This detail in the credits of “Top Gun” perhaps escaped the French-speaking public, but “annoyed” the English-speaking fans. “Top Gun: Maverick” uses exactly the same element for its credits, but finally corrects its error.
A momentous opening sequence
In August 2018, the film crew of Top Gun: Maverick spent a week on the USS Abraham Lincoln to take images of jets taking off and landing. Very precisely, 14 hours 43 minutes 00 seconds and 15 hundredths Rushes are then sent to the film editor, Eddie Hamilton. Tom Cruise will soon meet with the executives of Paramount Pictures as well as all the heads of the different departments to present to them what the film could look like.
Eddie Hamilton then has to edit these shots. He decides to make a remake of the credits of the Top Gun from 1986. He tells us:
“It’s the first thing I did on Top Gun: Maverick. In the original film, the total length of the opening sequence is 4 minutes and 11 seconds, and so I took that length. I watched the almost 15 hours of rushes and I edited a sequence with the exact same length. This is what we showed first at the studios. There were no actors, just shots taken on the screen. USS Lincoln. I kept the same sound, and the same Kenny Logins song, as we heard in the first film.
We were in the Paramount screening room and all the executives were there, the cast too, and Tom Cruise gave a presentation of the film. All of Paramount was there and Tom Cruise introduced the cast one by one, explained where the film would be shot, what we were going to do with the planes, the permissions given by the Navy.”
A mistake from the first film that “annoyed the fans”
For several months, Eddie Hamilton did not retouch this very first version. Then he adds the credits, using exactly the same typography as that of Top Gun. But when it comes to the box, that’s where it goes an addition and correction of a mistake in the text.
The world of 2018 doesn’t look like it did in 1986, and the story of the two films is not the same. Logically, Eddie Hamilton adds to the 1986 sentence, “His goal was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and ensure that the handful of men who graduated were the best pilots in the world.the words “and women“. Below, we read in the 2022 version:
On March 3, 1969, the US Navy founded an elite school for its best pilots. Its goal was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and ensure that the handful of men and women who graduated were the best pilots in the world.
A typo finally corrected
And there is another change, which is spelling correction of a term misused in the first film.
(With the addition of “women”) here is the only other thing I changed. The term “insure” is not a good one. It should be with an “e”, not an “i”. With an “i” it’s when you insure a car. So I corrected this error, which annoyed fans of Top Gun since 1986.
Indeed, to write “ensure that the handful of men“, that’s the term”insure“which is used in cardboard, and this one means in English”ensure“but like home or automobile type insurance. The correct term required by the meaning of the sentence is “ensure“, which always translates into French not “ensure“but with the meaning”affirm” Or “to guarantee” (“I assure you it’s the best”, for example).
Eddie Hamilton, for Top Gun: Maverick, therefore modernized the text of the box but above all corrected a crude typo which had the gift of annoying fans since 1986, since all copies of the film, physical or dematerialized, all TV broadcasts display the box with this error. A detail in appearance, but a big problem solved!
