Goofs for
Escape from New York (1981)

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• Miscellaneous: Italian subtitles mistranslate "fission" as "fixation".
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: Walls in the "Choc full o' Nuts" building clearly made of styrofoam.
  
  
• Continuity: Baseball bat falls off the head of the gladiator, but is back again in subsequent shots.
  
  

• Crew or equipment visible: You can see a crew member giving Isaac Hayes a "stand-up" cue quite visibly in the left side of the screen when The Duke is quieting the Madison Square Garden crowd.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: At the start, the scientist tells Snake they cannot neutralize the explosion until 15 minutes before the deadline. In other words, it can be neutralized anywhere from 15 minutes to a fraction of a second before the deadline, but no sooner. Therefore, it's OK that Snake lets the timer run down to 6 seconds.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: Snake and the others return to the elevator on top of the World Trade Centre (immediately following the loss of the jet-glider). Sticking out near the jam, you can see the fingers of a crew member pushing the right-side door closed.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: Crew fingers visible closing elevator door after failed escape run to glider. Seen on widescreen DVD edition.
  
  
• Factual errors: When Snake lands on top of the World Trade Center tower, his altimeter indicates less than 200. The tower was over 1300 feet.
  
  
• Continuity: When the President shoots Isaac, the cable to bring Kurt up from the city is clearly under the railings but when Kurt reaches the top the cable is over the top railing.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the sequence where Snake is being chased by the Crazies (and is about to shoot an oval pattern in a wall so he can break through), his eye patch shifts enough to reveal a perfectly good eye.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): The drunk wearing the President's pulmonary monitor incorrectly sings "Hail To The Chief" to the tune of the Christmas carol "Joy To The World".
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Brain stabs Romero in the storeroom and lowers him to the floor, Romero drops the last few inches and Brain is left holding the "knife" but you can see there is no blade.
  
  
• Factual errors: The American flag on the right-hand side of the tail on Air Force One is not reversed. In reality it would have the stars in the upper right to represent a real flag moving forward.
  
  
• Continuity: After Snake takes off in the glider, Charles Cyphers is seen in the control room wearing a shirt and tie. In the next shot, he is wearing a suit jacket, which he then takes off. He wears the shirt and tie for the remainder of the scene.
  
  
• Continuity: The interiors shots of the plane before the crash are from a wide-body airliner. However the wrecked fuselage seen on the ground is not a wide-body.
  
  
• Continuity: When Cabbie takes Snake to see Brain, Maggie answers the door. She goes inside first. Snake follows her and Cabbie goes in last, shutting the door behind him. But now in the indoor shot, Cabbie and Snake are in front and Maggie is way behind them.
  
  
• Continuity: Air Force One is shown in flight as an aircraft with engines mounted at the back either side of the tail. The wreckage on the ground and the computer image on the USPS computer as it crashes are of a 737 type aircraft with the engines mounted on the wings.
  
  
• Continuity: When the USPS initially go into New York immediately after Air Force One crashes, helicopter 3 is shown landing and a large chunk of the sticky back black plastic used to create its USPS livery is peeling off and missing from the tail section revealing the green US Army livery underneath. When it takes off again a few moments later, the tail is back to perfect black again.
  
  
• Continuity: When Snake get into a car to steal it to take himself, Brain and Maggie to the Duke's place the headlights are on. However when he starts to drive the car away the lights are off. The next shot shows the car font the front with the lights on. After crashing the car through the barrier after the run down Broadway the lights are off again but when the car stops the lights are on again.
  
  
• Continuity: When Snake first receives a signal on the President's Life Signs transponder, he radio's Houk then checks his mission timer. The timer reads 18:50:18 (and counts down to :14 seconds). As the scene is fading (at the :14 sec. mark), the timer changes to 17:50:14
  
  
• Continuity: Toward the end, the helicopter lands just outside the prison walls, and it's broad daylight. The rest of the film takes place at night, even though the times given indicate clearly that the helicopter landed only moments before the subsequent action.
  
  
• Errors in geography: The scene at the train station is clearly not in New York. The city's two rail stations, Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal both have their tracks located below ground level.
  
  

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