Ya gotta love stuff-ups in movies. The Hollywood production companies spend zillions of dollars and have hundreds of people working on a movie and they still come up with some easily-edited or -avoided mistakes. These are my favourite five:

1. Star Wars Episode 4. There is a scene in the middle where 4 stormtroopers march into a control room where the two droids have been hiding. These are the crack troops of the empire, measured, malevolent. The door has just slid into the ceiling as they march in … well, actually, it’s not quite made it all the way up … and one of the Emperor’s best troopers cracks his head on the door on the way in, almost knocking his helmet off. (He’s the one to the right of screen). I can watch this one over and over.
2. Independence Day. I love the scene where Will Smith is hanging out in the desert after his dogfight with an alien starfigher and this intense moment is spoiled as at least 6 inches of the boom microphone descends into the shot. You would think that when they spent over $100 million on this movie, they could have got one of their CGI boffins to paste some “sky” over it, at least… Well, finally they did, at least for the DVD release. When I went looking for the glitch over the weekend, watching this with Oldest Son, there was no boom mic to be seen. But it was there in the cinema release, seriously. (And let’s not even start on the continuity problems in the movie like the 15-mile-wide UFO exploding immediately over the Americans’ base but actually crashing a few miles to the left, or the faulty timer on the nuke delivered to the mothership which seems to take a lot longer to count down than the actual seconds on the clock).
3. Star Wars Episode 4 (again). Speaking of starfighters, in the penultimate scene where the Rebel Alliance’s space fleet attack’s the Death Star, we have occasional glimpses into the cockpit of various starfighter craft. There is one section of the footage where the film cuts to a pilot codenamed Red Leader, cuts away to the action, cuts back to Red Leader, away to the action, back to Red Leader, back to the action and back again to Red Leader. Interesting thing is - originally, each time we cut back to Red Leader, his helmet mike is on a different side of his head - right, left, right, left! I don’t know whether the film editors kept putting the next sequence in backwards or something, but there it was. Now don’t go looking for this one, kids, because George Lucas fixed it when he brought out the original trilogy on DVD. But it was fun while it lasted.
4. Die Hard. Hans Gruber orders his men to fire on the Feds’ RV with a rocket, they do and shatter the window between them and the RV. Gruber tells them to “hit it again”, and they do, breaking the same window again. Duh…
5. Back to the Future 2. The glitch is in the scriptingwriting this time. The Doc, Marty and Jennifer go forward in time. Old Biff steals time machine and takes the almanac to Young Biff in 1955. Then Old Biff goes forward in time thus returning the time machine to the Doc. Yet this is impossible since he would have returned to a future radically different to the one in which the Doc is waiting. Ironically, Doc discusses this very paradox when they goe backwards in time to “Biff’s 1985.”

I’m sure there are more out there, but these are my faves.