I guess this doesn’t really count as discontinuity, but prior to Harry Morgan playing Colonel Potter on MAS*H, he appeared in one episode as a deranged general who finally had to be taken away. I don’t think the general’s name was Potter, but Morgan remarked on that one time. Jokingly said he hoped anyone remembering him in that episode would figure he’d been cured and demoted.
I don’t know if it’s technically a continuity breach, but Albert Popwell was in four Dirty Harry movies as a different character each time.
It gave me a bit of cognitive dissonance.
Well, let’s pick on The Simpsons just a bit more: Homer and Marge started dating in high school. Then Marge got pregnant with Bart, and they got married while she was still pregnant. Bart is (perpetually) ten years old.
But, it’s been said elsewhere in the series that Homer is 38, or at least that he’s somewhere between 36 and 40. That means he was 28 when Bart was conceived. So, either Homer didn’t graduate from high school until he was 28, or Homer and Marge dated for 10 years after high school before Marge got knocked up. Neither one makes a whole lot of sense.
Also, since they recently reran the episode here where the Simpson kids are taken away from Homer and Marge and given to the Flanderses as foster kids: in the episode, Homer freaks out at the end because Ned is about to baptize his kids. But Homer and Ned go to the same church! Shouldn’t his kids have been baptized to go there? And even if not, what’s the big deal if they do get baptized, since it’s clearly not against their faith and they belong to the same church?
Maybe I take this stuff too seriously…
Wendell Wagner, I haven’t seen the French movie, but I saw Sommersby. Isn’t what happened with the soldier the main plot point, rather than a continuity error? Or am I misreading what you wrote?
IIRC, the wife knew the returning soldier wasn’t her husband, but she either liked him better or decided that any husband was better than no husband. I vaguely recall that it was a matter of honor (his or hers, not sure) that prevented him from revealing who he really was.
Or maybe I’m confusing Sommersby with another movie (or a book) where some guy decided it was worth dying to preserve his (assumed) good name.
Actually, I think the writers of The Simpsons are a lot more continuity-minded than most long-running shows. They just seem to be lax from time to time because they like to screw with the more anal retentive fans of the series who keep track of minor character or throwaway gag and forget, in words of MST3K, that it’s just a show.
Anyway, as for Homer’s age, I think they’ve settled permanently on 39 since there’s comedy precedent for it. Jack Benny said his age was 39 for 41 years.
As for Ned Flanders freaking out about the Simpsons kids not being baptized, that 's not really a continuity problem–it’s just Ned being Ned. While the generically Protestant church he and the Simpsons belong to doesn’t seem to insist that children be baptized (Rev. Lovejoy isn’t that upset about the kids not being baptized and is rather annoyed when Ned calls him up to alert him of this fact), it clearly means a lot to Ned personally because he’s such a rigidly devout uber-Christian.
AuntiePam, I haven’t seen Sommersby, so I can only go by what happens in The Return of Martin Guerre, which I have seen. In The Return of Martin Guerre, we only learn that the wife knew that he wasn’t really her husband late in the film. Until that point we assume that she was fooled by him also. She confesses in secret to someone that she realized very soon that he wasn’t her husband, but he’s so much nicer than her real husband that she decided to pretend that he is. Yes, there are no continuity errors in The Return of Martin Guerre as far as I can see. The comrade pretending to be the husband is the main plot. (Incidentally, there’s no way to know if the wife in the real incident in medieval France actually knew that he wasn’t her husband. She never said anything, but then we wouldn’t expect to say anything.)
Grimey came first.
I mentioned that in the thread for that episode and was yelled at for it.
That was his backup sword pulled from his ankle holster, of course! 
Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series.
You have this parasite that can bring people back from the dead. One character gets infected with two of them, his own (Character A) and another that was on another character (Character B) until some wierd shit happened that I’m not going to bother to try to describe here, but it eventually was placed on Character A so that he now had 2 parasites, his and B’s.
In the 2nd novel, Fall of Hyperion, a creature removes the “Character A” parasite while still leaving the “Character B” parasite on him, meaning that when Character A died, he would stay dead while Character B would revive. The actual quote was “The Shrike had granted me death without killing me.”
Er… however, I guess Simmons decided the Person A character was needed in future books because, even though the parasite that would’ve brought Person A back to life was removed by the Shrike, Person A kept on being resurrected in the final two books.
Oops!
Well, the Batgirl not being Barbara Gordon may not be inconsistent with the other movies, but in the first Batman, Harvey Dent was played by Billy Dee Williams, and in Batman Forever, the role is played by Tommy Lee Jones.
No, Homer and Abe set the house on fire, but it was able to keep standing. It isn’t shown in the episode, but you’d have to assume that either they called the fire dept, or the house was tough enough to handle a fire. When they go back to it a couple seasons later, it obviously suffered the effects of a fire.
…and everyone else in town was in on it, including Flanders? I think NOT!
The practice of using the same actor to portray entirely different characters is a common thing in some shows like Barney Miller. Some guest actors reprised their previous roles but some appeared as a different character each time.
Law & Order has done it a number of times. Before Jerry Orbach played one of the main detectives, he appeared on the show as a defense attorney. And Epatha Merkerson played a welfare mom whose kid was killed before she magically became a police lieutenant.
Nothing magic about it. That’s just a disadvantaged minority woman making something of herself and getting off the public teat. She must have been going to night school. Why are you trying to put her down?
On Days of Our Lives, Wayne Northup played Roman Brady and Josh Taylor played Chris Kosticek. Roman left, and when he returned he was played by Josh Taylor. Then Wayne Northup returned to play Alex North.
Judy Evans has been Adrienne Johnson, Bonnie Rogers, and is now back to Adrienne.
I watched Days for a long long time and never once heard of anyone named Brady. Then the aforementioned Roman Brady came on, and suddenly he had an entire family that had been living in Salen and running a pub for about twenty years. Where were these people hiding?
Yup. TNT has gotten back to the first season in their unending X-files reruns. A minor character in the recent “Genderbenders” episode seemed familiar. He turned out to be Nicholas Lea.
Who will appear in Season 2 as Ratboy! (AKA Alex Krycek.)
5 minutes older?
I recall them saying, despite appearances to the contrary, the episode wasn’t based on Martin Guerre.