Movies & TV Episodes with Obsolete Plot Points (multiple spoilers)

Cafe Society
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SPOILERS ALERT

In order to have an open discussion, without a SPOILER on every other line, I thought I’d just start out by saying that I’d like to have a thread where we openly discuss movies and TV episodes without worrying about whether we’ve let something slip. Having been thus warned, if you are the sort of person who just HATES spoilers, participate in this thread at your own peril.

The thread about dated song lyrics, as well as the fact that I just watched Law & Order, s5e1, “Second Opinion,” got me thinking about the number of pivotal plot points that make some movies and TV episodes difficult to understand.

In “Second Opinion,” a woman seeks out a quack “healer” for her cancer, because her insurance won’t cover treatment, as her cancer is a pre-existing condition. She changed jobs not knowing that she already had a cancerous mass, and it was diagnosed shortly after she took her new job, so even though she had no lapse in coverage, her new carrier could deny coverage. I remember the collective sigh of relief in the country when the law was passed requiring insurers to cover pre-existing conditions of new clients if they switched carriers with no gap in coverage. I knew people who stayed in jobs they hated because they, or a spouse or child, had a condition that required ongoing treatment, which they would lose coverage for if they left their job, and had a new insurance carrier at their new job. The episode is only 20 years old, but that law really changed healthcare in the US. I wonder if people in their early 20s catching a rerun don’t understand what the problem is.

Another one: there’s a brilliant screwball comedy from 1937 called The Awful Truth, with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. They are a divorcing couple, and the film takes place in the 90 day period between their filing for divorce, and the time the divorce is final. There are a couple of times when they are alone together, and they go to lengths to avoid being caught alone together. You will see a couple of people asking on places like IMDb why it’s such a big deal. Grant’s character comments that visiting days (court-ordered) with their dog will be easier when the divorce is final.

This is because back then, there was a law, or clause (I’m not sure of the terminology) in divorce law, at least in New York, where the film is set, that a couple can nullify a pending divorce by “re-consummating” the relationship, so to speak. They don’t want to be caught alone together, lest someone question what they are doing, and they have to refile.

At the end of the movie, they apparently do nullify in this manner, and there’s a coy way of showing it by cuts to a clock that shows the last 45 minutes of what would be the last day of their marriage, and implies that they are in bed together before the clock strikes midnight. It’s cute, and a little suspenseful, even though the light-heartedness of the movie makes you assume they’ll get back together.

No one in the movie spells out what the law is, so it must have been the case in most states, and the writer and director could assume the audience would know what was happening. I saw the movie when I was about 13, with my mother, who explained it to me as it was happening, so I “got” the ending, and it was fun.

That two very long examples. I can think of more, but I want to stop the post here.

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Off the top of my head, I can think of the radio play and film Sorry, Wrong Number. The premise of the story is that a spoiled, bedridden socialite is trying to call her husband, but the phone wires get crossed and she overhears a phone conversation by two people plotting to murder someone. The socialite then desperately tries to convince the phone operator and later the police that what she overheard was real, not her imagination.

Much like the divorcees mentioned in the OP, I’m sure most young people today wouldn’t have the faintest idea of what ‘crossed wires’ were, or what an ‘operator’ did for that matter.

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The Women. A group of women living in Reno which is the only place where they can get an easy divorce after having lived there for a requisite period of time.

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Naturally I can’t think of anything right now, but it seems like many movies that are more than 25-30 years old wouldn’t work now that most everyone has cell phones. Think about how many movies rely on someone not being able to warn another person that ‘The cops/Mark/dude is on his way over’.

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If All Movies Had Cell Phones

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The novel Red Dragon has a serial killer who finds his targets (families) through the home movies they shoot and then have to have developed. (The serial killer works for the developing lab)
The novel came out in 1980, when home-movie cameras were being slowly replaced by home-video recorders. In 1986 Manhunter, based on Red Dragon came out. It had the home-movie angle intact, and even then felt slightly dated. When it was remade as Red Dragon in the 2000s they replaced the developing lab with a specialized video editing company.

Nowadays, people use iMovie or some such to do video editing right in their computer. So now Red Dragon embraces TWO generations of obsolete tech.

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Related to this, All the President’s Men gets hysterical if one pays a lot of attention to all the WORK they are doing, racing to the beat the clock, for stuff that is a non-issue today. They have to burn time going out to find phone books to look up numbers for people in other cities. There are several times the camera stays on Robert Redford when he calls people long distance on a rotary phone. Nothing is happening on screen other than listening to the phone go brrrp, brrrrrrrrrrrp, brrrrp, brrrrrrrp, brrrrrrrp, brrp, brrrp, brrrrrrrrp, brrp, brrrrp. I grew up with a rotary phone, so in some ways, it’s nostalgic but at the same time, it’s maddening.

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Heh. This is a pretty cool example. I wonder how Dolarhyde would find his victims now. Leaked sextape? Facebook?

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You’d have to make some serious changes to Wait Until Dark to get it to work now. That wasn’t one of the movies I’d originally thought of, but it depends on Gloria seeing the villains using the pay phone, and Roat cutting the line on Suzi’s phone. Since everyone would have cell phones, none of that would work.

There’s an episode of The Brady Bunch where all the kids come down with measles. If that happened to a family of six now, it couldn’t go without comment. When the episode was made, in 1969, the vaccine existed, but it wasn’t widely implemented, not until after a 1971 series of epidemics. It was possible for conscientious parents whose kids were vaccinated against smallpox and polio not to be vaccinated against measles in 1969, especially if they were born before 1963, and it went without question.

The most troubling thing about the episode, though, is that I have actually heard anti-vaxxers bring it up as an example of how unserious a disease measles is-- as though a Brady kid is going to go deaf of blind on the show.

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There was an Ellery Queen episode where the victim dialed a phone number as he was dying. The number turned out to be spelling out the name of the killer. Problem was, there were only six digits in the number. This was true when the story it was based on was written. The series was set in the 40s, but aired in the 70s, so I doubt any viewer could solve the “challenge to the reader.”

“The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” had Judy Kockenlocker pregnant by a soldier in a drunken one-night stand. In the film, she married the soldier first. Nowadays, that step would be unnecessary.

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My favorite is Presumed Innocent. One key point of evidence was that they could tell the killer had blood type A from the semen sample. Today it would be a DNA match.

PS – this if addressed in the more recent sequel – very nicely too I though.

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The darkroom and the developer chemicals would be a little problematic too.

That was a great old movie and worth watching just for Audrey Hepburn, she was so pretty. :slight_smile:

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Time passes, and things go out of style, and change. I’ve already commented that we’re going to need “annotated versions” of some books and stories if they’;re to be understood. (In fact, look through things like *The Annotated Alice * to see some explicit examples of this, beginning with the poems that Lewis Carroll was poking fun at, but continuing on to other things, like the pun about “having a head on it” that depends upon knowledge of Victorian slang about stamps.)
One example that stands out is from the introduction to a collection of Fredric Brown mysteries that had appeared in pulps in the 1930s and 1940s. The circa 1990 editor, in his introduction, observed that he received one of them without the last page, and decided to try to solve the mystery while he awaited delivery of the missing page. He couldn’t do it – because it relied upon knowledge of a then-current advertising jingle or tag line. (I’ve similarly heard that the lines at the end of the Disney movie The Sword in the Stone are as dated, because they riff on a then-current commercial for Pepsi Cola. And what do current watchers of Happy Days reruns think when Richie’s father, after Richie loses a basketball game, offers him a Life Saver? It was hilarious at the timer, but now it’s lost all context.)

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I can’t think of any specific examples, but the no-fault divorce made a lot of older murder mystery plots obsolete. It was pretty common for the victim to be murdered by a spouse who could not easily have gotten a divorce, or at least for the victim’s widow to be suspected of committing the murder for this reason. The more modern version of this is a killer who chooses murder over divorce to avoid having to fulfill the terms of their prenup, but this isn’t as flexible of a plot device.

I saw a local production of the play a few years back, and spent some time thinking about how it could be updated. When I was a kid in the '80s/'90s our cordless phone sometimes picked up parts of our next-door neighbor’s phone conversations. I don’t know if that could still happen now or if cordless phone technology has improved, but I’ve seen sitcom episodes where a baby monitor allowed characters to listen in on other people’s phone calls.

A Sorry, Wrong Email version might work too. There’s apparently a very stupid person out there with the same last name and initials as me, and for several years I’ve been getting email newsletters, confirmations, etc., that he signed up for using my Gmail address. If he turned to a life of crime then it wouldn’t surprise me if he gave the wrong email to his accomplices too.

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There was an episode of The Brady Bunch dealing with the hassle of nine people, one telephone, that Mike attempted to fix by installing a pay phone. Today he’d just buy a family plan and get a sackful of cell phones.

And install a second bathroom, brilliant architect that he is.

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One with a toilet, this time.

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Actually, now that I think about it, that one dated pretty quickly, because there once was something called “local measured service,” which charged by the call, or even by the minute, for local calls, not just long distance calls, and this remained a billing option at least through the 1980s (and may still, for people with landlines, I don’t know), but in my memory (I was born in 1967) there’ve always been local flat fees available. Apparently, at some point in time, local measured service was the only way Ma Bell charged, and that must have been what the Bradys had, because Mike was complaining about the phone bill being so high, which was the reason for the pay phone.

Unless the kids had lots of friends outside their area code.

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I was watching an episode of Vera last night, in which a woman was shot with a shotgun outside of a vacation cabin. A cop said that one neighbour heard the shot but thought it was a firework, and the neighbour’s father thought it was a car backfiring. I can’t remember the last time I heard a car backfire. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a modern car do it.

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Star Trek IV is an obvious example. Kirk tries to hide the use of his communicator from the 20th Century marine biologist. Now she’d just ask, “Where’d you get that antique phone? Does it really still work?”

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Rather than asking if he needed to deal with that page, another way in which it’s outdated.