Goofs

When Idgie, Big George, and a third man go to get Ruth so that she can leave her husband, they all arrive in one car, but when they leave Big George isn't in the car.

When Evelyn arrives in Whistle Stop, Ninny is sitting on a suitcase. A few minutes later, when they walk towards the car, the suitcase has disappeared.

When Ninnie is voicing the story of Ruth's cancer, she states that Ruth is moved to the Threadgoode house and placed downstairs. The following scenes indicate that Ruth is in an upstairs bedroom, as we see Idgie looking out the window, and looking down at the kids playing ball, and we see the tops of trees when Sipsey prepares the medications.

During one of Evelyn's visits to Ninny, Ninny is sporting a new hair-do. Her hair has been cut quite short and colored lavender. However, the next time Evelyn visits Ninny, her hair is once again very long and very white.

When Evelyn picks up the note from Idgy to Ruth at the end of the film, she does not place the note back on her grave beside the honey. But when it flashes back to the grave the note has been placed back on Ruth's grave stone.

When Buddy is chasing Ruth's hat down the tracks he gets his shoe caught between a guard rail and the main rail. Guard rails are typically used on bridges and at switches, but has no purpose in this location other than to catch Buddy's foot.

When Buddy is chasing Ruth's hat, the tops of the rails are rusty from long disuse. Normally railroad tracks that are used regularly have a shiny metal rail surface.

In the scene where the young women are in the boxcar (from which they pass out canned goods), the box cars were obviously built by the set decorators. And wrong. The cars have outside bracing, common enough in the period of the film. But all outside-braced boxcars had their wood planks running horizontally, not vertically as in the movie.

When Evelyn hits the car in the parking lot she says she's older and has more insurance. Auto insurance wouldn't have paid for the damage done to the VW Beetle or to her own vehicle because it was intentional.

When Evelyn was knocking out the wall in her house she was using a 10 pound long-handle sledgehammer to break through the wall. When Ed comes she has switched to a 2 pound sledgehammer. Swinging the big hammer is tiring and imprecise for most people. She switched to the two-pound hammer to knock out the horizontal braces.

Ed says the Evelyn has hit the younger girls car six times, but in the film she only hits it four times. However, as Ed wasn't a witness to the event, he is only repeating it as he has heard it, possibly through an inaccurate account.

Ninny narrates: "But then it started to rain that month. And it rained and it rained and it flooded parts of Whistle Stop. And that's why Grady's deputies stumbled onto Frank Bennett's pickup truck."

Droughts can lower water levels and expose already-submerged cars. Heavy rains and fast moving water can cause a submerged vehicle to move and lodge in a more shallow area.

Despite the fact that the story takes place in the Deep South and all adults have (mostly passable) Southern accents, young Buddy has no southern accent at all, although he would in reality never have heard any other way of speaking.

When Frank Bennett's truck is retrieved from the river, as it's being hoisted up and spins, it is obvious that the engine/transmission have been removed, and a painted piece of sheet-metal put in place to obscure the void.

When Evelyn's husband brings her flowers, she pulls out previous flowers from the vase and we can see there is no water in the vase. Both bunch of flowers appear to be artificial.

During the scenes set in 1920 near the beginning of the film, Gene Austin's "My Blue Heaven" is playing at a wedding. The song was written in 1924 and not released until 1927.

At the film's end, as the camera starts to pan across the Café front, the first hanging 'tin' sign is for two liter soda 89c. Liters did not come into U.S. sales until PepsiCo introduced the first two liter sized soft drink bottle in 1970, likely long after the Whistle Stop decline.