Not really. Most of your proofs can be put down to Disneyfication. “Based on Hamlet” is still a valid description of The Lion King; no one has seriously claimed that there are no differences (you forgot to point out the whole *lion *thing).
Ooo. I got another one.
For years I didn’t realize the term “black comedy” also meant, “movies whose humor draws from a bleak and depressing outlook.”
When I worked at a video store, a customer walked up to me with a copy of Harold and Maude and asked me to recommend more black comedies from the seventies, I’m all like, “Well, I never heard of this. Have you seen Car Wash or Cooley High?”
I :smack: it when :smack: look at me like :smack:.
In all fairness, it took Disney a long time to realize The Lion King was based on Hamlet. It wasn’t until people began pointing out the numerous simularities to The Jungle Emperor that Disney realized how much it had been inspired by the earlier public domain work.
It may have been inspired by Hamlet, but it wasn’t based on it. The basic plot is completely different once you get past the “uncle kills father” part. Even that’s different, since in Hamlet, the story begins with King Hamlet already dead. I’ll do the opposite of what I just did, and compile a list of similarities.
- Scar kills Mufasa like Claudius kills King Hamlet.
- Scar becomes king.
- Simba is unhappy with his father’s death.
- Simba discovers that Scar killed his father.
- Scar dies.
I’m sure I’ve missed some parts that clearly point to the Hamlet-Lion King connection. Feel free to fill in the list as you see fit.
I too thought, in my innocent youth, that Grease was nothing but good, clean, wholesome fun. I was shocked! shocked! to learn those parts of “Greased Lightning” I always had trouble making out…
“…You know that ain’t shit when we’ll be gettin’ lots of tit…”
“…You are supreme, The chicks’ll cream…”
“…You know that I ain’t braggin’, she’s a real pussy wagon…”
You’re describing the anti-Monk!
I used to think Yoda was just a really old human.
Marc
No single epiphany – but I saw the 1967 sex comedy A Guide for the Married Man (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061736/) on television (several times) when I was about 9 or 10 years old. At this time I was vaguely aware of the existence of something called “sex” but largely oblivious to the details, so a lot of the plot points went right over my head – later becoming clear in retrospect. I also did not understand at the time that adultery might have economic repercussions – i.e., divorce and alimony – or that women, at the time the movie was made (not the time when I saw it), were generally eager to find husbands for economic reasons.
It was not until long after I saw Waterworld that I figured out Kevin Costner is a pretentious, incompetent dumbass.
In my defense, I had not, at that time, seen Field of Dreams.
It was years after I saw the Batman movies before I realized that the character played by Billy Dee Williams and Tommy Lee Jones was the same guy, Harvey Dent.
:smack:
Many years passed before I realized that Jock offered to marry Lady because she was pregnant.
The first time I saw Diamonds Are Forever, I was around 12 and I didn’t realize that the two hitmen, Mr Kidd and Mr Wint, were gay.
Indeed. Overall I feel the core theme of the movie is much more evocative of Henry V and the other “King” plays than Hamlet: “irresponsible boy-prince learns the meaning of being king”, mixed in with the whole divine right/favor of heaven thing (i.e., the whole country suffers when the ruler is not the rightful king).
As for replying for the OP’s topic: I remember experiencing “a moment of clarity” while watching Back To The Future II, when 50s-Biff tells Future-Biff to “make like a tree, and get outta here”, as he had to Marty in the original BTTF. This line puzzled me then, and I had walked around for 2-3 years thinking it was just supposed to be an example of how incoherently stupid Biff was.
But then Future-Biff raps 50s-Biff with his cane, saying, “It’s leave… Make like a tree and leave! You sound so stupid when you say it wrong!”
About 3/4 of the audience watching BTTF2 laughed. The remaining quarter (myself included) quite audibly gasped, “Ohhhhhhhh… Now I get it!”
When I saw the movie Malcolm X I had somehow never heard the term ofay. Everytime it was said I thought Denzel or Spike was saying “that ol’ fag”, and it made very little sense hearing about “ol’ fags coming down to buy black women” or “she married that ol’ fag she’s been running around with”.
For some reason I didn’t realize Bruce Willis’s girlfriend in Pulp Fiction was French. I could have sworn, both times I saw it in the theater, that she was Asian (and assumed that her accent was perhaps due to being Vietnamese or from some other French Asian colony). No idea why I thought this, but one of the people who saw it with me also thought she was Asian.
So, did the end of the movie just make zero sense to you? Why did you think she went crazy? Not mocking you, just genuinely curious. She -was- a bit fragile before, I know.
You know what’s really embarassing? I didn’t get the joke, it whooshed me so completely I didn’t even realize they were making a joke , until I read that comment.
When I watched Napoleon Dynamite, I inadvertently turned on the director’s commentary. When the movie started, everybody was like “Why’s the director talking over everything” and I was like “Shut up, it’s irony.” After about 15 minutes we had enough of irony and discovered the problem.
I’ve felt the same way (although the “Hamlet” influence was pretty obvious). I’m totally surprised that no critic or commentator ever mentions the obvious similarity between Timon and Pumba and Prince Hasl’s drinking companions (especially Falstaffe/Oldcastle) from the Henry plays.
It took several viewings of Minority Report before I realized that the three “pre-cogs” - Agatha, Arthur and Dashiell - were named after mystery writers, as their job is to detect crime.