Great posts folks! I especially liked UncaStuart’s - that’s the exact spirit of the OP I was going for, although I don’t mind off-topic.
Here’s one I saw last night in a TV commercial - one of those “Use your VISA checkcard” ones. They swipe the card so the VISA logo faces the camera with the bottom edge going left to right through the machine. Which means in reality nothing actually happened, since the magnetic strip is at the top of credit cards. :smack:
Over-steering is another good one. Better these days, but in old movies - wow. Get those wheels aligned! (Spoofed beautifully in Airplane!)
Liberal, there’s a great one of those fake headlines in a Twin Peaks rerun I saw the other night. One character shows another character an article with a headline that reads, “ASIAN MAN KILLED!!” All caps, two exclamation points, and the man’s ethnicity would not have been relevant to the story about an unidentified corpse found in Seattle.
I was watching Happy Days a couple days ago, and the episode opened with Richie, Potsie and Ralph’s band playing.
Potsie was the guitarist and vocalist, and it shows him wandering Arnold’s singing and playing - an electric guitar, that was quite obviously, even when he stopped wandering, unplugged. There was no sign of an amp anywhere, either. (I wasn’t paying enough attention to tell, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if the guitar music had been acoustic, too…)
There are two things I look for and have found countless times. (1) Often an envelope supposedly mailed in the 30s or 40s will have a ZIP code in the address, 25 or 30 years before ZIP codes were introduced and (2) an envelope addressed to a person in the 30s or 40s will refer to the Department of Defense which wasn’t established until after World War II.
With a minimum 32 point typeface.
And no cursor, like the word processor Carrie Bradshaw uses on Sex and the City.
And beeps for every action, and sometimes every keypress.
And a big popup window that reads “MAIL SENT” after email is sent.
And a keyboard that sounds like a clattering IBM Model M from 1987, even on new laptops.
I remember noting a pun involving the word “reigns”; I don’t think it was an error. (Though I have often seen misspellings on fake magazine covers in movies. I guess you can’t expect the graphic artists to be good spellers.)
But you should, though. The fact that they often aren’t is a travesty. Same with journalists (even amateur online journalism), and especially signwriters. But it seems to be no longer as important as it was, which is just not right.
It’s always fun to see something written in the Chicago font, which is as distinctive (to the right people, anyway) and widely used in everyday typing use as the Walt Disney signature typeface.
The worst as far as mistakes due to a lack of fact checking has to be the John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson movie. No, not that one, this one, Basic
When we first meet the NCIOC, (guy in charge) Sergeant West he is wearing Specialist (E-4) rank but is being deferred to by officers and NCO’s. IIRC, he is being called sir by some of the troops. Later his rank has changed to that of Master Sergeant (E-8, one hell of a quick series of promotions) We even see a woman with a Ranger Patch for her unit patch. They are also wearing berets during a field exercise which is not done.
The other one that sticks out in my head is Rambo: First Blood Part II. When we first see Col. Troutman, he has on a green beret with a Special Forces Unit Crest on it. He should have had his rank on his beret instead.
I know there are others, but I wanted to post this before this zombie gets locked.
I was watching some cold war era movie on cable. I think it was Iron Eagle II. The plot, such as it was, involved a group of American fighter pilots and Soviet fighter pilots joining together to fight generic Arab terrorist fighter pilots.
Now obviously it was unlikely they were going to get the cooperation of the real Soviet Air Force. And CGI technology wasn’t good enough back then to fake it. So they had to use American fighter jets and paint them to stand in for the Soviets. I can understand and except this.
But they decided to use F-4 Phantoms as the stand in. That was dumb. The Phantom is probably the most distinctive looking fighter the American military has. Anyone who knows anything about military aircraft (and who else were they figuring was going to watch this movie?) would immediately spot that they were faking it.
Going to what Liberal was mentioning upthread - anime often will have filler pieces in Romanji (roman letters) during various scenes. Sometimes they’ll use actual text for these images.
The absolute most fascinating combination of artistic text and animation subject I ever saw was from the first City Hunter TV series. This is a series about an urban fixer who solves problems for people. For a fee. Sometimes as a hero, sometimes as a villain. The title character also enjoys working for beautiful women, and will accept trade in kind for his services.
The text that showed up on the screen for the opening animation (with guns going off, and lots of beautiful women) is a primer-level discussion of the Shakers.
One of these things just doesn’t belong…
My contribution is a scene in Serenity, after Wash dies and Mal goes off to find the agent, leaving the rest of the crew to make a stand against the Reapers in a room with some heavy steel containers for cover.Big, burly Jayne has trouble moving the giant containers by himself because they’re so heavy, but a few seconds later he accidentally brushes against one of them and sends it toppling over, revealing that the heavy steel boxes are really just painted styrofoam.
A pet peeve that I see in movies, TV shows and music videos:
They use a classic microphone because it looks cool…then sing into it wrong! Mics like the RCA 44 & 77 are side address mics. Sound is picked up by the sides, not the end. I grind my teeth when I see some art director having the talent sing or speak into the end. It’s not as if there aren’t hundreds of films of people using these mics correctly.
Several years ago, one of my sisters was visiting and we were up late watching Jack Benny, probably on A&E. I think it was the Surgeon episode because at one point Jack was looking at an x-ray which my sister, an MD, noted was upsidedown.
Is this really true? It seems weird to me that you would need permission to include any everyday objects in a movie. If you do a street scene, do you need permission from every company that has their trademark showing?
Folks:
Just a reminder, in a thread like this that covers lots of movies, please be sure to use spoiler boxes. You type:
what you want covered and it shows up as what you want coveredFor more info, please see: Forum Rules and Post #4 in that thread.
Yes, I know, some of you would think that SERENITY is ancient and so spoiler-boxes aren’t required, but … just because something is a few years old doesn’t mean everyone has seen it.
In Independence Day, the scene where the military is getting ready for the final showdown with the alien ships, you see a lot of guys running around the airbase, and standing around during the president’s speech. When he saw this, my brother started laughing his ass off. All of those guys are wearing carrier deck gear.
He told me later that he heard the reason this happened was that the producers originally went to the military to get help with things like that, and were told that they would help on the condition that all references to Area 51 be removed. They refused, and so had to do it all on their own.
