This surprises you?!? :dubious: 
If you watch the original (non-remastered) episode, it’s quite obvious (at least in some shots) that the Constellation was indeed the AMT model. When filmed from the rear, it had none of the little embellishments visible on its full-scale counterpart.
In the climactic scene when it’s about to be swallowed up by the planet-killer, it’s also obvious that someone in the studio bumped the stand the model was mounted on. The thing jerked and wobbled terribly; at the time, I attributed this to the ship’s damaged impulse engines firing erratically. (I believe this bit of cinematic history was cleaned up by the CGI artists during remastering.)
I don’t know who came up with the White Whale/Bugle design for the planet-killer, but in the original you could see stars through the damned thing, which led me to believe that solid neutronium was as transparent as the proverbial transparent aluminum!
Another AMT kit served as the Enterprise seen hovering off Deep Space Station K-7 in the original “The Trouble with Tribbles.”
Nope, I was wrong. For some reason I thought Borax was a brand name. Kind of like how most people call tissue paper Kleenex.
Borax is a mineral. 20 Mule Team Borax is a brand name.
I’ve read through about half this thread and searched and not found a reference, so I will go ahead.
In watching The Big Lebowski on commercial TV the other night, my wife brought to my attention that they had dubbed the word “valued” in an enormous number of places (such as in, “That valued rug really brought your room together, man”). I didn’t recognize it until she brought it to my attention. I guess I didn’t notice it because the point of the rug in the movie is that it does have specific value to The Dude and that the word “Valued” lip-syncs just about perfectly.
That’s not the obvious thing that I hadn’t realized although I’d heard it a million times, though. The obvious thing was when I went to the grocery store and scanned my shopper’s card and the self-service register responded “Welcome Valued Customer”.
I nearly fell over laughing. It all made sense now.
After years of nightmares, reading the book in my teens, I did not realize until this last October, prior to Halloween that The Exorcists Father Karras is Greek and not Italian. It wasn’t until his Mother said his name, Demi,( which I used to mockingly imitate to scare my best friend) that I realized it.
Freaking 37 years later…geesh!
I just, literally five minutes ago, had this thought strike me out of the blue…
The main crazy lady villainess in the Harry Potter books is Bellatrix Lestrange, whose utter delight in making war on both Muggles and any Wizard or Witch who isn’t allied with Voldemort is quite obvious. “Bellatrix” is Latin for “warrior woman”!
Nitpick: She pronounces it “Dimmy.”
Mmm…I always interpreted it simply as a romance on both sides of the Iron Curtain, without any implications of a gulag.
“Standing by the wall” could simply mean the Berlin Wall, and “counting ten tin soldiers” could mean Nikita’s some kind of military commander or border guard. Their countries’ ideologies force them to keep the romance to letters, but the singer holds out the hope that one day it will no longer be a problem and that Nikita can “look towards the west and find a friend.” (Or maybe he’s just infatuated with Nikita after one glance, and is simply writing to her in the hope that she’ll take an interest in him and the West.)
As for the homosexuality issue, it’s ambivalent–of course we know that Sir Elton is gay, but according to Wikipedia, the song’s lyricist had no idea that Nikita was solely a male name. Sir Elton, however, said he WAS aware of it.
Posted too soon…I misread the Wikipedia article. It was Ken Russell, who directed the video, who hadn’t known that Nikita was a male name. Elton John and, presumably, Bernie Taupin did, but they had no problem with accepting the video’s script.
Lines like these make it pretty clear to me:
*The human heart, a **captive *in the snow…
I’ll never know how good it feels to hold you…
Do you ever dream of me…
When you look up through the wire…
*And if there comes a time
Guns and gates no longer hold you in
And if you’re **free *to make a choice
Just look towards the west and find a friend…
Nikita I need you so!
Though I admit I’m baffled by the reference to “ten tin soldiers.” I think I need to read some more Solzhenitsyn…
Again, not at all to me!
Bellatrix Lestrange (née Black), like Sirius and Regulus Black, is named after a star.
:smack:
I used to skywatch as a teenager and I STILL never caught the sibling naming convention there!
Bellatrix is Regulus and Sirius’s cousin, FTR.
Her siblings are Andromeda Tonks (mother of Nymphadora Tonks) and Narcissa Malfoy (Draco’s mom). Narcissa is the only born Black in a couple generations without an astronomical name. (She is named for the Narcissus flower.)
The star Sirius is in the constellation Canis Major (the Greater Dog), and Sirius Black’s animagus form is a dog which is black.
I really need to research that Wikipedicus spell…
Oh, stop being riddikulus.
Only now did I make the connection between this song and the one Howard sang at the Cheesecake Factory in TBBT:
:smack:
Listening to The Tubes Slipped My Disco yesterday, and as the song fades out to a conclusion, the guitarist plays a slow riff over the chaos, which I FINALLY recognized as I Could Have Danced All Night (Lerner and Loewe). :rolleyes:
I’ve only been listening to the Tubes for almost 40 years. :smack: