A great Rashomon style kids movie is “Hoodwinked”. A detective frog investigates the Little Red Riding Hood story and gets seperate conflicting stories from all involved.
S2E16 has then re-enacting a murder mystery (old paper clipping implicates one of the Minnow passengers in a death just before the Minnow sailed - all castaways knew the victim in some way)
S3E1 has Gilligan thinking he’s a vampire, dream sequence has Holmes/Watson-esque mystery sequence
Which was the one where Mr Howell is using a mocked up pay phone, and checks to see if there’s any change, with a guilty smile?
Rashomon. This is one of the greatest movies ever made, and Akira Kurosawa is one of the finest filmmakers. If you haven’t seen it, you should, albeit, if you are an American who will be seeing it subtitled, and don’t speak Japanese, there is something to be said for holding out for seeing it on screen. I saw it in 16mm, which was better than nothing. Totally blew me away, and I was familiar with the trope. This film invented it.
S2E17 is where a telephone cable washes up, several different phone calls were made. I didn’t see Howell using it, but I skimmed through it.
Actually, as I recall, there were no conflicts among the various stories, just ambiguities, i.e. when Red first realizes the Wolf is watching her through the bushes, she hears a menacing growl from him. When time comes for the Wolf’s version, the sequence is exactly the same, but we find out the growl was from the Wolf’s stomach - after we’ve learned he’s a struggling reporter who is underpaid and thus underfed.
I remember the All in the Family one. They were recounting Archie’s claim that a plumber’s assistant, who was black, had threatened Archie with a knife. In Archie’s version he’s a Black Panter-esque thug with a switchblade, in Meathead’s version he’s an oppressed Stepin Fetchit, Amos n’ Andy stereotype, finally in Edith’s version he’s just a regular guy (the knife was just a penknife he was using to eat an apple). Ron Glass from Barney Miller and Firefly played him.
And The Odd Couple, in an episode in which Oscar and Blanche recall the night that they broke up, each blaming the other – until Felix tells his version, and they realize that it was all his fault.
- It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia* had a great use of the trope.
The one from Raymond, about the new can opener, was great. Never knew the term before!
“YOU IRRI-TATE ME!”
(OT, but Ron Glass was great in the Twilight Zone episode “I of Newton,” where he said, “I can travel faster than the speed of light or make two electrons occupy the same quantum state…even go to Berlin if the Nazis had won the war, or Rome had Alexander the Great lived to a ripe old age…What a guy, huh?”)
Star Trek: The Next Generation had a Rashomon episode (ep 3.14, “A Matter of Perspective”) in which Riker is accused of murder and he and witnesses each provide their own different version of what happened.
The film was based on a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Akutagawa did indeed write a short story called “Rashomon”, but this wasn’t the story the movie was primarily based on. It’s based on “In a Grove” (藪の中, “Yabu no Naka”). (The movie does in fact open at the Rashomon gate of Kyoto, but that’s the only connection to the so-named short story. When the characters start narrating the story, the story they tell is basically “In a Grove”.)
But yes. A genius movie, and truer to its sources than most movie adaptations of literature, other than the titles.
Yeah, it was probably Roshomon. It’s easy to confuse Kurosawa with Sherwood Schwartz. I mean, The Brady Bunch is a just a retelling of The Seven Samurai.
Wow, we have 4th graders posting now!
Reminder: no helping them with their homework.
(“Where do penguins live?” or “What is the capital of New Jersey?” might not just be innocent questions…)
(I came in here to address the question and post the Simpsons reference, but my work was done for me)