Thursday, April 30, 2009

Napoleon Dynamite's hometown

I am a big fan of the movie, Napoleon Dynamite...the movie is quirky and there are lots of great movie quotes!

The movie was filmed in Preston, Idaho in the summer of 2003. It cost $400,000 to make and it grossed over $46,000,000 in the theaters.

I am in Ogden, Utah on business and Preston, Idaho is a 90 minute drive, so I decided to make the drive and see if I could find some exterior locations from the movie.

I went online and found this website that gives the address of the movies exteriors.

In the below pics, I have the pic I took today, followed by a screen cap from the movie...

Please click on my pic to see the bigger version

To see all of the pics click here...

First on my list was, of course, Napoleon's house. It sits mostly by itself on a dirt road outside of town.





Next to the house is the area where Tina, the fat lard of a Llama lived...the fence is gone, but the fence posts are still there.





The pic below is the actual mountain Uncle Rico bet Kip he could throw a football over...good luck with that!



Next, I swung by Pedro's house, no sweet jumps to be seen here...





Literally around the corner is Preston High School...



There are a lot of scenes in the movie that were filmed on these steps, the liger scene is one...





The tetherball scene does not actually take place at Preston High School, but at a nearby elementary school...there was no tetherball to be found on this day.





This next house is Tricia's house, the girl that Napoleon took to the dance. It took him like 3 hours to finish the shading on her upper lip...





The Pop'N Pins lanes is where Uncle Rico and Kip decide to have some ID's made so they "look official, like they have all the answers."





Summer's house looks like it is being renovated...I guess she moved out.





This is Kings, which is a drug store in town. This is where Uncle Rico embarrasses Napoleon in front of Summer, telling him to go get some Pampers for him and his brother.





Last, but not least, this is Rex and Starla's house, Rex as in Rex Kwan Do and his American flag pants!





It was a lot of fun driving around town and looking for the various exterior landmarks. I felt like a bit of a fool taking pictures of peoples houses, but it's been almost 6 years since the movie was filmed and I am sure I was not the first to do it.

I am off to go get some chapstick because my lips hurt real bad, gosh!

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Awesome! Looks like you had fun!

Salgat said...

Very awesome :D

Chester said...

Thanks for sharing and documenting these shots. I would have done the same thing. Thanks for being the 'fool' for me :D

Joel Settecase said...

Very cool. Must have been a fun trip, and you gotta love that movie. I recently look some pictures of another town: Gotham City. Yes, I maintain a Chicago Photoblog. If you are interested, check out: http://settecase.blogspot.com

. . . . . said...

Gosh! You have, like sweet photo skills! Thanks for sharing!

Unknown said...

Very cool.
Sightline Payments Bally Technologiespoker

Anonymous said...

I couldn't find napoleons house ...mind giving me some directions or the website with the directions that u found

Anonymous said...

Thanks! I am going to try to see these places when I am in the area in August! Great to see a veteran Napoleon fan map it for me :)