Top Gun: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that gives you the secret histories, little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. My name is Alex Heigel, not Jordan. Run Talk. I'm reading the wrong outline. Uh keep that in there, you know. Today we are taking a mock five look at Top Gun, Tom Cruise's beloved nineteen eighties fighter plane jingoistic extravaganza, currently enjoying a new moment in the spotlight thanks to its long in the making sequel, Top Gun Maverick Jordan's. As we uncovered in the Air Force one episode, you're far more of an expert in the aviation arts than I am. What is your particular history with Top Gun? Very little, I'm afraid, as we discussed in the Air Force one episode, I'm more of a large plane guy rather than a fast plane guy. Um. And Top Gun came out sort of in my personal pop culture danger Zone, which is nine six, the year before I was born, So it wasn't old enough to fit in with my pensiant for fetishizing old mid century entertainment. But it also wasn't new enough that I lived through it, So all in all, it really wasn't until this massive outpouring of affection for the sequel that I kind of really reconsidered it. And it's interesting to me to see how the original just exploded in the popular consciousness because it's coming not long after a string of movies colored by the war in Vietnam, and I'm talking about good, very good, and but they're also some of the most devastating movies ever made. I mean, you've got Deer Hunter, you've got Coming Home, you've got Apocalypse, now you've got Robert Altman's match. Tom Cruise was even in one of them. He's in UM four. I think that's after this. Yeah, you're right, that was eight nine. Maybe he took this to heart and made that as a corrective statement. Throughout most of the seventies, most of the movies about the military, at least the ones that weren't kind of reliving the supposed glory days of more moral wars, which is a phrase we could debate the meaning of some other time. But you know, World War Two epics like Pattent and things like that. The rest of the military movies from this period kind of took the more of the war's hell ethos and played up the horrors or at very at least the absurdity of armed conflicts. So it's really fascinating to me to see how quickly the tide turned. You know, the last helicopter out of Saigon was just a decade before Top Gun started filming. So it's really hard to imagine a movie like this getting made at any other period, let alone becoming such an enormous success. It's just such a perfect product of Reagan's America. It's really funny too that you're making that comparison between the seventies auteur era and this, because those guys that you're talking about, like Coppola and some of those guys were like real film school buffs, and the guys who are making the stuff in the eighties usually came from ads, as we'll find out with Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer. As we'll later find out, it's the films are suddenly becoming less informed by these traditional character beats and stories and suddenly more being informed by car commercials just the US. Yeah, yeah, myself, I don't give two tents of a about this movie. The only extremely eighties movie I cared about is Karate Kid, which is a movie. It's a semi autobiographical movie about me, and I watched it fourteen to seventeen thousand times growing up. Um, but yeah, it's it's worth adding that you are a black belt. Yeah, so he got me into martial arts. But yeah, so I don't really like Tom Cruise. I think he's fine in Magnolia. I admire his steadfast commitment to trying to kill himself with stunts every time a new Mission Impossible comes out, and he is sort of a fascinating like Uberman's character. He's a little short guy who's trying to like remold himself as a king god, and I admire that kind of mental dry I've But most of my feelings on him can be distilled from the fact that Christian Bale based his American psycho performance on Tom Cruise. But I am nothing if not easily swayed by popular opinion. And so as we travel through the film's genesis as a magazine article written by a guy who later became a farmer in Israel, the reason the crews strongly believes in the film's iconic greasy beach volleyball scene and the secret reason that the actor who played Goose was the toughest guy in the film. I think we might make a fast plane fan out of me. Yet you little fast plane. That's the first time that bid will come in. Here is everything you didn't know about top cut to begin with, what the hell a top gun? Other than a state of mind we all strive to occupy. Well, it's the U. S. Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Program And from one to nine eight three there was a guy named Ernie Christensen, Rear Admiral U S. N retired and a former Blue Angels pilot, which is the Navy's flight demonstration squad. He served as commanding officer of the Top Gun program. His career was predictably insane. He was the first Naval Academy graduate to complete a tour with the Blue Angels, who I don't know, have you ever seen the Blue Angels, not in person though they're the wing of the Navy that just basically go out and do like crazy loop deloops and fly bys. It's propagandas to get people hyped on the Navy. But before he did that, he flew three hundred sixty combat missions in Vietnam, and he crashed over the Tonkin Gulf in June of night after an engine flamed out, which forced him to eject from an altitude of five thousand feet. Then just two years later, during an air show with the Blue Angels at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, his F four belly landed after one of the engines remained stuck in afterburner mode and drove itself off the runway as he ejected from the cockpit. Anyway, while he was running Fighter Town, which is the colloquial name for the Marine Corps air Station Miramar in San Diego, California, Christison was approached by a freelance writer named Ahud Yanna, who spent two weeks embedded with the personnel there for an article for California Magazine was published in May of nineteen eighty three. After writing that piece, Yanna went back to Israel, where he researched and wrote another military theme book called No Margin for Air The Making of the Israeli Air Force. And he developed a farm and then he died in two thousand twelve, so good for him. Top producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer were at the peak of their powers as a production unit after hits like nine eight three, Flash Dance, n Everly Hills cop for Top Gun. Simpson came by the aviation theme quite naturally when he was born his dad as a boeing mechanic. Simpson grew up in Juneo, Alaska, attending church four or five times a week with his strict Baptist parents, and maybe that's why, upon striking it big in Hollywood, he went absolutely batch Looney Tunes for drugs and at one point was fired from Paramount after passing out mid meeting due to the combination of working on eight films at once and his heroic drug intake. He apparently also nearly drowned at a Top Gun cast party and w a bunch of pilots. Rowdy pilots threw him into a pool. He could not swim and his leather jacket and boots were weighing him down, so he had to be pulled out of the pool. Director Tony Scott recalled in a DVD commentary, now We're going to do a quick lightning round in Don Simpson's life because he exemplified the phrase coke adult Uh and as you might imagine with that live moss mentality, Uh yeah, he's that man, lived moss. He would wear black levies one oh ones and throw them away after their first wash or maybe before their first wash. I'm not clear on that, because he wanted the blackest crispus jeans on his body. Um, give them, threw them away through the way way. Yeah. Uh, you know, l a huge homeless population. None of those people could have used pants. Um. He claimed he never had plastic surgery, but various rumor mill churnings alleged that he went under the knife ten times in a six year period from for allegedly, among other things, a chin am plant, penis enlargement procedure, and placenta injections. I didn't know the enlargement thing was a real thing. I didn't know that that was a procedure one could have. I read about this from him. Your penis actually stands into your body, so what they do is is just yank the part of it that's in your body. Out ridiculous, Yes, exactly. Um. He was a pretty sex sponster. He hosted these wild all night cocaine field parties. He was alleged to have used the casting couch, which is the practice by which young actresses are forced to sleep with the person casting them on said couch. Um, and he would allegedly also secretly film these women during this moment. A former receptionist alleged that he was extremely verbally abusive to her, while also asking her to arrange for prostitutes for him as part of her day job. Um. He was close friends with the infamous Hollywood madame Heidi Flice, and he uh had sado masochistic tastes. There's a whole chapter in a book written by I think several Hollywood sex workers where they just have a chapter dedicated to him being a sado masochist. What's the book? The book is called You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again, is published in January, the same year spoiler and month spoiler alert Simpson died. Um. It described the stories of three prostitutes and one actress about the sexual encounters with various Hollywood celebrities. As you joked in here, not the most important takeaway, but do we think he was a dom or a sub? He was almost assuredly a dom Um. I don't know, though, somebody who's so in control in their daily life. Maybe like you usually find that those kind of like high powered business people like to relinquish control and kind of be you know, bossed around in bedroom settings. Uh. He refused to go to rehab instead hiring and I feel very justified calling this guy a quack. One doctor Stephen Ammerman to help him. Amaron was an addict himself who believed in a positively black sabbathy in regiment of using other drugs like morphine to combat the withdrawals from the drug The one was someone was quitting cocaine. He subsequently overdosed in the shower of Simpson's poolhouse in from a drug cocktail, an incident that prompted Bruckheimer to dissolve his partnership with Simpson. The doctor died, Yeah da yeah, Simpson himself. Than an incident, then yeah, one dies, I feel like then it All incidences are deaths, Not all deaths are incidents. Perhaps Simpson himself overdosed and died in January of n He died with twenty one different drugs in his systems, including antidepressants and stimulants and sedatives and tranquilizers, which were presumably all ingested to try and keep his body at a perfect stasis. Um. He obviously failed. Later that year, an LA Times investigative reporter named Chuck Phillips revealed the extent of Simpson's addiction and this is wild. He had been obtaining drugs from fifteen different doctors, and police found twenty two hundred prescription pills lined up in alphabetical order in his bedroom closet. Alphabetical. I mean, at least it wasn't a total animal. No. The journalist Charles Fleming would write in that Simpson's drug habit cost an excess of sixty thou dollars a month at the time he died. Jesus, Yeah, I mean, Don Simpson was I guess historically known if you're taking a very hands on role during productions, but he was noticeably absent during the filming of Top Gun because his drug use made him, uh surprise, increasingly paranoid, to the point that he rarely left his home. I mean, I'm kind of amazed that he was able to get vertical every day. There's a podcast on my heart actually called I think it's called The Dawn that's um a narrative telling of his very fascinating but also very tragic life It. Meanwhile, the much less colorful Jerry Bruckheimer majored in philosophy at college, which I of before getting into ad work. Um. He did an ad for the Pontiac gt O which I'll bring back in later, and eventually he got into film production. This is my favorite detail about this. He met Simpson at a screening of the cult favorite Jamaican Outlaw Films starring Jimmy Cliff The Harder They Come, which is really funny coming from the guy who eventually made the Rock. Um. The first flop that he made with Simpson was actually Days of Thunder starring Tom Cruise. It kind of put a dent in their momentum is you know, the hero gods of late eighties early nineties Hollywood. But he still has a pretty tremendous batting average in Hollywood. Uh, partially with Michael Bay, you know, through the Bay Run of the Blockbuster nineties, but he also created C S I and the Amazing Race. Um. All right, that runs us the category on top producers. So now we get into top writers. Brockheimer reads the article and in his words, he was struck by the lead which is at mock two and forty thousand feet over California. It's always high noon. That's pretty great, pretty greatly. So I was score points for a hood um and the photo art which he would later describe as star Wars on Earth. So it goes to Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. Two writers who met at Michigan State University, where Cash was actually EPs screenwriting partner or instructor, and um. It's funny Cash never moved to l A. He stayed in Michigan and made everyone collaborated with him long distance, which Epps explained, first they communicated by phone and mail, then they hooked up their computers with a program called carbon Copy that linked up their computers over the phone line. They would then keep a second phone line open and they would talk about the rewrite. So essentially, these guys are early Internet for runners just to write these scripts. They were both working for Paramount at the time, and Epps said that the pitch for top Gun came up in a meeting with Jeffrey Katzenberg. This is EPs again. He had a list of eight ideas that he offered us. Because I had my private pilots license, I was interested in top Gun. He added that he always envisioned crews for the lead role. And this is really interesting me because according to the Top Gun DVD commentary, Katzenberg and his fellow Paramount executive Michael Eisner didn't like the script that Epps turned in initially, and the film was shelved, or if not shelves, at least held up until there was a new CEO, a guy named Ned Tannin. He took over and he greenlit the movie during a lunch meeting, and he hadn't even read the screenplay. He just was like, up, Star Wars on Earth? Do it make it happen? Bruckheimer says they were paid about three to four hundred thousand for the script and it did not bode particularly auspicious career for the two of them. They went on to write Turner and Hooch, Dick, Tracy and Anaconda and Sure why not Flint Stones Viva Rock Vegas. Epp spent over a month at Merrimar interviewing pilots, doing water training, taking jet rides, and he also takes credit for inventing the Maverick and Iceman call signs, among a few of the other lesser ones. Uh. He seems a pretty salty. Sadly, Cash died at one point in the two thousands, but there's a really long ranging interview about his career at some site called like Remember the Eighties or something. But I don't know. If you're super interested in Jim Cash his life, you can go check that out. Isep salty because he uh, he didn't like that sounds like a low figure. They were given what three to four. I think he's salty. I think he's I think he's salty because of all of the rumors around there about how many drafts the script went through, and he said they were just minor changes here and there. They got blown out of proportion. Now we must get into Top Director. Yes, Tony Scott, Ridley's brother was hired based on a commercially done of a SOB car raising a SOB jet, And you were right. The car commercial thing ends up coming back. Jerry Bruckhamer got a start in commercials, so did the future director of Top Gun. And this is really weere. Two other rumor directors for the film were David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, which I couldn't have gone high. I got that from screen rant who have been somewhat dubious with their sources, but it does not make sense to me. Carpenter makes slightly more sense because he had come off escaped from New York, he had done Christine, he had done the thing, so maybe they were looking at him like, hey, maybe we could get this kind of weird action horror guy who had a pretty proven record at this point for doing this kind of stuff. Maybe get him. Cronenberg just had done Video Drome, which is one of the most off putting sci fi horror movies of all time. I have no idea how his name would have gotten into that conversation because he hadn't done The Fly until six, so I don't know. That's weird. It's also really weird that I guess Simpson and Bruckhammer supposedly approached Tony Scott because he directed I think it was his only feature film, The Hunger, which is this uh you described it as low medium, good vampire movie. I know it because it stars David Bowie and Kathy Deneuve, two of my my favorite people. Um, Susan Surrandon and Surround. That's right, because yeah, Bowie and Surrandon had a brief thing together. I think as a result of that movie, as they should have. Oh, I mean that's a power couple right there. But then did she end up getting with Tim Robbins of Top Gun? Wait till we get to my Meg Ryan Lightning Round. There's a lot of funny connections from the Top Gun cast. But um so Tony Scott. His only feature film has been this weird vampire movie with Bowie. The Hunger didn't do well at the box office, actually did so poorly that Tony Scott went back to directing commercials for a time because no one else would hire him. But Jerry Bruckheimer mostly felt a kinship with him because of his own ad background, wanted to take a chance on him. She's kind of nice. Yeah, no, I agree, and uh. Tony Scott's original pitch for Top Gun was Apocalypse now on an aircraft carrying, which producers shot down and hig, I'd like you to do the Mick Jagger voice via John mulaney. No, not funny. And then I guess Scott realized that it had to be a rock and roll movie about fighter pilots. Yeah funny, thank you very much. Uh not one of my better ones. Well, yeah, you got it. This is my favorite anecdote about Tony Scott, you gotta you gotta tell us Scott was fired three times during the making of this film. Um, it's gonna be close to a record, right each Yeah, each one of these has a longer story to it, but we're condensing them down. The first time he shot in slow motion, he shot like a bunch of these landings and slow motion, and he had been told not to. After the producers saw the first dailies, they were like, don't do that. It's a fast it's a rock and roll movie. We don't need slow motion. So he proceeded to shoot more scenes in slow motion, so he was dismissed for that. The second time was for costuming wardrobeing star Kelly McGillis and lighting her in such a way that and this is his quote, she looked beautiful in a horrish sort of way, the first of many horrendous things she was forced to endure for this movie. Yeah, yeah, we're not getting into Kelly mcgillis's life. It's tremendously sad. You can google it at your own time. Um, but she seems to be doing better. And the third time he shot, Cock put footage with the pilers of visors down, which you know you put Tom Cruise and val killing your movies. You want to see the money, you want to see the face, and you can't do that when they got all this you know, fast plane in their face. So that was the third time he was fired. And so the first time he was fired, he was already on the aircraft carrier and couldn't get back to land because of the weather. So he just kept shooting, which I really admire, but um, you know, he stayed on. Eventually didn't get fired a fourth time, four times the Charm and h In the DVD commentary, he says, between the Hunger and top Gun, the phone never rang. After top Gun, the phone didn't stop bringing. I moved to l A permanently, got a Ferrari, got another motorcycle, and lost my second marriage. To borrow a phrase from Neil Young's dad's Scott Young, the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. And now we must move into top cast Tom Cruise Cruise Control, cruising cruising cruise in US A cruising for a bruising. Cruise was cast in the film after working with Ridley Scott, Tony's brother on Legend, which is a semi semi memory hold terrible fantasy movie, and as he had in a clip from the thirtieth anniversary digital rerelease of Top Gun, they first offered me the film in three and at this time I was off in London working with Ridley Scott, and I remember I didn't address Top Gun during that time period. I was focused on shooting Legend. In Ridley said you gotta meet my brother. He's going to direct this film, Top Gun. And so Bruckheimer said, Cruz was still sporting his ponytail that he had from shooting Legend when he went down to meet the pilots at Miramar. And so right away these pilots are, we got this hippie coming in here. We're going to give him the ride of his life. They spun him at three to four g s and flew him upside down, and when he got on the ground, he went to the nearest phone booth and called Bruckheimer and said, I'm doing the movie. Uh. He later said that Maverick was the first character that he ever played who was larger than life. Those are his words. And it was also the first time that he had been involved in the movie from the early stages and helping kind of iron out the script. And he later said that he was really nervous about airring this movie, and Tony Scott would later recall he was out of his depth, was highwas and just amazingly considering what was to come for all the Mission Impossible movies. Tom Cruise had never ridden the motorcycle until this film, and to learn he went to the communiently named House of Motorcycles in alcohol in California, where they taught him in the parking lot of their shop. And the motorcycle that he rides in this movie he just learned, and he's given the fastest motorcycle in production of Kawasaki Ninja nine. He does not do things in half measures. I will say I've heard mixed things about Tom Cruises casting. One version is that the part was written especially for him. I guess they were inspired by his performance in the nine sports drama All the Right Moves. But there's also another, to me much more interesting bit of fantasy casting. According to some sources, John Travolta was originally considered to play the part of Maverick, but after lengthy salary debates, the studio backed off because recent movies like Urban Cowboy at All bombed and there were a number of other people at her that were considered. Matthew Modine apparently was offered the role and turned it down because of the film's pro military stance, but then would go on to do Full Metal Jacket. I guess that's not pro military though, yeah. Um, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, Matthew Roderick, Sean Penn, Michael J. Fox, Scott bo and Tom Hanks. We have our first Hanks connection. They all supposedly, according to what I found, turned this role down. I find it hard to believe it went through that many people. Um, and also Charlie Sheen, Rob Low, Kevin Bacon, Eric Stoltz, and Robert Downey Jr. Were also supposedly considered. And Charlie Sheen was so excited about this movie because this was like the hot title going around Hollywood the time, that he basically begged to take any role in it at all, even if it was a small one. And maybe it was in his blood because they you know this early stage of production. Tony Scott's vision for this was Apocalypse Now on an aircraft carrier, and his dad was in Pocalypse Now, so maybe he thought it was his destiny. But Charlie Sheen was rejected, which is maybe why he skewered top Gun in Hot Shots. Hot Shots is great. Yeah, Apparently all of the actors who were in the film actually got to ride and jets during the filming, and Anthony Edwards, who played Goose, was the only one who didn't throw up in the middle of his ride. I really do have a hard time imagining Tom Cruise throwing up. That just seems so at odds. We probably threw up and then swallowed it through his iron will Um Kelly McGillis, I just wet again. We're glossing over all of the actual horrible, real life stuff that happened to us. But even in this movie, she was not treated particularly well. Scott said that he had seen her take her top off and witness and that's the real reason she got the part. And that is that is in addition to the comment earlier where he said he made her look horrish. They were all so supposedly considering Brookshields and Deborah Winger for this. Tatum O'Neil, Jodie Foster, Daryl Hannah, Diane Lane, Sara, Jessica Parker, and Linda Hamilton's all turned down the role. Um some of those are good. Carrie Fisher was also considered for the role cruising. His famous cowboy boots as part of his wardrobe, were designed to make him more on a level footing with her because he's famously a short guy and she was several inches taller than him. I think she's five ten and he's five six, yeah, five seven, yeah, So but Scott kept them after filming wrapped because he likes cowboy boots, and Jordan tell us a little bit of the movie trickery that they used to make up for this height difference. Yeah. And the last scene in the Dinner, when You've lost that love and the fielding comes on the jukebox and they walk up to each other, Kelly McGillis is actually standing in a trench that was dug on set because they wanted the two to look like they were the same height, or at least similar height. So they first stand in a hole, which I feel like is such a beautiful metaphor for Kelly McGillis had to go through in this god forsacond production. Yeah, but as part of her research, she admirably shadowed a tremendously important woman, Christine Fox, who worked at the Marine Corps Air Station Merrimar as a civilian employee of the Center for Naval Analysis, which they probably could have phrased that better. Um, you know, like naval gazing for naval gazing was taken, but yeah, taken by n y u um at the little jab at your alma out of there. Uh. She later became the highest ranking woman ever to serve in the Department of Defense, in good on her. At the time the movie was being developed, the filmmakers wanted the character of Charlie to either be a groupie or a gymnast. I don't know how either of those would have fit into the plot, but they then head of Paramount Pictures, a woman by the name of Don Steele, used to authorize Yeah, Don s I mean that should have been the name of this character. Actually, she allegedly refused to authorize the movie Top Gun to be made until they made that character a real intelligent woman. And it's such a great role because among many other things, she has some incredible one liners. Uh, there's the scene when Charlie finds Maverick drinking at the airport bar after Goose has died spoilers, and she tells the bartender, oh, have what he's having? Hemlock is it? Which is such a great, smart, quick joke. It's it's a reference to the death of Socrates in the fourth century BC. According to legend, he was sentenced to die after being found guilty of corrupting the youth and failing to acknowledge the city's official gods, and as a result, he was forced to consume poison made of hemlock. There was just a great, deep cut, high flutant reference to pull in just as a throwaway line in this action are but Kelly Miglis was not asked to return from Maverick, saying in two thousand nineteen this is her quote. I'm old and I'm fat and I look age appropriate, and that is not what the whole scene is about. To me, he had much rather feel absolutely in my skin and who I am at my age, as opposed to placing a value on all that other stuff. Good for her. Yeah, So before mckelly McGillis was cast. Ali Shedy turned down the role because she didn't think anyone would want to see a movie about fighter pilots, which one of the all time hindsight is moves. Um. You know, the shoot seemed pretty wholesome, actually, McGillis said all that the young actors, with the exception of Cruise and Val Kilmer. Um. Kilmer because he was method, Cruise because his insanity was beginning to reiritate. Uh, stayed in a hotel for the shoot. Tom Cruise had to return some videotapes. Uh. That's American psycho reference for you. Uh. They all stayed. All the younger actors stayed in a hotel for the shoot, and they would bond by going out to dinner or to a driving range, or they would play tennis and baseball. Um. She did make an oblique reference in a two thousand interview that some of the cast went down to Mexico and got in trouble down there. Use your imagination. Yeah, this has crept up a lot of interviews with the cast. Apparently the cast with pile into Val Kilmer's van, the vehicle which he I guess shared with them was the same place where he lost his virginity, which is a interesting thing to come up while you're riding in that car um and according to Vowel, they would wreak havoc across the Mexican border. In the DVD commentary, Val Kilmer describes the shoot as like being one giant weekend. As far as making the still, McGillis has nothing but nice things to say about Cruise on their famous all in silhouette love scene was a late addition after test screening suggested it, and the reason that sin silhouette was that she had gotten a new haircut for a new film role and it was no longer consistent with the previous footage. It's also why she's got her hair in a baseball cap in the elevator scene. You know what she was making. She's making a movie called Made in Heaven, which is a seven comedy fantasy, really great plot about two souls who cross path in heaven and then attempt to reconnect once they're reborn on Earth. I think that's such a great premise. But it's really interesting to me, mostly because it features cameos by Tom Petty, Rick o'kasik of the Cars, and Neil Young, which I don't understand how they were convinced, especially Neil Young, to do that, but UM, I don't know. Maybe we were just a yeah, that's true. Um, this is the eighties. But I guess Cruise and McGillis their schedules are really tight because Tony Scott supposedly only had a matter of minutes to shoot this after the fact sex scene, which is hilarious. But this is also interesting. There's a scene earlier on in the movie when Charlie tells Maverick that she didn't want anyone to find out that she was falling in love with him. Maverick originally had a line to say, but Tom Cruise forgot it, so he just ad lib to went into kisser instead, and Tony Scott liked it so much that he left that scene in Good and Now. Val Kilmer the only Jim Morris and we recognize. Val Kilmer initially did not want to do this film. He said no recent documentary about his life. I felt the script was silly and I disliked warmongering films. But like McGillis, who he knew from Juilliard, apparently he was under contract to Paramount and so he did not have a choice, but he remained a conscientious objector. Uh. He did say that Tony's vision swayed him once he got onto the set, and so he, as he's wont to do, created his own backstory for Iceman, involving the character's relationship with his father. Of course, um there have been a lot of rumors over the years that he and Cruz did not get along with filming. While filming, they had a rivalry on the set, but it appears to have been smoothed over with the passage of time. Kilmer just kind of choked it up to him being all intense and method on set and treating Cruise as if he was actually Maverick, and every interaction with him had to be as if he was Iceman. And he was invited back for a small emotional cameo in the sequel, which is actually interesting in and of itself because it necessitated some pretty high technology recreations of his speaking voice, because he can't talk well or maybe at all, without the aid of a voice box after his very sad battle with throat cancer. He was a sweetheart, Kilmer said of Cruise during the filming, we were all quite rowdy, me and all the real fly boys and the actors, so I actually felt a little sorry for him, because we all had time to play and date the cute extras and zoom around San Diego in muscle cars, but Tom was always in some scene and never got to play with us. In order to stay in character, I guess Tom Cruise would sit as far away from the rest of the cast as possible between takes. And according to the actor who played Goose, Anthony Edwards, the script initially was skeletal and a lot of the humor was discovered in the moment from ad libs, And probably the most famous example of this involves Hell Kilmer. It's the scene when the students are being briefed by Charlie and the hangar and Maverick explains that he the bird to a MiG fighter and she asked him how he saw the mag up close, and he says he was flying inverted and then right then Ice Val Kilmer coughs bullshit, and all the guys laughed, And that line was ad lib by Val Kilmer in the moment, and everyone's reactions are genuine, are just really just laughing at him. Um Share was Kilmer's date to the premiere, which rules UM. And now we're getting into another another of America's sweethearts, Meg King Ryan. This is the Meg Ryan Lightning Round that I promised earlier. I'm so excited to get into this. UM. I completely forgot she was in this movie as Goose's wife, and I guess Tony Scott was initially reluctant to cast her because she'd appeared on a soap opera As the World Turns, but she got the role and she had her movie husband, Anthony Edwards, eventually dated in real life. But that's not all in the movie. There's the same where Goose plays Great Balls of Fire by Jerry Lee Lewis on piano. Meg Ryan, his on screen wife, would later marry Dennis Quaid, who play Jerry Lee Lewis and the Great Balls of Fire biopic, and there's some other interesting mcnavollian connections here. She would later co star with Val Kilmer and Oliver Stone's Jim Morrison movie, and then she and fellow Top Gun co star Tim Robbins, who I also totally forgot was in this movie, would act opposite one another in the comedy i Q, which also starred Walter Matthau. As Albert Einstein kind of love m grind. There's actually one other incident I forgot between Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer where they actually did get together in the trailer and Tom Cruise, uh, it goes up to Val Kilmer and he says, g like Huey Lewis and the News, and Val Komer says they're okay, And according to VAL's autobiography, Tom Cruise said, well, you know, their early work was a little too new wave for my taste, but when Sports came out in eight three, I think they really came into their own commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that I think really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Hughie has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor. Thank you for indulging me with that bit. I could have gone much longer now. Finally, I really hope that was just off the top of your head. No, I had to read that from my MDB. I don't have that whole thing memorized. Now. It is time Jordan's I hope you're ready. You got a fast plane plane talk. Yes, we are talking about the planes of Top Gun, top planes if you will. Yes. Top Gun's budget was just fifteen million dollars and a single F fourteen tom Cat cost about thirty eight millions, so Top Gun likely would have gotten made or at least made well without help from the Pentagon and the Department of Defense. But screenwriter Jack Epps Jr. Said that, despite rumors to the contrary quote, the Pentagon and Defense Department were really hands off. The Navy only had four issues. First of all, the name of the school was Top Gun and not Top Guns, which was the initial title of the film. Seems like an easy fix. Secondly, the relationship between Maverick and Charlie. Officers cannot fraternize, so Charlie became an independent contractor so they could end up romantically involved and not be brought up on charges. The third was that when they were doing research, Epps asked the pilots who they thought our biggest potential was for a conflict. This was during the Cold War, and instead of saying the Soviet Union, all the pilots said North Korea. Now, the US at this point was trying to fall relations with North Korea, so they asked us not to make the end conflict with North Korea, so it does end up being a nameless country that they fight against. And the fourth was that the Navy does not have mid air collisions, or if they do, they don't want them focused in big budget blockbusters, so it was changed to the jetwah situation that disrupts the air flow flow of air over the wings, which is actually a real incident, though I don't think anyone actually died. But yeah, considering the Navy basically viewed this film as an elaborate recruitment ad, they didn't particularly want to underscore the more hazardous aspects of enlisting in the Navy. Yeah, and incidentally, Time reported that the Pentagon was reviewing more than two hundred screenplays by the autumn after Top Guns release, which is a major increase from years prior. So Yes, their involvement in Hollywood quite deepens after Top Gun comes out. And here's the fact that's crazy to me. For a bunch of different reasons, the Navy authorized two actual missile shots to be fired for this film. I guess the rest of the shots of stuff being fired in the movie, we're done with miniatures. So these two real missile firings, they wanted to be able to reuse them from multiple times in the movie, so they filmed them from multiple angles so they'll be able to, you know, use these shots repeatedly during the film, quite literally getting more bang for the buck. And I guess these real life thank you, thank you. I guess these real life missile firings are pretty easy to pick out because, or at least if you're in the aeronautics, because the aircraft firing the missile is basically just flying straight and that would ever happen in a real life dog fight. You'd be you know, going all over the place. But to me, the fact that they fired missiles at all is pretty insane. Yeah. Um, but I guess the company that produced the model missile firings did such a good job that the Department of the Navy conducted an investigation to determine whether or not there were any other unauthorized firings of missiles from any of their planes. That's well, that's the impremature you want on your film. It's like, I always go back to this. It's like when they made Doctor Strangelove. They recreated the interior of the bomber so well that Kubrick was afraid he was going to get hauled in because the military would think that they had a leak. Um Scott wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, so he worked with the military and US government to use real planes, real equipment, the real base, ultimately paying the military one point eight million, a figure that covered the use of real pilots, who cost seven thousand, six hundred dollars an hour, according to an article in Time Magazine from six but Scott joked, they really just charged us for the fuel, which is a good deal because the nineteen eight six jet fuel was pretty cheap. It was just a dollar a gallon. BA birds now. Yeah, but Tony Scott wasn't always super precious about realism. He was filming a scene in the airplane hangar with a bunch of real life Navy extras, and they came up to him during breaks in between the shooting and complained that the patches on the actors flight suits were unrealistic, and Tony Scott basically brushed them off by saying, words are the effect of we're not making this movie for Navy fighter pilots. We're making it for the Kansas wheat farmers who don't know the difference. Somewhat dismissive, but okay, little bit. There's there's a military website called we Are the Mighty and they published a list called seventy nine cringeworthy technical errors and top Gun And the most having revelation is that there's no top Gun award in real life. It's more of a past failed thing at the school. And I don't know, I feel like this revelation is kind of a bumber. What a bummer? Um? So? The aircraft carrier shots in this film were shot on the U. S. S. Enterprise and some of the planes used were F fourteen Squadron jets, including the VF one fourteen art Varks and the VF two Black Lions planes. Which would you feel bad if you were the guy flying in art Vark if the guy next to use flying a Black Lions, I would I have no idea what any of that means, but you go take this over for me. I love this. So interiors for the U. S. S. Enterprise were shot on another aircraft carrier, the U. S. S. Ranger, And I mentioned this only because the interiors for the Ranger were also used to film interior shots for the starship Enterprise for Star Trek four, which is released the same year as Top Gun. So just to recap, the U. S S. Ranger subbed for two separate ships called the Enterprise in the same one year period. She has the range. I'd like to see Meryl Street pull that off. I love that so much. But the Enterprise is also the location for perhaps my favorite behind the scenes anecdote for this movie. Tony Scott was shooting the opening of the film. He wanted to have the aircraft taking off back lit by the sun, a real beautiful scene, and unfortunately, the captain of the aircraft carrier changed the course of the ship, moving it away from this glorious sun, and I guess Scott asked if he could steer the ship back the way it was, and the captain told him that turning the ship enormous aircraft carrier cost twenty five grand. And I don't know if if that was actually the cost of fuel and all the things that would go into needing to like course correct or if he was just purely like if this was extortion, But Scott kind of was check on the spot for grand so they could get in five more minutes of shooting, and Scott claimed that that check later bounced. It's just bluffing. That's the that's the real kicker for that. Uh. My favorite bit of fast plane trivia is that the jets were housed in Nevada and they had to fly about twenty minutes to where they were filming, and so each morning, the pilots would buzz the Nevada Brothels from about thirty ft up on the way to work. Again. Yeah that's not I yeah again. According to the DVD commentary, Scott thought this was hilarious. It's just those women are workers. To come on, guys, um random bits of plane talk. All of the film's advisors agree that pilots are not allowed to give themselves their own call sign. One of them recalls an instance in which a pilot tried to name himself Shark and was instead assigned the name Minno for the rest of his career. According it is but deservedly try to name yourself Shark. Come on. According to Commander guy Bus Snodgrass, tremendous name. A real life instructor at the Academy students are fined for making top gun references while they're enrolled. Five dollars every time you make a top gun joke at this school. Um, speaking of call signs, that's right. Do you know Goose's real name? What is it? Trick? Question is never mentioned in the film. Nick Bradshaw, I think you see it when Maverick goes to his bunk, and you see it like on his um, on his uniform in his room, But you never hear it mentioned bummer um and that officer's club scene. So in the commentary, military advisors said that the club at Miramar was actually fairly raunchy until the nineteen eighties, at which point an admiral's wife strongly advised they stopped bringing in local strippers. They do quibble with the idea that they would be heavily drinking that much the night before a mission, because they don't you don't want to be hungover in a fighter jet. Um, but grossly. Epps says that this kind of horn dog at brother environment was really only curtailed after the Tailhook scandal, in which the United States Navy and US Marine Corps aviation officers were alleged to have sexually assaulted up to eighty three women and seven men during a conference in Las Vegas. Yeah, this is just horrific. I guess the Navy and Marine aviators forced people to walk the gauntlet. They lined the hallway leading to the people's rooms, and as they would kind of pass them all, they would all just start groping them and assaulting them and their CCD footage of an U S. Navy aviation officer wearing a T shirt that has the phrase women are property on it. And this was justifiably so a huge scandal that resulted in more than three hundred naval officers, including fourteen admirals, having to face consequences, and many were pushed out of the Navy. Good and according to Medium, this also led the Navy to withdraw its support for the then in development Top Gun two around the same time in the early nineties, basically on the grounds this original movie had kind of encouraged this behavior and the Tailhook scandal. Uh, specifically the scene where Tom Cruise follows Charlie into the ladies room soon after meeting her at the bar. Good for the Navy. Uh, there's really no way to put a happy face on that story. Um, But because I'm wired this way. I'd like to take us out of that unhappy scene and into a recurring segment of the show that I like to call it belongs in a museum. This is the part of the show where I talk about priceless pop culture artifacts that have gone missing or were otherwise abused, and I think they really should have just belonged to a museum in the first place. The scene in which Maverick follows Charlie into the bathroom it was filmed at the headquarters building at Recruit Training Command in San Diego, and the building was later demolished in the late nineties. But before the headquarters could be inspected for demolition, the bathroom counter that Maverick leans on in the bathroom and stress tests for Charlie it was stolen, presumably by a top gun fan who has it in their private collection. And while we're on the topic of private collections, the diner bar featured in two key scenes in the movie, the one where Goose sings Great Balls of Fire and then at the very end where You've lost that love and feeling comes on the jukebox and uh, Charlie and Maverick have a little moment together right before the credits roll. That's a real place in San Diego hold Kansas City Barbecue, And after the release of the movie, the restaurant collected a pretty significant amount of top gun memorabilia that they had on display until there was a kitchen fire in two thousand eight, which destroyed much of the restaurant, but thankfully some most I think of the memorabilian props. According the original piano used in the movie survived and the restaurant reopens later that year in two eight. But unfortunately a few props sustained damage, like a flight helmet that got warped in the plastic all bubbled because of the heat, which is why this stuff belongs in a museum. Yes, and speaking of top gun locations, you could actually visit it. There's Charlie's house in this movie. The cute little Ocean Front Victorian Bungalow McGillis actually stayed there during the filming. Apparently it's now a pie shop. Built in seven, this cottage fell into disrepair, but when developers moved in to build a resort in that same area where the cottage was, the building was moved several hundred feet from its original location and restored to its former Victorian glory. And now it's called Hi Pie, a top gun themed pie shop along the beach front promenade. Jesus Christ. And having said all that, we'll be right back with more too much information right after this, okay, onto top cameras. Filming with all of these fast planes was an elaborate undertaking. It took fifteen months, Bruckheimer said, us to work out with the Navy lawyers and film crews how to have six cameras in the cockpits on the planes. But to the lawyers for the real hold up on that, Yeah, for sure. The actors playing the pilots were trained over three months to prepare for the velocity of an F eighteen flight. Um Scott and the crew put cameras directly on the planes, for which they needed special permission from the F a A, because they were concerned that they would break off and become these sky labs sized tunks of equipment hurtling to Earth over a vast distances. Um. For all you camera nerds out there, the team used an A six intruder with four camera positions, using special camera mounts that had been developed by Grum and aircraft co We mounted one in the cockpit looking forward over the shoulders of the pilot and the bomber navigator. The second was under the belly of the plane. The third could be mounted under either wing, looking forward or back, and another was on high on the tail looking down the fuselage. Future NASA astronauts Scott Altman piloted the F fourteen aircraft for many of the film stunt sequences, including the titular square off with the two MiGs. He's part of a bunch of the things. He was stationed at Miramar at that point, um and when they do the scenes of the aircraft buzzing the tower, that's him flying. Obviously, they did a lot of shots with miniatures, and despite Scott's professed focus on realism, Maverick and Goose are still depicted performing maneuvers that would be virtually impossible to use in training or combat. And despite all of that high flying, someone actually did lose their life during the making of this film in a fairly mundane circumstance is a veteran Hollywood film pilot named Art Shoal, who was killed shooting second unit aerial footage on the northern coast of San Diego when his iplane crashed into the sea. Yeah, and he intentionally put the plane into a spin. The capture of the footage with his onboard camera for the movie. But then as lane malfunctioned when he tried to pull himself out of the spin and he couldn't do it and his I guess. His last words over the radio were reportedly, I have a problem. I have a real problem. And the exact cause of this crash was never actually uncovered, probably because the plane was never recovered and neither was his body, but the film is dedicated to his memory. In happier developments, you cannot talk about Top Gun without talking about Top Volleyball. The iconic baby oiled volleyball scene that so many people have pointed out contributes to the homo erotic nature of the entire film. Uh Pauline Klee wrote in her review at the time, when McGillis is off screen, the movie is a shiny homo erotic commercial, just burn but incisive. That scene happens to be very important, Cruise said in interview with The l A Times. First of all, it shows that two fighter pilots physical prowess is very important. Plus the scene shows the constant competition between these guys, how they compete on every level, which is just truly the most fascinating insight into the mind of Tom Cruise. Um EPs agrees. He says that the scene was originally written his basketball but got changed, and he said, the idea was that these guys competed in the air and on the ground. The difference is the location and the amount of baby oil they lathered on the guys. We didn't write it as male beefcake. We wrote it as the highest level of competition. The court at Miramar was built. The beach volleyball court was built for the film. They just dumped a ton of sand in and they immediately dismantled it after shooting the wide shots showing the more impressive hits are professional volleyball players as stand ins and um, yeah, yeah, I love that they just threw this volleyball court up in a matter of hours. They just got a dump truck to back up tumps, some sand, threw up, some poles cready to roll, and then they were like, this is an embarrassment, get it off my military base. Pretty much. I guess that scene and also the locker room scene were a late addition to the film, basically designed for Tom Cruise to strip down for his fans, and one of the technical advisors for the film claimed that the filmmakers basically said, we're paying one million dollars for Tom Cruise, so we gotta show some flesh, and I guess port Tony Scott was just baffled by the whole thing. He's quoted as saying, I just didn't know what to do with it, the volleyball scene, but in the end it just became hunky bodies in California, Son, But it became a favorite with the women as well as the guys, especially the San Francisco guys, he said. Later an interview featured in the film's thirtieth anniversary DVD said he said, I didn't have a vision of what I was doing other than just doing soft porn um. The look of the actors in the scene, and I guess in the pilot program in general was said to be inspired by the work of photographer Bruce Weber, who's probably most famous for the work he did for Abercrombie and Fitch. He did a lot of photography for the famous posters and bags and stuff for them, so in case you needed another way to draw a line between this film and the worst people you know in high school, there you go. Uh. Kimmer made us semi funny joke, and another DVD interview, he says, I always suspected Tom might have cooked my volleyball close ups. If you notice, I don't have any cooking in movie lingo means the frames were either over or underdeveloped and therefore unusable, And he joked, I think Tom went in there got him a little Paola because I looked good. Oh man, top songs were moving to my favorite part of Top Gun with my boy. Kenny Loggins interviewed him about this, right, I interviewed him. I used Kenny Loggins was very sad about climate change, and I made a danger Zone joke out of the headline. And I don't think he liked it. Uh. I hope he liked it. I didn't hear back from him. Um. So Obviously, the best known Kenny Loggins track from Top Gun is danger Zone, but he and Peter Wolfe also wrote Playing with the Boys for the volleyball scene, as in, he literally wrote it for that scene and attempt to distinguish himself from the other candidates for the job. This is an interesting look into how these songs get written into films. They basically pull in a bunch of people and screen the scenes that are going to need these songs under them, and then people kind of say, oh, I wanted to write for that one. I want to write for that one, um and then proceed to do so, and then all of those songs are then chosen by the filmmakers. So at this screening, Loggins and Wolf are saying, while we watched it, and we could tell from the opening scenes, the aircraft carrier scenes, that everyone in the room is salivating, Oh my god, this is where most of these people are gonna want to write for. They're going to write for the big epic parts. And he said, but when the volleyball scene came on, Peter and I went, yeah, that one. No one's going to write for that scene. Let's make that happen. It has since become a hit in gay nightclubs. Meanwhile, Mother and Georgio Moroder and his lyricist Tom Whitlock, we're working on the rest of the film's music. Their partnership began when Whitlock to helped fix the brakes on the rotors Ferrari, which I think is adorable. Over three hundred songs were considered for the film before Bruckheimer asked Georgia to write something, and he came up with a song that would become danger Zone. Whitlock wrote the lyrics and they started casting about for a vocalist. You know. The Judas Priest was asked to contribute the song Reckless to the soundtrack, but then they said no because I thought the movie was gonna flop. If you told me that Judas Priests had a song in top Gun, I would have watched this movie. Um. Up to that point, they thought they had a different act, Logan said. And he said he thought it was either Toto, which fell apart over contracting reasons, or Mickey Thomas and Jefferson starship. Logan said he met Kevin Cronin from Rio Speedwagon a year ago and he told him that they asked him if he was available, and he said the notes were too high, but not for Loggin's baby. Corey Heart of All People reportedly said no because he wanted to write his own songs. Brian Adams supposedly turned it down because of the film's military themes, which is also the reason that Thomas and Starship withdrew from consideration, and Loggins, who obviously ended up singing the song, retired the song from his live sets briefly when CNN started using it as the background for dropping bombs on Bagdad, and then he says, quote, I thought it was bogus what was happening, and I didn't want to be associated with it, so I pulled it out of the show. Then I decided, since it was such a good song, I made a video of extreme sports and we used that footage as the background in concert. Loggins didn't even meet Cruise until two thousand and sixteen, but they were out doing a late night show together and he asked him if danger Zone would be in the sequel, to which Cruise replied, it wouldn't be Top Gun without danger Zone. So there you go. That makes me happy. I really like that. I like the Tom said that to him. Yeah, that's um. And we also cannot talk about Top Guns music without talking about Berlin's done Anna Take My breath Away, which picked up the Oscar and Golden Globe that year for Best Original Song. Wolf Many people probably know this. I just want to throw this in here. Berlin singer Terry Nunn was an original casting choice for Princess Leah. People that you didn't know that why didn't she do it? She told it down. I'm not sure if she turned it down or if they just but she like screen test. I think she did a screen test with Harrison Ford. Yeah, she's talked about it a lot. So Take My Breath Away was actually written and recorded after Danger Zone because Bruckheimer requested a song for a love scene. It was originally pitched to a band called The Motels, but Moroder had recently produced no more words for Berlin, so he brought it to them. He has said it is the song that he is most proud of having a hand in, which what to paraphrase one of my favorite Rosie iv Ittt reviews, I hate the song. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate the song. I hate it. It's a dirt that Encore operates all my least favorite elements of the eighties music and Marouder's work, frigid synths, lock step beats, and ridiculous squawking basslines. I hate this song so much is one of my least favorite top ten songs of the last fifty years. There I feel better now good. How do you feel about the song? It's trickly crap and it's awful. I hate this soft synth. Yeah, I hate it. I also hate it, maybe not as much as you, but it's not like a good song in my opinion. The academy beggs to differ. Uh singer Terry None would recall that of the recording of it, that we would go into Georgia's vast studio complex in North Hollywood, where he was doing three or four projects simultaneously, with an assistant producer in every room. He would blow in and say, I don't like the horns, take them out. We'll do more later, Okay, bye. Then he'd returned later, Oh, I love it. Do more harmonies because cocaine. Apparently, the band's manager thought the song was a dud and told None Terry, if this goes top ten, I'll get a mohawk. But the record company kept pushing and it went to number one around the world. So MTV came and filmed our manager getting a mohawk, quote Terry Nunne. But it was not all sunny for the band. When they were told the song was nominated for an Oscar, they were invited to perform on stage at the ceremony, but Terry Nunne said she refused to go because they wouldn't let her perform the whole song. The Oscar is doing like a big best song medley, so she turned it down, which is a decision she deeply regrets, especially upon finding out that Take My Breath Away won the Oscar. And now we're into a segment I like to call top Results. Obviously, the film was a huge hit. It grows three fifty six million against the production budget of fifteen million. Um. You mentioned this earlier, but people have theorized that after our loss in quotes in Vietnam, the film allowed Americans to feel good about the military again in the middle of the jingoistic Ra Ra eighties. I loved Ebert's review of Top Gun, where he says, movies like Top Gun are hard to review you because the good parts are so good and the bad parts are so relentless. The dog the dog fights are absolutely the best since Clint Eastwood's electrifying aerial scenes in Firefox. But look out for the scenes where the people talk to each other. Military recruiters parked themselves outside of theaters that were showing the film and reported a surge in calls about naval aviation officer programs. The Navy also wove in danger Zone type sounding music into their Join the Navy commercials right after the movie came out. And I mean that they're they're basically their ads look like Top Gun scenes. They included all these shots that look like they were taken directly from Top Gun and had sounded like music. Yeah, the number in uniform of uniform personnel in all branches of the military increased by twenty thousand over the previous year, and about sixteen thousand of those were just in the Navy. According to an article in the U. S. Naval Institute's magazine UH Less uh Militaristically, sales for ray bands, aviator sunglasses jumped after the movie premiered, as did leather bomber jackets and white T shirts. And the producers knew their film was a big hit when they started seeing guys rolling around l A dressed like Tom Cruise's character. This is something I didn't know. This sort of One of the unexpected UH consequences of Top Gun success was it really helped jump start the home video market because when VHS tape started going on sale in the early eighties, they were being sold for like a hundred bucks, which these days for inflation, was like two hundred and thirty dollars. So as a result, most of these tapes were being sold directly to rental stores who then would rent them out and try to make their money back that way. It really wasn't for like an individual consumer market, and the prices for VHS tapes with falls the eighties continued, but Top Gun sold their VHS tapes for twenty seven dollars, which was the lowest price for a top tier Hollywood movie, and they could afford to sell it cheaply because Pepsi bought sixty seconds worth of ad space at the start of the tape, which they filled with like a top themed diet Pepsi ad. And it's actually kind of cute. There's a pilot and he opens his bottle of diet pepsi, but he can't get it out of the cup holders, so he flies upside down like that. Yeah, it's good. It's good in the port and his cup. So since then, pricing VHS tapes to own right away has become a common practice, and home video allow for ease of repeated viewing, which gave rise to something called the Cinema fifty two Project. Have you ever heard of this? It's it's basically equal parts performance art and equal parts experiment. Uh. Participants in the Cinema fifty two Project watch a film fifty two times over the course of a year to test, according to the website, to test how it will affect your work, your relationships, your dreams, your attitude, your breakfast, whatever. And there's a guy who watched this movie fifty two times of the course of a year, I think it was once a week thereabouts. And revelations from this really, I would imagine quite torturous experiment included Tom Cruise blinks for hundred and sixty nine times, the were the is spoken two hundred and twenty three times, and the average time between air Boss Johnson's coffee spills is twenty seven minutes and twenty three seconds. Okay, uh, you know we also probably have to talk about Top Gun Maverick, a movie I have not seen and will not. Um. So I'm busy seeing the San Francisco Alamo Drafthouse restorations of John Carpenter's classic films throughout the summer, so I have bigger and better plans Jordan's and Cruise. I go against this tide of critical cruise reappraisal. AH continue, well this sequel. You very nearly got your way, because this sequel was held up for many, many many years, and for a while look like it might not happen. Partially was held up because of the aforementioned tailhook scandal, but also a number of other crucial reasons. One reason was that the technology was getting so good with fighter planes that the military didn't want to participate because they didn't want cameras anywhere near these new aircraft, just because they were afraid of, you know, still the tail end of the Cold War, so they wanted to keep their new technology under wraps. And also, Tom Cruise was a long time hauled out because I guess he wasn't really interested in doing sequels, and when he finally agreed to star in one, his salary demands made him and this is a quote from the studio unaffordable. Um. So they kind of tabled this whole idea for many many years, and they picked it up again in two with original director Tony Scott expected to helm, but his suicide in twelve placed the project in jeopardy. I guess in the days before his death, he'd finalized the script and started scouting locations, and he and cruised toward a naval air station in Nevada, just I think a week prior to his death for research purposes. But the film development carried on, and in June seventeen, Cruise revealed that the sequel would be titled Top Gun Maverick. Because he was very against having a number in the sequel. He thought that the numbers really cheap in sequels, so you refused to have a number. That's why you got Top Gun Maverick. And talking about the Top Gun sequel, Jerry Bruckheimer said, the majority of the pilots that we worked with on this current movie said they joined the military because of the first Top Gun. And that's really fun to me because one of the notes of the producers received from Paramount initially when doing the first Top Gun was too much flying, which is great. But Top Gun director the late Tony Scott, we'd call Top Gun the purest form of escapism, saying that it quote mainlines entertainment. That's good. I'd like to add that it free bases adventure huffs Exhilaration and shoots up Excitement and Top Gun was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in two thousand and fifteen. They said in an official statement at the time, turns out we all feel the need the need for They did not say that it's gonna googled at him. Absolutely, they did not say that, Well, Jordan's I think that's about we all have for fast Plane. Did you enjoy it more than large Plane? Oh? I mean nothing could take nothing could beat my love of large plane. But what about you? Did you? Did you enjoy this is more than you thought you would at the beginning. I enjoyed more of this than I anticipate enjoying either of those movies. But I'm just gonna say, you got a fast plane, and I want to take it to anywhere else. So with that, mine play us off. Tracy. Folks, this has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan runt Talk. Thanks so much for listening. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk and Alex Hegel, with original music by at the Apple Bomb on the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.