Ace Ventura: Pet Detective | Hard Rock Stadium, Miami Gardens — Where Snowflake Vanished

Everything in the film starts with an empty tank. Snowflake, the Miami Dolphins' bottlenose mascot, is lifted from the stadium two weeks before the Super Bowl, and a pet detective in a Hawaiian shirt is the only man who will take the case. The stadium is real and it was open for business: 347 Don Shula Drive in Miami Gardens, then called Joe Robbie Stadium after the owner who paid for it privately and opened it in 1987.

The timing is the good part. Filming ran through the middle of 1993. In January 1994, three weeks before the picture reached cinemas, the same building hosted Super Bowl XXVIII. The place has since been Pro Player, Dolphin, Sun Life and now Hard Rock Stadium, with a canopy added over the seating bowl in the 2015 rebuild, so the concrete Ace runs around no longer looks quite the way it did.

Come on a Dolphins Sunday, or for the Miami Open tennis or the Formula One circuit that now loops through the car parks. From the upper deck you can see the whole flat sweep of northern Miami-Dade. Down at field level, remember that the entire plot of one of the highest-grossing comedies of the nineties hangs on a dolphin that was never there.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.