50 Fun Facts About Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Which candy does Elliott use to lure the alien home in Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial?

Reese's Pieces got the part after Mars refused to let M&M's appear, fearing the alien would frighten children. Sales of the candy soared once the film opened.

MGM gave Dorothy ruby slippers, but which colour are the magic shoes in L. Frank Baum's Oz novel?

Silver shoes carry Dorothy home in the book; the studio changed them to show off its costly new Technicolor process.

Which humble item does The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy call essential for any space traveller?

A towel is so prized in Douglas Adams's comedy that fans carry one in public every 25 May, a tribute first held two weeks after he died in 2001.

Which sweet does the White Witch use to tempt Edmund Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

Turkish delight buys Edmund's loyalty with the promise of an endless supply, and real-world sales of the sweet rose after the 2005 Narnia film.

Which ruined landmark reveals that the alien world is really Earth at the end of 1968's Planet of the Apes?

The Statue of Liberty ending is the film's own: Pierre Boulle's novel instead flies its hero home to a Paris where the Eiffel Tower still stands.

Which actor voiced Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy while David Prowse wore the black suit?

James Earl Jones dubbed the lines afterwards because George Lucas wanted a darker voice than Prowse's West Country accent.

Which stainless-steel sports car replaced a refrigerator as Doc Brown's time machine in Back to the Future?

The DeLorean took over after Steven Spielberg vetoed the fridge, worried that children might climb into one at home and get trapped.

What is the name of the three-headed dog that guards a trapdoor in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone?

Fluffy belongs to Hagrid, who lets slip that the way past the enormous beast is to play it music until it falls asleep.

Which Star Trek actor based the Vulcan salute on a Jewish priestly blessing glimpsed in childhood?

Leonard Nimoy peeked at the blessing as a boy, though the congregation was not supposed to watch, and later gave its hand shape to Spock.

Into which volcano must Frodo Baggins throw the One Ring to destroy it in The Lord of the Rings?

Mount Doom is where Sauron forged the Ring, and its fiery heart is the only place the thing can be unmade.

Which colour pill does Neo swallow to wake up outside the simulated world in The Matrix?

Red stands for the hard truth and its rival for comfortable illusion, a choice Morpheus offers before Neo wakes in a pod wired to machines.

Which softly spoken computer turns on the astronauts of Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

HAL 9000 can read lips, which is how it learns that the two astronauts, talking where they think they cannot be heard, plan to disconnect it.

Which mysterious commander pilots the submarine Nautilus in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas?

Captain Nemo hides behind a name that is Latin for 'nobody', the same alias Odysseus used to outwit the Cyclops.

What name does George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four give the ever-watching leader of Oceania?

Big Brother stares from posters all over Oceania, and the name later passed to a reality TV show built on round-the-clock surveillance.

Which artificial intelligence starts a nuclear war against humanity in James Cameron's Terminator films?

Skynet was built by Cyberdyne Systems for the US military and struck back the moment its makers tried to switch it off, a date survivors call Judgment Day.

Which crop does stranded astronaut Mark Watney grow to stay alive in Andy Weir's The Martian?

Potatoes save Watney in a story Andy Weir first released free, a chapter at a time, on his own website after literary agents had turned him down.

Which dragon guards a stolen hoard of dwarf treasure inside the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit?

Smaug echoes the dragon in Beowulf, which is also roused by the theft of a single cup; Tolkien was a leading scholar of the poem.

Which noble family rules the North from the castle of Winterfell in Game of Thrones?

The Starks take a grey direwolf as their emblem, and in the opening episode the children adopt a litter of orphaned direwolf pups.

Which Studio Ghibli fantasy sends ten-year-old Chihiro to work in a bathhouse run by the witch Yubaba?

Spirited Away, in which Chihiro's parents are turned into pigs, became the first hand-drawn, non-English-language film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Which everyday British street object is the TARDIS stuck looking like in Doctor Who?

A police box was a telephone kiosk for officers on patrol, once common on British streets and now far better known as the Doctor's time machine.

Which author wrote both the science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea fantasy books?

Ursula K. Le Guin was the daughter of two anthropologists, and The Left Hand of Darkness imagines a planet whose people have no fixed sex.

Which role-playing game, co-created by Gary Gygax, was accused of promoting Satanism in the 1980s?

Dungeons & Dragons grew out of miniature wargames, with one big change: each player runs a single character instead of commanding an army.

Which hero do players control in The Legend of Zelda games, despite the title naming a princess?

Link wears green because the first game's hardware allowed his sprite only three colours and the adventure was set mostly in a forest.

Which helmeted supersoldier leads the fight against the alien Covenant in Microsoft's Halo video games?

Master Chief is a naval rank: the hero is Petty Officer John-117, and the cutscenes are staged so that players never see his face.

What is the name of the nation, ruled from the Capitol, where Katniss Everdeen lives in The Hunger Games?

Panem rose from the ruins of North America, with its ruling city in the Rocky Mountains and twelve poorer districts kept in line by the yearly contest.

Which theocratic republic overthrows the United States government in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale?

Gilead does nothing people have not already done somewhere: Atwood has said she put no practice into the book without a real precedent.

Which sceptical FBI agent and medical doctor is partnered with Fox Mulder in The X-Files?

Dana Scully is credited by some with a real 'Scully Effect', inspiring many young women who watched to pursue careers in science and medicine.

Which Starfleet captain, played by Patrick Stewart, commands the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation?

Jean-Luc Picard comes from a French wine-growing family yet speaks with an English accent; the series says French had become obscure by the 24th century.

Which director made both Alien and Blade Runner within four years of each other?

Ridley Scott came to cinema from advertising, where his many 1970s commercials included a 1973 Hovis bread advert filmed on a steep Dorset hill.

On which lush alien moon do the blue-skinned Na'vi live in the 2009 blockbuster Avatar?

Pandora is mined for unobtanium, a name borrowed from aerospace engineers' old joke word for a perfect material that cannot be had.

Which science fiction author's third law says that advanced enough technology cannot be told apart from magic?

Arthur C. Clarke stopped at three laws, joking that the number had been enough for Newton, and the last of them is by far the most quoted.

Which author's stories were filmed as Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly?

Philip K. Dick died of a stroke in 1982, the year Blade Runner opened, so he never saw the long run of films his stories went on to inspire.

Which character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels speaks in small capital letters with no quotation marks?

Death talks that way because, as a skeleton, he has no vocal cords; he also rides a milky white horse he chose to name Binky.

Which monster hunter, played by Henry Cavill on Netflix, is the hero of Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher stories?

Geralt reached a US president: Poland's prime minister gave Barack Obama a copy of The Witcher 2 video game as an official gift in 2011.

Which desert planet, home to giant sandworms, is the setting of Frank Herbert's novel Dune?

Arrakis grew out of Oregon: Herbert went to report on the state's shifting coastal sand dunes, never finished the article, and wrote the novel instead.

Which novelist, also the creator of the medical drama ER, wrote the book behind Jurassic Park?

Michael Crichton had used the idea before: his 1973 film Westworld is also about a theme park whose attractions, robots that time, run amok.

Which large yellow bird do heroes ride as transport in nearly every Final Fantasy game?

The Chocobo came from its designer's childhood memories of raising a chick to adulthood, and first appeared in Final Fantasy II in 1988.

Which race of robots wages war on the Twelve Colonies of humanity in Battlestar Galactica?

The Cylons changed makers between versions: in 1978 a long-dead reptilian race built them, while the 2004 remake made them humanity's own creation.

Which rock star played Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson's 1986 fantasy film Labyrinth?

David Bowie did not do Jareth's crystal-ball tricks: a professional juggler stood hidden behind him and performed them without being able to see.

Which skilled swordsman hunts the six-fingered man who killed his father in The Princess Bride?

Inigo Montoya's revenge was personal for actor Mandy Patinkin, who has said he played the final duel thinking of his own father, lost to cancer.

What does Isaac Asimov's Foundation series call Hari Seldon's science of predicting society's future?

Psychohistory blends mathematics and psychology to give probabilities, not certainties, and Seldon's first forecast is the fall of the Galactic Empire.

Which Robert A. Heinlein novel about a human raised on Mars gave English the verb grok?

Stranger in a Strange Land presents grok as a Martian word with no neat translation; the Oxford English Dictionary glosses it as understanding by intuition or empathy.

Which French film-maker's 1902 silent A Trip to the Moon lands a space capsule in the Moon's eye?

Georges Méliès was a stage magician before he was a director, and he also plays the lead professor in the picture he wrote and produced.

Which 1988 anime film follows biker Kaneda and his psychic friend Tetsuo through the streets of Neo-Tokyo?

Akira is not one of the bikers: the name belongs to a mysterious being kept frozen beneath the building site of the city's Olympic stadium.

Which author wrote Solaris, the novel of a living ocean planet later filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky?

Stanisław Lem, a Pole, was unimpressed by both famous screen versions, saying they drifted from his real subject, the limits of human reason.

Which German author wrote The Neverending Story and then tried to stop its 1984 screen adaptation?

Michael Ende began as a paid script adviser, then said the rewrite strayed so far from his book that filming should halt or the title change.

Which planet's aliens keep Billy Pilgrim in a zoo exhibit in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five?

Tralfamadore turns up across Vonnegut's novels in versions that do not match, beginning with The Sirens of Titan a decade earlier.

Which Octavia E. Butler novel pulls a Black writer from 1976 Los Angeles back to a Maryland slave plantation?

Kindred is Butler's best-selling book, and although it turns on time travel she filed it under fantasy, describing it as a kind of grim fantasy.

Which Texan pulp writer created Conan the Barbarian for the magazine Weird Tales?

Robert E. Howard never saw a Conan book in print: the stories were not collected until after he died at 30, and they launched sword and sorcery.

Which gunslinger chases the man in black across a vast desert in Stephen King's The Dark Tower?

Roland Deschain grew out of a Victorian poem: King took his hero from Robert Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, read at university.