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The show's origin story hasn't been drama-free off screen either. One filmmaker claimed the Duffers lifted his unmade script Totem, about a young girl with powers, while another accused them of ripping off his short film about the Montauk Project. Both cases were eventually dropped, with one plaintiff even admitting his work had nothing to do with how the series actually came together.
Before Toph Beifong became the blind, sarcastic earthbending prodigy we know, the character was originally written as male. Bits of that original design apparently still float around the show in background characters, including the wrestler known as The Boulder.
Garry Shandling's blustering Senator Stern character got his surname as a tip of the hat to radio host Howard Stern, according to Jon Favreau himself.
Down by the docks in Anvil there's a statue in the water that's clearly scaled up from The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbour, easily the most photographed statue in Denmark. It's a small, quiet homage that most players sail straight past without noticing.
Editor Michael Horton's very first assembly cut of the Helm's Deep battle ran a staggering 20 hours long before it got trimmed down into the sequence we actually see in the film.
At The Game Awards 2018, God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 walked in tied with eight nominations each, the most anyone had ever had at the show up to that point. Red Dead ended up winning more individual trophies overall, but it was God of War that took home the night's biggest prize, Game of the Year.
There's an item you can find simply called Blue Suede Shoes, and it's exactly the tribute it sounds like - a nod to the Carl Perkins rock and roll classic that Elvis, Johnny Cash, and half of music history have covered since. No real gameplay purpose, just a fun name for the collectors to spot.
The in-game book 'Kolb and the Dragon' functions as a playable choose-your-own-adventure story within Skyrim itself, letting the reader pick different paths through the narrative rather than simply reading static text like the game's other books.
Production designer Alan Lee's very first job on joining the film back in 1997 was designing the model for Helm's Deep, years before the battle sequence would actually be filmed.
