PARKS AND RECREATION (2009–2015)
TRIVIA: The writers didn't know
Nick Offerman could already play the saxophone when they made his character,
Ron Swanson, a secret saxophone player.
Jay Jackson, the actor who plays
the comically literal Pawnee newscaster Perd Hapley, was for many years an
actual print and broadcast journalist and anchor at news outlets in San Diego
and Los Angeles. After he retired from journalism in the mid-2000s, through a
friend's manager he got a small role as a reporter on a 2007 episode of Dexter.
He agreed to allow the manager to send him on other auditions, but only as long
as they only were for reporter roles, since that was his professional
background, so he ended up also playing reporters on TV shows such as Scandal,
Revenge, The Closer, The Mentalist, Body of Proof, and Braindead, as well as in
movies such as Battleship and Fast Five.
In the episode "London parts 1
& 2" Ben says to Andy "So all you did is stop drinking beer?"
and Andy replies "Yea I lost like 50lbs in a month." This is a
reference to Chris Pratt's real life weight loss for his role in Zero Dark
Thirty. He actually lost 60lbs.
Mayfair Games, makers of Settlers
of Catan, were contracted to make Ben Wyatt's Cones of Duneshire look like a
professional board game. Instead, Mayfair Games made a playable game with a
full set of rules. However, it's complex and dense, so it has not been produced
for the market. It was played at GenCon 2014 in Indiana, where 33 people paid
$100 each for a ticket to play and the Ledgerman position (the scorekeeper who
doesn't play) was auctioned off. The event made more than $20,000 for an
Indiana food bank.
Chris Pratt modelled Andy's singing
voice after Eddie Vedder, frontman of the band Pearl Jam, of whom Andy Dwyer is
a huge fan.
In Season 7 Episode 12, one of the
children trick or treating at Andy and April's house is wearing a Star Lord
costume. Chris Pratt (Andy Dwyer) played the character of Star Lord in Marvel's
Guardians of The Galaxy (2014).
