10 Movie Facts You Probably Already Knew Deep Down

How to Train Your Dragon's Toothless is obviously a dragon, but his design was actually modelled after a number of real animals, including dogs, horses, giant salamanders, and most prominently cats.

In fact, DreamWorks animators not only looked to felines to lock down Toothless' adorable look, but literally copied the movements of a real cat for many scenes.

For a sequence where Toothless flails his tail around, one of the movie's animators stuck duct tape to their own pet cat's tail and recorded the resulting movements, which they then translated near-identically into the film's animation itself.

And while it might be a surprise just how much influence live-action footage had on the final movie, if you've taken a moment to really think about the way Toothless looks and moves, he clearly owes far more of a debt to cats than any other type of animal.

As such, it shouldn't shock anyone that Toothless has become a popular cat name in recent years, enough that there's even a popular subreddit devoted to the phenomenon - /r/CatsNamedToothless. You love to see it.