The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha (1969) on Netflix

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha (1969)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

• Around 1967 Satyajit Ray wrote a screenplay about extraterrestrial creatures on Earth, with Marlon Brando and Peter Sellers meant to star. Trouble with Columbia Pictures shelved it, so Ray made a fantasy film in India instead.
• Nepal Dutta and Asim Dutta of Purnima Pictures lent only part of the money needed, not enough to shoot the whole film in colour, so Satyajit Ray made Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne in black and white, saving colour for the final scene alone.
• Producer R. D. Bansal grew less keen after learning the estimated budget, so Satyajit Ray spent the rest of 1967 scouting for finance, at one point nearly back in the straits he had faced shooting Pather Panchali.
• For the ghost dance, Ray dressed actors as every class except the sahibs, which were under-cranked shadow-puppets, and ended with the classes stacked upside down, priests at the bottom and common people on top, to picture the caste system inverted.
• The film's pivotal sequence is a six-and-a-half-minute dance divided into four numbers, for which Ray split the forest ghosts into four classes mirroring Hindu social hierarchy: king and warriors, sahibs, fat people and common people.
• Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne ran for 51 straight weeks, holding the record for the longest continuous run of a Bengali-language film in Bengal.
• Satyajit Ray wrote to Marie Seton that the film had entered popular culture with extraordinary speed, saying there was not a single child who did not know and sing its songs.