Trivia / Used Cars

• Acting for Two: Jack Warden plays both Luke Fuchs and his brother Roy L. Fuchs.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $8 million. Box office, $11.7 million. Despite positive reviews from both critics and audiences, and having Steven Spielberg as an executive producer, the film ultimately bombed due to being released just one week after Airplane!, which would go on to become one of the highest-grossing films of 1980. Nonetheless, Used Cars would become a Cult Classic in the years that followed and was partly responsible for Back to the Future getting made, due to (at the time) Columbia executive Frank Price being a big fan of the movie and commissioning Zemeckis and Gale to write the original BttF screenplay.
• DVD Commentary: A highly entertaining one with Kurt Russell, Robert Zemeckis, and Bob Gale.
• Missing Trailer Scene: One scene has Barbara get asked to prove her car lot has over 200 cars on it. In the movie, Rudy whispers to her from the audience to lie and say yes, because he has a contact he can get them from in a hurry. In the trailer, to show how "honest" he is, he explicitly says to her, "I want you to get up on that stand — and lie." This scene does not appear in the film.
• The Other Marty: The film was originally scored by Ernest Gold (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World); his music was replaced with a different score by Patrick Williams (The Streets of San Francisco).
• Technology Marches On: The climax hinges, literally, on a license plate acting as a hinged flap to cover the fuel cap which is centered on the rear of the car, a somewhat common feauture on '60s and '70s cars but subsequently abandoned because of safety issues.
• Those Two Actors: Michael McKean and David Lander — who at the time of the film's release were well known for playing Lenny and Squiggy — appear here as Eddie and Freddie, who help Rudy and company hack into the TV feed for their commercials.

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