Trivia / The Golden Child

• Corpsing: In the airport scene Charlotte Lewis is visibly on the verge of cracking up at Jarrell's antics as she drags him off. Doubly notable as arguably the only facial expression she ever shows in the movie.
• Dueling Movies: By an amazing coincidence, this movie came out at about the same time as another action-comedy fantasy film about East Asian mysticism, Big Trouble in Little China.
• Fake Nationality: Charlotte Lewis (an English woman of Irish, Chilean, and Iraqi extraction) and Victor Wong (Chinese-American) play Tibetans.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: A teaser trailer was released in the summer of 1986 featuring no footage from the film, consisting only of a narrator describing "The Chosen One" while we see a man on a large animal, come toward the camera during a mountain blizzard. Near the end of the teaser, the man is revealed to be Eddie Murphy, riding a yak. He turns to the camera and chides the audience: "If I'm the Chosen One, how come I'm freezing while you're sitting in a warm movie theater?! Chosen One, my behind! Why couldn't someone choose me to go to the Bahamas? I'm going back to LA and kicking someone's behind." Vilmos Zsigmond was the cinematographer for the teaser, which remains unreleased on home video. It was, however, uploaded to Website/YouTube in 2021.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: Like Beverly Hills Cop, the film started as a serious action film and then became an Eddie Murphy comedy.
• Money, Dear Boy: Charles Dance said of the film, "It put the old bank balance up a bit!"
• Old Shame: Eddie Murphy trashed this movie while promoting Coming to America, saying the original script was far better than the finished product (indeed, the novelization is closer to what was intended).
• Recycled Set: In the dream, when Chandler meets Sardo, Fu and "The Fat dude" and Sardo carves the dagger on Chandler's arm, the set is the same used in the last few seasons of Webster
• Those Two Actors: Victor Wong ("The Old Man") also plays Egg Shen in Big Trouble in Little China. His costar James Hong (David Lo Pan) is Dr. Hong. The two would appear together again in Paper Dragons.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In a brilliant example of Tropes Are Not Bad, Mel Gibson was considered for Jarrell. Face it: this movie has a rather cheesy and predictable plot, but it's being carried by Murphy's humor. Now imagine the movie without comedy but with Gibson.
  • John Carpenter was originally attached to direct, but opted to make the similar Big Trouble in Little China. As Nathan Rabin noted, both are movies with a strong Chinese and mystical element, but while The Golden Child was a box office success that ended mostly forgotten, Big Trouble in Little China was a failure eventually Vindicated by History.
  • John Barry wrote a score for the film, but it was rejected in favor of Michel Colombier's synthesizer music. Two Barry compositions remain in the soundtrack, one of those being Ann Wilson's "Best Man in The World" (La-La Land released the complete work of both composers).
    • In fact 1986 wasn't really his year, given that a) he also had some of his music replaced on Howard the Duck and b) he did Howard the Duck.
  • Alan Silvestri was originally set to provide the music score for the film but turned the project down. Think about it - he turned down this but not... Mac and Me. He did eventually score two Eddie Murphy films, namely Showtime and Holy Man.
  • Eddie Murphy wanted George Miller to direct. He turned it down because Murphy kept him waiting in a meeting for hours.

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