Francis Fisher plays Jonathan Taylor Thomas's character's mother in this film. In 1991 she was cast as his character's mother in the show "Home Improvement", but was replaced due to poor early audience reaction to her.
The scene where Marshall and Mark are in the swamp, Marty is clearly seen not filming them being chased by the alligator but later on in the movie, when they show their film they show the alligator chasing Mark and Marshall.
When the boys are filming Marshals antics at the beginning of the movie, they use a Kodak Brownie 8mm camera. The Brownie was a spring wound camera. As the film was exposed the spring unwound and the winding key, visible on the side of the camera would turn. In this movie it doesn't. Further, the camera held only two minutes of film and the spring wind would expose less than one minute. Many of the sequences are longer than that. When they upgrade to 16mm we see them watching their first footage. They use a Bell & Howell 500 series sound projector. It's threaded wrong with the film coming off the back of the feed reel instead of the front. At the end of the movie they use the same projector to show their "unfinished" film and they use the same reels of film. Their complaint that they didn't shoot enough film to give a show is justified. Only 4 or 5 minutes of film is on the take-up reel when the show ends. Also, an equal amount is on the feed reel, unshown, even though they have apparently shown all the film they had.
Donna Jo: You guys are great. There's no way we'd see guys doing stuff like this at the University. Damn, all the boys do there is study or throw footballs. It takes an imaginative guys to think of something like this. The kind of guy who'd consider shooting out streetlights, quality entertainment. The kind of guy who'd risk his little brother's life for some stupid race. Don't be an asshole, Marty.