Mostly-Unknown Facts About "The Big Green"

     I love The Big Green, one of those movies I grew up watching. Part of the fun of memorizing dialogue and camera-angle changes and everything else is that then you can spend the movie searching for hidden little background details, some of which I've listed here. (I was bored, okay? And already packed for Christmas break and studied up for my psych final tomorrow.)

     The population of Elma, Texas, was 2,367 when the welcome sign was first installed. As the town got smaller, two other figures were spray-painted on below that number and then crossed out, the current number is somewhere around 923 residents. There is no such town in existence. Tom tracks down Juan and his mom in Garrettville, which doesn't exist, either. Elma is part of Lane County, which is also fictional.

     The local high school's teams were known as the Armadillos, according to the billboard Anna Montgomery drives by off Route 49 in the beginning. Elma High won 3A football state titles in 1968, 1969, 1974, 1975 and 1976.

     The bag of Cheetos the birds eat off the boys is Super Sized, and the Cheetos are the puffed kind.

     Anna's last name is Montgomery, Tom's last name is Palmer, and then the full names of the kids are Evan Schiff, Larry Musgrove, Jeffrey Luttrell, Newt Shaw, Kate Douglas, Juan Morales, Tak Yomato, Nick Anderssen, Sophia Convertino, Polly Nielson and Sue and Lou Gates.
     Kate's alcoholic dad is Ed, Larry's bartender father is Cookie and Polly's mom is Brenda, who is married to Darius.

     Sue and Lou have asthma, Tak can burp the ABCs, Kate's parents are divorced and Larry's dad has a job. These are all the responses we know of to Anna's questioning what makes each of the kids special once she meets them on the first day of school. Kate also whittles on her desk with a huge pocketknife(three times), and the bench outside Polly's mom's gas station.

     In the scene where we first meet Sheriff Tom, there's a flier on the wall that says the "Cowboy's Professional Rodeo Association Finals" will be held somewhere unreadable, the date is hard to read, but appears to be December 13, 1996. Nobody caught the misplaced apostrophe? And there would be a flier posted for something that will happen a whole year away?

     Anna is left-handed, because when Tom meets her while she's on her run, her watch is on her right wrist, and also when she's wearing a different watch while teaching math. (Kate is also left-handed, as seen in when talking about being a cashier at the Piggly-Wiggly.)

     Unleaded gasoline was selling for 98 cents a gallon at the Texaco station, regular gasoline was $1.15 a gallon. A black-and-white two-year-old dog named Bubba is lost, according to the sign on the door, there's a reward out for him. There's also an upcoming BBQ supper for the volunteer fire department on Saturday the 9th at the high school, $5 a plate.

     The principal mispronounces Juan's name when introducing him, she says it "Joo-wan More-ray-leese." Larry calls geography class "geology" class.

     Tom describes soccer to Newt as "kind of like kickball, mixed with that-there hockey."

     Anna drives a maroon Mercedes convertible, license-plate number 344-570, and it has two bumper stickers on the back. Tom's patrol car has a license-plate number of 530-743.

     Besides the Big Green(green/white jerseys) and the Knights(black/silver), other teams in the league include the Terminators(royal blue/white), the Ninjas(white/black/red), the Walking Dead(red/white), the Buccaneers(red/black), and the Vikings(orange/white).

     I love all the shots from ground level during the games, following along behind the ball. My favorite line of all time about team spirit is where Sophia yells back at the Knights taunting the group, "We're not the Nothings from Nowhere! We're the Elma Nothings!"

     In the team-naming scene, Larry sums up Tom's job as "giving out speeding tickets and cleaning up dead animals off the highway." Coach Anna's four areas of practice are Fitness, Tactics, Technique and Game Psychology. Her first running session lasts for twelve minutes.

     One of the things Anna teaches in class is how to use the proper editing symbols for needed capitalization, period insertion, comma insertion, adding something in later you forgot to include, and adding punctuation marks.

     When scoring on Larry in practice, Juan first knees the ball three times, then heads it twenty-two times in a row before shooting.

     In the rain-soccer scene(one of my favorite montages in all cinematic history), there's a black Lab that decides to join in on the fun, so it's not just Ernie the goat that plays the game!

     Besides Ernie the Goat(owned by Polly), that black Lab in the rain game, and the five cows that get loose, there's a gigantic German shepherd-looking dog on the truck in the junkyard when Tom recruits Newt, and some type of sheepdog in Larry's dad's bar. Could any of those dogs be the missing Bubba?

     Jersey numbers for the team: 0 Larry, 2-A Sue, 2-B Lou, 4 Evan, 8 Nick,  9 Sophia, 10 Juan,  11 Jeffrey, 12 Polly, 13 Kate, 14 Tak, 85 Newt.

     The Big Green's regular season record is 7-2-1 according to the chalk marks, but they pick up another win somewhere before the title game, as the announcer says their record is 8-2-1. Maybe there were semifinal games played?

     Jay Huffer's normal job is an auditor for the IRS. (Can the guy get any less-likable?) Also, Larry's dad's bar has a Christmas tree in the back corner by the pool table.

     One of the cars sitting around the Morales' trailer park is a silver Pontiac Firebird.

     The Big Green score fourteen goals that we see during the movie. During the shootout, the order chosen is Juan, Kate, Nick, and Sophia, with Newt volunteering to take the last shot. Juan sinks his kick into the low left corner. Kate nails her shot chest-high left-center, Sophia crushes the ball into the high left corner.  Nick's ball sails just over the top bar right of center. And finally, Newt, of course, wins the game on the final kick.

     We don't really know much of who plays where position-wise, other than Larry is goalie(obviously), Juan is mentioned as center halfback, and based on her relentless pesky ball-swiping attempts, Polly is a defender.

     Not only did the kids win the Austin Junior Division league during Anna's time in the teaching exchange program, but their test scores rose all the way to fourth-highest in the whole state.