Reel Trivia

Next week sees the UK finally get access to Disney+, the House of Mouse's new streaming service. To get you in the mood today we're sharing a compilation of the promo material for Lilo and Stitch where the popular and cute destructive alien gatecrashes Disney animated classics including Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King . It's a lot of fun and serves as a nice homage to Disney movies too!

Disney Pixar's latest film Onward will be released in the UK this week. Pixar's films are full of Easter eggs. You probably know that most of their films feature a Pizza Planet truck and there are endless uses of the Luxo ball and "A113" which refers to a classroom number where many of the Pixar people started their careers. Pixar films are also well known for inserting references to future films and we've collected together these teases. Monsters Inc. - Clownfish from Finding Nemo  make several cameos in this film, most obviously when Sully gives Boo a clownfish toy but one can also be seen on the wallpaper of the sushi restaurant. Finding Nemo - In the dentist's waiting room a young patient is reading a Mr. Incredible comic book. There's also a nod to Cars - when the fish are escaping in their bags you can see Luigi zooming past.  Ratatouille - When a dog barks at Remy we can clearly see from it's shadow that it's Doug from ...

Zombieland 2 is now out to purchase on home media here in the UK and to celebrate we thought it would be useful to collect together all the rules from the franchise in case we need them for a zombie apocalypse. NB- In the original trailers some of these rules were assigned different numbers- the numbers listed are how they appear in the film. There's also some rules which weren't used in the films but are included in the promotional material. #1: Cardio. "Zombies lead a very active lifestyle. So should you". #2: Double Tap . #3: Beware of Bathrooms . #4: Seatbelts . "It's gonna be a bumpy ride." #6: Cast Iron Skillet . (This one isn't in the films but it is  in this promotional video) #7: Travel Light .  #8: Get a Kick-ass Partner . (Another not from the film but used in the poster seen below) #12: Bounty . (Only in promotional video) #15. Bowling Ball (In promo video) #17: Don't be a Hero. (This be...

Michael Giacchino is one of Hollywood's most in demand composers who has worked on massive franchises like Planet of the Apes, Star Trek and huge studios like Pixar and Marvel. He's next big project is the score for Matt Reeves' The Batman . What you might not know is that Giacchino loves to uses puns when he gives titles to his scores… Giacchino's big movie break came with The Incredibles and on the whole has fairly typical titles for it's soundtrack. It's final track which plays over the title credits is 'The Incredits'. It's 2009's Star Trek where the puns really come out with tracks including 'Enterprising Young Men', 'Nice to Meld You' and 'Does It Still McFly?'. Giacchino also got a lot of mileage out of the character Nero using his names for tracks entitled 'Nero Sighted', 'Nero Death Experience' and 'Nero Fiddles, Narada Burns'. He received quite a lot of criticism online for these ...

Dolittle hits UK cinema screens this week, starring Robert Downey Jr as the famous doctor who can converse with animals, with a slightly odd Welsh accent. Doctor Dolittle was the central character of a series of children's books by Hugh Lofting, starting with The Story of Doctor Dolittle in 1920. Lofting actually created Dolittle in illustrated letters to his children from the trenches of World War I when actual news was either too dull or too horrible. There have been a number of screen adaptions over the years but the first was in 1928 in Germany. Early animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger made Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere  ( Doctor Dolittle and his Animals ) as her second feature film. This trailer for a DVD version gives you some idea what it looked like: The doctor didn't return to screens until 1967 when he was portrayed by Rex Harrison in a musical version. It may seem odd that it took so long for a live-action film to be made but when you consider the books ar...

It's recently been announced that Billie Eilish will be singing the theme to No Time to Die and she becomes the latest in a long line of Bond theme performers. The songs are a key part of the films and in many cases more than one artists was asked to pitched a title song. Many of those not selected have not been revealed to the wider world but there are a handful of alternate Bond themes out there that were rejected but released elsewhere. Thunderball  The original title song for Thunderball was "Mr. Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" taken from an Italian journalist who used the phrase to describe James Bond. It was originally recorded by Bond-theme legend Shirley Bassey though is perhaps better known from a later version recorded by Dionne Warwick. There's not a lot wrong with the song but producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman felt the theme really needed to have the film's title in the lyrics. In the end it was Tom Jones who gave us "Thunderball...

With 1917 hitting UK cinemas this week, I thought it might be interesting to look at other films which have years in their titles... 10,000BC   Disaster movie director Roland Emmerich made this 2008 film about a prehistoric tribe of mammoth hunters. Most people thought it looked decent enough but style was no substitute for substance and the large number of historical inaccuracies didn't help critics enjoyment of the film. It's widely regarded as Emmerich's worst film and by many as the worst film of the year. Despite this, it did reasonably well at the box office. Year One   Another pre-historic disaster by a respected director, this time Harold Ramis. It stars Jack Black and Michael Cera as cavemen and is supposed to be a comedy. I struggle to get past the title- surely "Year One" means the first year after Jesus' birth and therefore some time post-cavemen? 1776  This 1972 musical based on the Broadway show of the same name is a...

Jimmy the Crow is surely one of the most unnoticed movie stars of all time. Between the 1930s and 1950s Jimmy, actually a raven, appeared in more than a thousand feature films, including the likes of The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life . Jimmy was found in a nest in the Mojave Desert in 1934 by animal trainer Curly Twiford. Twiford was keen to make Jimmy appealing for use in films so taught him as many tricks as he could including typing, opening letters and even riding a tiny motorcycle. Jimmy could understand several hundred words though Twiford said that only about fifty of those were actually useful. It generally took a week for Jimmy to learn each useful word, though it would take longer if the word has more than 1 syllable. Jimmy's big break came in when he was cast in the 1938 film You Can't Take it With You and I like to imagine he was a key reason why the film went on to win Best Picture. Jimmy obviously did something right because director Frank ...