A few years ago, I recalled a sci-fi story I read many times in high school: Omega by Amelia Reynolds Long. I remembered parts of it very clearly, enough to realize suddenly it was an adaptation of Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. I was also familiar with that story at the time, but the similarities just did not register with me.
I just realized why Apu’s convenience store on The Simpsons is called Quik-E Mart: You get screwed every time you buy something there! (“Quik-E” = “quickie,” geddit?)
Sorry, make that “Kwik-E.” D’oh! :smack:
Now, I have never watched Empire, because I don’t watch much TV. But because my husband has a subscription to Entertainment Weekly and a bunch of my FB friends watch it regularly, I know the basic strokes of the plot.
And yet, it wasn’t until about 3/4 of the way through the first season that I realized that it was a modern retelling of The Lion In Winter. I chalk that up to me being pretty dense sometimes…
In one of the old threads about the argument that The Lion King is a ripoff of Kimba the White Lion. Somebody posted that The Lion King probably has more in common with Bambi. I never noticed that before.:smack:
The Lion King is more Hamlet with elements of the Fisher King (the legend, not the movie).
Good observation.
how does this fit OP? “…Because you always thought it was in [whatever] time?”
Also, I, for one, hear it common binary-divisible time.
I just YESTERDAY realized that the name of “The Amazing Race” is a reference to “Amazing Grace”.
How so?
They just dropped the G. “Reference” may not be the right word…riff, maybe?
OK, well, I’m going to slink off into the corner in utter humiliation that you had to spell that out for me. :o
I used to read Dynamite, a kid’s magazine, back in the 1970’s. They had a column with a magic trick supposedly written by “Magic Wanda”. Only when I read some back issues as an adult did I realize, “magic wand” a.
There’s a commercial for Experian where a woman goes into a furniture store and demands an extra ottoman with her chair because she’s got such good credit, and at the end they carry her out of there sitting in her chair and ottoman.
I noticed for the first time that the store was called “Sittingham’s.”
That one could just be coincidence rather than something you’d been missing.
Or alternately, it was more juvenile “Let’s put the word “quickie” in the show because that’s kind of a dirty reference”… as opposed to “By emblazoning this upon the top of the building we declareth all who enter shall be screwed.”
I’ve been listening to the Pogues for years, and I knew “The Wake of the Medusa” was about the painting, but I just realized that it is also about The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly:
The casket is empty, abandon ye all hope
They rode off with the money, and left us with the rope
Until just now, I didn’t realize Méduse meant jellyfish. Now it all makes sense.
I do not know how obvious this is, but I just started watching Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and I spotted an iconic visual from a more recent movie made by one of his disciples. The stills do not do the comparison justice. There is even a scene early in Throne where a soldier is wearing three feather-like clan flags on his back, virtually identical to the kaadu riders in Menace.
Multiple viewings of Citizen Kane will reveal all sorts of stuff you didn’t notice before, although maybe that doesn’t quite fall under the heading of “obvious.” For example, that snow globe that he’s holding and drops when he dies – it’s first glimpsed in the background on Susan’s desk with a bunch of her other stuff the first time Kane meets Susan and visits her room. Once you realize it’s there, you understand why he stops his rant later in the movie when he picks that up and why he’s holding it when he dies. It represents a past time when he was happy, and he realizes what he’s come to. Which in turn eventually brings him to Rosebud. The film is loaded with stuff like that.
Honestly people riding through fog is so common I’m surprised there’s not a TVTropes page about it. I did see a neat fan art of Darth Vader in samurai armor, so I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if that’s where the inspiration came from.