10 Things You Didn’t Know About Top Gun

It was the top grossing movie of 1986 and for damned good reason. Top Gun is one of those movies that needs to be shoved into a time capsule or blasted into space in case those aliens start feeling frisky. It’s definitely a product of the Cold War and might feel a bit strange watching it through the lens of 2019, but it is exactly the type of 80’s movie that mixed rockin’ music, hot ladies, and killer action special effects to deliver one hell of an experience. Feel free to browse below at these 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Top Gun.

#1. The Director: Tony Scott had recently made the vampire drama The Hunger a few years earlier. It wasn’t a massive success and it was only because of a commercial that Tony had shot for automaker SAAB with a jet racing a car that gave him an opportunity to direct Top Gun. He would later be fired on set 3 different times before finally finishing the film.

#2. The Vision: Tony Scott’s original vision of Top Gun was for it to be Apocalypse Now on an aircraft carrier. Then he decided it would be like a rock n roll fighter jet movie.

#3. Getting Tom: They had sent Tom Cruise the script several different times but he would never commit to it. They found out the Blue Angels were going to be flying in an air show locally so they got Tom to ride over there and go for a spin with the pilots. They took him in the air and spun him around at 3G, making him barf in a bag. When he got back down to land, he immediately ran over to a payphone and called his agent to accept the film.

#4. Ice-men: Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer had a cold relationship on and off set. They rarely were around each other away from the cameras. Either Tom would be hanging out with the guys or Val would. Not both of them. The relationship they had in the film was very similar to the real life relationship. The “bullshit” scene in the hangar wasn’t in the script. Just came from Val.

#5. Negative Ghost Rider. The Pattern is full: One of the things about Top Gun that is most unrealistic is the flying. That may sound weird since it is about fighter pilots but real combat aviators would never fly as close to one another as they do in the film. They tried to get some shots of the planes moving in a more realistic formation and scenes that depicted what actual combat would look like but it just didn’t look cinematic enough. Compromises were made and now we have a movie about F-14’s needed to get extremely close to get a missile lock that could have been done at ranges 10X’s what we see in the film.

#6. Barf-bag: They filmed some of the actors during their fly-alongs but the footage was unusable for the film because all of the men looked so sick while doing it. Anthony Edwards was the only actor to go up in the plane and not get sick. Kilmer also didn’t get sick, I guess, but that is because he refused to go up in the plane.

#7. RIP: A very famous acrobatic stunt pilot by the name of Art Scholl died while filming the background for the scene that would be used for the Goose crash scene. He had a trailing plane behind him but Art’s plane disappeared through a cloud and the trailing plane lost sight of him as he crashed into the ocean, unable to recover for a spin. The film is dedicated to his memory.

#8. WAAAA: Tony Scott said that Meg Ryan cried on cue 22 times in a row.

#9. If you’re not first: The real Top Gun school doesn’t have an award for the top students. In reality, the aviators graduate from the school and then head back to their squadrons to train their comrades in what they learned.

#10. Rock n’ Roll: Soundtrack god Kenny Loggins basically fell into the role of the singer for the hit song “Highway to the Danger Zone”. He wasn’t originally going to be the singer for the tune and it ended up reviving his career and becoming the biggest hit from the film.