Trivia for
Red Dawn (1984) More at IMDbPro »

• This was the first motion picture in film history to be released with a MPAA "PG-13" rating. (The Flamingo Kid (1984) was the first film to be *given* a PG-13 rating, but sat on the shelves for five months before being released).
  
  
• The movie being shown to American prisoners at the Russian camp near Calumet is Aleksandr Nevskiy (1938).
  
  
• This film was entered into the Guinness Book of Records as having the most acts of violence of any film up to that time. It was calculated that on average an act of violence occurs at a rate of 134 per hour or 2.23 per minute.
  
  
• The cast underwent a "realistic", intensive 8 week military training course before starting work on the movie.
  
  
• The radio announces: "John has a long mustache", the same message the French resistance gets in The Longest Day (1962).
  
  
• The illustration of Genghis Khan in the high school classroom at the beginning of the film is a caricature of director John Milius.
  
  
• Charlie Sheen's feature film debut.
  
  
• The original trailer that comes on the laserdisc shows a scene with a tank rolling up to a McDonalds restaurant where enemy soldiers are eating. This scene does not appear in the final cut, and may have been removed due to a mass murder at a McDonalds in San Ysidro, CA, just weeks prior to the film's opening.
  
  
• The film's replica Russian T-72 tank was so precise that when it was transported to the studio, two CIA agents followed and wanted to know where it had come from.
  
  
• The plot, a Russian/Cuban invasion from Mexico, was based on CIA and War College studies of US weaknesses at the time.
  
  
• Five parachutists dressed as Soviet soldiers were blown as much as a mile off course during the filming of the invasion scene at the high school.
  
  
• In the movie, a regional headquarters for the invasion forces is bombed by the Wolverine insurgents. On 8/3/06 the actual 107-year-old historical landmark used in the film, the "Center Block Building" in Las Vegas, NM, was destroyed as result of heavy thunderstorms.
  
  
• During filming, an old Safeway grocery store in Las Vegas, NM, was converted to a sound stage and used for several scenes in the movie.
  
  
• The submachine gun that Strelnikov uses near the end of the film is a Jati-matic GG-95 PDW, a Finnish-made weapon that is one of about 400 that were manufactured in the mid-'80s.
  
  
• "Red Dawn" was the given code name of the military operation in Iraq that captured Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003. John Milius felt honored by that.
  
  
• The original tagline for the movie said: "In our time, no foreign army has ever occupied American soil." Some historians believe it to be historically inaccurate. During the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States, British troops did in fact occupy American territory, including an area outside of New Orleans and most notably when they captured and burned Washington, DC, including the White House itself, in 1814. Also, several islands off the coast of Alaska were occupied by Japanese forces for part of the Second World War. However, the phrasing is "In our time . . . " - i.e., within a viewer's lifetime - and that is technically correct, as no viewer was alive during the War of 1812 and at the time of the Japanese occupation, Alaska was still a territory - it didn't become a state until 1959.
  
  
• The original title of the script was "Ten Soldiers".
  
  
• Though the story takes place in Colorado, filming was actually done in New Mexico (the town of Las Vegas, NM serving as the main characters' hometown of Calumet). In the short montage of destroyed Russian vehicles that have been tagged with Wolverines graffiti, there is a highway sign in the background (with a large fish on it) advertising Storrie Lake - this is a NM state park area about 5 miles north of Las Vegas.
  
  
• The classroom flag at the start of the movie is a 48 star flag. This was the flag of World War II, and a symbolic reference for a movie portraying the start of World War III.
  
  
• In the movie, a regional headquarters for the invasion forces is bombed by the Wolverine insurgents. On August 3, 2006 the actual 107-year-old historical landmark used in the film, the "Center Block Building" in Las Vegas, New Mexico was destroyed as result of heavy thunderstorms.
  
  

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