Trivia: Eddie Murphy's entire scene in the jail cell with his "Karate" impersonation was ad-libbed, there was no script direction at all. (00:23:30)
Trivia: Melinda Dillon was given the wrong script on purpose when they filmed the Chinese restaurant scene. She had no idea that when they brought the duck out it would have its head still attached. All of her reactions, including when she first sees the duck and when the server cuts the head off, were completely genuine.
Trivia: Not a mistake but a "before they were famous": little cousin Vicky with the blonde hair is Elaine on Ally McBeal (Jane Krakowski).
Trivia: A group of old college friends reunite at the funeral of Alex, another old college friend. The part of Alex, the corpse, who is only partially seen in the unusual opening credits with the undertaker, is played by Kevin Costner, in one of his first roles on film.
Trivia: Annette O'Toole, who played Lana Lang in Superman III, plays Clark Kent's mom on Smallville.
Trivia: The film is a parody of Hamlet.
Trivia: Michael J. Fox, Tom Hanks, Nicolas Cage and Timothy Hutton all auditioned for the role of Joel.
Trivia: The title is an "in-joke" as Sean Connery said he would never play Bond again.
Trivia: Tommy Chong couldn't do a Spanish accent, so while all the other Spanish characters imitate Spanish English, he just does a speech impediment instead. He admitted so himself in the 'making of'.
Trivia: When the title first appears, it says "Monty Python's Meaning Of Liff," which abruptly changes to "Life" with the title is struck by lightning. Author Douglas Adams (friend of Graham Chapman and occasional Python contributor) contacted Terry Gilliam to ask if he could use the title "The Meaning Of Liff" for a mock dictionary he was writing at about the same time. Adams and the Pythons agreed that the crossover publicity could be mutually beneficial. (00:17:35)
Trivia: Director Bob Clark has a cameo appearance in this film as one of the KKK members.
Trivia: The original title for the film roughly translated to "Pirate Patrol." The title was changed during production, however, as Jackie Chan and the producers feared that other Hong Kong studios would rush to copy the film by making similar pirate-themed adventures. Chan later chose the much more vague title of "Project A," since it gave nothing away about the plot.
Trivia: Colleen Camp plays Deborah Foreman's mother in the movie, even though in real life she's only 9 years older than Foreman.
Trivia: During the end credits, we see a bold promise that Doctor Detroit would return in "Doctor Detroit II: The Wrath of Mom" (spoofing the title of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan). This was probably just a gag, as Universal Pictures did not have high expectations for Doctor Detroit, and the film was a critical and box office failure, so no sequels were ever discussed. but to this day, Dan Aykroyd fans still ask him about the Doctor Detroit sequel. While he quickly dismisses any notions of a sequel, Aykroyd does, in fact, consider Doctor Detroit his most important film, for personal reasons: "Obviously it's the most important movie of my career. It's the one where I met my wife. It led to three kids and 30 years of marriage, so it's a pretty important movie for me. But I don't see Universal stepping up to that particular one." (Dan Aykroyd, 2013).
Trivia: This was David Niven's final film. He was so ill during production that his lines throughout most of the movie had to be overdubbed by impersonator Rich Little.