How is this iconic shot 25 years old?!? (Picture: TriStar Pictures)

It was the biggest film of 1991, and – for a while – the most expensive movie ever made. And this week it celebrates its 25th birthday.

As Terminator 2: Judgment Day revels in a quarter century of being one of the greatest action movies ever made, we’ve hacked the Skynet mainframe to bring you a few choice nuggets of intel.

Here are 25 things you might not know about the classic movie, and the Terminator franchise.

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1. If you’d somehow managed to avoid all the publicity and didn’t know that Schwarzenegger’s Terminator was there to protect John Connor, rather than kill him, you’d be none the wiser until the moment the two Terminators meet for the first time. The script is deliberately engineered to be vague for its opening half hour. (And it works; my wife didn’t have a clue.)



2. There’s a parallel universe somewhere where the film starred O.J. Simpson. He was earmarked to play the Terminator in the first film, but was – oh, sweet irony – deemed ‘too likeable’.

We’ll have to put up with Stallone instead, won’t we? (Curiously Stallone was also in the frame for the title role first time round, but declined.)

3. Earl Boen, who plays smarmy psychologist Dr Silberman, is as well known for his voice work as his on-screen acting. His most famous role is that of the dastardly Ghost Pirate LeChuck in the Monkey Island series.

4. Billy Idol was originally James Cameron’s choice for the T-1000, but a motorcycle accident necessitated his recasting. Here he is in The Wedding Singer instead.

5. Linda Hamilton’s twin also appeared in the film. She shows up in scenes where Sarah is duplicated – notably during the finale, in which the T-1000 impersonates her.

6. And while we’re talking about family connections, Hamilton’s son also appears. He’s the toddler she’s seen playing with in the holocaust nightmare sequence.

7. By the way, the fallen masonry in the model of the wrecked Los Angeles you can see in that clip? Crackers and Shredded Wheat. So now you know.

8. Legendary Pink Panther composer Henry Mancini was commissioned to do an album full of big band versions of film themes, and contacted composer Brad Fiedel with the intention of including a swing version of his Terminator theme. Sadly Mancini passed away before the project was completed, which was probably not a bad thing as Fiedel was still struggling to work out the time signature.

9. On the other hand, if you’re Richard Easter, and Steve Wright gives you the afternoon off from his Radio 1 show, you might come up with this. (Features the immortal ‘If I thought I’d get results then I’d act a whole lot sweeter / But people always respect an Uzi nine millimeter’.)

10. The minigun that the Terminator uses to destroy the Los Angeles police fleet – miraculously without hitting a single officer – is the same one that Schwarzenegger and his team used in Predator, a few years before. (The script pays homage to this when the Terminator hefts it onto his shoulder, causing John to remark ‘It’s definitely you’.)



11. The scene where the T-1000’s truck loses its roof in the storm drain was semi-improvised; they hadn’t realised it wouldn’t fit under the bridge until they’d arrived on location. So off it came.

12. The biker bar in which the Terminator acquires its clothes is actually a set – but it fooled one passerby, who thought it was real, and was surprised to see a muscled Arnold Schwarzenegger wandering through in a pair of shorts. He told her it was male stripper night.

13. The shoot was so long that Edward Furlong went through puberty. In certain scenes he’s standing in a hole, so as to hide his rapidly advancing height, and his voice broke during filming, resulting in most of his dialogue being redubbed in post-production. Curiously, one scene that was left intact was this one.

14. During one action sequence, Linda Hamilton removed her earplugs between takes when she visited the toilet, and forgot to put them back in. The shotgun blast that followed when filming resumed permanently damaged her hearing.

15. It was retconned in Terminator 3, but according to a police report that the T-1000 scans early in the film, John Connor is supposed to be ten. Ten. Ten! That’s the same age as Kevin in the second Home Alone film.

DEFINITELY not the same age as John Connor (Picture: Giphy)

(No, we don’t see it either.)

16. In order to play the battle-damaged Terminator seen late in the film, Schwarzenegger would spend five hours in make-up. He supposedly got through this with a combination of foot massage, oatmeal and Austrian Christmas music. (After defeating the T-1000, an exhausted Arnie is heard to mutter ‘I need a vacation’, which was an on set improvisation, inspired by Kindergarten Cop.)


17. This scene? Totally reading from a card attached to the windscreen.

18. The movie spawned a number of video game spin-offs. Most memorable was the Operation Wolf-style gun game, particularly popular in the arcades, but here’s a shout-out for the frankly dreadful ZX Spectrum version – complete with sliding block puzzles, Spy Hunter-esque chase scenes and the WORST PUNCHING SOUND EFFECTS EVER.

19. Between shooting the first Terminator film and the second, Linda Hamilton found time to appear in forty-six episodes of Beauty And The Beast. Meanwhile, Joe Morton, Robert Patrick and Xander Berkeley would all go on to appear in The X-Files. Oh, and this chap, evacuating the SWAT team? That’s Dean Norris, better known as Hank in Breaking Bad.

20. Watch Schwarzenegger during the film: he doesn’t blink once. (He’s wearing sunglasses for half of it, which is kind of cheating, but I still think the Terminator stands a reasonable chance against a Weeping Angel.)

21. The ‘liquid nitrogen’ in the truck that crashes into the steel mill is actually…liquid nitrogen. It had to be kept at a constantly low temperature, so all the sweat on the cast was added on by the makeup team.

22. The film was extensively parodied, although one of the most amusing tributes was in the closing scenes of Wayne’s World. (Star Mike Myers was worried that people wouldn’t find it funny. Thankfully, just about everybody did.)

23. More twins. This time it’s Don and Dan Stanton, ostensibly playing the same security guard, although they were basically taking that last sibling fight to a whole new level.


24. According to the film’s alternate ending, the destruction of Cyberdyne meant that Judgement Day never happened, and John Connor grew up and became a senator. This is impossible, because John’s very existence is dependent on him discovering the time machine at the end of the war and sending his own father back to 1984 to fertilise his mother.

The resulting paradox from the ‘happy’ ending would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum and destroy the entire universe. (That’s only a worst-case scenario; it’s more likely to be limited to merely our own galaxy.)

25. By the way, that alternate ending has one of the most amazing pairs of dungarees ever.

DEM DUNGAREES THOUGH (Picture: Giphy)

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