Trailer
Plot summary
On a boat tour at Cape Cod in 1964, eight-year-old Allen Bauer jumps overboard though he cannot swim, and underwater he holds hands with a girl and can suddenly breathe. He is pulled back up, separated from her, and believes the meeting was a hallucination. Twenty years later Allen co-owns a New York fruit and vegetable business with his brother Freddie, and his romances keep failing. After a breakup he returns to Cape Cod, where scientist Walter Kornbluth is diving. Knocked unconscious in the water, Allen wakes on a beach beside a young woman who cannot talk. She kisses him, dives away as a mermaid, and Kornbluth sees her. She recovers his wallet, uses charts from a sunken ship to reach New York, comes ashore at the Statue of Liberty and is released into his care.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Splash (1984)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Splash was the first film released by Touchstone Pictures, a label Walt Disney Studios created that same year to release films aimed at adult audiences, with mature content not appropriate for the flagship Walt Disney Pictures banner.
- Daryl Hannah's fully functional mermaid tail was designed by Academy Award-winning visual effects artist Robert Short, and she swam in it so fast her safety team could not keep pace; she had been swimming with her legs bound together since childhood, fascinated by Hans Christian Andersen's “The Little Mermaid”.
- Disney Imagineers were building a ride originally to be called Zip-a-Dee River Run, but studio executives asked that it be named Splash Mountain to promote the film, after the Imagineers turned down their earlier request to work Hannah's mermaid character into the ride.
- Before Daryl Hannah was cast as Madison, the role had been turned down by P.J. Soles, Tatum O'Neal, Michelle Pfeiffer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Melanie Griffith, Diane Lane, Kathleen Turner and Sharon Stone; Lane was insecure about the required nudity and chose Streets of Fire and The Cotton Club instead.
- Established actors including Chevy Chase, Dudley Moore, Bill Murray and John Travolta were considered for the lead role before the producers settled on the then lesser-known Tom Hanks.
- Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's book Freakonomics credits the film with popularizing the name Madison for girls, as does Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought.
- According to the Social Security Administration, Madison was the 216th most popular girls' name in the United States in 1990, the 29th most popular in 1995 and the third most popular by 2000.
- Ron Howard turned down the chance to direct both Footloose and Mr. Mom so that he could direct Splash instead.
