Goofs for
Escape from New York (1981) More at IMDbPro »

• Miscellaneous: Italian subtitles mistranslate "fission" as "fixation".
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: Walls in the "Choc Full o' Nuts" building are clearly made of Styrofoam.
  
  
• Continuity: Baseball bat falls off the head of the gladiator, but is back again in subsequent shots.
  
  

• Crew or equipment visible: You can see a crew member giving Isaac Hayes a "stand-up" cue quite visibly in the left side of the screen when The Duke is quieting the Madison Square Garden crowd.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: Snake and the others return to the elevator on top of the World Trade Centre (immediately following the loss of the jet-glider). Sticking out near the jam, you can see the fingers of a crew member pushing the right-side door closed.
  
  
• Continuity: When the President shoots The Duke, the cable to bring Snake up from the city is clearly under the railings; but when Snake reaches the top, the cable is over the top railing.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the sequence where Snake is being chased by the Crazies (and is about to shoot an oval pattern in a wall so he can break through), his eye patch shifts enough to reveal a perfectly good eye.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Brain stabs Romero in the storeroom and lowers him to the floor, Romero drops the last few inches and Brain is left holding the "knife" but you can see there is no blade.
  
  
• Factual errors: The American flag on the right-hand side of the tail on Air Force One is not reversed. In reality it would have the stars in the upper right to represent a real flag moving forward.
  
  
• Continuity: After Snake takes off in the glider, Charles Cyphers is seen in the control room wearing a shirt and tie. In the next shot, he is wearing a suit jacket, which he then takes off. He wears the shirt and tie for the remainder of the scene.
  
  
• Continuity: The interiors shots of the plane before the crash are from a wide-body airliner. However, the wrecked fuselage seen on the ground is not a wide-body.
  
  
• Continuity: When Cabbie takes Snake to see Brain, Maggie answers the door. She goes inside first. Snake follows her and Cabbie goes in last, shutting the door behind him. But now in the indoor shot, Cabbie and Snake are in front and Maggie is way behind them.
  
  
• Continuity: Air Force One is shown in flight as an aircraft with engines mounted at the back either side of the tail. The wreckage on the ground and the computer image on the USPF computer as it crashes are of a 737 type aircraft with the engines mounted on the wings.
  
  
• Continuity: When the USPF initially go into New York immediately after Air Force One crashes, helicopter 3 is shown landing, and a large chunk of the sticky back black plastic used to create its USPF livery is peeling off and missing from the tail section, revealing the green US Army livery underneath. When it takes off again a few moments later, the tail is back to perfect black.
  
  
• Continuity: When Snake first receives a signal on the President's Life Signs transponder, he radio's Houk then checks his mission timer. The timer reads 18:50:18 (and counts down to :14 seconds). As the scene is fading (at the :14 sec. mark), the timer changes to 17:50:14
  
  
• Continuity: Toward the end, the helicopter lands just outside the prison walls, and it's broad daylight. The rest of the film takes place at night, even though the times given indicate clearly that the helicopter landed only moments before the subsequent action.
  
  
• Errors in geography: The scene at the train station is clearly not in New York. The city's two rail stations, Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal both have their tracks located below ground level.
  
  
• Factual errors: When the Duke is shooting at the handcuffed President, we hear the sound of very loud, echoing gunfire even though he is conspicuously using Snake's submachine gun equipped with a rather large silencer.
  
  
• Factual errors: While briefing Hauk about "David 14," Rehme says the jet is "Seven miles out and closing." Even at a leisurely 300mph (the cruising speed of the Convair 580 aircraft the Air Force One model was based on), the plane would have reached them in under a minute and a half. Yet they have plenty of time to get to the control center and ID the aircraft before it even crosses the river.
  
  
• Continuity: When the bombs in Snake's arteries are deactivated, he raises his right hand to his left wrist to display the time on his countdown clock. When we see a closeup of the clock as time runs out, Snake's right hand is not there. But when we switch back to the previous view, his right hand is still pressed against the clock.
  
  
• Continuity: The poster advertising shows Snake Plissken sitting in front of the head of the Statue of Liberty which is lying in the street. However, in the movie, the Statue of Liberty is intact; in fact, Liberty Island serves as the control station for the prison facility.
  
  
• Continuity: Right before Snake's fight with the Duke at the end of the film, he watches his timer which says 00:01:32. Then after the president shoots the Duke and Snake gets the micro-bombs deactivated he waits for 10 seconds and watches his timer which reads 00:00.02. However the time elapsing between the two times he checks his timer is 00:02:08, but according to what we see on the timer in the film only 00:01:30 should have past.
  
  

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