10 Movie Mistakes That Became Canon
When movie "mistakes" get legitimised one way or another.
Who among us doesn't love spotting a totally ridiculous mistake in a movie?
Filmmaking is so damn hard that it's frankly impressive there aren't more mistakes in most films, and while most mistakes generally doesn't disrupt the integrity of a movie that much, they can become fun artefacts in and of themselves.
Yet every so often a mistake will emerge that, for one reason or another, transitions into canon.
This list will cover both moments which were long accepted to be mistakes by audiences, but were in fact later confirmed not to be, and flubs that occurred during filming which the directors decided to work into the story.
These 10 movies all featured moments that have either been consistently referred to as mistakes or were in fact on-set mistakes, yet both have ultimately been legitimised as canonical, curated parts of the final presentation one way or another.
Canon can obviously be a slippery concept in some cases, especially where older movies without many surviving cast or crew members are concerned, but these apparently erroneous moments are now generally embraced as "legit" by the film community at large...
10. Mrs. Teevee Doesn't Know Her Music - Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory
An oft-cited "mistake" in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory occurs when Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) plays a tune on the keyboard to open the door to his chocolate room - a musical piece which Mrs. Teevee (Dodo Denney) confidently identifies as "Rachmaninoff."
But as it turns out, Wonka wasn't playing a Rachmaninoff composition at all, but rather Mozart's overture to the Marriage of Figaro.
It's a gaffe that surely flew over the heads of most young viewers, though adults familiar with classical music have often pointed out the supposed error.
Yet on the film's DVD commentary, it was clarified that this wasn't really a mistake at all - it was simply intended to demonstrate Mrs. Teevee's know-it-all personality, that she's not nearly as smart and worldly as she evidently thinks she is.
Ironically, it also ends up making those who point it out as a mistake seem a little over-confident in their own powers of observation, given that they missed what it was actually supposed to indicate about the character.
Though it's been parroted as a mistake for literally decades, those in-the-know have made it abundantly clear that Mrs. Teevee is the ignorant one - not author-screenwriter Roald Dahl.