Great movie, by the way.
In the Simpsons episode, Bart Sells His Soul, Millhouse has a piece of paper that represents Bart’s soul, which he purchased from Bart for $5 so Bart could buy a crappy toy. Bart spends the rest of the episode trying desperately to get it back. So I suggest Bart Simpson’s soul as an unusual McGuffin.
How about “The Universe on Orion’s Belt?”
I don’t think it’s ever explained what it really is- just that it’s vitally important to the Aliens.
Fine I’ll just back out of the thread.
Rosebud. It’s even said specifically that it doesn’t matter (“just another piece of the puzzle.”)
The stolen money in Slither
Turns out the money has been spent and the only sign of it was several RVs that chased the characters throughout the film.
The White Castle restaurant in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
In the Neil Simon-penned Bogart-film parody The Cheap Detective, the main characters are on the hunt for a set of twelve egg-shaped diamonds, which turn out to contain real baby chicks.
I’d just like to mention that the bar in some AMC movie theaters is named MacGuffins. Hah!
Blue Streak: Martin Lawrence stars as a jewel thief who steals a valuable diamond and stashes it in a construction site when he realizes the cops are closing in. One prison sentence later, he returns to retrieve the loot but finds the construction site is now a police station. Hijinks ensue…
Is that really a McGuffin? It drives the plot of course, but it also has significant utility within the story itself. Multiple plot points turn on Frodo or Sam using it.
The head of Alfredo Garcia
I may get smacked down for this but:
The Raquel Welch poster in Shawshank Redemption.
A object essential to the plot (hides the escape path, fits in with a prisoner wanting a sexual object). But it is inconsequential in itself.
The great JON SABLE FREELANCE comic book had our hero wind up in a spy-fiction-esque adventure where various and sundry characters try to steal The Secret Formula — which I guess would fulfill its role as a MacGuffin even if nobody ever gets around to spelling out that it’s rocket fuel or a chemical weapon or whatever; all that matters is that it’s worth a whole lot of money.
Turns out it’s the secret formula for Coca-Cola.
Season 2 of the great TBS show The Detour revolves around retrieving the ass from one of Saddan Hussain’s toppled statues. Why? Does it even matter why?
I have always considered the dead women in the container and the stained glass window in the church, that drive all of season 2 of The Wire, as MacGuffins. Well, MacGuffin like perhaps. I loved the fact that the whole season’s storyline is impelled by McNulty’s brilliant but petty revenge against Rawls and Valchek’s jealousy over Sobotka’s donation to the church.
In the David Bischoff novel Star Fall, it’s a common practice for people to have their brains transferred into artificial bodies. The plot is kicked off when the protagonist has his brain accidentally transferred into an artificial body that he wasn’t supposed to, a model of body with all sorts of illegal improvements to it.
The model name of the illegal body in question is, of course, MacGuffin.
In the superhero computer game City of Heroes, if you run out of missions from your regular contacts (or just don’t feel like doing them), you can listen to the police scanner to pick up randomly-generated missions. One category of them consists of “Retrieve the <random object> from the <random villain group>”. The list of random objects includes, among other things:
- A Dragoon Ball
- A Responsometron
- Event Horizon
- File X
- Formula 13
- Inobtainium Alloy (an alloy of Nonsuchium and Yeahritium)
- The All-Purpose Virus (which can somehow infect both humans and computers)
- The Book of K’Gar (the holy text of a future alien religion)
- The Liquid Computer
- An Oberation Oscillithruster
- The Phased Linear Oscillation Transducer (P. L. O. T.) Device
- The Tachyon Wave Motion Prototype
- The Ultrascope!
The orb from the “Venture Brothers”. A mysterious object created by a collaboration of history’s greatest geniuses. It’s function is unknown but it is regarded by all factions as being both too dangerous to use and too dangerous to allow your opponents to possess, and too valuable to destroy.
In the Super Mario Bros game, it occurs to me that Princess Peach could arguably have the last name McGufifn.
Your avatar reminds me of the traditional BattleTech Macguffin, the ever ubiquitous Star League Cache ™.