9 Movie Bloopers That Made the Final Cut

When a squad of stormtroopers bursts into the control room on the Death Star, watch the one on the right as they come through the doorway. He clocks his helmet square on the low door frame — and you can hear the bonk, too.

George Lucas not only kept the take, he later added a sound effect to lean into it, and gave it a wink in Attack of the Clones when Jango Fett bumps his head on his own ship. The actor, Laurie Goode, said he was as surprised as anyone to see it survive the edit.

During the “Battle of Carthage” staged in the Colosseum, a chariot gets flipped over. Once the dust settles, look in the back of the overturned chariot and you’ll find a modern gas cylinder — presumably rigged to feed one of the fire effects.

The film is set in 180 AD. Pressurized gas canisters were a good 1,600 years away. It’s the kind of thing you can’t un-see once someone points it out.

At breakfast, Julia Roberts picks up a croissant. Cut to the next shot and it’s suddenly a pancake with a bite taken out of it. Then the bite mark shifts around between shots for good measure.

This one has a tidy explanation: director Garry Marshall preferred Roberts’ performance in later takes, where she’d been eating a pancake instead. Continuity lost, but the scene plays better — which is exactly the trade-off editors make all the time.

In the Mount Rushmore cafeteria scene, Eva Marie Saint pulls a gun and fires. In the background, a young boy at a table calmly sticks his fingers in his ears — a beat before the shot goes off.

He’d clearly sat through enough noisy rehearsals to know what was coming. Hitchcock used the take anyway, because everything else about it was right, and now that little kid is immortal.

Mel Gibson’s 13th-century epic has a couple of anachronisms that no chainmail can hide. During the charge at Stirling, keep an eye on the far edges of the wide shots and you can spot a car parked in the background as the horses thunder past.

There’s also a white van that drifts through the trees during Murron’s funeral. Blink and you’ll miss them — but they’re there, quietly ruining the year 1297.

In The Curse of the Black Pearl, right around the moment Jack Sparrow barks “on deck, you scabrous dogs,” glance over his shoulder to the far left of the frame. Standing there, gazing out to sea, is a crew member in a tan cowboy hat, sunglasses, and a white t-shirt.

Turning a real working ship into a film set takes a small army, and telling the extras from the grips is harder than it sounds. This one just didn’t get the memo — or the costume.

When Bella rolls up to her new high school in that battered red pickup, look at the windshield. The boom microphone is clearly reflected there — and as the camera pulls back, you can watch the mic politely retreat out of shot.

Reflective surfaces are a sound recordist’s natural enemy, and windshields are the worst of the lot. It happens more than you’d think; it’s just rarely this easy to catch.

You’ve probably heard this one: as Dorothy and friends skip down the Yellow Brick Road, something in the background looks like a body swinging from a tree — supposedly a heartbroken Munchkin actor. It’s the internet’s favorite creepy movie legend.

It’s also nonsense. What you’re seeing is one of the large exotic birds — most accounts say a crane — that the studio borrowed from the Los Angeles Zoo to make the forest feel alive. The Munchkin scenes were filmed separately, so those actors weren’t even on set that day. Snopes has been patiently debunking this since 1997.

Another classic you can safely cross off: the story that a Roman charioteer in the 1959 epic Ben-Hur is wearing a wristwatch. Charlton Heston himself waved it away in his memoir, and when you actually pause the chariot race, there’s no watch to be found — just a shadow people have been squinting at for decades.

Genuine anachronisms are all over cinema, but this famous one is a phantom. If someone swears they’ve seen it, ask them to point to the frame — they can’t.