Iron Sky (2012)
Trivia
Adler says Moon Nazi invasion on Earth begins at 5:45 a.m., exactly like the German invasion on Poland that triggered World War Two.
The radio traffic heard in the scene where the spaceships from the other UN countries join the fight was entirely crowdsourced. The dialog were recorded by fans of the film at home and send to the director.
The German customs office would not allow the film-makers to bring any Nazi costumes and regalia into Germany, but fortunately the makers of Inglourious Basterds helped director Vuorensola by revealing how they had circumvented the same problem.
The character name Vivian Wagner is a reference to a Finnish newspaper comic strip Viivi & Wagner about the relationship between a woman and a pig.
Nazi spaceships are named after operas in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle. "Rheingold", "Walkure", "Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung".
The huge black and white YES! propaganda poster of the president of the United States is modeled after the ones the Nazis made for the 1932 presidential elections, which bore Hitler's face.
One of the nazi zeppelins has registration code Q-N4751, which can be read as kuu-natsi (moon nazi in Finnish).
The scene in which Vivian Wagner is at her public relations firm going over her staff's presidential campaign pitch is a direct parody of the scene in Downfall (2004) in which Hitler discovers he'll lose the war. Peta Sergeant even shakily removes her glasses the way Bruno Ganz as Hitler does in the earlier film.
The Nazi moon base is located in the Schrödinger crater on the far side of the Moon. The crater is named after Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, best known for the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment.
The original idea was conceived by Jarmo Puskala in a dream. He told the director Timo Vuorensola about his dream in a sauna, and Vuorensola replied he would make it into a film only if they got Udo Kier to act in it and Laibach to make the soundtrack.
When Renate Richter takes off the helmet after leaving the escape pod, it can be seen to bear the number "SS-1138", a nod to George Lucas.
A tribute to 'Pink Floyd' is made by using synthesizer effects for barely a few seconds from the band's track "On the Run" from their album Dark Side of the Moon (which is where the Nazis made base). The music can be heard just after the scene where the Earth fleet departs for the moon.
Vivian Wagner's logo is almost identical to Wonder Woman's symbol (two layered W's with "wings" at the side), except that her's has a V for Vivian as the top letter.
When Adler orders the attack on Earth at 5.45 he uses the exact words of Hitler when he announced the war with Poland claiming that Germany was firing back and that "von jetzt ab wird Bombe mit Bombe vergolten" ("bomb will be retaliated with bomb").
The sound of a bell tolling is played repeatedly while the Nazi flying saucer is on its way to Earth on its first mission. This seems to be a reference to modern Nazi/UFO Mythology, which alleges the existence of a secret SS project to develop a machine known as "Die Glocke" - the Bell - an anti-gravity device designed to power the (fictitious?) "Haunebu" - the secret Nazi saucer. The saucer shown in the film also strongly resembles the "Haunebu" as depicted in various images claiming to depict this craft.
On a large computer screen in one scene, the "greatest war machine ever created by man", a.k.a. the "Götterdämmerung", is described in German as "eine Beförderungsplattform für duale ultra-schwere relativistische kinetische Atomhaubitzen". Literally, this translates to "a carrier for dual ultra-heavy relativistic kinetic atomic howitzers".
There's a swastika shaped hopscotch course at ground just before James Washington opens the airlock.
The throbbing sound of the engines of the Nazi fighter aircraft (accompanying the zeppelins) is that of the pulse-jet engine of the V-1 "Buzz Bomb".
The scene where Washington, after he has been "albinised", is trying to respond to the Nazi salute while in a wheelchair is a nod/parody to Stanley Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)'.
Washington calls Doktor Richter a mini Mengele. Josef Mengele was a Nazi physician who performed inhumane experiments on people.
The fighter jets used by the US to repel the Nazi attack are Fairchild-Republic A-10 "Thunderbolt II" and Lockheed Martin F-22 "Raptor". The F-22 is even shown with open weapons slots when attacking the UFOs as the stealth abilities of the aircraft are greatly impaired by external weapons such as missiles and bombs.
Vivian Wagner's first scene with her campaign staff is a homage / parody of the infamous scene in the German movie "Downfall", which is a popular internet meme where people add arbitrary subtitles to Hitler's berating (in German) his staff in a bunker.
The scene where she addresses "those who haven't" to leave the room rather than addressing the individuals to remain like in the film is rather based on the internet meme rather than the film itself. .
The scene where she addresses "those who haven't" to leave the room rather than addressing the individuals to remain like in the film is rather based on the internet meme rather than the film itself. .
A poster of the Finnish rap artist Petri Nygård can be seen in the scene where Washington rants in the street corner.
When the television news report the attack of the flying saucers, the clock shows 9:11 the whole scene.
The symbol used for the lunar mission in the film Iron Sky (a kind of stylized V) is the one used for the cover of the Volk album, by the Slovenian industrial-rock group Laibach.
When first meeting the Moon Nazis, Washington tries to placate them by extolling everything he knows about German, including a word that sounds like "varvenugen". "Fahrvergnügen" was a tag-line used on American TV commercials for Volkswagen in the early 1990's, nearly 30 years before the time frame of the story.
Cameo
Johanna Sinisalo: The writer credited as having the original idea for the film appears as the candidate running against the president in the upcoming election. Seen in the news feed in the start of the limo scene.
Tero Kaukomaa: Finnish representative at the United Nations.
Director Cameo
Timo Vuorensola: In a deleted scene included in the Director's Cut as a homeless man speaking Finnish to Renate and Washington after their encounter with the neo-nazis.
