I could have sworn–I would have sworn–that I’ve seen The Thin Man two or three times. The other night, I saw it was on TCM, and, “OK, that’ll be fun to watch again.” From the first moment to the last, it was “I don’t remember that!” I can only assume that I had never actually watched it before.
Where did that come from? I’ve read the novel. I don’t remember seeing any of the sequel movies, though given my apparent memory problems, maybe I did. It was just really weird.
Damn good movie, by the way. I’m glad I’ve seen it.
Just stopped in to say how much I love The Thin Man movies. Saturday was William Powell day on TCM, and they showed two of those, plus one other Powell/Loy flick.
Disney’s The Black Hole, which I recently watched with the kids.
I saw it when I was little and liked it. The cool swirling black hole, the gothic spaceship, wise cracking robots, Star Wars shooting action, and the red robot with one eye was badass.
All that clicked.
Then they went into the black hole. Wait, what?!? Where did all this Heaven and Hell imagery come from!?!? I swear when I was little, the smaller ship emerged at the end with them saying “we have a new universe to explore”. I honestly didn’t remember a surreal 2001 Space Odyssey ending with angels and demons. :eek:
Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe- the animated version. Watched it as a kid, decent enough. Watched it in college- WHO PUT ALL THIS MISOGYNISTIC CHRISTIAN IMAGERY IN MY MOVIE???
There have been jokes in sitcoms that made me fondly chuckle for years afterward and then I’d finally get a chance to watch that episode again, wait eagerly for the line… and then find out I’d remembered it wrong. It makes me more understanding of misquotes like “Luke, I am your father” and “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more” - arguably, these are improvements on the originals, or at least easier to remember.
Not this one: it was an alliterative line from the Michael character, played by Peter Scolari. Lines from Newhart himself that have always made me chuckle (even if I might not be remembering them exactly) include:
The Black Hole came out in a dead zone for me - I was too old to go see Disney movies, and I didn’t have kids old enough to take. I have always been puzzled by the movie, though - it seems to end halfway to any reasonable story conclusion, and even though I’ve seen it twice as a sober adult, it’s kind of weird and formless and a little bit nightmarish. It feels like a second-rate pilot for a third-rate series in the aftermath of Star Wars, before anyone but Lucas had really gotten a handle on the genre.
Welles was thin enough during his early life. Watch him in Citizen Kane without the fat suit. He was no longer thin by the time of The Lady from Shanghai, but he wasn’t fat yet either.
Okay - I have a very minor example, and it’s a book. I always loved a line from The Red Badge of Courage: “The sun was a red wafer pasted in the sky.” Then I was rereading it and discovered the line was “The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer”, which is frankly a lot more clumsy - why bother with a simile form? Bah! this Crane guys stinks.*
So we’ve gone from movies you completely misremembered seeing, to individual lines from books. It’s the Cafe Society, Jake.
An example of a better misremembering is one of the many translations of The Odyssey has in the open something like
Robert Fitzgerald
book 1, line 14 - The poet asks the Muses to sing of how Odysseus fought only to save his life, to bring his shipmates home. But not by will nor valor could he save them, for their own recklessness destroyed them all—children and fools, they killed and feasted on the cattle of Lord Helios (Hyperion), the Sun, and he who moves all day through heaven took from their eyes the dawn of their return.."
I’ve always remembered that as “stole from their eyes the dawn of their return” which I much prefer.
I could swear the first time I watched he said something about waiting for grandkids to go after.
