One of the reasons we love “Independence Day” so much: Boomer the dog, who makes a heroic leap to safety when a fireball consumes a tunnel full of cars.

Sure, the humans manage to save the entire world, but Boomer’s bravery is also pretty damn impressive. And he’s there at the ending alongside his people as they celebrate their victory over the aliens.

The original fate of the dog, who was played by a Labrador Retriever named Dakota, was not so rosy.

Here’s some key facts about Boomer:

Boomer didn’t survive in the original script

Screenwriters Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich noted in an audio commentary that they initially decided to kill off the dog, owned by Jasmine (Vivica A. Fox) and Steve (Will Smith). As the scene plays out, when fire hits the crammed tunnel and there’s clearly no way out, Jasmine grabs her son Dylan (Ross Bagley) and runs toward an emergency door on the side. Boomer, meanwhile, waits patiently in the car, and, in the original version, did not survive.

But test audiences reacted to strongly to Boomer’s death that Devlin and Emmerich realized they had to reshoot it so that Boomer lives. In the now-famous shot, Jasmine calls for Boomer and he comes running, leaping ahead of a giant ball of fire to join her and Dylan safely.

The heroic dog leap scene was later shot using rear screen projection, meaning that the real dog was never in any danger.

We later see Boomer at the underground government facility and in the truck with Jasmine as she rushes to congratulate her new husband after his victorious battle.

“People were more concerned about this dog than the millions of people in the cities”

“But no matter how many people were to be killed, or how many buildings [were] blown up, it never had the impact of this one simple dog running from the fire. People were more concerned about this dog than the millions of people in the cities. That says a lot about us as a culture,” Devlin said in this 2020 CinemaBlend article.

Boomer finds the injured First Lady

After escaping from the tunnel, Jasmine commandeers a truck and heads to the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro base, not realizing it’s also been destroyed. As she looks for survivors, Boomer sniffs out the wreckage of a helicopter, finding the severely injured First Lady Marilyn Whitmore (Mary McDonnell).

Since a living, sniffing Boomer is integral to that scene, and several others including the finale, either those scenes were also reshot or those test audiences weighed in very early in the process.

Boomer wasn’t the best trained dog

Despite Boomer’s impressive reaction to Jasmine’s recall command, when we first meet him, he’s happily chewing on a pair of Steve’s tennis shoes. Oops.

Dakota, the dog who played Boomer, was “a humper”

On the 25th anniversary of the movie, Fox recalled the downside of working with a dog costar. She told The Hollywood Reporter: “The dog was a humper. They would yell ‘cut,’ and I guess me in those [short] pants and everything, he would just jump on me. OK. Good thing I like dogs.”

Thanks to the view afforded by that famous leap, viewers could see for themselves that Boomer was not fixed.