As someone who owned an original Double Dragon arcade cabinet in college, there was no way I was going to miss a brand-new “special collector’s edition” blu-ray release of the notoriously bad Double Dragon film from 1993.

I should also preface this by saying that I’d never seen the movie before. Heard about it, sure. But I’d never actually sat through it and – it turns out – knew very little about it (other than it starred a pre-Party of Five Scott Wolf).

Despite the film’s reputation – it’s got a whopping 8% on Rotten Tomatoes – the new release (from MVD Entertainment Group, as part of their Rewind Collection) is surprisingly fully featured and clearly has been given a lot of love.

And the film has shockingly good DNA. So many of the people who worked on this film did so very early in their careers and eventually went on to amazing things.

So what can you find on the disc, other than the movie?

• There’s a brand-new feature-length making-of documentary that’s basically an hour of slightly embarrassed interviews with costars Scott Wolf and Mark Dacascos and writers Peter Gould and Michael Davis.
• There’s an extended interview with producer Don Murphy in which he goes into detail about how Double Dragon came to exist (and then goes on to talk about other facets of his career).
• There’s an original, 1993 “making-of” featurette that was obviously created to promote and sell the movie
• There’s some behind-the-scenes footage, trailers, TV spots, a TON of photo galleries.
• And there’s the first episode of the 1993 Double Dragon animated series (“The Shadow Falls”).

The only thing that’s missing is a feature-length commentary, but it seems like director James Yukich – who was and is best known for music videos – has distanced himself from the film. It was his only movie.

Reader, I combed through the entire disc. I watched the movie and ALL of the special features. So without further ado, here are 32 things I learned while watching Double Dragon:

1. No one even pretends this movie isn’t crap.

2. Alyssa Milano is in this! Why did no one tell me?

3. Wha? Robert Patrick is in this, too? Fresh off his blockbuster turn as the T-1000 in Terminator 2, getting him on this film was quite the coup.

4. Except Patrick is playing a white American guy pretending to be a Japanese samurai. Oh.

5. The producers felt that having Robert Patrick’s name attached to the movie was more important than casting an actual Japanese actor to play Koga Shuko.

6. Therefore, the writers (Michael Davis and Peter Gould) were given the task of rationalizing why Robert Patrick wasn’t Asian. Which is why he has a speech about changing his name from Victor Geistman. Except someone OTHER THAN the writers added the quip “Nobody wants to party with Victor Geistman,” which isn’t funny and Davis and Gould clearly thought was a dig at their script.

7. The amazing Paul Dini wrote the first draft of the screenplay and has a Story credit on the film. After Dini, the script went to novelist Neal Shusterman before it finally ended up with Davis and Gould, who basically rewrote the entire thing.

8. Double Dragon was Peter Gould’s first writing credit, and he went on to be one of the head writers on Breaking Bad and co-creator and executive producer on Better Call Saul.

9. The original concept for the movie came to producer Don Murphy while he was playing Double Dragon 3 at Meltdown Comics in LA. He felt the game series had a compelling mythology and could support a film.

10. Within a few months of optioning Double Dragon for his fledgling Imperial Pictures, Murphy also optioned a script from a young, unknown Quentin Tarantino: Natural Born Killers. (Murphy has produced a lot since, including From Hell, Real Steel, and all of the Transformers films.)

11. Most of the people working on Double Dragon thought they were making a gritty Enter the Dragon-type movie. But it turned into a somewhat-fun-for-the-whole-family “kind of a mess.”

12. Robert Patrick looks just like Johnny Depp in this movie, and every time he was on screen, I thought it was Depp. Every. Single. Time.

13. Mark Dacascos (who plays Jimmy Lee) is the son of two martial arts teachers. In fact, his mother was the first woman to be featured on the cover of Black Belt magazine.

14. Going into the film, Dacascos had a black belt in multiple disciplines. Costar Scott Wolf (who plays Billy Lee) had no training whatsoever.

15. Dacascos sprained his ankle on the first day before the cameras even started rolling. He never told anyone and did the whole movie with a sprained ankle.

16. During the big fight scene in the junkyard, Scott Wolf betrayed his youth and inexperience by making play fighting sound effects with his mouth while filming.

17. The director (James Yukich) betrayed HIS inexperience by attempting a complex technical shot on the first day of filming. He wanted to be one of the first directors to get a single shot that moved up and out of the water; instead, he almost ended up being the first director to get nothing shot on the first day.

18. Almost nobody working on the film was familiar with the Double Dragon games. The writers didn’t know the game and were never given a copy as “research.” Dacascos didn’t know it at all. Only Wolf knew the game, but he had never really played it.

19. Julia Nickson (perhaps best known for her breakout role of Co in First Blood Part II) stars as the Lees’ aunt Satori Imada. This was at the same time as she had a recurring role on the first season of Babylon 5.

20. George Hamilton and Vanna White make cameos as newscasters (and report on Madonna’s breakup with… Tom Arnold). Andy Dick is their weatherman.

21. Despite being a low-budget movie set in a post-apocalyptic, futuristic Los Angeles (and featuring some of LA’s best-known landmarks), the film was actually filmed in Cleveland.

22. Scott Wolf and Alyssa Milano met on set and were later engaged in real life. (She’s why he looks back on the film so fondly.)

23. Unanimously, everyone agrees that there are a lot of really great ideas in the movie, but they’re all disconnected and don’t go anywhere. According to writer Peter Gould: “There’s maybe an OK movie in there struggling to get out.”

24. Another point on which everyone agrees is that the movie tried to hit every demographic – to its detriment. It tried to appeal to kids, teens, and adults. And it just didn’t work, especially since it was given a PG-13 rating.

25. Watching behind-the-scenes footage from any movie makes it clear just how much work is done in post production. However, watching BTS clips from Double Dragon make the movie look like a middle school play.

26. A stand-up comedian (Mark Brazill) was hired to come in and “punch up” the script with quips and one-liners. He went on to co-create and produce That 70s Show.

27. While filming, the cast threw out the first pitch at a Cleveland Indians game. Robert Patrick was pitching, and Scott Wolf was catching. Patrick threw the ball too high, and it sailed over Wolf’s head. The director showed up late to the game and asked a random employee how it went: “Some old guy threw it over some little kid’s head.”

28. Patrick had some of the best lines of villain dialogue. Example A: “I just want total domination of one major American city. Is that too much to ask for?”

29. Example B: “You’re like a son to me. And like a son, I can always have another.”

30. But the absolute best line in the movie is when the henchvillains capture Alyssa Milano’s character, look her straight in the face, and say, “NOW who’s the boss?” *chef kiss*

31. Davis and Gould challenge the internet community and any fans the movie has to re-edit the film (as was famously done with The Phantom Menace) to make it more coherent.

32. Davis and Gould hadn’t seen anything from the movie (including dailies) before it premiered. Today, they admit to feeling appalled and more than a bit embarrassed while at the premiere, but they’ve come to terms with the fact that all screenwriters need at least one project like that in their careers.