Man who said he'd eat his shoe if Top Gun: Maverick was made faces up to his promise

If you like Tom Cruise and have a hankering for Reagan-era 80s nostalgia then we can highly recommend Top Gun: Maverick, the long, long-awaited sequel to the original Top Gun which was released way back in 1986.

That's a whopping 36 years between the two films, which was made even longer due to Covid-19 (the film was initially scheduled for a release in 2019 but was delayed due to the complexity of filming the action sequences and the subsequent pandemic). Development of the movie actually began much before that in 2010.

In fact, it was so long that some people believed that the film would never see the light of day. One of these people is the entertainment editor of Polygon, Matt Patches, who tweeted in October 2010 that: "If Top Gun 2 happens, I will eat a shoe."

Bold words but surely he wouldn't go through with it, right? Well, no actually.

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True to his word, Patches has eaten a shoe and shared his entire succulent meal on YouTube for us all to watch.

I ate a shoe because of Top Gun 2www.youtube.com

Now, eating shoes isn't wise or good for your digestive system so Patches instead cobbled together an eatable shoe made out of fruit leather, edible glue, and liquorice laces, unlike Werner Herzog who actually a real shoe in 1980 in response to his friend Erroll Morris getting a documentary made called Gates of Heaven.

That might sound like a cop-out but to his credit Patches did actually walk around outside in the shoe before he consumed so at least it was a worn shoe and not likely to give him a bad stomach (although it looked gigantic so there may have been a slight bit of indigestion).

Paramount Pictures even sent Patches a shoe cake in anticipation of his stunt, which almost definitely tasted better than a real shoe.

Top Gun: Maverick has opened to rave reviews but in an interview with Vanity Fair, Patches states that he believes that a Top Gun 3 will not be made but wisely stops short of making any more unwise bets against himself.

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