Trivia
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Spoilers (3)
The title's translation in Russian is "Catch the Wave!", in many other languages it's "Kings of the Waves".
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All the actors got to record in the same room together, which is unusual for an animated movie. However, due to scheduling conflicts, Jeff Bridges and James Woods never got to record their voices together.
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The layout department set up a special motion-capture camera system on an old Sony video camera to give the illusion that the movie was actually being made with a real hand-held video camera, and thus enhance the documentary atmosphere in the film.
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In a pictorial montage early on, where Cody is explaining the history of surfing and surf culture, one of the pictures featured is the 18th-century Japanese woodblock printer Katsushika Hokusai's "Great Wave off Kanagawa" reworked so a penguin is seen surfing off the wave's lip.
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UFOs are placed all around the movie in various scenes like "Z is for Zurfing" and where viewers meet Chicken Joe's dead father. This is revealed in one of the Easter Eggs on the DVD.
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Cody's name is a reference to Mavericks, a famous surfing spot. It is also a possibly reference to the NBA basketball team the Dallas Mavericks, of which directors Ash Brannon and Chris Buck are fans. Finally it refers to the main character of Top Gun.
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Real-life famous surfers are shown throughout the film as part of the Pen Gu contest. Those surfers are Renato Mendes (Brazil), Rory Nubbins (Australia), and Tatsuhi Kobayashi (Japan).
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Early in the movie, Cody remarks about the lack of waves in Shiverpool, "You should have been here yesterday...", a common surfing aphorism lamenting poor surfing conditions.
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Two songs by Green Day - "Welcome to Paradise" and "Holiday" - are used as background music for the film but did not appear on the official soundtrack album. This is probably due to the profanity in the songs.
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This surprised a lot of people by picking up the third nomination for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars that year after the locks, Ratatouille and Persepolis. Many expected the box office hit, The Simpsons Movie, to be the third nominee.
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This was Jeff Bridges's second animated film. The first was The Last Unicorn, released 25 years previously.
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At the start of the movie, Cody is asked if he has any other skills besides surfing. He asks "Like what? Singing and dancing?" This is a dig at the concurrently produced Happy Feet.
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The character of The Geek is a homage to another of Jeff Bridges's creations, The Dude, in The Big Lebowski.
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Directors Ash Brannon and Chris Buck provide the voices for the film crew chronicling the adventures of Cody.
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Reggie Belafonte was inspired by Bill Sharp, the promoter of the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards. Sharp is known for his spiked-up hairstyles and frequent media appearances on TV and in surfing documentary films such as the Billabong Odyssey.
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In one scene, Mikey Abromovitz says "I feel a little light headed." That line was heard in Sony Animation Pictures' first movie Open Season.
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Originally SPEN was to have on-screen announcers appear as a walrus named Chunk and a seal named Rock, but were replaced Kelly Slater and Rob Machado signed on. However, the characters can still be found in the various Surf's Up video games, with Sal Masekela making an on-screen appearance in Chunk's guise.
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In the first appearance of SPEN Sports, there is a line "And now to dodgeball", in reference to Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and its ESPN 8: the Ocho joke.
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In the brazilian dub of the film, Cody's city is translated to Frio de Janeiro (Frio means "Cold" in English), as a reference to Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil.
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When Cody washes up on the beach while Z is training him, Z laughs and says "Wipeout." This is an homage to the beginning of the song "Wipeout" by The Surfaris, where a similar laugh and the word "wipeout" begins the song.
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Spoilers
Originally, there were interviews with two of Z's old girlfriends, Doris and Sheila (voiced by Mindy Sterling and Jane Krakowski, respectively). They were cut to keep the focus of the film on Cody. Doris and Sheila do appear in the movie, when Z appears on the beach near the end.
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Big Z faked his death and assumed a new identity as the Geek. This is a tribute to James Woods's previous film, the gangster classic Once Upon a Time in America, where the same thing happened with Woods's character.
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