Inspired by Obvious things about a creative work you realize after seeing/hearing it for the millionth time, what are some mistakes that you didn’t notice the first time you saw/heard a creative work that now constantly stick out like a sore thumb?
Personally, I’m currently being driven nuts by the Metric lyrics:
Something about it never quite sounded right, but it wasn’t until about a week ago that I realized it was because she’s singing vertebrae (plural) and not vertebra (singular). :smack:
Well, for years I was perfectly happy with sound in space. I mean, it’s movies, and it’s not real and it’s fun. But now it bugs me. I wish it didn’t. I feel like I’m swallowing the camel (faster than light travel, “rational” intereactions with competing species) and straining at the gnat (physics). Besides, it just makes “sense” for explosions to make noise, you know?
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
There’s a scene where Gillian is in front of a whale tank explaining to a crowd some stuff about whales. Kirk is in the tour group, as is a middle-aged, short, squat nun. The camera angle flips back and forth between Gillian and the crowd. In one shot, the nun is young, tall, and thin. In the next shot she’s back to her old self again.
In The Ten Commandments, the Hebrews are leaving Egypt, and there is much commotion. An blind old man is asking his grandchildren to describe what’s going on. He’s wearing a wrist watch.
That IS ridiculous! How the hell would a blind man read a wrist watch? 
Don’t be silly. They didn’t have those back then.
He wore a miniature sundial and used his fingers to read where the shadow lay.
Did we really take only *two *responses to go from "Mistakes You Missed but Now Can’t Stop Noticing " to “any random movie mistakes you might once have read about?”
Oh c’mon, everyone knows he used the back of his hand, which is much more temperature-sensitive.
We’re a talented board that way.
In the LOTR movie The Two Towers, when Eomer has met and talked with Aragorn & Co., he remounts his horse. Just as he’s back in the saddle and starts to speak, his sword totally falls out of its sheath. He glances at it and then continues his speech. I saw the film a dozen times before I watched the commentary and can’t believe I missed it until it was pointed out. Now it’s all I see of that scene.
There’s one small plot hole in Dr. Strangelove that kinda bothers me. As the B-52 “Leper Colony” is unaccounted for, and presumably still planning to bomb its primary target, we’re told that if it succeeds that will be sufficient to trigger the Soviet’s doomsday bomb. But the plane has been damaged. It’s leaking fuel and can’t reach either of its intended targets, and so it diverts to another target of opportunity. I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to assume that that will bring about doomsday, too; but they never say for sure and that alternate target would probably be of lesser importance.
It’s such a great movie that I hate finding any reason to doubt it. The inexorable slide toward armageddon should be airtight.
I thought the point of the doomsday device was that it would be triggered by **any **nuclear bombing of the USSR, not just a attack against a major target.
It took me many dozens of viewings of Star Wars before I noticed the stormtrooper hitting his head on the doorway (as the troopers enter the security room on the Death Star, where Artoo and Threepio are hiding).
I suspect this is, in part, because a lot of those viewings were on TV, in non-letterbox format, and the guy’s on the far right side of the screen.
its driving me crazy now because I can’t remember it… in one my favorite Buffy episodes (might be the season 2 Xander magic episode) a boom mic just pops into frame and really jars me out of the scene.
I’d heard about that for years and years, but could never see it. Finally, when the “Special” Edition was released to theaters, I had a friend point it out to me.
From then on I could see it, but it cracks me up every time! It makes me chuckle more to realize that’s the guard they make stay there to watch the droids.
They talk about the doomsday machine quite a lot, and it’s meant to be the ultimate deterrent. It’s triggered automatically by a computer, so the necessary conditions could be as abitrary as they wanted them to be. The only specific cases they mention are the intended targets of the bomber. We’re probably meant to conclude that it’s the same for any nuclear bomb dropped anywhere on the Soviet Union. It’s certainly not a point on which I’d risk the survival of humanity, mineshafts notwithstanding.
But still, I think the plot hole is there. In any other movie, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. In one that’s otherwise perfect, I can’t help but notice it.
In Braveheart when they kill a guy early in the movie he’s wearing blue jeans under his robe type garment.
Blues Brothers leave their concert at 9 or 10 PM and they drive for 10 minutes and it’s broad daylight instead of being dark.
I don’t have a life outside of TV and movies, so those are the big mistakes I notice! 
Several TNG episodes after seeing or reading about bloopers. Such as Denise Crosby waving in her last (filmed) scene. Patrick Stewart making a face at someone before he is off camera.
I loved in non touched up Return of the Jedi there was a group of four tie fighters that just disappear at a certain point.
In Doctor Who, Pyramid of Mars, when the bad guy stands up, a hand moves out of scene that was holding the cushion on the chair!
To the OP, I know that I have had moments like that, when a lyric or some real world thing made more sense but I can’t think of any.
Maybe phrases, because they are a pet peeve of a friend, where it’s redundant? So, saying “ATM machine” or “PIN Number?”
Yep, I can’t think of any but I know I have thought it before and :smack:.
vislor
I started a thread once asking for cities largely known for one thing, like Pompeii or Littleton, CO or Waco, TX.
I think New York City was the sixth post.
In Bad Boys (the one with Sean Penn and Esai Morales), during the final fight scene, there’s a crowd shot where you can see a cameraman in a hawaiian shirt, sitting there with his camera in the middle of the crowd. It’s clear as day, but I saw that movie dozens of times without noticing it, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it they didn’t point it out in the director’s commentary.
I laughed for years at that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog bit where he says something is really nice … for him to poop on! LOL. Good times.
Then I realized, wait, that’s a puppet. He. Can’t. Poop!
:eek:
My friend and I noticed 2 things on our whateverth viewing in 1977. Neither of us had noticed them before, but in both scenes, that’s all I see now.
First - The spy outside the Mos Eisley cantina accidently whacks his prosthetic snout with his hand as he’s putting away his communication device. Now when I see that scene I get distracted anticipating the moment of contact.
Second- When Luke first opens the door to Leia’s cell on the Death Star, there is a splotch on Leia’s robe right over her boobs. That amused 2 11-year-olds to no end, and still gives me an immature giggle whenever I see “the dot”, as we named it.