Bad movie errors by the prop / art department

[Kolga]

@KneadToKnow

Poor Tiffany…

Huzzah, sir. I say again…HUZZAH.

[Declan]

@RealityChuck

I haven’t seen the movie, and am no expert on aircraft, but in the still accompanying the movie Jet Attack in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, it shows the heroes attacking some North Korean guards in order to steal their MiG and make a daring escape. If you look at the MiG, you can see the star and bar on the fuselage.

I would assume the plane isn’t a MiG, either.

I got a 403 error code on the link , but the USAF did operate a short squadron of mig 21 aircraft for aggressor purposes. Supposedly they are a hot item for a number of countrys that operate the type, the indians practically salivate over aquiring them.

Declan

[zenith]

@Baldwin

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.)

Actually, stuff like this is all-too-common to those of us familar with the Omaha World-Herald .

A recent W-H gaffe was the classified ad for “Cute boxer puppies. Dewormed. Shots,” that appeared under the heading of “Firewood For Sale”.

[Marley23]

@Audrey Levins

I grew up watching old movies and it seems to me that up until the 70’s, scenes that took place at night look remarkably just like daytime. With perhaps a blue filter placed over the lens to make it look kinda dark. I mean, it’s so bright that everything has the same sharp shadows it would have at three in the afternoon.

“Day for night” is a famous, and famously cheesy, effect. It’s exactly what you describe.

@Baldwin

I remember noting a pun involving the word “reigns”; I don’t think it was an error.

I’m voting for a homonym-induced error, with a modest chance of trying too hard to be clever. The expression is “takes the reins” and it doesn’t make sense with the other spelling.

[puppygod]

@iamthewalrus(:3=

Heh. I came in here to post the reasons for this, and I realized that I already had, above.

But I thought of another reason that this is done. It’s done for clarity. The typical shot of the computer screen is very brief. Unless you’re very familiar with the layout and use of the program in question, you’re likely to miss whatever cue the director thinks is important.

Computer programs are generally designed to work silently and fail noisily. If you instruct a computer to do something like send an email, it will only alert you if something goes wrong. You know it sent because you just hit the send button and got no error. But the audience often needs to be notified of successful actions, not failed ones. Someone watching an email in a movie is probably paying attention to the content of the email. All of a sudden the email window goes away (because the user moved the mouse and clicked send), and if they weren’t paying close attention, the viewers have no idea what happened.

Obligatory link Casey & Andy CinemaOS.

[Lust4Life]

Not so much now but it still happens,the incorrect use of swords.

You see pirates fighting with cutlasses but using them like court swords(Foils),what most people consider to be classic fencing.

But in reality cutlasses or sabres used on foot are held high and vertical and are used in short downward slashing movements.

I’ve even seen characters fencing foil style with medievil swords.

When people fight with rapiers its the sword point that is the business not so much the edge though most films seem to get this right.
The only other thing that I can think of is Rambo supposedly fighting against elite Spetsnazs troops though they are all wearing as I recall Logistics badges.

[Lumpy]

I just saw a prop error the other day. It was a commercial for IIRC dog treats, and showed the dog running through the house looking for bacon. It checks out the stove top where there is a brand-new bare grey metal cast iron frying pan. I guess the makers had to go out a buy a pan for filming.

[Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela]

Just to prove it can happen even in some of the finest movies, there’s a moment in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” where someone is in a record store in Italy and prominently displayed is the Miles Davis album “Tutu”. The film is set in the late 1950’s and “Tutu” wasn’t released until 1986…

That one’s purely the art department - some set dresser spotted an album with a great photo of MD, and didn’t check if it was an anachronism. Happens often, and it’s only noticed by geeks (like me)…

[Alessan]

When it comes to prop department errors, you can’t get much better than the Antonio Banderas movie *The Thirteenth Warrior * - if you could call them “errors”, as the prop department obviously didn’t care to even try and make the weapons and armor appropriate to the period. One of those 8th-Century Vikings was wearing what looked like Conquistador armor, for Odin’s sake.

[Greg_Charles]

In some movie I can’t quite remember, maybe with Stephen Seagal, the hero visits “Chinatown, San Francisco”. It’s set in the modern day, and yet it’s dressed up to look like a westerner’s idea of 18th Century Shanghai. I expect this kind of thing for foreign settings, but San Francisco?

[Jophiel]

@EmAnJ

In the new Indian Jones movie

they travel to Peru - Cuzco, I believe, maybe Lima - and when they’re walking through the ‘city’, it’s shown as dilapidated and falling down, and all the people there are dressed in traditional clothes, which is certainly NOT the case in either of these cities.

My wife (born & raised in Peru) had a host of gripes about those scenes including…[spoiler]- They play Mexican music in Nazca

• The townsfolk are wearing woolen shawls despite being in the desert
• The temples are of Mayan architecture way outside the boundires of the Mayan empire. Of course, she’d have wanted Incan architecture and it was outside of that as well (though not nearly as far).[/spoiler]She had other complaints but more plot-related and I’ll stick to prop related here.