Volunteers

The film was mildly controversial for its Coca-Cola drink scene, which played like a very deliberate product placement. The movie was made by TriStar Pictures, which was a division of Columbia Pictures, which was owned by the Coca-Cola Company. Just recently, home video cassettes of "Ghostbusters (1984)" had been released with an advertisement for Coke on the tapes. The film's co-screenwriter Ken Levine has explained this on his blog by saying: "We wrote that Coke scene in the first draft, 1980. It stayed in every draft and wound up on the screen. Originally, the movie was set up at MGM. After a couple of years, it went into turnaround, finally landing at HBO Silver Screen in partnership with TriStar. This was 1984. TriStar was a division of Sony, as was the Coca-Cola Company. No one from the studio ever asked that that scene be in. No one from the studio ever mentioned that scene period. A year later, the film was released, and we walked into a major shitstorm. I look back and think, all of this could have so easily been avoided if he just offered her a joint".

Early in the movie, after Lawrence boards the airliner and the cabin door is shut, one of the thugs chasing him tries to board the plane by jumping from the stairway. When he hits the side of the plane, the cabin door flexes and moves, revealing it to be a fake door.

Tom Hanks' character has firstname "Lawrence". Hanks saves the village. As film fades to black for credits, a large group of "volunteers" gather around Hanks. Just as black for start of credits shows, chants of "Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence..." are heard. Absolutely a tribute to scene of O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia marching across traintop to chants of "Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence..."

Featured in Biography: To John with Love: A Tribute to John Candy (1995)