15 Things You Never Knew About 'The X-Files' Movie on its 20th Anniversary

"Cherish the past. Enjoy the present. Because the truth... is coming."

When "X-Files" fans first heard the above in the first teaser trailer for their favorite TV show's first movie, they got more excited than Mulder opening a new bag of sunflower seeds.

On June 19th, 1998, "The X-Files: Fight the Future" hit theaters -- while the show was still on the air. It's been 20 years since "The X-Files" made its first leap to the big screen and expanded the scope of Mulder and Scully's investigation. And even now, it remains one of the high points of this long-running franchise.

Celebrate this anniversary with a few uncovered secrets about how they pulled off the original "X-Files" movie.

1. Creator Chris Carter originally planned for the TV series to end and for this to be the first in a series of films continuing the show's mythology. Instead, it wound up serving as a bridge between Seasons 5 and 6.
2. The movie was filmed during the hiatus between Seasons 4 and 5 in 1997. Season 5 featured relatively fewer episodes with Mulder and Scully together in order to accommodate reshoots for the movie.

3. Armin Mueller-Stahl's character, Conrad Strughold, was named after a real-life Nazi officer who conducted experiments on prisoners.
4. Approximately 3000 live bees were used in the filming of the infamous bee sequence (above).

5. The number 1121 appears several times during the movie and throughout the series as a whole, including on one of the domes in Antarctica. This number is a reference to November 21st, the birth date of Carter's wife.
6. Actor Terry O'Quinn, who plays SAC Darius Marchaud, appeared in two different episodes of the TV series in completely different roles, once in Season 2 and again in Season 9.

7. The scenes set in the desert town on the outskirts of Dallas were actually filmed in Southern California. The real Dallas doesn't have any desert areas nearby.
8. The closing scene was filmed in Foum Tatouine, the same place where George Lucas filmed the Tatooine scenes in 1977's "Star Wars."

9. It's no coincidence that one scene in the film features a drunken Mulder urinating on a poster for 1996's "Independence Day." Carter used that moment as a chance to express his dislike of the film.
10. The film was codenamed during production as "Blackwood" early on, a reference to famous horror novelist Algernon Blackwood. Scripts were also printed on red paper to make it hard for people to copy them.

11. Chris Carter wrote the script in ten days, during his Christmas vacation in Hawaii. While on vacation, he set aside a few days to break the movie's story with "X-Files" writer Frank Spotnitz on 3x5" index cards.
12. Their collaboration resulted in an outline that Carter would later write into a 124 page script.

13. Most feature films have at least six months to a year of pre-production to assemble key production heads and build sets, etc. Due to the film's schedule, the "Fight the Future" team only had (gulp) six weeks.
14. All of the film's sets -- from the alien craft hiding under the arctic ice to the frozen cave in the film's opening --had to be built as soon as they were designed. Which means the studio spent a fortune having to rent all the stage space to house the sets that were built simultaneously due to the time-crunch the film was facing.

15. Director Rob Bowman, who helmed previous "X-Files" episodes, storyboarded the eff out of this movie. According to Den of Geek, he left the production with a book of storyboards as thick as the dictionary.