Oops: The bottle of Old Spice cologne in Donnie’s medicine cabinet shows a picture of a modern yacht with a tri-cornered sail. However, this Old Spice logo didn’t appear until the mid 1990s - in 1988 the logo was a clipper ship. A bar of deodorant also features the wrong logo for the time.
Oops: The movie takes place in 1988, but the vehicles have late 1990’s style license plates on them.
Crew visibile: When Donnie and his father are having a conversation in the car - right before they almost run Grandma Death over - a clapperboard is briefly reflected in the car window behind Donnie’s Dad’s head.
Oops: At one point in the film, when Donnie grabs the keys to the car, there is a Blockbuster card visible. The card shown is not one the Blockbuster style membership card from 1988 - in fact, it is a much more recent one. Richard Kelly said this was done on purpose, as Blockbuster had some sort of endorsement deal for the film.
Oops: When speaking to Donnie, Professor Monnitoff refers to the then-current 1988 edition of the book A Brief History In Time (Stephen Hawking) as he suggests wormholes as a plausible method for time travel. Ironically, this chapter on wormholes was not added to Hawking’s book until the edition released in 1998 (ten years after the events of the movie).
Oops: The copies of the book “Watership Down” display the cover design as copyrighted 1996, even though the film is actually set in 1988.
Oops: In the first sequence of the school scene when we see shots of the movie characters, a girl is carrying a Dickies brand book bag. This model wasn’t introduced by Dickies until the late 1990’s.
