Which is bad, but not horse boner bad. During an (originally consensual) outdoor sex scene between Drogo and Daenerys (originally played by an actress other than Emilia Clarke) a nearby horse apparently got “visibly excited by watching these two humans” prompting the crew to start laughing. Worse, the inexperienced showrunners opted to make their White Walker just a dude in a green suit, so they could “figure out what he looked like later with CGI” – not realizing that creating a digital design from scratch rather than simply create a costume “would have taken half the budget of the pilot.”
When all was said and done, the pilot … didn’t work. There were major story problems, and after the expense of traveling to distant locations, there were few wide shots resulting in “very little scope.” Reportedly one HBO exec remarked: "Why the f**k did we go to Morocco? You can't see f**king diddly squat, we could have shot it in a car park!" Another said: "It looked like it was shot in my backyard." Astoundingly, Game of Thrones was given another chance and the pilot was mostly reshot. One actor referred to the pilot quagmire as a “$10 million-dollar rehearsal.”