How Twisters connected to the original 1996 Twister

Twisters has taken the box office by storm. As audiences head out to the theater to take in Hollywood’s latest blockbuster sequel, people might be wondering how the new movie is connected to the original 1996 blockbuster Twister. We’re rounding up all the ways Twisters links up to the first movie, as well as its tributes and some great easter eggs for fans to pick up on when they go for round two with the tornado wranglers.

Coming nearly 30 years after the original Twister, from director Jan De Bont and stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, the sequel kicks things up a notch or two with even bigger tornadoes and a whole new cast of characters.

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung—whose previous film Minari was nominated for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won for Best Supporting Actress—Twisters features none of the original movie’s cast, instead introducing fans to a younger crew of storm chasers played by Daisy Edgar Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, and more.

Twisters is technically a direct sequel

Albeit with completely different characters

Universal Pictures

Twisters is almost entirely stand-alone sequel, so anyone can walk into it without having seen the original, and they won’t be missing anything story-wise. But there is one very direct bit of continuity between the 1996 film and its sequel. In Twister, Jo (Hunt) and Bill (Paxton) are trying to get their experimental tornado measuring device Dorothy—itself a nod to the greatest tornado movie of all, The Wizard of Oz—to work. They end up going through four Dorothy units before finally managing to send its little data collection spheres up into a twister to collect all that data.

At the beginning of Twisters, the ragtag crew led by Kate (Edgar Jones) is still using the same technology, though now they’re onto Dorothy V. According to Business Insider, production designer Patrick Sullivan explained, “Our version is Dorothy V, because there were four Dorothies in the first film.”

The movie also carries on the Wizard of Oz inspiration, with the Storm Par team led by Javi (Ramos) operating under the codenames “Scarecrow,” “Tin Man,” and “Lion” as they get their fancy new radar system in place to collect even higher quality data than the crew of the first movie could ever have imagined.

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All those homages

Though not direct references, there are plenty of homages to the style of the original Twister that you can find in Twisters, including the following:

The ragtags vs. the corporate storm chasers

The original Twister was very much about a ragtag crew of storm chasers going up against a group of corporate-sponsored chasers led by Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes). Twisters keeps a similar dynamic going, but mixes things up a bit. Though she originally starts from similarly humble beginnings as a storm chaser, after going through a terrible tragedy and losing several of her friends, Kate goes off to a new life in New York. She’s lured back by Javi, who has gotten big money sponsorship to do the kind of data collection on tornadoes he’s always dreamed of.

When she arrives in Oklahoma, Kate finds herself on the corporate side, while the seeming antagonists are a moxie group of YouTubers who sell T-shirts and shoot fireworks up the middle of tornadoes, all led by the charismatic Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). It’s only later that Kate discovers she might be on the wrong side, and has to find a way back to her homegrown Oklahoma roots.

Philip Seymour Hoffman style

1996’s Twister features an incredible cast of supporting characters, with the fan favorite being Dusty Davies, played by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman. In a wonderful nod to Hoffman’s character, and the rest of the original’s eclectic supporting cast, the sequel has its crew of independent storm chasers styled very much in the fashion set by Dusty. With tie-dyed shirts, colorful fabrics and plenty of personality. By the end, Kate’s very khaki look is even reminiscent of how Jo was styled in the original movie.

“I’m not back”

The plot of the original Twister involved Bill going back to Oklahoma to get divorce papers signed by his ex, Jo, when he gets pulled back into chasing a flurry of tornadoes all hitting in one day. Throughout the movie, characters keep excitedly welcoming Bill back into the fold, and he is constantly having to remind them, “I’m not back.” That is, until he finally does agree to make his stay permanent by the end.

Twisters follows suit, with Kate returning to Oklahoma for just one week, as she tells Javi over and over. And just as in the original, when characters suggest that she is “back,” she reminds them, “I’m not back!” You can guess what happens by the end.

Movie theater mayhem

One of the most iconic set-pieces from the 1996 Twisters happens at night, when a tornado essentially sneaks up on the crew as they gather outside a drive-in movie theater. With the Stanley Kubrick horror classic The Shining playing, the tornado comes up behind and literally rips the screen away while the audience flees. Twisters pays homage in two ways. The first is at a nighttime rodeo, which is interrupted by a large twister, but the second is even more explicit. As a giant EF5 tornado barrels toward a small town, the crew and much of the town take shelter in an old single-screen movie theater doing a screening of the 1931 classic Frankenstein. At one point, the wall with the screen literally gets torn away to reveal the tornado behind it.

That red pickup truck

One of the most iconic images from the original Twister is Bill’s shiny new red Dodge pickup truck, which gets put to use by the storm chasers, and gets pretty beat up in the process. In Twisters, Tyler drives a red Dodge pickup of his own, decked out with all kinds of gear to protect it from tornadoes, and even a clever bit of technology allowing the truck to secure itself to the ground in order to literally drive into the middle of one.

“Naked as the day she was born”

In Twisters, Kate and Tyler end up at her childhood home, where Kate’s mom regales them with the embarrassing story of her daughter, as a little girl, running out of the house, “naked as the day she was born,” to watch a big storm. The story is an homage to a similar scene in the original, where Bill’s old pals tell his new fiancée how they first met him while he was “butt naked” watching a tornado.

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Easter Eggs

Beyond just stylistic similarities to the first film, these blink-and-you-ll-miss-it easter eggs are direct references to iconic moments from Twister, but you’ll have to know where to look:

Bill Paxton’s son, James

In perhaps the sweetest easter egg for fans of the original, late actor Bill Paxton gets a nod thanks to the cameo appearance of his son, James Paxton. The younger Paxton appears as a motel guest who is giving the clerk a hard time while a tornado approaches just outside. “It’s really a cameo, so it’s an Easter egg for the fans of Dad and the original,” James told Entertainment Weekly. “I did this one for Dad.”

Photo: Warner Bros.

Flying cows!

One of the most famous moments from the original Twisters was when the team watched as a cow got sucked up into the vortex of a tornado. While fans watching the sequel may have missed another flying cow, Chung assured everyone in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that there is actually one present during the final tornado sequence, though viewers might need to look extremely closely. It was the visual effects team that managed to sneak the cow in there. “It’s the hardest thing to spot…I only spotted it because I noticed some weird marking on a piece of flying debris,” Chung said.

Photo: Universal Pictures

Bombers baseball

At the very end of the original Twister, a young boy who survived the storm can be spotted wearing a white T-shirt with the logo of a local baseball team called the Bombers. In the new film, Kate is seen wearing a red version of the same shirt.

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