Top Gun Creators Had to Ditch a Pivotal Plot Point After Navy Disapproved
Well, it's not exactly a shocker that the Navy had a say in the making of Top Gun.
Paramount Pictures' Top Gun (1986) turned out to be the biggest commercial hit of that year, eventually earning $357 million, launched Tom Cruise into stardom, and became one of the greatest advertisements ever for the American military, particularly for US Navy aviation, to the point that they had to fine people in the actual Tactics Instructor program, which inspired the movie, for quoting it.
Unsurprisingly, the Navy had a hand in creating Top Gun. The military has long been involved in Hollywood, and in the case of Top Gun, producers paid the military $1.8 million for the use of a Naval air station, aircraft carriers, planes, and pilots (via Time). The deal was, of course, not purely the matter of money. The Navy had at least a limited veto power over the movie contents.
Generally they did not abuse it, and allowed filmmakers their creative freedom. As the result, Top Gun was not exactly realistic.
"The first movie was fake," Mark Vizcarra, director of the documentary Tomcat Tales, noted to New York Post. "When they are flying upside down, canopy to canopy, and the fly-bys — the moment anyone would do that in the Navy, you would get your wings pulled."
But there was at least one case when the Navy disapproved of a critical plot point. About an hour into Top Gun, Maverick's best friend and wingman Goose (Anthony Edwards) dies in a tragic accident during a training flight. Originally, the scene involved a mid-air collision between aircraft. But allegedly the Navy felt there were too many mid-air collisions, and forced some changes to the script.
In the final scene, the pilots are trying to get a lock on instructor Jester's (Michael Ironside) plane, but the rivalry between Maverick and Iceman (Val Kilmer) leads to dangerous maneuvering.
Maverick and Goose's plane enters Iceman's jetwash, suffers a flameout of both engines, and goes into an irrecoverable spin. This forces them to eject, but when they do, Goose hits the canopy on the way out, and the impact kills him before he even makes it into the water.
The result was just as impactful, and perhaps more so, because there is a greater element of tragic randomness. In any case, even if the final version of the scene was created due to the outside meddling, Goose's death ended up among the most memorable parts of the movie and the most memorable incidental deaths in Hollywood.