Trivia / Rambo III

• Banned in China: The movie was banned in the USSR (the ban was lifted very quickly because of the Soviet collapse).
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • Rambo says to the Big Bad, "Your worst nightmare," not "I'm your worst nightmare."
  • A popular urban legend claims that the dedication at the end was originally "to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" before The War on Terror, when "brave Mujahideen fighters" was supposedly changed to "gallant people." In reality the dedication always said "gallant people," though the movie itself does glorify the Mujahideen to a degree that's become Harsher in Hindsight since 9/11.
• California Doubling: Israel and the American Western Desert for Afghanistan.
• The Cast Showoff: One scene has Rambo playing a game on horseback. In reality, Sylvester Stallone has been riding horses since childhood and even competed in his first polo match at age eleven.
• Creative Differences: Russell Mulcahy was originally chosen as director on the basis of his music videos and Highlander. He left due to differences with Stallone:
  He went to Israel two weeks before me with the task of casting two dozen vicious looking Russian troops. These men were suppose [sic] to make your blood run cold. When I arrived on the set, what I saw was two dozen blond, blue-eyed pretty boys that resembled rejects from a surfing contest. Needless to say Rambo is not afraid of a little competition but being attacked by third rate male models could be an enemy that could overwhelm him. I explained my disappointment to Russell and he totally disagreed, so I asked him and his chiffon army to move on.
• Fake Russian: The French Marc de Jonge as Colonel Alexei Zaysen.
• Prop Recycling: The Hind gunships (sans the fake front fuselages), as well as the KLMK jackets and the Tanks, but No Tanks Soviet equipment were all reused from Red Dawn (1984).
• What Could Have Been:
  • David Morrell, writer of the novel First Blood, co-wrote an earlier draft for the third film, which was originally going to be about Rambo rescuing Trautman, who has been taken hostage by revolutionaries in some Central American country. The producers, however, wanted to take advantage of the media coverage surrounding the Soviet-Afghanistan wars and decided on a new script putting Rambo in the middle of that action.
  • Stallone later said his original premise of the film "was more in keeping with the theme of Tears of the Sun, but set in Afghanistan."
  • There was originally going to be a female lead in the film named Michelle, a doctor from the Netherlands who comes to Afghanistan to cure the children caught up in the war. Her role in the story was reduced with each script revision that by the final draft, Michelle was completely gone. Michelle still appears in the novelization of the film, as it was based on an earlier draft.
  • The film's climax was originally going to feature Rambo and Trautman escaping over snow-capped mountains and fighting Soviet soldiers in blizzard-like conditions, but this idea was scrapped because it would have cost too much to film.
• Working Title: Full Circle: First Blood Part III

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