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The original trailer that comes on the laserdisc shows a scene with a tank rolling up to a McDonald's restaurant where enemy soldiers are eating. This scene does not appear in the final cut, and may have been removed due to a mass murder at a San Ysidro, CA McDonald's just weeks prior to the film's opening.
The radio announces: "John has a long mustache", the same message the French resistance gets in The Longest Day (1962).
The movie being shown to American prisoners at the Russian camp near Calumet is _Aleksandr Nevsky (1938)_ .
This film was entered into the Guinness Book of Records as having the most acts of violence of any film up to that time.
The cast underwent a "realistic", intensive 8 week military training course before starting work on Red Dawn.
The movies replica Russian T-72 tank was such a precise replica that when it was transported to the studio, two CIA agents followed and wanted to know where it had come from.
The plot for the movie, a Russian invasion from Mexico, etc., was based on CIA and War College studies of US weaknesses at the time.
Red Dawn was the first motion picture released with the PG-13 rating, which had been created after difficulty rating some movies in 1984, most notably Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). (The Flamingo Kid (1984) was the first film to be *given* a PG-13 rating, but sat on the shelves for five months before being released.)
The illustration of Gengis Khan in the High School classroom at the beginning of the film is a caricature of director John Milius.
Five parachutists dressed as Soviet soldiers were blown as much as a mile off course during the filming of the invasion scene at the start of the film.
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