Game of Thrones had a lot of viral moments over the course of its run — the death of Ned Stark, the Red Wedding, the Battle of the Bastards, etc. But few set Twitter on fire quite so much as a scene from the fourth episode of the final season, “The Last of the Starks,” where fans spotted an errant coffee cup on a table during a feast. (We never did figure out exactly who left it there, by the way.)
The coffee cup was quickly edited out of the scene, but fans were already jumping all over it. I’m surprised the coffee cup didn’t get its own spinoff, that’s how popular it was.
And that brings us to House of the Dragon, the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel series. According to co-showrunner Ryan Condal, the crew is being very vigilant not to make any similar slip-ups, telling The Hollywood Reporter that they maintained they maintained “a very heavily policed set — there was lots of Starbucks-hunting going on.”
Find the coffee cups in House of the Dragon, win a prize
Condal also pointed out — accurately — that slip-ups of this kind happen all the time in film and TV; perhaps because so many people were watching that final season of Thrones, it was treated as a huge deal, but it’s pretty common. “We always joked around about it, that we were going to make Starbucks goblets so at least they fit in the scene.”
Condal’s co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik went even further in that direction, telling THR that the crew actually left coffee cups “everywhere we could so that later on we could paint them out digitally.”
"See if you can see where the Starbucks cups were that we removed digitally after the fact, and if you can find one, there is a prize."
Obviously the prize is a cup of coffee. You can try and win it when House of the Dragon premieres on HBO and HBO Max on August 21.
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