Bloopers No One Got To See

Like deleted scenes and director commentaries, bloopers are one last little way to enjoy a favorite film after the fact. It's a lot of fun to be taken out of the world of a movie and get a glimpse at the filmmaking process by watching the actors flub their lines, miss their marks, and curse up a storm.

Those blooper reels show up on online or on the movie's DVD special features menu...usually. There are some bloopers that, for whatever reason, never get released for public consumption; we only know about them as stores from the set. Here are some outtakes that we're sure would be classics, if only we ever got to see them.

Plenty of Star Wars B-roll and bloopers have leaked out over the years, but for some reason, outtakes of the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi remain unseen—probably to preserve the dignity of actor Sir Alec Guinness or his co-star Mark Hamill. 

The very first Star Wars lightsaber fight occurs in the first movie in the franchise, 1977's A New Hope. As our heroes flee Imperial captivity with Princess Leia in tow, Darth Vader defeats Luke Skywalker's mentor Obi-Wan before his eyes. It's a scene that's both exhilarating and heartbreaking, but on the set, Hamill couldn't keep his cool. The actor told a crowd at the 2017 Star Wars Celebration that the scene took more than a few takes—because he just couldn't stop himself from laughing.

The Hunger Games in The Hunger Games are ultimately everyone for themselves, but Tributes Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Rue (Amandla Stenberg) look out for each other—until Rue dies from a spear to the stomach. As she dies, Rue asks Katniss to sing to her, and she chokes back tears as she obliges. After Rue passes, Katniss tenderly kisses her head. It's sad, brutal, and hilarious—at least on the set. In an interview with E! Online, Stenberg and Jacqueline Emerson, who played another Tribute named Foxface, said that Lawrence's kisses left "a gross little spit bubble," which led to much laughter amongst the cast.

Les Miserables is a very serious movie that combines all the non-hilarity of 19th century French political revolution with the equally unfunny subjects of starvation and prostitution. (But hey, the songs are good.) Anne Hathaway won an Academy Award for playing the orphaned, abandoned, and emaciated Fantine. The character dies, but returns later in the film as a ghost during the death scene of Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman). This isn't a movie or scene where a blooper reel would be very tasteful, so Hathaway had to describe her big goof on The Daily Show. As co-stars Amanda Seyfried and Eddie Redmayne were singing, crying, and hugging over the fading Valjean, Hathaway tried to move underneath the camera to quickly zip around...only she tripped on her ghost costume, and was so startled she couldn't sing her next few lines.

Robin Williams went wild in the recording booth while laying down his lines as the Genie in Disney's 1992 classic Aladdin. That was part of the reason Williams was so great for the part—he was a frenetic ball of comic energy, rapidly delivering unscripted jokes and breaking into spot-on celebrity impressions. Audio engineers reportedly recorded 16 hours of Williams' riffs, but only one read per line of dialogue could make it into the final cut—this means there's a vault somewhere with tapes of Williams' many, many outtakes. 

Audiences may hear them someday, but not anytime soon. There was a clause in Williams' will preventing the use of any unused material for 25 years. Williams died in 2014, so that means Disney can't release any of the bloopers—or use any of the recordings in any way—until 2039.

Designed by the people who brought us the Muppets and voiced by Frank Oz, the tiny green Jedi Yoda is so realistic that it's easy to forget he's a puppet. And as tends to be the case with most cutting-edge technology, that meant problems could and would occur while filming the character's scenes in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. 

Mark Hamill talked about the myriad on-set Yoda issues at Star Wars Celebration in 2017, recalling that whenever the puppet "would start going haywire and the ears would move and the eyes wouldn't open," they'd rush it to the repair crew. Filming then shifted to securing reaction shots from Hamill. "So every time you see me talking and you can't see Yoda, it's a stick with a piece of tape on it."

People getting hurt isn't usually something that's funny, but the circumstances surrounding Hilary Swank's injury on the set of the 2007 romantic drama P.S. I Love You are absolutely ridiculous. While it's terrible she got hurt, she certainly had an interesting story to tell. The script called for Swank's co-star Gerard Butler to do a little striptease, but one of his suspenders inexplicably snapped and flew into the air, whipping Swank right in the forehead. The Oscar winner said the moment "left a perfect suspender" mark on her brow—and required stitches.

Filming a sex scene is incredibly awkward. Actors have to lie there virtually naked and pretend to engage in very intimate acts under hot lights with crew members watching. One way the body and mind inadvertently reacts to such a weird situation: hysterical laughter. Jennifer Lopez and Ryan Guzman starred in the 2015 drama The Boy Next Door, about an ill-advised fling between a teacher and her much younger neighbor. There are of course some steamy, sexy, serious moments in the movie—of which Lopez admitted to Us Weekly that neither she nor Guzman could handle. "We couldn't stop laughing at one point," she told the magazine. "You feel so awkward."

Fox's quirky sitcom takes place after just about everybody in the world has succumbed to a deadly super-virus. Two of the last survivors, Phil (Will Forte) and Carol (Kristen Schaal) find each other, and know what they must do: try to repopulate the Earth. That makes for some odd love scenes between two strangers who don't even like each other much at first, and filming those scenes was even weirder and funnier than the finished product. Schaal told Marie Claire that because her character had to forcefully yell at Forte's character, the necessary "diaphragm work" put her into "the danger zone of where the beans are." Schaal had no choice but to accept what was going to happen next. "Finally, I just looked at Will and I was like, 'I'm gonna fart on you.' And I did."

It isn't just a clever title: there are a lot of fantastic and memorable songs in The Sound of Music. One highlight is "Something Good," in which baroness Maria (Julie Andrews) and single father of seven Captain Georg Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) pretty much admit that they love each other. 

Charmian Carr, who played eldest Von Trapp sibling Liesl in the 1965 movie, recounted the day the "Something Good" sequence was shot in her memoir, Forever Liesl. Carr reported that Andrews and Plummer were "both exhausted," as they'd been filming the movie for more than six months, and came down with "a bad case of the giggles." It apparently started when a set light "started making funny noises, not unlike someone making a raspberry off camera." Andrews began to laugh, and then so did Plummer. Director Robert Wise got so frustrated with so many ruined takes that he gave his stars an extra-long lunch break to "walk it off."