Wardrobe Malfunctions That Ended Up In The Movie

In cinema, a little allure goes a long way. The mystery of what's left to the imagination, the suggestiveness of certain imagery, the scandalous nature of some film and TV scenes — Hollywood capitalizes on all that coquettishness. But sometimes the "scandal sells" approach goes a little further than intended when an actor's clothing stops cooperating and they flash more skin than they intended, or when they're simply wearing something they definitely shouldn't be. 

Any skilled costume designer, dedicated director, or eagle-eyed editor would remedy accidental near-nudity or glaring mistakes on set or in post-production to ensure the public never spotted the garment glitch. That's usually how it works, too — except in the case of these wardrobe malfunctions that skated past a hundred sets of eyes and somehow ended up in the movie.

There's something special about the "Star Wars" film universe's far-reaching, wide-ranging appeal. Though creator George Lucas reportedly owned up to purposely making his prequel installments more friendly to a younger audience (heck, he even created Jar Jar Binks using Disney's Goofy as an inspiration), a vast majority of "Star Wars" fanatics are adults. And apart from an innuendo or two likely meant to make the older crowd chuckle, the franchise has remained largely squeaky clean...with one notable exception.

In "Return of the Jedi," actress Femi Taylor portrays Oola, the green-skinned Twi'lek slave dancer Jabba the Hutt holds captive in his palace. Before Oola meets her grisly death at the mouth of a hungry Rancor, Jabba makes her strut about in her skimpy outfit while he watches — and grabs hold of Oola's chain during the sequence, making her stumble and causing a wardrobe malfunction that makes her costume reveal something you'd never think you'd see in a "Star Wars" movie. The slip happens in the blink of an eye, but it definitely ended up in the movie. The fact that Lucas was a stickler for scrubbing up "Star Wars" footage for home releases makes it especially bizarre that this malfunction didn't end up on the cutting room floor. 

Watchers of "Vanilla Sky" aren't left wanting additional adrenaline-pumping action, an extra smattering of stirring sci-fi, or more eyebrow-raising decisions that make Tom Cruise's character seem genuinely dangerous. One of the most noteworthy scenes in the film involves such a move made by Cruise's David Aames, who captures Cameron Diaz's Julianna "Julie" Gianni, his one-time lover, and straps her to the bed. Diaz, wearing a sheer dress, attempts to flip herself over on the mattress, and in doing so, accidentally shifts the top of the garment out of place. The actress is quick to fix the wardrobe malfunction mid-scene, pulling the gown into its original position, but the chest-exposing take wound up in the film's final cut.

Acts of physical passion and a focus on human anatomy are closely linked to the horror genre, what with all the sexy scenes sprinkled between slayings, so it doesn't come as too much of a surprise to hear that Jim Gillespie's 1997 slasher "I Know What You Did Last Summer" includes a touch of sensuality. That's all well and good — until such a moment pops up in an otherwise completely innocent scene. As Sarah Michelle Gellar's character Helen Shivers, a gal who's definitely not the brightest tool in the shed, desperately tries to escape death, she attempts to climb a rope up to safety and away from the killer. Her decision is a pretty dim one, but it's nothing to think twice about — that is, until the camera shows Gellar frantically pulling the rope toward herself and we see what's underneath her shiny, ill-fitting dress.

Director Steven Spielberg's lively adventure pic "Raiders of the Lost Ark" keenly depicts Egypt in the mid-1930s. But between the earth-toned trinkets and the intricate tapestries that line the city markets, there's something (or someone, rather) that ruins the atmosphere. Look closely in the background of one particular scene, just behind Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones, and you'll spot an extra wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, casually co-mingling with Egyptian locals in traditional outfits as if he doesn't stick out like a major sore thumb. This wardrobe malfunction wouldn't get so much as a passing glance in 1981, the year the film was shot, but it attracts all the wrong kind of attention in 1936, when the story takes place.

Starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes, and Morgan Freeman, helmed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Edward Zwick, "Glory" earned well-deserved accolades when it debuted in 1989. Critics lauded the American Civil War-set film for its breathtaking cinematography, its stellar cast, and its emotionally resonant narrative. What they loved even more than all that was how the creative team paid "enormous attention to period detail," praise that's incredibly ironic considering a major wardrobe malfunction that made it to the theatrical cut.

One child, standing in the foreground of a scene, sticks his arm in the air as packs of his peers walk around him. On his wrist, he's rocking a silver and tan digital watch, a piece of technology that without a doubt wouldn't have been around in 19th-century America. The actor in question should have slipped his accessory off before stepping on set, or someone — anyone — else should have caught the mistake. 

Considering that Samuel L. Jackson has previously expressed his view that nude scenes are "extremely awkward" to film, and admitted that he isn't quite sure his manhood is "formidable" enough to "fill [his] aura," you'd be right to assume that the prolific actor has never in his decades-long career sauntered around in his birthday suit for a movie. As it happens, however, you'd be wrong.

In the 2001 drama pic "The Caveman's Valentine," known as "Sign of the Killer" in certain countries, Jackson strips down and struts past a mirror in a scene likely meant to show off only his buttocks. But, as most malfunctions go, so much more than intended was caught on camera. In a flashbulb moment while his backside is on display, viewers can see Jackson's frontside, too. "The Caveman's Valentine" never got a Blu-ray release, meaning no one will ever see a high-resolution shot of Jackson's nether region, so his dignity is at least partly preserved.

Peter Weir's 1981 Australian drama war film "Gallipoli" is noteworthy for a few reasons: It took home a grand total of eight Australian Film Institute awards, boomed in the box office down under, earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film in 1982, and fared well with critics. It's also become known for a vastly different reason: "Gallipoli" features a bit of Mel Gibson nudity. 

A then-25-year-old Gibson shows off everything he's got during a scene in which his character — Archy Hamilton, the stockman and sprinter with his sights set on the Australian Imperial Force — sheds his colors to go for a swim with his soldier pals. When he dives down to the seafloor, we end up seeing more of Gibson's "downstairs" than we should have. Gibson clearly wasn't given any costume modifications to help prevent any slippage, and the shot wasn't clipped out of the theatrical or home release versions of the film. To make the situation even more eye-popping, "Gallipoli" is rated PG!

The Michael Bay-directed "Bad Boys II" is a small slice of heaven for any fan of the buddy cop and action-comedy genres. It's got a leading duo (Martin Lawrence as Marcus Burnett and Will Smith as Mike Lowrey) who work off one another's attitudes and push each other's buttons; a high-stakes mission the pair have to embark on; a seemingly indomitable villain; and the ubiquitous beautiful and badass woman who ends up a love interest for one of the protagonists. Gabrielle Union is that more-than-a-pretty-face character in the film (she plays Special Agent Sydney "Syd" Burnett), so it's unsurprising that she's seen sporting some revealing outfits. One in particular is a little too low-cut, however. 

In a scene where Union's character chucks a gun toward a live minefield and then ducks for cover, her cut-out dress slides sideways to reveal her nipple. In real time, the malfunction is a bit hard to spot, but slow down the footage just a tad, and you'll see Union's chest clear as day. 

With its pitch-perfect soundtrack, superb costume design, and fine-tuned set design, David O. Russell's "American Hustle" is a sublime period pic and an excellent snapshot of the sights and sounds of the 1970s. Main cast Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jeremy Renner look straight out of the disco-crazed decade, and so does supporting actor Louis C.K. as Stoddard Thorsen — except for one wardrobe detail that got completely overlooked and made multiple appearances in the movie. The Rolex C.K.'s Thorsen wears is actually a huge anachronism. It isn't an era-appropriate accessory like some may assume; rather, it's a solid-gold 116718LN GMT-Master II model Rolex with a ceramic bezel, a watch that was first manufactured around 2010.

When it comes to the world of music, you can tell a lot by a person by what they listen to. Beyond that, you can also learn a lot about someone's musical tastes by what they wear around town. That means you can probably spot a rock fan, a metal fan, or a rap fan based on the clothes they wear and the bands they rep on their clothes. But what about time travelers?

A film that chronicles the early 1960s conflicts between the warring mod and rocker subcultures in Britain, "Quadrophenia" should have taken extra precaution to ensure that everything looked accurate for a story set during the decade of free love, Beatlemania, and sexual liberation. Unfortunately, a glaring error was made ... and was left in the final cut. One character sports a shirt repping Motörhead, the English rock band that formed in June of 1975 — over a decade after the year in which "Quadrophenia" takes place.

Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" is the story of an oil man, a tyrant of a greed-driven tycoon named Daniel Plainview, fascinatingly portrayed with shocking brutality by Daniel Day-Lewis, who received his second of three Best Actor Academy Awards for his work as a driving force of the California oil boom in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Plainview aggressively cajoles and bends rivals and allies alike to his will, traipsing all over others metaphorically when he's not traipsing literally around his forever increasing land holdings dotted with big, noisy oil derricks. Such labor requires a solid, reliable, and sturdy pair of work boots, and Plainview can be seen wearing a pair of brown leather ones. They look suitably expensive, but they also look unsuitably modern. During a moment of rest, the camera shows the bottom of Plainview's boots, and they bear a waffle pattern, the kind found on early Nike running shoes. The latter is widely acknowledged as the originator of that kind of groove — which it pioneered in 1972, decades after the California oil boom.

"Dazed and Confused" is one of the best teen movies of all time, a personal and casually realistic look at the night after the last day of school in a Texas town in 1976. Nothing much really happens in Richard Linklater's re-creation of his own youth at the dawn of the American bicentennial summer, just like what happens when real kids get together, both then and now. Early in the film, as darkness falls, characters Pickford, Michelle, Slater, Jodi, Clint, and others cruise around town in their cars. During a scene shot from the point of view of one of these teens as they navigate traffic, a motorcyclist weaves around them, and he wears a vest-type jacket adorned with an illustration of a scary skull face. That's the logo of the dark punk band the Misfits, the group that would launch Glenn Danzig to fame. That's an anachronism. "Dazed and Confused" takes place in 1976, a year before the band formed, and five years before it publicly unveiled the skull logo.

"La La Land" both does and doesn't capture the feel of life in modern-day Los Angeles. For example, there are very few spontaneous, expertly choreographed musical numbers on the freeways surrounding the City of Angels, but widespread L.A. does revolve around commuting — countless Angelenos spend hours a day in their cars getting from one side of the area to the other, enduring all of the requisite annoyances and mishaps. At one point, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) are both present for an incident of road rage. During that sequence, jazz pianist Sebastian wears an appropriately retro-flavored brown shirt. In the next scene, he arrives at his apartment to see his sister, Laura (Rosemarie Dewitt). But by that time, he's wearing a blue shirt, despite not having had the opportunity or time to change. After Laura takes off, Sebastian sits down at the piano, and he's once again dressed in that brown shirt. This is not a magical shirt, nor were scenes of Sebastian furiously switching shirts cut out — it's a continuity error, which "La La Land" director Damien Chazelle acknowledges in a commentary track on the DVD of the film.

Before he became the go-to guy for filmmakers looking to cast middle-aged authority figures in prestigious dramas like "Gravity" and "The Truman Show," and before his four Academy Award nominations, Ed Harris was a smoldering young actor. After his breakthrough role as real-life test pilot and astronaut John Glenn in the 1983 movie "The Right Stuff," Harris starred as naval serviceman Jack Walsh in Jonathan Demme's World War II-homefront-set romantic drama "Swing Shift." It's a movie about love, relationships, and physical displays of affection, but it's very clean, earning a PG rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. Those de facto censors apparently didn't notice a quick scene of full-frontal male nudity. In one sequence, Harris's character emerges from a shower and wraps himself in a small bath towel. As he dries off his hair with another towel, he plops down in an easy chair, and the camera catches Harris' entire male anatomy when the towel rides up.

Adaptations of Jane Austen's novels "Persuasion," "Emma," "Mansfield Park," and "Sense and Sensibility" delighted critics and audiences in the 1990s. Even though they were all set in the early 1800s, known as the Regency era in British history, modern audiences looked past the period costumes, highly mannered behavior, and constant discussions of marrying off daughters and sisters to see the universal themes of love, friendship, and empowerment.

Arguably the most successful '90s Austen-based project was 1995's "Sense and Sensibility," which won cast member Emma Thompson a screenwriting Oscar and elevated the outside-the-U.K. fame of her co-stars Kate Winslet and Hugh Laurie. The intricately realized film also has a few modern touches, although one was clearly unintentional: With Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman) looking on, Mr. Palmer (Hugh Laurie) reluctantly holds an infant. The baby's outerwear is Regency-appropriate, but its other garments are not. The little one wears a 20th century-style disposable diaper, which certainly wasn't available in 1810.

Former teenage journalist Cameron Crowe won a screenwriting Oscar for his semi-autobiographical 2000 movie "Almost Famous." Patrick Fugit portrays William Miller, a preternaturally talented music writer who gets hired to file articles about rock concerts and life on the road. One of the 15-year-old's first assignments is to review a Black Sabbath concert. Backstage, he meets the members of Stillwater, the fictional band who he'll tour with for the rest of the movie. At one point, William witnesses the band members argue about the design of their first-ever T-shirt. However, later in the film, Stillwater makes a stop in Kansas for a show and member Russell escorts William to a house party. There's a fan of the band there, wearing a Stillwater T-shirt — which isn't the same design as that of the T-shirt the musicians were discussing earlier, said to be its first and only shirt. 

The winner of the 1992 Academy Award for Best Picture, "Unforgiven" is one of the bleakest Westerns ever filmed. It offers a gritty, unsettling look at life in the West in the 1880s, in contrast to the mid-20th century entries in the genre with clear heroes and villains and a rosy, adventurous spirit. Former criminal William Munny (Clint Eastwood) descends on a tiny Wyoming town in search of two violent cowboys with a bounty on their heads, to the chagrin of anti-vigilante sheriff Little Bill Daggett. Portrayed by Gene Hackman in an Oscar-winning performance, Daggett is often seen wearing pants held up with a belt that flows through sewn-on belt loops on his pants.

According to Arizona's official state historian Marshall Trimble, pants that came with built-in belt loops were available before the 20th century, but were very rare. The Levi Strauss Company didn't begin installing belt loops until the 1920s, for instance. In the late 19th century, when "Unforgiven" is set, cowboys and other denizens of the American west wore suspenders if they needed to keep their pants up, or, barring that, donned pants that fit tightly enough that they wouldn't slip through the course of the day.

Amid a decades-long global streak of global box office domination with his Hong Kong-produced, primarily English-language martial arts-based action movies, Jackie Chan produced and starred in the 2001 film "The Accidental Spy." More than just prolonged sequences of Chan rapidly beating up an endless string of villains with his physics-defying stunt work, it's an action comedy, and nowhere does that signature Chan style present more than in a lengthy fight scene in which the actor's character Buck Yuen, an exercise gear salesman turned criminal organization target, must fight off one violent bad guy after another while completely nude. It's comical how Chan, as Yuen, attempts to maintain his modesty and dignity and keep himself covered with whatever objects are at hand. Precise cinematography also helps keep the nudity down to non-private areas. But "The Accidental Spy" isn't perfect in its execution, and throughout the scene, Chan gives the audience a little bit more of himself than he intended. In other words, in one way or another, "The Accidental Spy" accidentally exposes almost all of Jackie Chan.

All three "Indiana Jones" movies from the 1980s are set in a past that's both distant and very removed from that time. Conceived as an homage to mid-century film serials by franchise creators Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, its heroes and villains are clearly defined. Fictional treasure-hunting archaeologist Indiana Jones is the hero, and in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," historical Nazis are the bad guys. The latter is set in 1938, and Indy encounters Nazis at a book burning. 

The Nazis are clearly identifiable by their uniforms, which, according to "The Complete Making of Indiana Jones: The Definitive Story Behind All Four Films" (via TheRaider.net), are all real, having been sourced in Eastern Europe by the film's co-costume designer Joanna Johnston. However, they don't quite date to 1938. All the actors portraying Nazis wear uniforms loaded with medals awarded for tasks and acts of war committed during World War II, which largely took place in the 1940s. Those medals wouldn't have been conceived or received yet.

Thoroughbred horse racing is a specialty sport in the 21st century, but in the early to mid-1900s, it was one of the most popular spectator events around. The memory and importance of many of the sport's most prominent figures have been lost to time, and it takes a big-budget, high-profile Hollywood movie to restore fame and interest to those forgotten athletes. "Seabiscuit" was that kind of movie. The 2003 movie centered on the titular racehorse, an undersized, unlikely champion who became a big winner and crowd-pleasing favorite during the Great Depression. 

Tobey Maguire played Seabiscuit's main jockey, John "Red" Pollard. In the film's many racing scenes, he's seen wearing a racing helmet with a prominent chin strap. This is more of a thing that modern jockeys sport. In the 1930s, real horse riders didn't wear helmets that locked into place with a chin strap. That's called a Caliente helmet, per Jockey Tack, and those weren't introduced into horse racing until the 1950s, per the Jockey Guild, about 20 years after the events depicted in "Seabiscuit."