Futuristic Sci-Fi movie stereotypes!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

Anybody here ever see the “Evil Overlord List” at http://minievil.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html ? It has a list of cliched things NOT to do if you’re planning on world (or galactic) domination! Pretty funny. A sample of them would be:

My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.

My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.

Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.

I will not gloat over my enemies’ predicament before killing them.

When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought I’ll shoot him then say “No.”

After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks’ time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled “Danger: Do Not Push”. The big red button marked “Do Not Push” will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.

I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum – a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.

This Evil Overlord List is Copyright 1996-1997 by Peter Anspach. If you enjoy it, feel free to pass it along or post it anywhere, provided that (1) it is not altered in any way, and (2) this copyright notice is attached

And in case anybody wants to rat me out, I did crop the list as theres something like 250 + items on it and I figured that it’d be better to post a sampling than the whole thing.

Here’s another cliche that applies to Star Trek. If someone dies at the beginning of the episode, its a major event and the rest of the episode will be devoted to preventing/dealing with that character’s death. If they buy it any time after the halfway point, its no big deal. (See the DS9 episode with terraformer who reignites a star and then flies his shuttlecraft into it.)

82

MEBuckner, there’s also one I missed from Four Day Planet. One character was named Mohandas Feinberg.

83

Except in very rare cases, whenever someone in SF travels back in time, its always to fix something that they somehow have screwed up in the past. No one ever goes back to change something like the birth of Hitler or anything like that. To me, it seems like THAT would be more interesting. After all, we already KNOW what happens if Hitler gets born. The question is: What happens if he doesn’t? Or, what would happen if someone dumped a herd of horses in North America at around 3 BCE? Why doesn’t SF address THOSE issues in its time travel stories? I know there’s “alternate universes” where those kinds of things have happened, but no one travels through time to MAKE them happen, unless, of course, they’re the bad guy.

84

What about the supplement to the list that I wrote, found here: http://www.members.tripod.com/jmspoofe/Archive/evil_overlord2.htm

Oh, and thanks for the link… I had come across the list a LOOOOONG time ago when a friend printed it out and gave it to me… so now I can finally give credit where credit’s due!

85

I’d like to point out that at least one of these cliches is the result of limited budgets and practicality.

Aliens who look like humans wearing makeup: Before the advent of CGI, this was pretty much what filmmakers HAD to do. The only workable alternative to makeup was sophisticated puppetry and animatronics. While the Jim Henson Studios and Stan Winston Studios (Jurassic Park, Predator, Terminator II) are superb in this area, they don’t work cheap. A puppet can be much more expensive than an actor and a competent make-up artist, so that is what is most often used, especially in television, where producers must produce 20+ hours of film in less than a year on a budget far, far below that used to make a two-hour film like Phantom Menace, whose production lasted three years. (The budget for Phantom Menace was $115,000,000, according to http://us.imdb.com/Business?0120915. The budget for the last season of Star Trek: Voyager was about $50,000,000, IIRC.)

The Star Trek website answers the question “Why do the aliens look so human?” They aren’t exactly dodging it.

86

MARS NEEDS WOMEN!

Alien bug thingies always lust madly after human women.

87

there are two elements which appear in nearly every science fiction epic ever made:

1)Inter-species love affairs (i.e., a woman with three tits, purplish silver skin, and exterior brain, enamored with the hunky reptillian robot guy)

2)The bozo who, when cornered by a festering, maggot infested villian, points his gun and shouts, “I’ll shoot, I’ll shoot!” until the villian eats his head

(not that I have ever WATCHED a film like that…)

88

Why is it that the aliens are almost always tougher than humans? What if we’re the biggest, baddest intelligent life in the universe?

89

Biggest? Possibly. Baddest? Likely. Most intelligent? Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!

90

Screech Owl said …

Being a planner, I often considered the built environment of the future.

  • Urban renewal took everything. No Queen Anne style houses, no Craftsman bungalows, no post-WWII ranch houses … all of 'em plowed under. There’s no such thing as a “historic district” in the future, because there’s nothing historic to preserve!

  • Everyone either lives in massive high-rise apartment buildings, or 5,000 square foot I.M. Pei/International style single family houses on five hectare lots. Urban sprawl must be horrendous.

  • Mass transit is nonexistent, except for what are called “personal rapid transit” systems – think Detroit’s people mover with more track and smaller cars.

  • Downtowns have no auto traffic whatsoever – it’s one big pedestrian mall, even though cities now are often getting rid of their old ped malls. There’s no first floor reatil, either – just broad plazas and water fountains. The only background noise in a busy downtown is that of wind chimmes.

  • Slums are either completely nonexistent, or else make Johannesburg shantytowns seem like upscale subdivisions in comparison. The future has no lower middle class, either.

  • If there are cars, they’re all new. You won’t see people driving around in the equivalent of a 30 or 40 year old 2001 Buick Century, even though cars from the 1960s and 1970s are still seen on American streets.

91

And, frankly, who can blame them??

Mmmmm, Elizabeth Hurley. Mmmmmmmmmmm. %)

92

Mostly good points, but I’m in a kvetching mood tonight. :slight_smile: Apologies in advance.

You mean, like the O-rings on the Space Shuttle??

I think they’re being realistic in that regard. Large ships have enough space for life support. A one-person vessel has too much overhead. Ten, still iffy. A thousand, well, now yer talkin’.

And as far as failure modes, who says they don’t know? Any enormous system is going to have some critical components that, if blown up, will cause it to fail horribly. I don’t recall any special failure modes on Imperial Star Destroyers.

Sure, like the Boeing X-36 project and the Hunter UAV. We’re working on that now. Also robotic tanks, hostage-negotiation robots. . . . The main reason they’re leaving the human in the loop on these (radio-controlled models, government-style) is just because we don’t have software that is smart enough to take over those functions.

Only because these movies and books are being written for an English-speaking audience. Would you prefer that they required you to learn Klingoni in order to follow the plot, or would you rather read subtitles??

Then there are Stanislaw Lem’s books, in which the characters speak Polish (unless you’re reading a translation). :stuck_out_tongue:

Like Mars, Venus, Luna, or Jupiter, you mean? Earth is probably a pretty rare planet. Colonies aren’t going to be able to count on finding anything similar. They might make it to that stage after a few thousand years of terraforming. . . .

One word: “Evian”. :slight_smile:

93

  1. Whenever people are thrown into a cell with a force field, they MUST reach out and touch it, and then say “Yep, it’s a force field!” But they never get their finger fried.

  2. In many movies, the font on the computer screen is huge.

  3. All evil aliens have green blood. (well, a lot)

94

Elmwood…

You wanna talk about Urban Sprawl, look at Coruscant (the capital planet in the Star Wars series). Buildings are several kilometers tall… no oceans… and almost the entire planet is covered with construction. Some people estimate Coruscant’s population to be around 500 trillion sentient beings.

Now THAT’S “Urban Sprawl”.

Achmed…

I’m familiar with the others, but “Luna” seems to have been left out of my 1st-grade astronomy book.

95

An alien will always miss the hero, even if it shoots from 3 feet away…
But if the hero shots at 12 aliens from 200 feet away, he will hit them all, mostly because they freeze up like deer in headlights

96

Luna = Earth’s moon

Ever notice that other planets’ satellites are referred to as ‘moon’ or ‘moons’ (lowercase m), whereas Earth’s satellite is referred to as ‘Moon’ (capital m)? Earth’s satellite is the only major satellite in our solar system without a romanticized name** (not named after a figure in Greek/Roman mythology, or a Shakespearian character). Some literature uses ‘Luna’ to correct that “oversight”. (I have also see ‘Selene’ somewhere, can’t find the cite.)
**There are probably some recently-discovered satellites that are numbered rather than named. I can’t find which carton my astronomy books are packed in right now.

97

Well, yes, but despite his appearance, Mr. Sulu fancied himself a later day D’Artagnan, not a samurai, in that episode where all the characters revealed the hidden sides of their personalities.

98

I think many of the cliches have already been said, but let’s see what I might add:

  1. hero and heroine go to the virgin planet, and have to wait like a year to someone else to come and visit them. The heroes appear with a newborn baby and a set of new clothes, even though all they were wearing when they landed on the planet was the usual gray working uniform.

  2. The president of Earth’s only goverment will be white, and English will be his firt language. Also, it seems only language spoken at the Earth will be English (exception: Blade Runner, they presented ordinary people talking a mixture of languages)

  3. Flying cars…
    PD:

"Ever notice that other planets’ satellites are referred to as ‘moon’ or ‘moons’ (lowercase m), whereas Earth’s satellite is referred to as ‘Moon’ (capital m)? Earth’s satellite is the only major satellite in our solar system without a romanticized name** (not named after a figure in Greek/Roman mythology, or a Shakespearian character). Some literature uses ‘Luna’ to correct that “oversight”. (I have also see ‘Selene’ somewhere, can’t find the cite.) "

Actually, Luna is just Spanish for…Moon! Not much romanticism there, Selene seems a better name, a moon goddess.

99

Even worse than “Everyone speaks English in the future” is that everyone from earth has an American accent, and most aliens, especially wise ancient races, speak with British accents.

I also love the scene in Star Wars where Obi Wan tell Luke that Sand People couldn’t have attacked the crawler because, “Only Imperial Storm Troopers are so precise.”

Of course a dozen of them couldn’t so much as graze 4 people and 2 droids in a narrow corridor.

100

Every air ship or space ship runs on anitmatter or crystals of some sort. Nothing ever runs on gas, perhaps due to the pollution problems. But anyway, does anyone know where I can find some of this anitmatter crystal suff? It seems to me it will be worth a lot of $$.