I’m sure I’m not the only person who enjoys in-jokes in the movies. Such as, in Tango & Cash, having Sylvester Stallone’s character dismiss Rambo as a “p*ssy.” But what about in-jokes that weren’t made? How many comedic missed opportunities are out there?
Here’s one to get the thread started:
*** The Incredibles.** Mr. Huft, an angry little man who runs around yelling a lot, was voiced by Wallace Shawn. I am deeply disappointed that Brad Bird and Pixar couldn’t have him inject “Inconceivable!” into one of his tirades…
He also played the Ferengi Grand Nagus Zek in Deep Space Nine, hearing him spout out one of the Rules of Acquisition shouldn’t be too inconcievable…
“Bob, are you forgetting the First rule of acquisition? once you have their money, you never give it back, is that too inconcievable for you to understand, Bob?”
I’m waiting for Ron Glass’s character in Firefly (and the upcoming movie, Serenity), to reveal that the reason he has a fairly detailed knowledge about the law, crime, criminals and weaponry is that he used to be a police detective.
Michael Douglas plays a San Francisco cop in Basic Instinct, being drawn against his will into Sharon Stone’s peverse world of bondage, sex and murder.
An in-joke that I feel needed just a bit more to be perfect:
A halloween episode of Everbody Loves Raymond had Ray’s dad (played by Peter Boyle) handing out candy to trick-or-treaters…in a Frankenstein costume. It took me a minute or two to figure out why I had a weird sense of deja vu, but once it clicked I kept waiting for him to break into “Puttin’ on the Riiiiiiiiitz”. Or would that have removed the subtlety that adds to the fun?
There’s an actor David Wohl who looks a lot like veteran character actor George Wyner, who played one of the DAs in “Hill Street Blues.” David Wohl was a guest star in a HSB ep, and I was hoping that they would have some scenes together, but, no, it didn’t happen.
In a recent episode of JLU, Hermes (messenger of the Gods) visits Diana. Hermes was voiced by Jason Bateman. Now here is where it gets interesting… On JLU the voice of Green Lantern is provided by Phil LaMar who, it turns out, was also the voice of Hermes (Conrad of Planet Express) on Futurama. I would have loved it if Diana started talking to a guy with a Jamacian accent.
I always thought that when Richard Dreyfuss got onto the alien ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind someone should have shouted, “It’s a cookbook!”
Of course, one of the best in-jokes on a TV series was when William Shatner first showed up as the Big Giant Head. When Dick Solomon (played by John Lithgow) picked him up at the airport and asked him how was his flight, Shatner said everything’s fine except when he saw a weird creature on the wing of the plane when he looked out the window! Solomon’s response: “The same thing happened to me!” Cut to commerical. The in-joke was that both Lithgow and Shatner played the same main character in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” who saw a gremlin that was sabotaging their plane. Shatner played the role in the TV show, and Lithgow did it in the movie version. That joke was priceless. I loved it.
I’m sure I have a couple of wished-for jokes, but they’re not coming to mind.
Two that I did enjoy were:
Wings: Roy, who I always thought was a ringer for Oliver Hardy, happens to wander over next to Lowell’s freshly delivered wax figure of Stan Laurel. Everybody points and laughs, and a mother even sends her kid over so she can take his picture with Laurel & Hardy. Roy doesn’t get what’s going on and nervously fiddles with his tie.
Freaks and Geeks: The Halloween episode, in which the mom has chosen a vampire costume for the dad – played by Joe Flaherty.
I… don’t get it.
There was a couldn’t-be-a-coincidence joke like this on 24 recently when Former President David Palmer returns to help out the current acting president, and someone mentions that he’s glad to see the country is in “good hands”. The joke being that that actor is currently the spokesperson for Allstate Insurance, whose slogan is “you’re in good hands”
In Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (the novel,) there’s a scene where Caravaggio (the thief) has to steal some documents from a party attended by Axis bastids. He waits until everyone has stumbled off to bed, strips naked (the better to avoid alerting people with rustling clothing) and creeps into the darkened house. Just as he’s laying his hand on the box that contains the documents he’s after, he’s surprised by bright headlights shining through the window behind him, and turns to see a car pulling into the driveway.
It’s a very painterly passage, and no accident – it perfectly describes a painting by Caravaggio: The Thief.
When the movie came out, I was looking forward to seeing that bit, since the cinema lends itself to references like that a little better than the printed page. (And Willem Dafoe looks exactly right for the part.)
I liked that movie a lot more than I expected to – but I’m still disappointed that they didn’t include that part.
Yes, I’m complaining about the lack of a Willem Dafoe nude scene. Don’t start.
