Trivia for
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) More at IMDb Pro »

• Director Trademark: [Stanley Kubrick] [faces] Dave Bowman going through the Star Gate.
  
  
• Frank Miller, who plays the mission control voice, was a member of the US Air Force in real life, and a real mission controller. He was hired because his voice was the most authentic the producers could find for the role. Inexperienced and nervous, he could not keep from tapping his foot during recording sessions, and the tapping sound repeatedly came through on the audio tracks; Stanley Kubrick folded up a towel, put it under Miller's feet, and told him to tap to his heart's content.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [Stanley Kubrick] [zoom] as Dr. Floyd reads the zero-g toilet instructions.
  
  

• The full text of the Zero Gravity Toilet Instructions: ZERO GRAVITY TOILET PASSENGERS ARE ADVISED TO READ INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE USE - 1. The toilet is of the standard zero-gravity type. Depending on requirements, System A and/or System B can be used, details of which are clearly marked in the toilet compartment. When operating System A, depress lever and a plastic dalkron eliminator will be dispensed through the slot immediately underneath. When you have fastened the adhesive lip, attach connection marked by the large "X" outlet hose. Twist the silver coloured ring one inch below the connection point until you feel it lock. - 2. The toilet is now ready for use. The Sonovac cleanser is activated by the small switch on the lip. When securing, twist the ring back to its initial-condition, so that the two orange lines meet. Disconnect. Place the dalkron eliminator in the vacuum receptacle to the rear. Activate by pressing the blue button. - 3. The controls for System B are located on the opposite wall. The red release switch places the uroliminator into position; it can be adjusted manually up or down by pressing the blue manual release button. The opening is self adjusting. To secure after use, press the green button which simultaneously activates the evaporator and returns the uroliminator to its storage position. - 4. You may leave the lavatory if the green exit light is on over the door. If the red light is illuminated, one of the lavatory facilities is not properly secured. Press the "Stewardess" call button on the right of the door. She will secure all facilities from her control panel outside. When green exit light goes on you may open the door and leave. Please close the door behind you. - 5. To use the Sonoshower, first undress and place all your clothes in the clothes rack. Put on the velcro slippers located in the cabinet immediately below. Enter the shower. On the control panel to your upper right upon entering you will see a "Shower seal" button. Press to activate. A green light will then be illuminated immediately below. On the intensity knob select the desired setting. Now depress the Sonovac activation lever. Bathe normally. - 6. The Sonovac will automatically go off after three minutes unless you activate the "Manual off" over-ride switch by flipping it up. When you are ready to leave, press the blue "Shower seal" release button. The door will open and you may leave. Please remove the velcro slippers and place them in their container. - 7. If the red light above this panel is on, the toilet is in use. When the green light is illuminated you may enter. However, you must carefully follow all instructions when using the facilities during coasting (Zero G) flight. Inside there are three facilities: (1) the Sonowasher, (2) the Sonoshower, (3) the toilet. All three are designed to be used under weightless conditions. Please observe the sequence of operations for each individual facility. - 8. Two modes for Sonowashing your face and hands are available, the "moist-towel" mode and the "Sonovac" ultrasonic cleaner mode. You may select either mode by moving the appropriate lever to the "Activate" position. If you choose the "moist-towel" mode, depress the indicated yellow button and withdraw item. When you have finished, discard the towel in the vacuum dispenser, holding the indicated lever in the "active" position until the green light goes on... showing that the rollers have passed the towel completely into the dispenser. If you desire an additional towel, press the yellow button and repeat the cycle. - 9. If you prefer the "Sonovac" ultrasonic cleaning mode, press the indicated blue button. When the twin panels open, pull forward by rings A & B. For cleaning the hands, use in this position. Set the timer to positions 10, 20, 30 or 40... indicative of the number of seconds required. The knob to the left, just below the blue light, has three settings, low, medium or high. For normal use, the medium setting is suggested. - 10. After these settings have been made, you can activate the device by switching to the "ON" position the clearly marked red switch. If during the washing operation, you wish to change the settings, place the "manual off" over-ride switch in the "OFF" position. you may now make the change and repeat the cycle.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick initially approached Arthur C. Clarke by saying that he wanted to make "the proverbial good science-fiction movie". Clarke suggested that "The Sentinel", a short story he wrote in 1948, story would provide a suitable premise. Clarke had written the story for a BBC competition, but it didn't even make the shortlist. "The Sentinel" corresponds only to the relatively short part of the movie that takes place on the moon.
  
  
• The screenplay was written primarily by Stanley Kubrick and the novel primarily by Arthur C. Clarke, each working simultaneously and also providing feedback to the other. As the story went through many revisions, changes in the novel were taken over into the screenplay and vice versa. It was also unclear whether film or novel would be released first; in the end it was the film. Kubrick was to have been credited as second author of the novel, but in the end was not. It is believed that Kubrick deliberately withheld his approval of the novel as to not hurt the release of the film.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick planned to have Alex North (who wrote the score for Kubrick's Spartacus (1960)) write a musical score especially for the film. During filming, Kubrick played classical music on the set to create the right mood. Delighted with the effect, he decided to use classical music in the finished product. North's score has subsequently been released as "Alex North's 2001" (Varese/Sarabande 5400).
  
  
• The main Discovery set was built by aircraft manufacturer Vickers-Armstrong inside a 12-meter by two-meter drum designed to rotate at five km per hour. It cost $750,000.
  
  
• With the exception of two baby chimpanzees, all of the apes in the beginning of the film were played by mimes, dancers and actors in costumes.
  
  
• Douglas Rain (the voice of HAL) never visited the set.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick had several tons of sand imported, washed, and painted for the moon surface scenes.
  
  
• According to Douglas Trumbull, the total footage shot was some 200 times the final length of the film.
  
  
• Daniel Richter, who plays the ape Moonwatcher, choreographed most of the Dawn of Man sequences.
  
  
• All of the special effects footage had to be printed on the original negatives. Stanley Kubrick thought using copies of the negatives would harm the visual quality of effects shots.
  
  
• Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of neural networks who was also an adviser to the filmmakers, almost got killed by a falling wrench on the set.
  
  
• The entire centrifuge section of the Discovery spacecraft was constructed as a single set. It was designed to rotate for shots such as the "jogging Frank" sequence, so that the actor remained on the bottom.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick worked for several months with effects technicians to come up with a convincing effect for the floating pen in the shuttle sequence. After trying many different techniques, without success, Kubrick decided to simply use a pen that was taped to a sheet of glass and suspended in front of the camera. In fact, the shuttle attendant can be seen to "pull" the pen off the glass when she takes hold of it.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick was very well read. It is rumored that the image of the star-child came to him from the "Spirit of the Earth" in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound": "Within the orb itself, Pillowed upon its alabaster arms, Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil, On its own folded wings and wavy hair The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep...”
  
  
• An early draft of the script had narration.
  
  
• Incrementing each letter of "HAL" gives you "IBM". Arthur C. Clarke (co-screenwriter) claimed this was unintentional, and if he had noticed it before it was too late, he would have changed it. HAL stands for Heuristic Algorithmic Computer.
  
  
• Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick disagreed on what HAL's birthday should be. Kubrick wanted HAL to be about the age of a child, so his death would have more emotional impact. Clarke insisted such an old computer would not be used for an important mission. In the book, HAL's age was four years, while in the movie it was nine years.
  
  
• The subsequent novel and the screenplay both give HAL's birthday as 12 January 1997, but the date given on screen is 12 January 1992.
  
  
• The chess position and moves that we see are from a game played in 1910 in Hamburg between two undistinguished players named Roesch and Schlage. The computer claims that the final position is a checkmate in two moves. Actually, white is not obliged to play the move that HAL suggests (Bxf3), so we have a checkmate in three moves.
  
  
• Rock Hudson walked out of the Los Angeles premiere, saying, "Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?"
  
  
• Among the model-makers was David Peterson, later Wales's foremost sculptor and a prominent nationalist activist.
  
  
• According to Isaac Asimov, Stanley Kubrick wanted to get an insurance policy from Lloyd's of London to protect himself against losses in the event that extraterrestrial intelligence were discovered before the movie was released. Lloyd's wouldn't insure him.
  
  
• The television interviewer explains that gaps of seven minutes each were edited out of the broadcast as signals raced between Earth and the hugely distant Discovery crew. Given that the resulting interview ran about four minutes and there were 19 such gaps, the interview must have taken about 2 hours 17 minutes to tape.
  
  
• In the French version, Dr. Floyd's middle initial, R, stands for Richard.
  
  
• Evidence of Stanley Kubrick's attention to detail: there are visible replacement instructions for the explosive bolts in the ejection apparatus of the pods.
  
  
• Although the memories of many Los Angeles residents insist that 2001 opened at the famous Cinerama Dome on Sunset Blvd., it actually opened at the Warners Cinerama Theater on Hollywood Blvd., and played there for months. It did not play at the Dome for several years.
  
  
• The carry-on bags belonging to Russian space scientists with whom Dr. Floyd shares a drink are marked Aeroflot (in Cyrillic), still today the Russian national airline.
  
  
• When the film was sold to British TV, Stanley Kubrick urged that it be shown in "letterbox" format, with a black area at the top and bottom of the screen. The BBC complained that while this was fine for dialogue sequences, viewers would become confused when the scene shifted to outer space. The BBC's solution, used during the first TV presentation, was to add fake stars to the black areas above and below the picture area. Bitterly opposed by Kubrick, this disastrous experiment was never repeated.
  
  
• Cameo: [Vivian Kubrick] the daughter of Stanley Kubrick plays Dr. Floyd's daughter.
  
  
• The first line of dialogue is spoken by a stewardess, 25 minutes and 38 seconds into the film.
  
  
• In the novel, TMA-1 (the site of the discovery of the monolith) stands for Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1.
  
  
• According to Katharina Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick provided the breathing heard in the spacesuits.
  
  
• The joke working title, "How the Solar System was Won", reflected the original idea for the film. Just as How the West Was Won (1962) was a series of short stories spanning decades, "2001" was going to be a series of stories showing explorations on many planets and moons. The last story would be "The Sentinel" which showed the uncovering of the monolith on the Moon, and the first contact with extra terrestrials.
  
  
• Originally intended as a road show release, with Overture, Intermission, and Exit music (all with curtain warmers) and a 35mm b/w prologue of interview with experts on the possibilities of extra terrestrial life. Despite the fact that the Overture, Intermission, and Exit Music were not used, the film still went out as a roadshow release, and still had an intermission.
  
  
• An early (non-joke) working title was "Voyage Beyond the Stars". When Fantastic Voyage (1966) was released, Stanley Kubrick reportedly so disliked that film that he did not want his film to sound anything like it.
  
  
• The title was chosen because 2001 was both the first year of the next century and the next millennium. In 1999 Arthur C. Clarke held a press conference in which he said he was dismayed that so many people (including college professors and journalists) were incorrectly calling 2000 the beginning of the 21st century.
  
  
• Though the Arthur C. Clarke story "The Sentinel" is often cited as the source for the movie, the ape-man segment is loosely based upon his story "Encounter at Dawn".
  
  
• Though almost invisible when watching the film on a TV screen, the three satellites in the first space sequence bear German, French, and Chinese markings.
  
  
• The movie has many instances of product placement for IBM. The most apparent are the computer panels in the spaceplane that docks with the space station, the forearm control panel on Dave's spacesuit, and the portable viewscreens on which Dave and Frank watch "The World Tonight".
  
  
• According to the dates on the original screenplay the whole was written in a period of only 58 days (from 13 October 1965 to 9 December 1965).
  
  
• This was the only film to be pulled from Cinerama venues while it was still making a good profit. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was anxious to release their completed production Ice Station Zebra (1968).
  
  
• The first film showing a completely revised (and very short-lived) version of the M-G-M lion logo.
  
  
• There is no dialogue in the first 25 minutes of the movie, nor in the last 23 minutes (excluding end credits). With these two lengthy sections and other shorter ones, there are around 88 dialogue-free minutes in the movie.
  
  
• Much like The Wizard of Oz (1939) and "Dark Side of the Moon", it is said that the Pink Floyd song "Echoes" from the album "Meddle" can be perfectly synchronized with the "Jupiter & Beyond the Infinite" segment of the film. See links section for details.
  
  
• The re-recording of the score by Alex North which wasn't used was conducted by North's friend, Jerry Goldsmith.
  
  
• Was voted the 26th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
  
  
• In honor of the book and movie, NASA named a Mars orbiter: 2001 Mars Odyssey. This was not the first time NASA had a connotation with the film; the Apollo 13 command module's callsign was Odyssey during the ill-fated mission.
  
  
• Frank Poole and Dave Bowman watch themselves in a television interview on "BBC 12". This was a play on the fact that, at the time of production, there were only BBC channels 1 and 2.
  
  
• According to Stanley Kubrick biographer John Baxter, Kubrick decided to use the Sinar Front Projection system for the desert backdrops during the animal/ape scenes. This method was selected because rear projection of the desert scenes would have proved too "murky" for SuperPanavision. The use of the Sinar system explains why in the scene where the leopard is sitting next to the dead zebra (in reality a painted dead horse) the leopard's eyes glow a bright color. The Sinar system used glass transparencies as backdrops; however, the projectors necessary for this system were so hot that a draft or a breath could crack the glass. As a result, crew members were required to wear face masks, which started a long-persistent rumor that Kubrick had a paranoia of catching infections.
  
  
• This film was shot at MGM's Borehamwood Studios next door to where the TV series "The Prisoner" (1967) was being filmed. Prisoner star Patrick McGoohan borrowed some special effects footage of a starry sky for his episode "Chimes of Big Ben". This footage was not used in the broadcast version of the episode but is visible in an early edit that was later released on video.
  
  
• The phrase "See you next Wednesday" is heard for the first time during the scene in which Poole receives birthday greetings from his parents. The phrase would become a trademark of director John Landis who would use it in many of his movies.
  
  
• Originally, Stanley Kubrick hadn't planned to show the early man as a hairy monkey. He even had Stuart Freeborn create a primitive but more human-like make-up for the actors, but he couldn't find a way to photograph them in full length without getting in trouble, since they had to be naked.
  
  
• At the "Dawn of Man" part at the beginning of the film, it shows a dead zebra. The zebra was actually a dead horse painted with stripes.
  
  
• In order to get the relaxed tone for HAL's voice, Douglas Rain spoke his lines barefoot with his feet resting on a pillow.
  
  
• Originally, HAL was to be called Athena and have a female voice.
  
  
• In 2002, named by "Positif" (France) as one of the 50 best films of the last 50 years (critics' choice: #1, readers' choice: #1 )
  
  
• The animal used in the "Dawn of Man" sequence, the one that looks like a black pig with a trunk, is a tapir.
  
  
• Some of the "Dawn of Man" African sequences used the sounds of wild cats, gorillas and chimps originally recorded for the MGM film Mogambo (1953). The sounds were authentic and actually recorded in Africa during the making of "Mogambo" when the film company was on location there.
  
  
• The entire film contains only 205 special effects shots, compared to 350 in Star Wars (1977) and over 2,200 such shots in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005).
  
  
• This is the last movie ever made about mankind landing on the moon before mankind landed on the moon.
  
  
• The apes in the "Dawn of Man" sequence would not have been on a nomination list for an Academy Award because the award for Best Makeup was not created until 1981. The award given to John Chambers for Planet of the Apes (1968) was an honorary award.
  
  
• When Stanley Kubrick learned that his film would have an intermission in most cinemas (as this happened in most films that length) he not only ordered where the intermission took place, but had his film's composer record specific music for the intermission, and requested that the theater be plunged into darkness for a minute before the film restarted.
  
  
• The actual "Space Station 5" model, which was about 7 feet across, was found a few years after 2001 was made, discarded in an English field with wild grass growing over its rapidly decaying surface. The model was destroyed by vandals a few days later.
  
  
• The 'buttons' that Dave Bowman presses to arm the depressurization sequence of the pod are the valves of the seat portion of a Martin-Baker aircraft ejection seat's personal equipment connector (PEC). The valves sealed the pilot's air services such as oxygen, pressure jerkin, anti-g suit and air ventilation (depending on the specific aircraft requirements) when the seat was not in use. Below the valves can be seen the brass intercom connections. The component seen could possibly have been salvaged from a series 4 seat fitted to an English Electric Lightning.
  
  
• HAL 9000 never once says, "Good Morning, Dave," despite this line being one of his most recognized quotes.
  
  
• The movie's line "Open the pod bay doors, HAL" was voted as the #78 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100).
  
  
• In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #15 Greatest Movie of All Time.
  
  
• Ranked #1 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Sci-Fi" in June 2008.
  
  
• The movie's line "Dave, my mind is going... I can feel it." was voted as the #82 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere in 2007.
  
  
• The movie's poster was as #10 of "The 25 Best Movie Posters Ever" by Premiere.
  
  
• The famous time-cut between the bone and the spaceship took its inspiration from the time-cut in the film A Canterbury Tale (1944), directed by Michael Powell. In that film a medieval Nobleman on a pilgrimage to Canterbury lets loose a falcon, which in the following shot it seen rising vertically, then cuts to a World War II fighter descending vertically over six hundred years later, then cuts back to the Nobleman, who is now a British soldier.
  
  
• If you consider the relative positions of Bowman when he first arrives in the suite, when he is next standing in the room, when he is in the bathroom, when he is at the table, and when he is in the bed, these points form a star.
  
  
• Aside from the film's music, no sound is heard in the space sequences. This is because technically in space, there is no sound.
  
  
• According to Keir Dullea (Dave Bowman), Nigel Davenport and Martin Balsam were hired and later replaced before Douglas Rain finally landed the role of HAL. Davenport was actually on-set in England during filming, reading HAL's lines off-camera so that Dullea and Gary Lockwood could react to them. Apparently, Stanley Kubrick thought that Davenport's English accent was too distracting, so after a few weeks he dismissed him and for the remainder of the shoot HAL's lines were read by an assistant director who, according to Dullea, had a Cockney accent so thick that lines like "Better take a stress pill, Dave" came out like "Better tyke a stress pill, Dyve". Later Balsam was hired and recorded HAL's voice in New York, but again when Kubrick heard his lines he wasn't satisfied, so he finally got Rain to re-record everything during post-production. For the sequel, Peter Hyams' 2010 (1984), the opposite process was used: Rain recorded all of HAL's dialogue during pre-production prior to principal photography. That's why, to this day, Dullea and Rain have never actually spoken directly to each other or met in person.
  
  
• The sun and the crescent moon aligned with each other (in the opening shot) was a symbol of Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion that predated Buddhism and Christianity and was based on the teachings of the prophet Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra). This particular alignment symbolized the eternal struggle between light and darkness. Appropriately enough, the famous "2001 Theme" is from "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spake Zarathustra), the symphonic poem by Richard Strauss, based on a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, which contained his famous declaration "God is dead". One can assume, given Stanley Kubrick's working methods, that none of this was accidental.
  
  
• The process that was used to create the wild, kaleidoscopic images Bowman experiences going through the Stargate is known as "Slitscan photography". It was developed by Douglas Trumbull (later special effects supervisor on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)) and involved moving the camera rapidly past different pieces of lighted artwork, with the camera shutter held open to allow for a streaking effect. The overall effect gave the audience the sense of plunging into the infinite.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick cut 19 minutes from the film's original 158-minute running time after its New York premiere, mostly to speed up the pacing.
  
  
• After seeing a documentary titled To the Moon and Beyond (1964) at the 1964 New York World's Fair, Stanley Kubrick hired one of its special effects technicians, Douglas Trumbull, to work on this film.
  
  
• Originally Stanley Kubrick had planned to shoot the film in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1. After consultant Robert Gaffney convinced the director that Super Panavision (aspect ratio 2.2:1) was a more visceral experience, Kubrick agreed and got MGM to pay for the photographic process. Since shooting a 70mm space film with monaural sound was frowned upon, Kubrick decided to mix the soundtrack in stereo sound.
  
  
• Poole (Gary Lockwood) was filmed wearing a helmet on the bridge of Discovery because Stanley Kubrick initially had doubts over the scientific possibility of a person's survival for even an instant in a vacuum; however, data published at the time indicated that such survival was indeed possible, which allowed the Emergency Air Lock re-entry sequence to be filmed and for scenes to be shot of the astronauts without their helmets.
  
  
• Most of the monitor screens used throughout the spacecraft sequences are rear-projection 16mm showing loops of film. Due to Stanley Kubrick's typical multi-multi-take technique, a lot of these loops ended up getting scratched, and if you study some of the screens, particularly in the pod, you can see repeating scratches.
  
  
• According to co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke's non-fiction book, "The Lost Worlds of 2001," the first scene shot in the film was the "Monolith on the Moon" scene. The date was December 29, 1965 - nearly 2-1/2 years before the film's release in April 1968. The book includes a copy of the "call sheet" for the day's shooting.
  
  
• Although it's commonly believed that the famous "jump cut" is from the bone being tossed in the air to a ship floating in space, it is in fact not a spaceship, it's a nuclear device circling the earth. So the bone being used as the "first" murder weapon is thrown to the "ultimate" weapon. Originally the "star child" was to detonate this device and all the other devices that were circling the earth. Stanley Kubrick decided against the ending as it was too similar to the end of his previous film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), where nuclear bombs are exploded.
  
  
• Rock band Pink Floyd was at one point approached to perform music for the film. However they turned it down due to other commitments.
  
  
• The end music credits do not list a conductor and orchestra for "Also Sprach Zarathustra". Stanley Kubrick wanted the Herbert von Karajan / Vienna Philharmonic version on English Decca for the film's soundtrack, but Decca executives did not want their recording "cheapened" by association with the movie, and so gave permission on the condition that the conductor and orchestra were not named. After the movie's successful release, Decca tried to rectify its blunder by re-releasing the recording with an "As Heard in 2001" flag printed on the album cover. John Culshaw recounts the incident in "Putting the Record Straight" (1981). In Decca's haste to rush the re-release to market, the L.P. was issued with a disfiguring pitch waver at the end of each side. In the meantime, MGM released the "official soundtrack" L.P. with Karl Böhm's Berlin Philharmonic "Also Sprach Zarathustra" discretely substituting for von Karajan's version. The always publicity-minded von Karajan, by then permanent conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was furious with Decca. Rhino's current CD release of the soundtrack purports to restore the von Karajan recording to its proper place.
  
  
• Although all advertisements, as well as the soundtrack album and the movie's closing credits, claimed that the film was released in Cinerama, it was not shot in the Cinerama process (three synchronized films which would be shown by three synchronized projectors on a huge, curved screen) but by one camera on 70mm film with a special anamorphic lens that would then project a blown-up image onto the curved screen. This was also true of all so-called "Cinerama" films made from 1963 onward.
  
  
• Originally the Discovery was to have traveled to Saturn, but the special effects crew was unable to make convincing-looking rings around the planet. Effects artist Douglas Trumbull eventually perfected a technique for making the rings after production was completed, and used Saturn's rings to great effect in his directorial debut, Silent Running (1972).
  
  
• The monolith was originally to have been a black tetrahedron; however, it did not reflect light properly. Stanley Kubrick then decided to use a transparent cube, but that proved to be too difficult to use because of the reflections created by the studio lights. Next came a rectangular monolith cast from Lucite that looked unconvincing, and finally the familiar black slab.
  
  
• Arthur C. Clarke once said, "If you understand '2001' completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered."
  
  
• By the year 2001 some of the product placements had become outdated. RCA Whirlpool, the maker of the zero-gravity food preparation unit on the moon shuttle, had become Whirlpool. The Bell System had been divested and the long-distance service became AT&T. Pan Am had ceased operations as an international air carrier (in fact, the Whirlpool change had already happened by the time of the film's original release).
  
  
• MGM took a four page advertisement in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Star to launch its publicity campaign for 2001: A Space Odyssey during 25th February 1968.
  
  
• The film initially did such poor box office that MGM actually considered pulling it from Cinerama release after completion of a 30 day run. The exhibitors began reporting that audiences were not only increasing, but it was noted that some audience members had come to see the film multiple times. It eventually became one of MGM's biggest hits.
  
  

• SPOILER: At the end of the film, the only spacesuit that was never used is the blue one. In 2010 (1984), the blue suit is missing its helmet, apparently because the producers thought that Dave used it in 2001 when disabling HAL. Dave is actually wearing a green helmet, from the green suit which was stowed inside the emergency airlock.
  
  
• SPOILER: HAL sings "Daisy Bell" ("A Bicycle Built for Two") as he is shut down; this was the first song ever "sung" by a computer, a IBM 7094 computer at Bell Labs in 1961. Furthermore, the lyrics include the phrase "I'm half crazy".
  
  
• SPOILER: It is reported that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke watched an enormous number of science fiction films in preparation for creating this movie and Kubrick himself acknowledged the influence of producer George Pal's films. Pal's Conquest of Space (1955) is referenced several times: a civilian scientist arrives by transport on a wheel-shaped space station orbiting Earth, astronauts watch TV from Earth and watch one-way messages from their loved ones, a spacecraft's mission is prepared in secrecy and its destination changed just before launch, an astronaut is killed while making a repair to a spacecraft antenna and his body must be retrieved, the crewmember in charge of a space mission goes insane and tries to kill other crew and sabotage the mission.
  
  
• SPOILER: When Bowman is disconnecting HAL, HAL claims that his first instructor was someone named Mr. Langley. In both the novels of 2001 and 2010 and even the movie 2010 (1984), HAL's programmer and instructor is Dr. Chandra. However, as HAL only mentions Langley during the scene where his circuits are disconnected, this could be interpreted as a result of his memory failure.
  
  
• SPOILER: In the sequence in which Bowman recovers Poole's body with the pod, the camera was running at four times normal speed so that the resulting footage would be in slow-motion, giving a slow, "drifting in space" look. That means the soft contact of the pod's arms with Poole's body was actually rather rough, and as a result, the stunt man doubling for Poole was badly bruised by the end of the takes.
  
  

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