley: Hello? Hello, Dimitri? Listen, I can't hear too well, do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? Oh,that's much better. Yes. Fine, I can hear you now, Dimitri. Clear and plain and coming through fine. I'm coming through fine too, eh? Good, then. Well then, as you say, we're both coming through fine. Good. Well it's good that you're fine and I'm fine. I agree with you. It's great to be fine.
While the dialogue from "The Lost Emperor", as scripted by Milligan, is as follows:
Bluebottle: Eccles? How do you like being on guard? Eccles: Fine, fine. Bluebottle: Yes it is fine, I feel fine on guard. Eccles: Yeah, so do I. I, I feel fine on guard. Bluebottle: Yes, it is nice to feel fine, in't it Eccles? Eccles: Yah. Bluebottle: Yeah. Yes, it is fine. (After Some Time) Bluebottle: Yes it is good that we both, what is us, feeling fine, in't it? Eccles: Yah, we both feel fine. Bluebottle: Yes we are both... Bluebottle & Eccles: Feeling fine.
...etc., etc. - repeated one or two times until Bluebottle, having thought about it too much, declares:
Bluebottle: 'Ere!...I feel sick!
Though Milligan was credited eventually for the usage of "We'll Meet Again" over the closing credits (he was a fan of explosions), he has never been fully credited for his unintentional scripting of Sellers' improvised dialogue.
For Peter Sellers, who had the good fortune of preceding this with The Pink Panther (1963), which merely set the springboard for him.
Slim Pickens acknowledged that his career surged like never before due to his involvement in this movie. It certainly didn't hurt either that since Kubrick, Sellers, and Scott were all reticent to do interviews that the duty then fell on Pickens to appear on The Tonight Show to promote the movie.
"After Dr. Strangelove, the roles, the dressing rooms, and the checks all started gettin' bigger."
Stillborn Franchise: In 1995, Stanley Kubrick enlisted Terry Southern to script a sequel titled Son of Strangelove. Kubrick had Terry Gilliam in mind to direct. The script was never completed, but index cards laying out the story's basic structure were found among Southern's papers after his October 1995 death; it was set largely in underground bunkers, where Dr. Strangelove had taken refuge with a group of women. In 2013 Gilliam commented, "I was told after Kubrick died - by someone who had been dealing with him - that he had been interested in trying to do another Strangelove with me directing. I never knew about that until after he died but I would have loved to."
Much of Peter Sellers' dialogue was improvised (Kubrick had three cameras on Sellers at all times to take full advantage of this), including the hotline telephone conversation. Similarly, Strangelove's Evil Hand's rampage at the end was largely improvisation (it was also Sellers' idea that it should be gloved). Keep in mind that Kubrick was the most insane perfectionist in the history of filmmaking. And Sellers got to ad-lib.
During the shootout in Ripper's office, Peter Seller's line was "I've got this thing in my leg." When he said it, it sounded like "This string in my leg's gone." Naturally, it was kept in.
At one point, George C. Scott is emphatically trying to convince the president (Sellers) to launch an attack when he suddenly trips and collapses to the ground before quickly picking himself up and continuing the scene. It fit so well with the deliberate ridiculousness of the rest of the movie that Kubrick left it in.
The end of the movie, where Strangelove stands up and yells "MEIN FÜHRER, I CAN WALK!" was actually an improv done by Peter Sellers, who got caught up in the moment, forgot that his character was paralyzed, and accidentally stood up as he was about to deliver his response to the ongoing argument around him. Instead of cutting the scene, decided to do an improv, delivering the final, iconic line before the bombs fall and the credits roll.
Pablo Ferro used his own handwriting as a mockup of the titles, but Kubrick liked them so much that he told Pablo to use them as they were.
Troubled Production: First, while shooting aerial footage over Greenland, the crew accidentally caught a secret US military base on camera. Their plane was forced to land and they were suspected of being Soviet spies.
Secondly, Peter Sellers was initially cast as Major Kong until he injured his ankle on the set so the role was recast with Slim Pickens now playing Kong... which delayed production by a month since Pickens had never in his life traveled outside of the United States so he had to file for a passport and deal with the necessary paperwork and waiting times.
John Wayne was considered for the part of Major Kong, but never replied. It's possible that it was because he considered the movie too "leftist."
In one version of the script, aliens from outer space observed all of the action.
Merkin Muffley originally had a bad cold and a slightly effeminate manner. Peter Sellers played this up so hilariously that the cast kept cracking up during filming. Stanley Kubrick decided to make him a foil for everyone else's craziness instead, and re-shot the scenes with Sellers now playing the role straight, serving as an oasis of reason amidst all the madness.
As mentioned before, the film originally ended with a huge pie fight, but Kubrick found it too farcical and cut it. So far the footage has only been screened once at London's National Film Theatre after Kubrick's death.
Working Title: The Edge of Doom, The Delicate Balance of Terror and Dr. Doomsday or: How to Start World War III Without Even Trying, Dr. Strangelove's Secret Uses of Uranus, and Wonderful Bomb.
system constructed by the Soviets in the '80s is essentially a real-life version of the Doomsday Device.