Bloopers So Good That They Kept Them In The Movie

Bloopers happen. In fact, once in a rare while, they're actually a good thing. A film is a large and collaborative effort. Scripts get rewritten all the time when a director or actor or designer gets an idea on the fly, and it's immediately incorporated into the film because it's exciting, it's dynamic, and it makes sense for the look, feel, or plot of a movie. Actors contribute to this dynamic in their own unique way. They make a mistake, flub a line, or react in the moment in what seems to be out of character ... but it just works. These bloopers were so good, the filmmakers ended up actually keeping them in the movie.

Most of the examples of finished product bloopers you'll see below are in films you've probably seen dozens of times or more, but it's always possible that a botched line reading or a stunt that accidentally became a real-life action beat has escaped your notice before now. As Bob Ross once said, "There are no mistakes; just happy accidents" — a philosophy that seems to be borne out by many of the scenes listed below.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote "Good Will Hunting" to give themselves a couple of meaty roles. Not only did the movie shoot them to the A list, but they won a best original screenplay Oscar for their efforts — yet they didn't write arguably the most famous and heartfelt scene in the whole movie.

During a therapy session with Will Hunting (Matt Damon), Dr. Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) discusses how much he misses his late wife, recalling in a hilariously intimate moment how she used to fart in her sleep so loudly she'd wake herself up. Damon and Affleck mention on the "Good Will Hunting" DVD commentary track that Williams, a master of improvisation, made up the monologue on the spot, and it was so funny that Williams and Damon both broke out into genuine laughter. That made it into the film — as did some shaky, out of focus shots, the result of the cameraman's own uncontrollable laughter.

One of the more enjoyable new additions to the "Star Wars" canon found in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" is the sometimes funny, sometimes nasty droid K-2SO. He's been described as "the anti-C3PO," according to actor Alan Tudyk, who provided motion capture and a voice for the character. During a scene in which K-2SO is pretending to escort partners-in-crime Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) into Imperial custody, he gets too far into character, as it were, and slaps Cassian across the face. Luna didn't know Tudyk was going to slap him, and to keep from laughing and ruining the take, he covered his face.

A post on X (formerly known as Twitter) from @infoCinelandia shows how the moment was unplanned and Luna had a hard time staying in character. Fortunately, the moment was able to survive not just the editing process but multiple layers of CGI and other special effects. That's pretty impressive for a simple smack on the head.

Alfred Hitchcock coined the nonsense term "MacGuffin" to describe important objects upon which the plot of a movie revolves. This would include the ring in "The Lord of the Rings" or the Infinity Stones in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He who controls the orbs controls the universe, and the recovery of one is a major element of "Guardians of the Galaxy." They're incredibly important, which is why it's so funny when Chris Pratt, as Star-Lord, straight up drops one when he's supposed to hand it over. But he stayed in character and caught the orb before it could shatter. Pratt's blooper worked with the comical tone of "Guardians," so it made the cut and stayed in the movie.

It's exactly the kind of irreverent detail that the "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies (and, one could argue, most installments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe) are always throwing in to keep the super-heroic dramatics from getting too heavy. But in this case, it was a genuinely unscripted moment that was too perfect to be removed.

As the great wizard Gandalf, Ian McKellen's comic timing in the scene when he visits an aged Bilbo Baggins in his tiny hobbit house is so good that the scene looks totally worked out. McKellen has to duck to move around and runs into a chandelier. That was planned, but then he turns around and runs right smack into a rafter ... which was not planned. McKellen came up with the idea in the moment and didn't tell director Peter Jackson he was going to do it. The director liked it and kept his star's blooper in because it's a light-hearted moment that more fully paints a picture of just how tiny those hobbit houses really are.

The moment shows how a master actor like McKellen can turn discomfort into instant gold, and how some of the most memorable moments of even a classic movie like "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" can come up completely on the fly, not handed down by the director.

Every once in a while, Mother Nature steps in to provide some on-the-spot thematic support for an important shot. According to production lore from "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," a troublesome flag that wouldn't stay put during a key sequence provided an unplanned moment that Peter Jackson happened to like.

As war looms and the loss of Rohan seems imminent, Eowyn (Miranda Otto) stares off into the distance as the camera reveals a wide scenic shot. As she does, a flag on a pole whips nervously and wildly in the wind. And then, aptly expressing the mood of uncertainty and destruction to come, the flag rips off the pole and flies away. The metaphor was apt — but it was really also a blooper. Peter Jackson didn't plan for this — it was just really windy on that day of shooting. He knew a great shot when he saw one, though, and kept it in.

The police lineup scene early in the movie is crucial to the plot of "The Usual Suspects." It's where all the criminal main characters meet to arrange a big heist. And yet, as each character steps forward to read the line police told them to read, they can barely contain their laughter. It's disarming and shows how the criminals are completely dismissive of law enforcement. But that wasn't in the script, and it wasn't a directorial note. No, the cast of "The Usual Suspects" couldn't stop laughing because actor Benicio Del Toro couldn't stop farting. Co-star Kevin Pollak says he farted on "like 12 takes in a row." Director Bryan Singer got so mad with the cast's inability to focus that he yelled at them ... which probably only made them laugh harder. To Singer's credit, he saw the entertainment value in his leading men horsing around, and ultimately opted to keep it in the final cut.

Writer, director, and star Ben Stiller sought to explore the lowest trenches of male stupidity with 2001's "Zoolander," but one of the film's funniest moments comes from Stiller himself having a very Zoolander-esque brain freeze during a tricky dialogue scene between himself and David Duchovny.

It might not be a very flattering story for Stiller, who accidentally pulled a real-life Zoolander with the flub, but it speaks to his comedic instincts that he left the moment in the movie.

In the comedy about very dumb male models tasked with stopping an assassination, Derek Zoolander (Stiller) learns via a very lengthy monologue from former hand model J.P. Prewitt (Duchovny) that explains the longstanding conspiracy about how figures in the fashion world have orchestrated several assassinations, using brainwashed male models to do the dirty work. Immediately after, Zoolander again asks, "but why male models?" Stiller couldn't think of his line, so he just repeated his line from earlier in the scene that set off Duchovny's monologue. It wasn't scripted, but it so perfectly emphasizes how dumb Zoolander is that it stayed in the film.

It's one thing to leave a blooper in a comedy like "Zoolander" or even a lighthearted adventure movie like "Star Wars," but the whole point of "Casino Royale" is to present audiences with a gritty, no-nonsense version of Agent 007, James Bond (Daniel Craig). Fortunately, the blooper in question doesn't really read as a mistake, but an uncanny visual allusion to an iconic moment in the history of the "James Bond" franchise.

While he follows a horseback, bikini-clad Bond girl with his eyes, Daniel Craig was supposed to simply swim up onto a beach. But as he floated up, the actor ran into a sand bank. That gave him no choice but to quickly stand up on his feet and stomp out of the water. Suddenly, Craig is standing there, muscled-up body on display, along with some very revealing swim trunks. "Casino Royale" was a reboot of the Bond series, and you could assume that this was a reference to an almost identical scene from the first "James Bond" movie, "Dr. No," in which Ursula Andress emerged onto a beach in much the same fashion. But it was a total accident.

In the "Fast & Furious" movies, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges (Tej) and Tyrese Gibson (Roman) often serve up what Ludacris calls "comic relief." "We have a lot of fun on set, because we do a lot of different takes and a lot of our ideas make it into the movie," Ludacris told IGN. Case in point: In "Fast & Furious 6," as Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) enters a scene, Roman quips to Jordana Brewster's character, "Hey, Mia, you better hide your baby oil!" Going off-script, Johnson retorts, "You better hide that big-a** forehead." Also unscripted, and also in the movie, is Ludacris's spit take. "I was really laughing," he later admitted. "We make real moments."

For diehard fans of the "Fast & Furious" franchise, these real moments are part of the fabric of what makes the series special, and it's next to impossible to imagine the movies being the same without them.

There were two raiders of the lost ark in "Raiders of the Lost Ark": heroic American archaeologist Indiana Jones, and evil French archaeologist René Belloq. Right before the ark is opened in all of its face-melting, head-exploding glory, the movie features a tight shot of Belloq, played by actor Paul Freeman. A fly quite comically lands on Freeman's face, which obviously wasn't supposed to happen because flies aren't readily trainable. Freeman certainly felt the bug, but he didn't think anyone else noticed. And then, it would seem, that the fly walks right into Freeman's mouth. Was it gross? Did Belloq deserve that? Yes, and yes. But Freeman didn't really swallow the fly. He said the film looks "choppy" in that scene, noting that a few frames were removed to make it look like the fly crawled into his mouth, when in reality it actually flew away. Nevertheless, Freeman earned praise for going the extra blooper mile — in her 1981 review of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Pauline Kael of The New Yorker calls the actor "a trouper" for eating the bug.

Few filmmakers were as deft at blending horror with comedy as the late Wes Craven, who arguably reached the apex of this approach to the genre with the original "Scream." Fittingly, one of its best and funniest moments is said to have been an on-the-spot improvisation by Matthew Lillard — a spontaneous quip that went on to become one of the movie's many quotable lines.

Craven's "Scream" deftly blends horror and comedy to produce a slasher movie that's simultaneously a self-aware parody of the genre. In one scene, the film's copious use of slippery fake blood made the former lead to the latter: Billy (Skeet Ulrich) grabs a blood-covered phone, only to have it slip out of his hands and knock Stu (Lillard) in the head. His response: "You hit me with the phone, d**k!" That reaction is right in character for Lillard's goofy, wound-up character, and according to the DVD commentary, it wasn't scripted. Craven, knowing it was too good to cut, went ahead and kept the blooper in the movie. Blood and laughter — the definitive "Scream" moment.

Donald Glover has a supporting role in director Ridley Scott's science-fiction epic "The Martian." Glover told Conan O'Brien on "Conan" that Scott moves very quickly, generally only securing three or four takes of a scene at most before moving on. Knowing he only had a limited number of opportunities to "bring it," Glover said he was nervous, but nailed a scene in which he was supposed to spit in a wastebasket, do some staged business, and then get up and walk away. Well, he almost nailed it, because when he had to do the get-up-and-walk-away part, he slipped and fell. "And then I get up, and I'm like, 'I'm fine.'" Scott's reaction, according to Glover: "That was great." The shot made it into the movie. "When you see me in the movie and I eat it, that's really eating it."

Glover's retelling of the whole incident is almost as amusing as the moment in the movie itself.

Sometimes an on-set accident lends so much power to a sequence that it's hard to imagine how the scene would have worked without it. Such is the case with a particularly nauseating monologue in "Django Unchained" featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and a disturbing amount of what turns out to have been the actor's actual blood.

One of Django's (Jamie Foxx) chief aims in this 2012 Western is to free his wife (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of terrifyingly crazed slave owner Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The meeting between Django and Candie is extremely tense, and for dramatic effect, Candie slams his hand onto a table ... right onto a glass. DiCaprio didn't stop at all during his blooper-fueled take, despite the fact that he'd just seriously lacerated his hand. He continued his monologue, and the scene, while nonchalantly picking out pieces of glass. Director Quentin Tarantino, recognizing great drama — or maybe just not in any hurry to ask for another pass at the scene — kept it in the final cut.

A lot of actors will bring home a souvenir from a movie set — their costume or a special prop, for example. Daryl Hannah's souvenir from "Blade Runner" is a scar on her arm, and the incident that caused the injury made its way into the movie. While playing a replicant named Pris, Hannah ran from genetic designer J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) and slipped on the wet pavement in the pouring rain, falling onto a vehicle and smashing into one of its windows with her elbow. None of this was planned, and Hannah finished filming the scene, preserving what ended up being a fairly serious injury for posterity.

It just goes to show, despite what the public relations people at the Tyrell Corporation may try to tell us, replicants can make mistakes just like humans can. Fortunately, Hannah wasn't seriously hurt (permanent scar notwithstanding) and the moment lends a bit of additional tension to the film.

Much like Stanley Kubrick or Michael Cimino before him, David Fincher has a reputation for attention to detail on the sets of his films. So, if an accident not only happens but survives Fincher's editing process, it's a pretty special moment, indeed. Just such a moment can be found in Fincher's underrated 2011 thriller, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."

It's an otherwise quiet scene in the English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson's crime thriller. Perhaps it was a palate cleanser between scenes of brutal violence, but it's just investigator Mikael (Daniel Craig) in a cabin kitchen, reaching for a can of cat food by which to feed a cat. It was just supposed to be a bit of time-passing stage business, but as he grabs the can, Daniel Craig knocks over a bottle. He instinctively jumps back and grabs it before it can smash to the ground. The quick act helps to characterize Mikael as an agile warrior of a guy who gets things done, but it was completely accidental. David Fincher praised the blooper and kept it in the movie.

For her role as the manipulative outlaw Daisy Domergue in Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight," Jennifer Jason Leigh had to know how to play a little guitar. She learned on a vintage 19th century Martin on loan to the production from the Martin Guitar Museum. In one scene, Leigh's co-star Kurt Russell was supposed to yank the instrument out of her hands and smash it to smithereens — but of course, in real life, the cameras were supposed to cut first so it could be swapped out for an ordinary guitar. The cut didn't come, and Russell dutifully destroyed the Martin — valued at $40,000 — causing a genuinely surprised Leigh to cry out, "Whoa! whoa!" Russell, Leigh says, "felt terrible" because he "had no idea" that he was busting up such a valuable guitar.

There's no hard data to back this up, but at $40,000, this may well be the most expensive movie mistake on this list.

"Rain Man" is that rare film that wins the Oscar for best picture and includes what basically amounts to a fart joke on screen. Not only that, but it was also a completely unscripted and, according to one of the film's stars, completely authentic moment as well. It has to rank as one of the most memorable fart scenes in movie history when brothers Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) and Charlie (Tom Cruise) are in a phone booth together, and Raymond passes gas. Well, according to Hoffman, the moment was completely real, and in an effort to give Cruise a warning about what was to come, he quipped, while staying in character, "Uh-oh, fart." Cruise is overwhelmed by the big smell in the tiny place, and the scene from then on is entirely ad-libbed. "It's just my favorite moment of any film I've ever done," Hoffman later said, via Contact Music. "That includes Shakespeare that I've done onstage, anything."

"The Outsiders," based on S.E. Hinton's classic young adult novel about teens from the wrong side of the tracks, benefited from the cast of talented young actors under the direction of Francis Ford Coppola — almost all of whom went on to be major stars, including Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, and C. Thomas Howell.

In a scene at a drive-in, Dillon and Howell's characters (Dallas Winston and Ponyboy Curtis, respectively) hang out in the seats for people who didn't come in cars. According to Hinton, who was on set the night the scene was shot, the scene played out a little bit differently than had been scripted. Dallas hits on Cherry Valance (Diane Lane) ... until he falls out of his chair and hits the ground. Howell can't help but laugh and he looks offscreen to Coppola, presumably for a "cut" motion, but Coppola kept rolling, and Dillon climbed back up into his chair and continued the scene.

The characters in "Clueless" are largely, in a word, clueless, particularly whenever they are forced to discuss anything that falls outside the purview of their insular and privileged lives. As it turns out, one of the movie's funniest moments in service of that idea was actually completely unscripted and a prime example of how sometimes an actor's real-life ignorance can contribute greatly to a character, and, perhaps, serve as a bit of a learning experience for everyone involved.

In a high school debate exercise on whether the U.S. should take in refugees, ditzy Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) mentions the plight of displaced Haitians. Only she mispronounces it as "Hate-ee-uns." While it makes sense that a clothes-obsessed, self-absorbed teenager would not know how to pronounce that word, it was actually Alicia Silverstone who didn't know how to pronounce "Haitians." Her ignorance might be embarrassing to Silverstone now, but it led to one of the most adorable bloopers that made it into any hit movie of the '90s.

However, let's keep in mind that Silverstone was in her late teens when she made "Clueless," and almost certainly knows how to pronounce "Haitians" correctly today. 

There's nothing like a well-timed pratfall to really endear a character to the audience. And sometimes, the actor playing that character gets a little clumsy as well, and the moment ends up in the movie as a perfect synthesis of real life and make-believe. That's certainly the case with one of the funniest moments in Disney's "The Princess Diaries."

This movie made Anne Hathaway a star, and the DVD has become a slumber party classic for little kids. It's a classic ugly duckling story of a girl named Mia who finds out she's the heir apparent to a small European kingdom. But she's so very awkward, you see, falling down all the time, as she learns how to carry herself with the grace and poise befitting a royal. At one point, Mia is dancing on some bleachers in the rain at her private school with her best friend. Then she takes a pretty nasty tumble. That's no stuntwoman, and that was not supposed to happen; Hathaway really did slip and fall down, and hard. But it fit in so well with the character's awkwardness that it was kept in the finished film.

Actor Dustin Hoffman, as a proponent of the Method school of acting, seems to have found himself at the center of happy filmmaking accidents on more than one occasion. In addition to the gassy phone booth movie magic of "Rain Man," "Midnight Cowboy" also features an on-the-spot improvisation from the actor, and it gave birth to an even more indelible movie moment in the process.

The 1970 movie "Midnight Cowboy" features one of the most famous lines in movie history, and it's all because of a blooper. As Ratso Rizzo (Hoffman) and Joe Buck (Jon Voight) are walking across a busy Manhattan street having a conversation, a car nearly hits Ratso. Or rather, it nearly hit Dustin Hoffman. The movie had a very low budget, so it was shot with a hidden camera on a real street ... and a real car really almost hit Hoffman. His angry, funny response, "I'm walkin' here!" (along with a few smacks on the hood of the offending taxi) was so perfectly in character that director John Schlesinger kept it in the film, which went on to win best picture at the Academy Awards.

"Almost Famous" is very close to writer-director Cameron Crowe's heart. The story of a teenage journalist (Patrick Fugit) embedded on tour with a '70s rock band is based on his actual experiences as a teenage journalist. Crowe won a screenwriting Oscar for his efforts, but one of the most affecting moments of the film wasn't from Crowe's real life or his script. 

When Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) tires of her life as a "Band Aid" (a groupie, in other words), she tells young William she's going to live in Morocco for a year because she needs "a new crowd." Then she sweetly asks William if he'd like to join her. He replies with a wishy-washy, less-than-enthusiastic, "Yes. Yeah." Penny asks, "You sure?" to which William says, "Ask me again." She does, and this time he delivers an emphatic "Yes!" The "ask me again" wasn't William being smooth or romantic — Fugit was unhappy with his first line read, and he asked Kate Hudson for a do-over while the cameras rolled. According to his DVD commentary track, Crowe thought the exchange came across as sincere, so he kept it in.

Movies don't get much more beloved than "Pretty Woman," the comedy classic that made Julia Roberts into a top-tier movie star. And one of her best moments in the movie was a completely real and authentic accident.

Portraying Vivian, the prostitute with a heart of gold who falls in love with businessman Edward (Richard Gere), thrust Julia Roberts onto Hollywood's A-list in 1990 and she's been America's sweetheart ever since. In perhaps the movie's most famous scene, Edward offers Vivian a fancy necklace to wear, and snaps the hinged soft case suddenly shut near her fingers, making her boisterously laugh. Well, that was Julia Roberts showing off her famous laugh and smile — not Vivian. In 2012, "Pretty Woman" director Garry Marshall told Entertainment Tonight that Roberts had a habit of showing up to work a little groggy after partying all night. He and Gere conspired to jolt her to attention with the old snapping box gag. They planned to include the prank in the film's eventual gag reel, but Marshall thought it worked much better in the actual movie.

It's one of the most famous movie bloopers of all time in one of the most scrutinized and analyzed movies ever made: The hilarious moment when an Imperial stormtrooper cracks his head on a doorway in the original "Star Wars" movie from 1977. Once you see it, or have it pointed out to you, you can't help but watch the guy — clumsy even by stormtrooper standards — crack his head over and over again, every time you watch the movie.

This blooper is so famous that in 2017, The Hollywood Reporter tracked down Laurie Goode, the man who claimed to be the immortal stormtrooper, and got the full story from him. "On the second day of filming, I developed an upset stomach. By midmorning I had paid three to four visits to the loo/bathroom," Goode recalled. "On about the fourth take, as I shuffled along, I felt my stomach rumbling, and 'bang,' I hit my head! As I wasn't moving too fast, it was more of a scuffed bash, so it didn't hurt, but as no one shouted 'cut,' I thought the shot wasn't wide enough for me to be in frame."

Goode said he was surprised to see his blunder in the finished film and has been telling friends and strangers about his small but pivotal role in "Star Wars" mythos ever since, concurrently watching his time in the slapstick spotlight grow in significance and notoriety.

As the clip above shows, filmmaker George Lucas referenced the famous flub in "Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones," showing Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison), after he's cloned to create the Empire's army of stormtroopers, hitting his own head on a closing spaceship door.

Most bloopers arise out of production organically, but every once in a while, an inspired filmmaker comes up with the idea to set up a blooper-prone scenario intentionally. For instance, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" director Judd Apatow and star Steve Carell decided that in order to accurately capture the pain and trauma of his character's chest-waxing scene, he would need to undergo the procedure for real, on camera.

"Virgin" co-star Paul Rudd confirmed the story for GQ on YouTube. "When Steve was getting waxed in that scene, he really was," recalled Rudd. "The girl who actually did it said that her family owned a salon, and she did this and I don't think that was true. I don't think she'd ever done it." Her eagerness to book an acting gig led to unimaginable pain for Carell, which in turn generated many of the classic lines from the scene that are still remembered today.

Is a blooper still a blooper when it's basically been (at least somewhat) intentionally orchestrated? Opinions may differ, but this scene is funny enough to merit inclusion here.

Robin Williams was famous for his wild improvisations on film sets, but even he wasn't above getting caught off-guard by an unplanned incident from time to time. On the set of his classic comedy "Mrs. Doubtfire," the comedian found himself hiding his face behind a makeshift mask of cake frosting in order to conceal his identity. But according to "Doubtfire" lore, whoever came up with the gag didn't consider the effects of those hot studio lights, so the icing makeup began to melt and drip off his face. Ever the master improviser, Williams came up with his "one drop or two?" line on the fly, and the rest is comedy history.

Of course, for every unplanned bit that made it into the final cut of "Mrs. Doubtfire," there were plenty of improvisations left on the cutting room floor. So much so that the film has one of the most memorable deleted scene reels of all time.

"Citizen Kane" is another film that's been analyzed and scrutinized from every angle, and director-writer-star Orson Welles favored a kitchen-sink approach for his first feature film, giving audiences plenty to chew on for decades hence. According to "Kane" lore (referenced in numerous pieces of writing on the film), during one climactic scene between Welles and Joseph Cotten, Cotten stumbles over the word "criticism," pronouncing it as "crimiticism" instead.

The flub is in line with Cotten's character's drunken state, and you can see Welles almost break character laughing at it, perhaps deciding then and there that he was going to include the mistake in the movie. Other accounts of the story say that Cotten made the mistake in rehearsals and was directed by Welles to replicate it when the cameras were rolling. Either way, it's a bit of authentic human mispronunciation that you don't often see in feature films, now or in the 1940s.

What better project than "Pineapple Express" — a film that seeks to combine equal parts action and comedy — to include a dangerous and injurious stunt mishap in the finished product? The highly problematic James Franco, who plays lovable stoner Saul in the movie, took it upon himself to perform a stunt involving running headfirst into a tree in fear.

According to co-star Seth Rogen, a pad fixed to the tree to cushion Franco's colliding head ended up causing grievous harm to the actor when he ended up smacking an improperly attached screw and gashing his forehead. The take stayed in the film (probably as a simple measure to avoid having to shoot the stunt again), and Saul ended up wearing his iconic headband for much of his other scenes, so it all worked out for the best. It's possible that Franco might have had second thoughts about performing his own stunts after this happened, though.

The late master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has an infamous reputation for his fastidious perfectionism and attention to detail, so you know if he let a mistake stay in one of his finished films, it has to be a pretty good one. Such is the case with "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," featuring a completely unhinged and over the top George C. Scott in the role of General Buck Turgidson.

As you can see in the clip above, during a particularly impassioned speech regarding the United States War Room's "big board," Turgidson trips and falls into a seamless somersault before rising to his feet, all the while continuing to speak as if nothing happened. According to "Strangelove" legend, Scott actually tripped for real while filming the scene, and the veteran stage actor simply never broke character. In any event, Kubrick was clearly satisfied with the take, since it was put in the movie and became a part of legendary blooper history.

The sweetly nasty 1988 yuletide Bill Murray vehicle "Scrooged" isn't lacking in violent slapstick, mostly of the planned and rehearsed variety. But at least one of its pratfalls — specifically, the one that transpires after Murray douses a waiter he thinks is on fire in another one of his Christmas ghost-provoked hallucinations – is reportedly a genuine accident. You can see it happen in the clip above (which references the part about it being unscripted in the title) and enjoy the way Murray doesn't break character while adding to the film's cavalcade of painful humor.

It's a truly great pratfall, enhanced by Murray's nonchalant recovery as he exits the restaurant. It's further improved by the widely reported notion that the fall was completely accidental and authentic. It's enough to make even the most jaded Ebeneezers among us laugh and learn to celebrate the holiday season ... by watching "Scrooged" again.