Rescue 911/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: Though popular in its own right, this show has yet to see an official DVD release (likely due to the true stories involved). However, that hasn't stopped two YouTubers from posting various episodes on YouTube.
    • The show did get a VHS release in 1997 as Rescue 911: World's Greatest Rescues; however, it is edited together with international stories and a new narrator.
  • Technology Marches On: A few examples:
    • "911 Under the Bed" featured the victim going for a rotary phone, before grabbing a digital phone to save time on dialing. It's worth noting that cell phones existed at the time of the segment, but the only available models were expensive and bulky.
      • You actually can see these sometimes. An episode about killer bees shows just how bulky those old cell phones were.
    • A few episodes showed garage doors trapping people underneath them. In those cases, the houses had to have been built in the 1980s or before, when garage doors were much more dangerous because they lacked sensors and would keep descending no matter what (or who) was underneath.
    • With episodes dealing with carbon monoxide poisoning, one might wonder why the victims didn't have CO-detectors. Common carbon monoxide detectors at the time tended to be pads that would turn brown or black when CO was present. Audible alarms didn't become commonplace until the 1990s, after carbon monoxide deaths had increased.
    • The scenario in "Freezer Tongue" might be more difficult today, since a lot of refrigerators have freezers on the bottom or on the side.
    • Every so often, you might see an episode that shows a child playing a Nintendo Entertainment System or Sega Genesis.
    • Another episode had a five-year-old girl call 911 after coming home and finding the house completely empty. What had happened was a case of communication failure: the girl normally took a bus to another school where she was picked up by her mother; however, on that particular day she was instead taken straight home by a friend's parents, and her mother was at the other school looking for her. Naturally, with the prevalence of cell phones today, such a scenario may seem antiquated to the modern viewer.
    • One episode features a toddler getting burned by hot oil when he trips over a fryer's electric cord. Modern fryers have breakaway cords that are designed to prevent exactly that kind of thing from happening.