A great movie will transport you to a new world and into the lives of its characters, engaging your willing suspension of disbelief. But sometimes when your attention wanders from the story, you notice mistakes that take you out of the narrative—small errors that the filmmakers hoped you’d never noticed or never even noticed themselves. Now, they’re film history, preserved in the final cuts of their movies. Read on for seven classic movie mistakes that may have slipped right past you, even if you’ve unknowingly watched them dozens of times.
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The biggest movie of all time includes a big historical blunder. As the camera pans over the dead and wounded on a Civil War battlefield, it also pans over a street lamp. While only gas lamps would have been used at the time, some fans see what appears to be the outline of a more modern light bulb inside.
The Wizard of Oz is a classic that has stood the test of time, but, despite what its biggest fans would say, it’s not perfect. And one blooper that made it into the final version literally diffuses some of the movie’s magic: After terrorizing the Munchkins in an early scene in Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) prepares to make a grand exit in a ball of red smoke. But if you keep your eyes peeled, you’ll notice that the trap door in the floor through which Hamilton “disappears” starts to open before the smoke effects can fully obscure it.
The iconic noir film Double Indemnity follows an insurance salesman named Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), who is roped into a scheme concocted by one of his beautiful clients, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), to kill her husband. Neff is unmarried, which makes him an easy mark for the femme fatale—but MacMurray’s real-life wedding ring is visible in many scenes. He was married to theater and silent film performer Lillian Lamont at the time.
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Far in the background of the upper right corner of a scene in which Clint Eastwood’s Blondie and Eli Wallach’s Tuco attach dynamite to the a in the classic Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a car can be spotted driving by. The film is set in 1862, and the automobile would not be invented until 1886. (Also, in the next scene, the pair are completely dry, despite having just been in the river.)
The first Stars Wars film contains one of the most famous movie bloopers ever—perhaps because not many movies have been watched quite so many times by their fans. If you watch closely during the scene in which a group of stormtroopers menace C-3P0 and R2-D2 on the Death Star, you’ll notice that one of them bonks their helmeted head on the top of the door frame as they enter the room.
Indiana Jones is famously no fan of snakes, but he needn’t be too worried about getting bitten—when the confrontation between the adventuring archeologist and a hissing, hooded serpent in Raiders of the Lost Ark was filmed, the snakes were kept safely in a glass tank. However, in the original release of the first movie in the franchise (as well as early VHS releases), you could actually see the snake reflected in the glass as Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) appeared to gape at it from only inches away. Unfortunately the blooper has been digitally scrubbed from the DVD and Blu-ray release, but the legend lives on.
Hopefully you were swooning too hard over the romantic chemistry between Edward (Richard Gere) and Vivian (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman to notice a silly goof during their cozy breakfast the morning after their first night together. Vivian nibbles at a croissant as Edward reads the newspaper, but when the camera cuts back to her, she’s suddenly holding a pancake with a single perfect bite out of it.