Tora! Tora! Tora!

Continuity mistake: During the attack a parked US plane is blown up and the prop goes cartwheeling off along the runway. Not wishing to waste a perfectly good explosion the director filmed this from several different angles and used the same explosion several times. You can easily see the prop each time.

Continuity mistake: When Kramer meets Admiral Stark at his residence he is shown leaving the house through the front entrance. The next shot, showing the house from the drive, the entrance is not the same as the close-up.

Continuity mistake: When the flight school instructor in the yellow Stearman first sees the Japanese planes, it is surrounded on three sides (left, right and rear), but when she takes the controls to dive out of the way, there are no Japanese planes on either side.

Dennis Gannon

Continuity mistake: When the USS Ward first spots the mini-sub trying to sneak into the harbor, we see a close up of the conning tower. The forward edge of the conning tower is undamaged. Next we see the USS Ward fire it's first shot and we see the shot miss and hit the water well forward of the mini-sub. Look at the conning tower and there is now a square notch in the forward edge. The USS Ward fires its second shot. Just before the special effects explosion you can see the forward edge of the conning tower is undamaged. After the flash from the shell hit on the conning tower subsides, we can now see the square notch which we saw after the first shot which missed. Finally, the mini sub submerges and in the underwater shot, the forward edge of the conning tower is again undamaged.

Continuity mistake: When the sub is trying to sneak into the harbor, the first shot shows it with the conning tower out of the water, when the U.S.S. Ward spots it, all they see is the periscope, but when they start to shoot at it, the conning tower is once again out of the water.

Dennis Gannon

Continuity mistake: When Admiral Kimmel is chatting with the naval officer and General Short about how to counter a Japanese attack, you will see a table in the background near the window that is set up with the leaves fully extended and chairs in front and at both ends. When the camera pans to the window towards the end of the scene, the table has been compacted and the chairs moved.

Factual error: When the Japanese planes attack the airfield, none of the American planes have numbers or letters, just a star.

More mistakes in Tora! Tora! Tora!

Trivia: The code for successful surprise (and the movie's title) "Tora! Tora! Tora!" was a shortening of the words totsugeki (attack) and raigeki (the Japanese term for torpedo bombers), and was originally spelled "To ra, to ra, to ra!" Those two shortened words were interpreted by American radio operators, who happened to intercept them, as the Japanese word for "tiger"; hence "Tora! Tora! Tora!"

More trivia for Tora! Tora! Tora!

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