How to Train Your Dragon 2 [2014]

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• Hiccup calls Valka "Mom" only twice in the entire film: once during the battle at the dragon sanctuary and again after the battle at Berk.
• Dean DeBlois asked Cate Blanchett to play the role of Valka during the 2011 awards season where How to Train Your Dragon was being campaigned for Academy Award recognition. "I told her that I had written the part for her in How To Train Your Dragon 2. And she smiled, saying that the (original) movie was 'a big hit in her household with her three boys,'" said DeBlois. "I told her about the character, and I could see it blossoming in her mind." DeBlois wanted Blanchett to play Valka because he knew she could strike the right balance of "rich and commanding," mixed with a sense of "regret and vulnerability" that the part called for.
• Djimon Hounsou would often do vocal exercises to prepare for his voice acting. One of these was a loud, terrible scream. Dean DeBlois liked it so much that he decided to use it as Drago's cry to summon his dragons.
• Originally, Gobber was the one who was meant to be killed by the brainwashed Toothless. But when Guillermo del Toro read the draft, he suggested that Stoick should be killed instead, as it would have a bigger impact.
• Stoick the Vast has some experience and lines in common with another Gerard Butler character, Creedy in Reign of Fire, which was also about dragons. One such allusion comes during the battle scene where Stoick is fighting Drago.
• Drago's Bewilderbeast loses its left tusk, just as Drago also lost his left arm to a dragon. This is similar to a situation in the first film, where Hiccup loses his left leg, as a parallel to Toothless losing his left tail fin.
• Gobber is the first character to "come out" in a DreamWorks Animation film. This is evidenced when he says the reason he never married was because of the arguing. He then adds, "Well, this and another reason." Writer-director Dean DeBlois told E! News, "When we were recording Craig Ferguson, I had written the line, 'This is why I never got married,' and he, as he often does, added it as an ad lib and he said, 'Yup, Gobber is coming out of the closet.'"
• Valka was originally written as the villain, but this idea was dropped in later drafts. Also, Drago was intended to appear in the third film How to Train Your Dragon 3, but was bumped up to the second one.