Off topic aside - this wasn’t from a movie or TV show (that I know of), but there was an old urban legend I’d heard repeated several times about someone who receives a bill from a credit card company or layaway program for $0.00. The poor victim keeps getting threatening letters DEMANDING immediate payoff of this balance, and he can get no live person on the phone to explain his situation. Finally in exasperation, the poor guy writes out a check for $0.00 and sends it to the credit card company. At which point, the guy gets a “thank you for paying off your balance” notice. That happened to a couple of friends of mine. (Well, it happened to some people my friends know. Ok, so maybe it happened to someone who knew someone who knew my friends…but it really happened! :D)
Anyway, getting back on topic - how about the sequence from “Dracula” in which the crew of the transport ship is getting picked off one by one, and the ship is finally found adrift off the coast of England,without a living soul.
This was a particularly creepy high point of the novel IMO, and I suppose it still works if you set your horror story in 1898. But when the monster movie the Relic tried to copy it and it instantly destroyed any and all credibility. In 1898, if a monster is loose aboard a ship, the ship crew might be isolated and on their own. However in 1998, there was already a thing called radio, in which a besieged crew could call for help. (The movie also asks the audience to swallow that idea that the ship managed to drift all the way up the Mississippi river to the bay of Chicago without smashing into anything else, which is pretty absurd.)
IIRC, even worse, the actual date they used to set the stories in the TV show was after the switch over was done in the 40’s so it was wrong even inside the show. I think it was the premier episode as well.
In an issue of Editor & Publisher that probably dated near the end of this show’s run, there was an article on future technologies that opened with a little pastiche of Lou’s newsroom getting voice-transcription workstations. It was kind of lame and lumpy, but one joke sticks in my mind, from Lou to the hotshot reporter guy: “Yeah, you need more practice. Your last story had six 'gee, I’m great’s buried in it.”
Here’s snopes on the subject. Apparently, you can get a bill for $0.00, but it’s because you actually less than $0.01, but more than $0 in finance charges, and a printer than doesn’t print bills in fractions of a cent. If it a one-time bill, like a hospital bill, or your last car payment, call.
Now, in regard to credit cards, if you still get paper statements, and not just online ones, you get one every month, regardless of whether you have a balance or not. If you don’t have a balance, it will have $0.00 in the “amount due” line. Something has to go there.
I haven’t seen The Relic, but wow. That would be a boat visible from shore at all times, wouldn’t it? I mean, by people with binoculars, whose job it is to keep an eye out for such things. As soon as it was off-course, someone would alert the Coast Guard, or something. In Dracula, the ship is in the ocean. Whole different thing, regardless of the 100 year interval.
Also, Dracula is very creepy on the whole. I like Victorian novels, but I’m the first to admit that some of the are pretty long-winded. Dracula is a real page-turner, and very succinct for the literature of the time.
Just last night I watched an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show where Rob believes that Buddy and/or Sally are going to be fired due to budget cuts ordered by the network.
Rob discovers this when he finds a discarded memo in the basement garbage from the network to Allen Brady. Why was Rob going through the garbage in the basement? Because Sally accidentally threw out the script for that week’s show.
Today, of course, they’d just print another copy (or even just email it to each other).
Hmm. It says emissions testings are required in some areas in Indiana. Nowhere I have been. Cars take off from stop like in a squid-like cloud of black smoke, they are burning so much oil. Cars drive around dragging their mufflers, or with the muffler entirely absent.
Indiana is the kingdom of crappy cars. You see cars with windows made out of trashbags, sometimes entire doors replaced by Visqeen, cars with spiderweb cracks right over the driver’s side of the windshield, cars missing the hood, cars listing to one corner because the shock is broken. Cars missing bumpers. Cars with huge dents-- HUGE. And I don’t mean once in a while-- every time I go out driving, I will see at least one car like this.
I can just imagine Johnny and Barbra listening to their iPods instead of the (satellite) radio, and either letting their mother’s repeated attempts to warn them about what she saw in TV go straight to voicemail or just turning their phones off to avoid her nagging. Barbra loses her phone in a commentary and naturally the farmhouse is in a cellular dead zone and owed by an old man who didn’t bother with cable or internet access. The entire movie would still play out the same way (other than Harry blaming the zombies on Obamacare).
IIRC one early episode even had a subplot involving the Soviet consulate in NYC.
I think The Strain did a nice homage to the Demeter; the main characters even commented on how disturbing it was that none of the passengers called 911 on their cells.
Don’t get started on Heathers - a gun in school is merely an inconvenience? Teen suicide just being one of those things? Men whose being (potentially) gay is a huge deal? Passing around handwritten notes instead of making Facebook postings? They don’t make them like that anymore.
The ending of the Hitchcock movie Rope seems rather quaint now.
Jimmy Stewart has figured out that they’re murderers, so he says (paraphrasing) “I’m not going to do anything to you - society is. But I can guess that you’re both going to die!”
Then he fires a few rounds out of a pistol out of the open skylight in their NYC apartment. You can tell from the various off-screen voices that people have heard the gunshots, call the police…and then you hear police sirens coming for them…all in about 20 seconds. Fade Out.
Everything about that wouldn’t happen anymore, including the die part.
I spotted one in a current series. I’m watching Boss right now and one subplot involved a reporter trying to get medical information about the mayor from his doctor. At no point does the docter mention that this was a HIPAA violation and could land her in jail for ten years (along with stiff fines, since it’d be a deliberate violation).
HIPAA doesn’t exist on TV. At least once a week, there’s an episode of something, where a person is injured or critically ill, and their friends and co-workers are all gathered in the hospital waiting for word-- but no family member is present– and a doctor comes out and gives really explicit information on the person’s condition to everyone in the room.
The only time HIPAA ever exists is when detectives are racing a clock to find a kidnapped child, and want information from a suspect’s psychiatrist, who tells them to get a subpoena.
There’s another plot point in The Relic where an alarm is triggered, and the security doors come down trapping everyone inside the building. And the building was a museum or some other public building which large numbers of people would go through in a day. I don’t know Chicago’s fire codes in detail, but I can’t imagine anyone being allowed to design a system like that back then or today because of the fire hazard of such a system.
Speaking of fire hazards, there’s a few movies which have plot points that revolve around Halon suppression systems (maybe Terminator 2?) and most places have moved away from those systems because of liability and because Halon is a CFC and Halon production/use is illegal in some places, which makes maintenance costly. I’m not sure what the exact rules are in the US, other than knowing that Halon fire-extinguishers are still allowed for certain applications.
He talks about “toll calls,” a very LA-specific problem. But why would the kids be calling kids who lived in distant parts of the Southland? Maybe they were from their old neighborhoods, from the days before they somehow formed a family.
Rocky Horror Picture Show’s entire premise of Brad and Janet’s car breaking down and they’re walking to an unknown person’s house to use a phone is lost. The other part of Rocky Horror is Rif Raf taking over because Frank-N-Ferter’s lifestyle is too extreme.
Saw a cop show once. One cop was trying to trick the other cop into revealing his age. “What were you doing when Kennedy was shot?” type questions. Never did figure it out.
Today, you just type in the name and place (and this cop had a quite unusual name) into one of those people finder web sites. You’ll get their age for free. (And for $20 bucks you can get a lot of information.) Nevermind using any cop database for some reason.
This happened on the classic cop show Rizzoli and Isles waaay back on July 8, two thousand-ought-fourteen. Boy, those were the days.
It wasn’t LA specific. “Toll calls” were calls that were in a different area code, so there was a charge, but they weren’t thought of as “long distance” by most people, because they were for close-by areas, usually in the same state, and didn’t require operator assistance-- you could dial them directly. When we lived in New York, calls from Manhattan to Long Island or Westchester county, and IIRC, the other boroughs, were toll calls, even though these were places you could get to rather quickly-- in fact, there were lots of people who worked in Manhattan, but lived on Long Island, in Westchester County, or one of the other boroughs. So after we moved to Queens, if I wanted to call my parents at work in Manhattan, it was a toll call.
I couldn’t tell you if it was a by-minute charge, or a surcharge, though. By the time I lived in NYC as an adult, with a phone of my own, you could get unlimited long distance plans.
listening to their iPods instead of the (satellite) radio, and either letting their mother’s repeated attempts to warn them about what she saw in TV go straight to voicemail or just turning their phones off to avoid her nagging. Barbra loses her phone in a commentary and naturally the farmhouse is in a cellular dead zone and owed by an old man who didn’t bother with cable or internet access. The entire movie would still play out the same way (other than Harry blaming the zombies on Obamacare).