Trivia / The Blue Shell Incident

• Corpsing: Joel noticeably laughs at one point when voicing Mario's Paper-Thin Disguise, Handio.
• Dueling Dubs: Two separate Russian fan dubs were made, available here and here. The second of them was streamed in its entirety on Joel's twitch channel and met with Approval of God.
• Development Hell: The film took well over a year to make, starting production on August 21, 2018 and not premiering until November 14 of the following year, with the official YouTube upload occurring the following day. Much of this is down to the fact that the 26-minute short was a one-man job, with Joel being the sole staff member during the entire production cycle, with the only outside assistance being suggestions from Twitch chat. There's also the fact that the master footage for the first act of the short was accidentally wiped following a Windows 10 update, with the material in the final cut being salvaged from an archival preview previously screened during one of Joel's Twitch streams.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: A good few moments in the film were added after Joel saw ideas from his chat members, and decided to add them in.
• Throw It In!: Several mistakes were kept in due to the Rule of Funny, like Mario referring to Metal Gear McQueen as the "second weapon" instead of "secret weapon" as in the original take, with Joel rationalizing that the first weapon was the gun.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The story was almost a murder mystery, with Mario killing Luigi as revenge for getting more attention at E3, Sans investigating, and Larry the cucumber covering it up because Garfield would kill him otherwise. A person in chat suggested Joel make a Metal Gear joke early on, and the rest is history.
  • Handio's name was almost "Joey the Hand."
  • Joel considered ending the movie on the reveal that Mario was Scatman John, but ultimately decided against it as it would've left too many loose ends.
  • The final fight scene would have had a moment where Mario was invincible for 5 seconds after using the Star and being impaled with the shovel, then dying immediately after, but it was cut for being too hard a concept to convey.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: First played straight and then averted by the end. Due to the sporadic development of the film Joel mostly came up with new plot points on the fly, or with a random suggestion from chat, or from a dumb throwaway joke to the stream. But by the final act of the movie Joel instead planned meticulously, even doing segments off stream to tie every single random plot point together in a way that one would almost believe the whole thing was planned from the start.

---