Trivia for
Surf's Up (2007) More at IMDbPro »

• The title's translation in Russian is "Catch the Wave!", in many other languages it's "Kings of the Waves".
  
  
• At the beginning of the film, one of the "crew members" joked to Cody if he sang or danced in the movie. This is a clear allusion to a previous animated film about penguins, Happy Feet (2006).
  
  
• All the actors got to record in the same room together, which is unusual for an animated movie.
  
  
• The layout department used a special motion-capture camera system mounted on an old Sony video camera to give the illusion that the movie was actually being made with a real hand-held video camera. This was used to make the film look like a documentary.
  
  
• In a pictoral montage early on, where Cody is explaining the history of surfing and surf culture, one of the pictures featured is the 18th-century Japanese woodblock printer Katsushika Hokusai's "Great Wave off Kanagawa" reworked so a penguin is seen surfing off the wave's lip.
  
  
• Was shipped to some theaters under the name "Competitive Spirits".
  
  
• UFOs are placed all around the movie in various scenes like "Z is for Zurfing" and where viewers meet Chicken Joe's dead father. This is revealed in one of the Easter Eggs on the DVD.
  
  
• Originally, there were interviews with two of Z's old girlfriends, Doris and Sheila (voiced by Mindy Sterling and Jane Krakowski, respectively). They were cut to keep the focus of the film on Cody. Doris and Sheila do appear in the movie, when Z appears on the beach near the end.
  
  
• Cody's name is a reference to Mavericks, a famous surfing spot. It is also a possibly reference to the NBA basketball team the Dallas Mavericks, of which directors Ash Brannon and Chris Buck are fans. Finally it refers to Top Gun (1986) whose main character was nicknamed Maverick.
  
  
• SPEN ("Sports Penguin Entertainment Network") is a parody of the sports channel ESPN.
  
  
• Real-life famous surfers are shown throughout the film as part of the Pen Gu contest. Those surfers are Renato Mendes (Brazil), Rory Nubbins (Australia), and Tatsuhi Kobayashi (Japan).
  
  
• The character of "The Geek", is likely based on Jeff Bridges's character the Dude in The Big Lebowski (1998)
  
  
• Early in the movie, Cody remarks about the lack of waves in Shiverpool, "You should have been here yesterday...", a common surfing aphorism lamenting poor surfing conditions.
  
  

• SPOILER: "Geek" rhymes with "Zeke," which could explain how Big Z took the name of the Geek.
  
  

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