I guess in the end, the moral of the story is to never let jealousy and arrogance control your actions, and to keep a good supply of fly paper around your science experiments. Otherwise, you're gonna have a bad time.

And that's, um, that's chaos theory.

- Was originally a Tim Burton project.

- The inside-out baboon puppet required 3 people under the floor to operate: two to control movement, the third to pump the blood. The rest of the crew forgot about them during the lunch break, however, and left them there.

- Chris Walas, the head of creature effects for the film, had already made a name for himself in the special effects field through his creation of the monsters in Gremilins and the melting face effect in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He essentially used a modified version of the latter effect for the scene where Stathis's hand is melted by Brundles vomit (yuck): stone bone surrounded by layers of gelatin which were then melted on film.

- Martian Scorsese told David Cronenberg that he looked like a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. So Cronenberg decided it was appropriate to have himself cameo as the doctor who delivers the maggot baby in the nightmare sequence.

- It took 5 hours to apply Jeff Goldblum's makeup in the later stages of the transformation.

- Michael Keaton was considered for the role Seth Brundle, but he turned it down.

- As such, Jeff Goldblum was not one of the top candidates for the role. In fact, the executives at Fox thought he wasn't nearly bankable enough, and Chris Walas feared he would be hard to work with on makeup. But eventually, Goldblum won them over, and he even got his at-the-time girlfriend Geena Davis cast as the female lead.

- Chris Walas didn't want to create a transformation effect similar to An American Werewolf in London or Thriller. Instead, he came up with the idea that the transformation wouldn't so much be morphing from one stage to another, but rather Brundle's flesh rotting away before finally giving way to the fly monster-thing underneath, which would burst out in the climax.

Ewewewewewewewewewewewew.

I just now noticed he has a little mouth thing. I need bleach.

Okay, I'm good.

- Despite everything that happens in this movie, Geena Davis was only genuinely disgusted when Brundle's ear fell off.

- Chris Walas's work earned him top billing in the credits (his name was cheered during the test screenings) and an easy Oscar victory a year later. He insists he only won because his name appeared before everyone else's.

- In one of the most infamous deleted scenes of all time, a now desperate and undelightfully mad Brundle sends a baboon and a cat through the teleporter to see what would happen. A hybrid abomination appears on the other side, and Brundle puts it out of its misery by beating it to death with a pipe.

...

Yikes.

The scene was cut when a Toronto test screening demonstrated the somewhat nebulous idea that showing your hero mutilate and kill cute animals sort of makes him unsympathetic. Thankfully, the sequel more than fulfilled the animal abuse quota.

The scene is on Youtube, but I ain't embedding it because reasons.

- There exists an alternate ending where Geena Davis's character dreams that Brundle's baby is in fact a beautiful human baby with butterfly wings that flies off into the sunset. It was cut because the effects for the scene didn't look convincing. Also, it was frigging ridiculous.

- Okay, not really a fun fact, more of interesting tidbit, but nonetheless sort of cool: Mel Brooks produced this movie. Yes, that Mel Brooks. The same one who made this, too. He can produce horror movies about human deformation and identity if he wants to, dammit. Of course, he was afraid that people wouldn't take the movie seriously if they found out he was involved, so the studio downplayed his involvement. When his connection to the project eventually discovered, he decided to make the most of it and gave out deely boppers at the premiere.

Hmmmm, Mel Brooks and sci-fi. Reminds me something...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=aVZUVeMtYXc

I know what movie I'm doing tomorrow...