It isn’t explained in the movie why he just doesn’t upload the thing into the alien equivalent of an iPod (no doubt the size of a pinhead and containing all music in recorded history). Why risk losing his only copy, by keeping it an only copy?
One gets the impression that the aliens have just never come up with the idea of headphones. Everyone seems to find them a novelty, and Gamora shouts to be heard over them when she’s wearing them, as one might expect of someone first encountering headphones. So it’s possible that there isn’t an alien equivalent of an iPod.
You’re the kind of person who asks why they didn’t just get the Eagles to fly the ring over Mount Doom and drop it in, aren’t you?
I’m the sort of person who has owned a cassette tape before, and who knows they don’t last decades if they are played a lot. In short, a person over 45. 
He didn’t open it because it was the last thing she gave him and he felt guilty about not being able to touch her right before she died. He couldn’t bring himself to open it until he felt he had redeemed himself for abandoning his mom at her death.
They aren’t prisoners, they are collectables on display. Their convenience is not of primary concern.
Because Sauron and the Ringwraiths would have eaten them for breakfast.
Of course it is explained in the movie, the tape was a gift from his mother, the headphones were one of the few things he had of earth. Do they really need to blatantly spell things like this out for people?
Because that doesn’t make any sense, as well as being reasonably physically impossible?
Sure, I get why he’d keep the tape - but not why he’d fail to make a copy, and take this precious (and singular) tape with him everywhere and listen to it all the time - of if he did, how it would last 20 plus years of constant use. Certainly, my tapes did not last nearly that long!
I’m willing to suspend disbelief about the laws of physics involving alien spaceships, because I’ve never been on an alien spaceship; it is a bit harder to believe in eternal cassette tape life, having actually owned and used cassette tapes.
The tangent about the tape is goofy. They used Science! to improve it. He went back for it, not because it’s the only copy of the music, but because the physical objects are important to him for sentimental reasons.
Here, I’ll fanwank it for you:
Yondu: Hey, they Terran kid is crying because his… headset thing is broken. [hands over the walkman and a riot of unspooled tape] can you take a look at it, techie?
Techie: Sure, Boss. [Waves a sensor at the walkman] How does this thing work… huh, oh I see, it’s using variations in magnetic field to store data… hah, and then it’s dragging the ribbon across a reader head. That’s ingenious. I’ve never seen such a weird clockwork thing before.
Yondu: Can you fix it?
Techie: Well, the ribbon can be rewound, but it could snap eventually. I guess I could vapor deposit a layer of selinum di-chloride on it, that would keep it for torqing, and smooth the works. Once that’s done, it shouldn’t be able to haphazardly unspool like this. Then I’d add a thin film of magnetic nanoderms and that’ll keep the head from demagnitizing the ribbon.
Yondu: I think my translator implant is having some trouble following you.
Techie: Yeah, I can fix it. Give me two hours and our little Terran meat-pie will be smiling again.
[end scene]
Just imagine how much that would have improved the film if it were shot. :rolleyes:
The problem is that it was simply lazy plotting. Make the maguffin at least make sense in-universe.
Same as having Rocket attempt to kidnap the hero in broad daylight in the middle of the street in a busy city. It can be fanwanked of course, but it was lazy.
I don’t see why Quill wouldn’t have gone to Earth periodically. He knows where it is, and has a Starship. He wouldn’t stay long because there’s little for him there and it must seem like a backwater place to him. But he probably picked up a few things, including the t-shirt the red girl was wearing at the beginning.
He was wearing that shirt as a kid the night that he was spacenapped.
But yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s been back to Earth since then. He’s got a spaceship that seems to have no problem traveling to different planets. He has that tape deck mounted in his ship. He’s also referenced things that would not have been around when he left Earth – Pulp Fiction namely. Additionally, Yondu even makes a crack or two that sound like something someone on Earth post-1980s would know (I can’t remember what they are offhand, unfortunately).
Clearly, Quill’s been to Earth a few times. He’s picked up hairy trolls, tape players, and recorded movies off the HBO satellite while in orbit on his space VCR. Then he traded his movies to Yondu for space gas for the Milano.
That’s not the maguffin. The Infinity Stone is the maguffin. The Walkman is nothing more than ambiance.
And, Jeebus, the aliens used generic star-trekish technology. They could’ve replicated the damn thing if the cassette wore out, and no one would be able to tell any difference. This thread derail is like complaining that Star Trek movies make no sense because they don’t explain how Picard can order Tea, Earl Gray, Hot without an in-movie explanation of what just happened.
Um, yes it is. There need not be only one maguffin per movie. A “macguffin” is just a term for anything that the protagonist pursues simply to push the plot along. At one point, his tape performs that role.
The complaint here is that the item is the thing used, in-movie, to connect the kid in the hospital scene to the grown-up in the on-planet scene; if you recall, he places the tape in his walkman, and that’s the first clue you have it’s the same guy, grown-up “27 years later”. The problem is that, for those of us who grew up actually using tapes, that’s slightly jarring - I definitely noticed it while watching the movie with the kid.
Not a big point, but it was there.
Can it be fan-wanked away? Of course it can.
In any event, a more significant example of lazy plotting is having Rocket attempt to kidnap the protagonist on a busy street in broad daylight. Any reason why that makes sense in-plot?
because raccoons are not nocturnal? *
Or because he’s such a badass he simply doesn’t think its an issue.
Actually, they usually are. Nocturnal, that is.
Edit: missed the edit.
He was a Bounty Hunter, not kidnapping?
He was a bounty hunter who was kidnapping the protagonist.
Is there some major objection to using that term for unlawfully capturing someone and putting them in a bag?
Apparently, whatever term one uses, it was against the law on that planet, because the next thing you know, Rocket and Groot are in jail for doing it.
Given that Rocket was allegedly an experienced bounty hunter, what was he doing “bagging” a victim on the street in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people? Could anything be possibly be more conspicuous than an eight foot tree-thing and a raccoon bagging a man on the street?