Trailer
Plot summary
The Hendersons drive home to their Seattle neighborhood after a camping trip in the Cascade mountains, and their car hits a Bigfoot. Taking the creature for dead and seeing fame and fortune in it, the family straps it to the roof of the station wagon. That night George finds it gone. The Bigfoot has tipped the refrigerator over in a hunt for food, and he watches Bedtime for Bonzo on television. The family takes him for an intelligent, gentle creature, and George names him Harry and decides to return him to the wilderness. When George tries to coax Harry into the station wagon, Harry becomes upset and runs off. Meanwhile Jacques LaFleur, a French-Canadian hunter who now tracks Bigfoot, has found a license plate the Hendersons left behind.
Cast
- William Ontiverosas Sgt. Mancini (as Bill Ontiverous)
- David Richardtas Dirty Harry Officer
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Harry and the Hendersons (1987)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Rick Baker almost walked away from the project once it was set up at Steven Spielberg's Amblin Productions, because he still resented Spielberg over the earlier unproduced film Night Skies, which was later reworked into E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; director William Dear talked him into staying and the two eventually reconciled.
- John Lithgow originally turned down the lead role of George Henderson because he felt the first draft made the character act too ridiculous, but he signed on after seeing a drawing of Harry and asking to read a second draft.
- Makeup artist Rick Baker initially turned down director William Dear's offer to design the Bigfoot character Harry because of his workload, then changed his mind, letting Dear pitch the finished script and creature design to studios together as a package.
- Steven Spielberg served as the film's uncredited executive producer after being impressed by director William Dear's work on the Amazing Stories episode "Mummy Daddy," which led him to ask about Dear's other film ideas and set up Harry and the Hendersons at his Amblin Productions.
- William E. Martin first described the concept to William Dear in 1978 at a cocktail party. He and Ezra D. Rappaport had envisioned it as a sitcom in the vein of The Munsters or The Addams Family, with Harry living with the Hendersons as a "big dumb cousin" and getting into conflicts hiding from the neighbors.
- The film won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, and in the United Kingdom it was originally released under a different title, Bigfoot and the Hendersons, even though the later TV spin-off kept the American name.
