Trivia / The Secret of Monkey Island

• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Some dim-witted Argentine journalists found the famous "grog recipe" on Facebook and presented it as an example of "evil harmful alcoholic recipes available on the interwebs, that teenagers could drink before going out to dance!". They didn't realize it was tongue-in-cheek, nor noticed "XD" is an emoticon. Later on, a vending machine with "Grog XD" showed up in the finale of Tales of Monkey Island, which for many was a Crowning Moment of Funny.
• Creator Backlash: The game's composer, Michael Land, was never entirely satisfied with the soundtrack, due to the clunky and barely functional sound software (LucasArts had just started doing their sound design in-house after outsourcing it to another developer for several years) limiting what he could do. It provided the impetus for him to design the iMUSE system used for the rest of the company's adventure games.
• Dummied Out: When listening to the CD-ROM version of the game in a CD player, a song can be listened to that's never used in the game.
• Genre-Killer: While previous Lucas' adventures were killing Text Parser adventures everywhere, in Spain the text genre experienced a surge in popularity in the late 80s thanks to locally produced adventures released for the still relevant 8-bit computer market. Monkey Island provided a fatal blow to all that, as the contemporary new adventures of the era got scathing reviews and were labeled as obsolete products due to direct - and somewhat unfair - comparison.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The Scumm Bar in all of its appearances uses "O, Good Ale, Thou Art My Darling".
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The Grog machine strongly resembles a Coca-Cola vending machine. The swoosh was changed to be less wavy in order to appease Coca-Cola.
• The Other Darrin: Carla and Lemonhead in the Special Edition (S. Scott Bullock, who had voiced the latter in Curse, now voices Red Skull).
• Throw It In!: Before Guybrush was named, he was just labeled "guy", and his artist saved his sprite brushes as "guy.brush". The developers called him Guybrush as a temporary name until they decided to keep it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original game's proposal document tells a completely different story where Mêlée Island™ is a formerly thriving pirate hub ruined by the desires of Governor Fat who built the island to encourage treasure seekers to recover the Treasure of Monkey Island. As the game began, pirates began to flock to Mêlée Island™ again due to rumors that the Governor now had a copy of the map to the treasure. When the game started production assets for Governor Fat were created (with the key art done by Steve Purcell), but eventually the plot changed dramatically and he was replaced with Elaine Marley. Elements of this plot seem to have appeared in the sequel, which is a treasure hunt for Big Whoop and also features a comically obese governor named "Governor Phatt".
  • It is said that they actually were going to let the viewer see the 'scene behind the door' in Elaine's mansion, but thought it would be funnier to leave it to the viewer's imagination.
• Working Title: The game went into production as "Mutiny on Monkey Island", though the aforementioned mutiny never appeared even in early drafts of the story or the design documents.