Facts That Fans Of The Franchise May Not Know

"Top Gun" was written by the screenwriting team of Jack Epps Jr. and Jim Cash, who were two of the hottest scribes in the business. While crafting the "Top Gun" script, they realized on one level that it's a sports film, which opened up many new possibilities story wise.

As Epps explained in a documentary on the film, "The key to this movie is how athletic these guys are. So my partner and I approached it, and we said, 'Well, wait a minute, what this really is is about sports.' If we take the movie aside, from my point of view as a writer, 'Top Gun' is a sport is a sport movie, and the sport is ACM: Aerial Combat Maneuvering. And any athlete knows that you go and you're always trying to see who's the best in any situation. So, to us, we sort of framed the movie more on the athletic side than the military side." Much like we see in sports, the movie had a lot of young talent who were really eager to prove themselves. As Epps continued, "A lot of people came together at the time where this was important in their careers, they were really trying to prove something, everybody had a lot at stake in this movie, and I think it really shows on the screen. There's a lot of energy and enthusiasm, I think it plays all the way through."

The writers also put important scenes in locker rooms because when the pilots aren't wearing their uniforms, they don't have their rank, and they can say in the locker room what they can't say anywhere else. (Recall the sequence where Maverick and Iceman go head to head with Iceman telling him, "You're dangerous.")