Trivia / Happy Gilmore

• Acting for Two: Adam Sandler secretly provided the vocal effects for the clown at the mini-golf scene.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Bob Barker wasn't interested in the extended cameo until he was informed he would win the fight against Happy.
  • When the director told Bob Barker that a stunt double would be used for the fight, Barker insisted on doing the scene himself, saying "Wait a minute; I know how to fight." Barker was friends with and was trained by Chuck Norris.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Some people, particularly The Price Is Right fans, think Bob Barker says "The price is wrong, bitch!", even though it was Happy who says this when he thinks he's beaten Bob in his brawl. After the fight, Bob says "Now you've had enough... bitch."
• Cast the Expert:
  • Christopher McDonald was cast in part because he was an avid golfer in real life and could actually hit the shots required by the script himself. Director Dennis Dugan leaned into this by using wide-angle shots whenever he could to show off McDonald hitting shots for real, including Shooter's climactic 30-foot putt at the end of the movie. Dugan gave McDonald seven tries to sink it on camera before he would use editing to stitch it together; McDonald got it on the fifth take.
  • Averted with Adam Sandler. In real life, he is terrible at both hockey and golf, and many of his efforts in the film had to be shown with editing.
• The Cast Showoff: Carl Weathers got to show off his singing chops when he sings "We've Only Just Begun".
• Colbert Bump: Because of Bob Barker's cameo, ratings for The Price Is Right rose considerably amongst college-age viewers.
• Creator Backlash: Lee Trevino said that had he read the script and seen the salty language, he would've passed.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Adam Sandler named Happy Gilmore as his favourite role. He named part of his production company after it (Happy Madison), and included Happy in the second version of "The Chanukah Song".
  • Christopher McDonald had an absolute blast making the film, really enjoyed working with Sandler and already being a golfer let him play while he was working.
• Defictionalization:
  • The NHL Shop sold hockey stick putters for many years.
  • In the film, the Tour Championship is seen as the pro golf tour's most prestigious event, and seems to be a major championship. But when Happy Gilmore came out in 1996, the PGA Tour's Tour Championship was the tour's season finale in November. A player had to be in the Top 30 on the Tour's Money List following the event the week before, but that was it. Beginning with the 2018-19 season, the number of playoff events was cut down to three, and whoever wins the Tour Championship wins the FedEx Cup and is considered the champion.
• Friendship on the Set: Despite their onscreen brawl, Adam Sandler and Bob Barker became good friends in the years that followed. In 2007, during his last season hosting The Price Is Right, there was a primetime Price is Right special that also looked back on Bob's TV career, and Adam appeared as a guest with a poem that paid tribute to him.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Happy asks Chubbs why a guy his size didn't play a "real sport" like football. Chubbs claims that his mother wouldn't let him sign a permission slip for it. In Real Life, Carl Weathers was a pro football player before becoming an actor.
• Life Imitates Art:
  • There are a number of aspects to Happy's character that seem eerily prescient of Tiger Woods, who turned pro several months after the movie was released. First and most obviously, there is the emergence of a new and apparent "outsider" to the sport of golf which causes viewership to skyrocket: although Woods was nowhere near the outsider that Happy was (having practiced and competed in the sport for years before turning pro), he was undeniably unlike any other golfer that had come before him, and caused non-golf-fans to tune in regularly to watch him. Second, there is Happy's skill at the long drive, which Tiger did so well in his early career that courses actually started to add yardage to their holes in an attempt to "Tiger-proof" them (although Woods' game was always far more balanced than Happy's). Third, there are Happy's bouts of rage and cursing fits, which Tiger has been known to break into from time to time (another aspect of him that brought in viewers), though again, never to the extent that Happy did.
  • Golf Ranges have been known to put up signs telling people not to do a running start swing, the "Happy Gilmore."
• No Stunt Double: The crew was going to give Bob Barker a stunt double for his fight with Adam Sandler but he insisted on doing it himself. Earlier he had been trained in martial arts by Chuck Norris.
• Shown Their Work: Either by accident or intentionally. In the scene where Happy fights the alligator, he manages to hold the gator's jaw closed while it's struggling to open them, before head-butting it unconscious. Leaving aside that last part and the fact that it's a comedy film, it's entirely possible (if still very dangerous) for Happy to have done so: alligator biting strength is well beyond human bounds, yet the muscles for opening their jaws are much weaker.
• Throw It In!: Christopher McDonald ad-libbed Shooter's finger-gun celebrations and mannerisms, since the script never laid out why he was named or nicknamed "Shooter". Similarly, McDonald's celebration when Shooter sinks his final putt at the championship was genuine and off-the-cuff, as the extras and crew were audibly cheering and placing bets on whether McDonald could sink the 30-foot putt himself.
• Uncredited Role: Judd Apatow did an uncredited re-write.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Bruce Campbell was almost Shooter McGavin. Kevin Costner was offered the role, but he turned it down in favour of another golf film, Tin Cup.
  • Tim Allen was also considered for the role of Shooter.
  • The script called for an immediate scene transition after Happy slugged Barker, but then they got the idea to turn it into a full-blown fistfight instead. Initially, Bob Barker didn't want to appear in the fight against Happy until he was informed he was going to win it.
  • Originally Happy was supposed to fight Ed McMahon, but he declined to the role because of the film's profanity and crude humor.
  • Nearly 30 minutes of the film was cut so that it could obtain a PG-13 rating rather than R.
• Write Who You Know: Adam Sandler loosely based Happy on his childhood friend Kyle McDonough, who played ice hockey and would golf with Sandler as they grew up. Sandler could never hit the ball as far as McDonough and figured that McDonough's hockey skills gave him an edge.
• Written-In Infirmity: Mr. Larson is always leaning on something, as years earlier Richard Kiel suffered a head injury in a car accident which severely affected his balance, causing him to spend much of the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

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