[Upbeat music playing] If you’re a Napoleon Dynamite fan then stick around
because you’re about to discover 15 amazing facts about this 2004 indie comedy.
[Film clapper sound, music continues]
The title sequence wasn’t originally part of the movie.
The movie didn’t have a title sequence when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival,
but one was added in later once Fox agreed to distribute the film.
And the sequence was designed by Aaron Ruell, who played Kip,
and only had two days to produce it.
Jon Heder who played Napoleon and Efren Ramirez who played Pedro
were much older than the high school characters they played on screen.
At the time of filming, Heder was 27 and Ramirez was 31.
Jon Heder did almost all of the drawings in the movie himself.
The only one he didn’t do was the unicorn.
And the one he made of Trisha took the longest for him to make, which took about 30 minutes.
Ya know, because of all the shading he had to do on her upper lip.
Napoleon’s hair was nasty during filming.
Jon Heder got his hair permed to play Napoleon,
but he wasn’t allowed to wash it for the entire 22 days of filming.
So his hair built up quite a smell from all the time he spent shooting near dairy farms
and getting sweaty in the Idaho summer heat.
Many events from the movie were based on real life experiences.
Jared Hess and his wife Jerusha wrote the screenplay
and used many of their personal experiences to write the story.
So this makes some of the best parts like: Napoleon dragging a toy behind the bus,
the chapstick phone conversation,
the cow death scene, and even the poofy sleeve joke even funnier knowing that those actually
happened in real life.
Even Napoleon's family's pet llama, Tina, belonged to Jared Hess's mother.
The time machine gag was based on Aaron Ruell’s real life brother who had a similar experience like Napoleon and Uncle Rico.
Ruell’s brother actually bought a fake time machine from someone online,
and it reportedly looked even worse than the one you see in the movie.
The hook the seller used to convince Aaron Ruell’s brother to buy it
was by including a few $10 bills from different time periods to prove that the machine really worked.
Rex was almost played by another famous comedic actor.
Jack Black almost got the role of the over-the-top martial arts instructor,
but the role went to Diedrich Bader instead.
Bader also didn’t pull any punches for his scene with Kip
and was hitting Aaron Ruell pretty hard during each take.
But the worst part of it was that Ruell had a very bad migraine that day,
so if Kip looks like he was in pain, it’s because he really was.
Jon Gries, who was the meat-loving Uncle Rico, is often misquoted as being a vegetarian,
but he stated in the audio commentary that he just doesn’t like eating steaks.
Even still he was dedicated to his role and chowed down on red meat for each take,
but he would spit the meat out between takes,
and in this scene you can see him spit out the meat into his hand.
Tina Majorino who played Deb also had some food problems of her own.
Even though Deb eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
Tina has never eaten one because of a life-threatening allergy she has to peanuts.
It took four take to get the steak to hit Napoleon in the face.
The piece of meat was actually thrown from off screen by Jon Gries
and hit Jon Heder so hard it gave him a bruise on his nose.
There were two different versions of Kip’s Tupperware demonstration.
To film the scene they had one filled with cement and another one without.
They did a take with each Tupperware and ended up using the one that broke
because of how much funnier Aaron Ruell’s reaction was to watch.
A few fast facts about the movie that you may not have noticed are:
The cheese pile from the phone conversation that changes size between shots
because they only had one block of cheese to use for all the takes.
The hilarious dialogue exchange Rico had with Kip over his internet use
was completely improvised.
And D-Qwon’s voice from the Dance Moves tape was actually provided by Jon Heder.
Napoleon’s hilarious belly flop off the fence was real,
and Jon Heder fell so hard that he said it knocked the wind out of him.
Lafawnduh’s real family starred in the movie.
The movie was filmed in Preston, ID
which Jared Hess said doesn’t have a lot, if any, Black people,
so he told Shondrella Avery to bring her actual family to be extras
for LaFawnduh and Kip’s wedding.
Napoleon’s famous dance scene wasn’t choreographed.
Tina Majorino helped Jon Heder choreograph some of his steps,
but Heder came up with most of the moves by himself on the day of filming.
The dance was filmed in only three takes
and the best parts of each were spliced together for the final cut of the movie.
What’s your favorite part from Napoleon Dynamite?
Let me know in the comments below.
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