Did You Know?
Before closing their doors for good in 1982, the Checker Motors Corporation of Kalamazoo Michigan supplied cars to the series.
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Judd Hirsch was often late to rehearsals because he was conducting business in his office.
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After the third season, director James Burrows and writers Glen Charles and Les Charles quit the series to create Cheers
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In an episode during the first season, Danny DeVito's character plays violin in one scene. A photo taken during rehearsals of that episode ran in a tabloid magazine along with a story describing how De Vito is "giving up" acting to play violin. De Vito's relatives called him out of concern believing the story was true.
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When ABC canceled the series in 1982, HBO considered purchasing the show, only to lose out to NBC, which promoted the show in ads stating "Same time, better network".
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The theme song's title, "Angela (Theme from Taxi)", was written/performed by Bob James and was from his 1978 album 'Touchdown'. The album's title track was the song James had actually written for the theme, but Taxi's producers liked the short cue Bob had recorded for one brief scene with Alex (Judd Hirsch) and a young woman, Angela, and used that instead.
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In the opening credits the cab is being driven across New York's Queensboro (59th Street) Bridge by Tony Danza. The buildings in the background keep reappearing in the same place. The segment was shot once in the middle of the 1.4-mile bridge and then repeated several times to run throughout the entire credits.
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Andy Kaufman had invented the persona for his character in his comedy act prior to working on the show, including the famous line "tank-you-veddy-much". It was the show's writers that came up with the name of Latka Gravas. Kaufman created Latka's language, which he taught to Carol Kane for her role as Simka, by inviting her to dinner and refusing to let her speak English.
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On The Howard Stern Show, Taxi writer Sam Simon claimed that when Jeff Conaway was absent during the production of one episode, his dialogue was reassigned to the other cast members who delivered the jokes as well or better, which made the producers realize that Conaway was expendable. Conaway left during the 4th season.
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Judd Hirsch (Alex), Danny DeVito (Louie), Marilu Henner (Elaine) and Tony Danza (Tony) are the four actors who appear in every episode. Contrary to popular belief, background actor J. Alan Thomas was not in every episode, being absent from 7 (this trivia does not include Taxi Celebration episodes as they are essentially clip-shows with no new footage).
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