With Pixels arriving in theaters this past weekend, old-school arcaders were probably having some fun spotting all the little '80s references scattered throughout the film. One such memorable '80s-centric moment comes when the crew is out fighting an invading alien race who've disguised themselves as video game characters and they come across an adorable little Smurf. 

In the early trailers for Pixels, there's a funny scene when Kevin James blasts a Smurf to pixels, saying "Don't tell anyone I killed a Smurf." You can watch the moment below at around 1:33.

At some point between that trailer and the opening of the film, the Smurf scene needed to be reshot and Michelle Monaghan was brought in instead of James. In this outtake from my Pixels interview for Fandango, I mention the Smurf scene not realizing that Kevin James has no idea his version doesn't exist anymore.

Watch what happened next...

So why was the original scene cut? There could be a number of reasons. As Monaghan points out in the interview, the "Zorax scene" was cut, which seems to have made it so the Smurf bit had to be shot again. (We're not 100% sure what "Zorax" is referring to, though it's most likely an old MSX computer space game that went by the same name. See an image below.)

As mentioned above, Pixels is littered with '80s references, and not just of the arcade-game variety. Everyone from Madonna to Max Headroom makes an appearance. When I asked director Christopher Columbus about references he wanted to put in but couldn't, he told me they tried hard to get Michael Jackson, but it didn't work out.

Also Mr. T turned them down.

You can watch my complete Pixels interview below.