Trivia / Scanners

• Billing Displacement: Top-billed Jennifer O'Neill doesn't appear until the 37 minute mark and is more of a supporting character to Stephen Lack's character. Michael Ironside is billed fifth despite arguably playing the most memorable character of the film.
• Breakthrough Hit: For David Cronenberg.
• California Doubling: It's brief, but Thunder Bay, Ontario is mentioned in passing. The film was shot in Montreal and Toronto.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Michael Ironside was originally hired for a bit part of one to two scenes and was paid $5300 CDN.
• The Danza: From the credits:
  Assistant to Mr Heroux.....Kim Obrist
• Dawson Casting: Dr. Ruth tells Vale that he founded Biocarbon Amalgamate in 1942. Patrick McGoohan was 14 years old in 1942.
• Deleted Scene: Production stills exist of shots in the final duel between Cameron and Revok, where the top of Cameron's head explodes, sending sparks into the air. Apparently this climax was filmed but David Cronenberg chose to omit it from the final print.
• Franchise Zombie: David Cronenberg only ever intended Scanners to be a single film (and it's amazing that film even saw the light of day, given its Troubled Production). Christian Duguay took over and made Scanners II: The New Order and Scanners III: The Takeover about a decade later. The protagonist of 2 is apparently the son of the protagonist of the first film, but that's where the connection ends; the third film onwards feature entirely unrelated characters. This spawned yet another duo of spinoff movies, Scanner Cop and Scanner Cop II. Exploding heads and dueling telepaths are clearly just too awesome not to milk it for all it's worth.
• Prop Recycling: For the scene where Darryl is set on fire and his head comes up, Michael Ironside wore a fake pair of eyes worn by Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man.
• Reality Subtext: A drug marketed to pregnant women as a painkiller that turns out to cause strange deformities in their unborn children; ephemerol bears an eerie similarity to the real-life scandal in the late 1950s as women who had taken thalidomide during pregnancy (marketed as relief for morning sickness) began to give birth to children suffering phocomelia or other physical deformities.
• Recycled Script: The four sequels follow different characters with variations of the first movie's plot. That plot being "a loner Scanner gets recruited by a shady organization to become one of their psychic enforcers and battle a psychopathic rogue Scanner, leading to hero and villain engaging in a brutal psychic duel that leads to the evil Scanner's bloody death."
• Spoiler Cover: The original poster depicts the moment Vale does a "Freaky Friday" Flip with Revok in the climactic scanner duel, killing Revok in the process.
• Technology Marches On: The very idea that someone could intrude upon a computer system via its connection to the phone lines seems to be an alien concept to ConSec's security director. He and the ConSec technicians ponder aloud exactly how it might work, presumably because audiences in 1981 would be equally confused by the notion.
• Troubled Production: David Cronenberg once called this the most frustrating film he'd ever made. The film was rushed through production - filming had to begin without a finished script and end within roughly two months so the financing would qualify as a tax write-off, forcing Cronenberg to write and shoot at the same time. Cronenberg also cited difficulty with and antagonism between the leads, particularly Patrick McGoohan and Jennifer O'Neill.
• What Could Have Been: In the original screenplay, written back in 1976, the protagonist's name was going to be Harley Quinn (note that Batman: The Animated Series did not exist yet and this was beforeinvoked Michael Ironside took up the other DC Animated Universe role of Darkseid) and he was going to be a much darker character than Vale - it was going to start with him Mind Raping a woman in a subway on purpose, as opposed to Vale's accidental crime in the opening scene of the completed film. Also, the original setup was more like a futuristic spy film, with the US government hiring a group of scanners to infiltrate a corporation called Cytodyne and stop its army of evil scanners.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: The film was written like this, which was forced upon Cronenberg because of the way the production had to be structured due to financing reasons. There was virtually no pre-production, so he had to start shooting with an unfinished script. He would write in the morning, and film the rest of the day, mostly out of order. On top of that, they often had to drive around at random, looking for places to shoot scenes. So literally everything was done by the seat of their pants. He talks about it at some length in Cronenberg on Cronenberg.

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