Well, we certainly didn’t see this one coming!
Remember “The Matrix”? The 1999 sci-fi action film starring Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss that was so wildly successful that at one point, everybody wanted to don on cool sunnies and be just like the power couple Neo and Trinity?
You’d be baffled to discover this one secret that was recently revealed by Simon Whiteley, who worked as a production designer on the film.
To jog your memory, the first few minutes of “The Matrix” featured a “digital rain” aka a torrent of lime-green characters trickling down and then jamming the frame. It was supposed to be a computer code to represent the activity of the virtual reality environment of the Matrix on screen. “The Matrix” directors The Wachowskis opened every subsequent film of the film franchise with this sequence, and it truly was an iconic scene, without which, “The Matrix” would’ve lost some meaning.
As it turns out, it’s not some indecipherable computer code.
If you examined it closely, you’d see that it’s a jumble of hiragana, katakana, and kanji – also known as Japanese characters. The bigger surprise is when Simon Whiteley revealed that the code was something that he fished out of his Japanese wife’s cookbooks. In particular, it’s a jumble of sushi recipes. We repeat, sushi recipes.
CNET quoted Simon as saying, “I like to tell everybody that The Matrix’s code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes. Without that code, there is no Matrix.”
Baffled? Yeah. Us too.
Sources: Munchies, CNET / Featured image: Tony Werman.
