Trivia / The Secret World of Alex Mack

• Ability over Appearance: Alex was originally intended to be male but changed to female after Larisa Oleynik was cast.
• Billing Displacement: A young Jessica Alba appeared in three episodes, yet still got mentioned on the DVD cover twice.
• California Doubling: The scenes set in Paradise Valley were actually filmed in the Santa Clarita Valley.
• The Cast Showoff: In the first season episode "The Solo", Alex sings a cover of Leonard Cohen's 1974 song "Leaving Green Sleeves". Larisa Oleynik previously appeared as the younger Cosette in a San Francisco production of Les Misérables back in 1989.
• The Danza: Jessica Alba as Jessica.
• Enforced Method Acting: In the scene of the pilot in which Alex ends up embarrassingly nude behind some boxes after her first involuntary morph leaves her without clothes, Larisa Oleynik was nude for real, only wearing a Modesty Towel over the portion of her body that remained obscured by the atrezzo. Given that only her head and shoulders were visible, and thus she could have remained mostly clothed without ruining the shot, it seems to have been a case of this trope. Oleynik was twelve at the time and speaks of it as a very embarrassing experience. Noticeably, her powers never affect her clothes in future episodes, which is lampshaded in the first episode when Annie tells Alex to concentrate when morphing so her clothes liquefy with her.
• Fake Nationality: The Viennese Lars Fredrickson is played by American actor Kevin Quigley.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Rescued. The first season was released on DVD in 2007, but never continued beyond the said season and went out of print, done in by its distributor, Genius Entertainment, being folded into Vivendi Entertainment. In 2017, Mill Creek Entertainment released the complete series on DVD.
• Out of Order: Very noticable in Season 4 in which 12 of the 20 episodes were actually produced for Season 3. Alex's hair style changes between episodes as a result.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original idea was for the show to be called High Voltage and to star a young boy with special powers. However, when the series was pitched to Nickelodeon, it was decided that the main character should be a girl. And, thus, the idea was retooled into The Secret World Of Alex Mack.
  • It should come as no surprise that the decision to make the lead character a girl came at the same time that Nickelodeon was ending the network's most popular female-lead series Clarissa Explains It All.
  • According to an interview with Oleynik, Alex's powers were tweaked so her clothes would morph along with her because Larisa was embarrassed to shoot unclothed scenes (she only did one in the pilot, in which she appears nude behind some boxes after morphing into liquid state).
  • The developers of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl wanted to add Alex to the game as a playable character, but were told no by Nick.
• Word of God: At the end of the series, Alex is given an antidote to remove her powers, but whether she takes it or not is left unrevealed. Oleynik maintains she didn't.

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