My problem is the victim will not only wake up OK, but will remain asleep for exactly as long as needed. Need tem minutes to open a safe? No need to tie anyone up just bop them with a ten minute bop.
As far the UFC, if you could visit a dressing room after a knock-out you would see lasting effects almost every time. My first coach kept his hotel address pinned to his gym bag so he would know where he was staying. He could function but usually could not remember where to go if he received a knock out. Dizzienss, memory loss, slow speech and vomiting can occur for hours.
Then there’s the rear naked choke hold (popularized by Jack Bauer on the TV series, 24), banned by most (all?) law enforcement because (ding ding ding) it’s not safe. Don’t fight it!
This choke, in either the figure-four or clasped-hand variation, is an extremely dangerous technique if used thoughtlessly or improperly. When applied as a blood choke in particular, the brain is immediately deprived of oxygen, leading (as mentioned above) to unconsciousness and ultimately (if not released) to brain damage or death.
People getting knocked out with blackjacks was a comic book staple in the 1930s and 40s. Don’t know if it originated there or if they borrowed it from movies.
C’mon, don’t forget the details, like all the hilarious mixups while she was “Gertrude”… Elizabeth Satchell and Jean Simmons (and more recently Helena Bonham Carter) played up the slapstick aspects of the dual role.
But Shakespeare should get the credit. He pulled out all the stops with these scenes, with Hamlet’s bumbling just making things worse. Keep in mind, it was Professor Rosencranz who realized that a second blow from a coconut was needed (nobody remembers this correctly, which makes it a great bar trivia topic).
In the Doc Savage series, I think they used some sort of odorless nerve gas that was contained in glass ampoules that were in the crook of their arm. It only lasted a minute or so, enough for Doc Savage and the crew to get out of harm’s way.
I can remember at least one other scene mocking the “knock out the guards and steal their uniforms” cliche, where the guards emerge from the room after the struggle and our beat up protagonists follow
While I agree with most if this cogent analysis, I feel you do a disservice to your scholarship by omitting to mention the vital role played throughout by the swanee whistle.
Archer made fun of this trope. A character was conveniently knocked out for about 20 minutes. The rest of the episode had him complaining about all the doctor visits and MRIs he required.
In the short lived TV show Sledge Hammer, they parodied a scene from the movie Witness. One episode had Detective Hammer silently creeping up on someone in a farm setting. He hits the bad guy over the head with the butt of his pistol. Said bad guy reacts exactly like someone would in real life, he proceeds to scream and beg Hammer to not hit him again.
In his memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, author George MacDonald Fraser (of “Flashman” fame) wrote that when he was serving as a soldier in Burma in WW2, he once saw an example of someone behaving in real life exactly as one would expect from the then-current movies: a fellow soldier shot by the Japanese during an advance falls, rolling over and over, and exclaiming “they got me, the dirty rats got me!”
This one drives me crazy. Protagonists can survive rifle shots to the torso in most movies, yet sticking a five-inch knife blade anywhere in a bad guy’s body is immediately fatal. Not sure why a much slower-knife blade is deadlier than a bullet…
