While attending Hogwarts, teenaged Tom Riddle grew frustrated by his conflicting needs to stay under cover, while amassing knowledge of torture, mutilation, and murder. His solution: using a Time-Turner to live a double life in Nazi Germany (in canon, Riddle attended Hogwarts from 1938 to 1945).
Riddle magically aged his body a few years on these excursions, appearing as he would in his thirties. As “Amon Goeth,” SS commandant of a labor/concentration camp (as seen in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List), Riddle was able to indulge his cruel and sadistic impulses without opposition or inconvenient questions.
The “Goeth” hanged at war’s end was, of course, not Riddle. A classmate who’d been unwise enough to make one too many jokes about snakes was transformed by Riddle into a facsimile of Riddle’s future self/Goeth, and transported to the platform in Riddle’s place just as the noose was tightened.
It’s been ovetrtaken and negated by the later films and stuff, but after the very first Star Wars film came out*, it was suggested that Obi-Wan Kenobi is really a clone of the original Old Ben Kenobi. The designation “Obi-Wan Kenobi”, is, like “Artoo-Detoo” (R2D2) and “See Three Pio” (C3PO) a phonetic rendering of “O.B.-1” = “Old Ben One”, the first clone.
*The one that came out in 1977, and now called Episode 4: A New Hope. The theory was viable throughout the first trilogy, but the second trilogy and the Clone Wars stuff pretty much killed it.
For Star Trek Into Darkness (this cropped up on TV Tropes):
Khan was given plastic surgery upon re-awakening to make his identity as “John Harrison” more convincing (thus explaining his race lift).
Which makes sense when you think that the last thing Section 31 would want is to draw too much attention (hell, ANY attention) to an operative that’s supposed to be in deep cover. And when you consider that Spock Prime, who met the original timeline’s Khan, is walking around…
And here are a couple for Disney’s The Princess and the Frog. The first I glimpsed on TV Tropes, the second I came up with myself:
-Dr. Facilier is Big Daddy’s illegitimate half-brother. Not too far-fetched when you think that rich white Southern men around that time period often kept black mistresses. And it adds an extra layer to Facilier’s focus on Big Daddy as the center of his plans-- “I’m as much my daddy’s son as Eli is, so why shouldn’t I have what he has?”
-And since the definition of “royalty” in that movie seems rather flexible, when Facilier describes himself as being “royal on my mother’s side,” he is referring to the fact that his mother is descended from Marie Laveaux, Voodoo Queen of New Orleans.
I read that article when it was first published and thought it was brilliant. I also thought that the scenario that writer came up with for the next two movies was worlds better than the crap Lucas wrote.
The next Star Wars sequel will feature a spunk little Sith Princess with a cute animal sidekick, who goes on a journey of growth, self-discovery & inflicting pain & fear on a helpless Galaxy.
Of course. Even before the sale to Disney, a Star Wars musical was inevitable. It worked out so well the last time!
To tie it up in a perfect bow, the musical journey of discovery the Sith Princess and her cute animal sidekick share with us should be—nay, MUST be—a celebration of Life Day.
I’m serious. I believe that the combination and intensity of emotions that viewers (particularly those who Remember) would experience upon witnessing this movie would be so indescribably powerful, that the electrical emanations from the brains of all those viewing would shake the Earth into a parallel plane of existence, thus ushering in an era of untold potential beneficial evolution.
The Machines in the Matrix dont need humans for power. They made us believe that to make us think we are critical to their survival. The machines stuck humanity into pods because it was sentient enough to have a sense of ethics- it would be unethical to drive us to extinction. We are like animals in a wildlife preserve- dangerous but important to protect.
When the architect said “there are degrees of survival we are prepard to take” he was referring to the conscience of wiping out humanity for their own survival.
I have no idea where I originally came upon this concept, but it’s based on info from the licensed roleplaying games (yeah, yeah, suck it. :D) The idea proposed there was that the Force doesn’t play nice with machines, so the more machinery you have as part of you, the harder it is to access the Force to accomplish anything. (It was built in as a game-balancing act, to prevent a player from being both a kick-ass nearly invulnerable cyborg/droid AND having kick-ass nearly impossible to stop Jedi/Force powers.)
However, it makes for really interesting implications if applied to the source material: Anakin getting Vaderized becomes even more of an example of the Emperor’s evil - he *knew *that Anakin was more powerful than he was, so instead of plopping him into a bacta tank, or speed-growing a few clones to harvest replacement organs and limbs for him, he stuck him into a Force-nullifying mechanical suit as the perfect opportunity to keep Vader dependent and limited.
This interpretation also has the bonus of making Vader’s nerfed powers in ANH more believable compared to the agile and superpowerful tricks he pulled in RoTS. I got no excuse for Obi-wan, sorry. He’s a lazy asshole who didn’t keep up his training regimen in the desert, even with nothing else to do out there.
Here’s one someone came up with for an RPG: The Holosith. The idea is that the reason the Sith are so hard to get rid of and keep popping up, is that people can and do learn how to be pseudo-Sith just by watching entertainment shows. Since the Dark Side is powered by emotion and will, someone Force-sensitive can make the stuff he sees an actor on a show do actually work.
Tom & Jerry was or became an allegory for WW1, with Tom as the Germans (the Jerries) and Jerry as the British (the Tommies of WW1) and Spike as the USA.
E.T. and his alien buddies were poachers, sneaking onto the wildlife reserve planet to score some good Earth weed. When humans stumbled onto their illegal operation they panicked and fled, thinking the authorities were onto them. They only came back for E.T. because he threatened to rat them out to the actual alien police if they didn’t.
I think this is basically true in the movie. When he says/sings the line about his mother, it shows an image of a voodoo queen that looks just like depictions of Laveaux.
I like Robot Chicken’s theory that E.T. was a mentally retarded alien that wandered off during a field trip, and the rest of his species speak fluent English and have all their fingertips glow.
