Inspired by the new Toy Story 3 trailer: I love the alien guys, and I own two of them. It wasn’t until I was in Toys R Us looking for a third that I saw the packaging. Little Green Men. :smack:
Yeah, travelling mattes didn’t arrive till the thirties, I think. They could easily have done a static matte, though. Simple in-camera effects like a split-screen double exposure were well known (and a good deal cheaper and easier than building a duplicate set).
Again, what am I missing? What’s the thing you noticed and what makes it interesting?
Little green men = stereotypical movie alien. I think that’s all there is to it.
Electric Warrior said:
That’s obvious, but doesn’t answer the question. What about “Little Green Men” applies to the little alien guys from Toy Story 3? Can you show a picture of the alien guys? Is the packaging labeled “Little Green Men”?
Something in the story is assumed to be clear to the audience but isn’t. Break it down for the guy who doesn’t know what Toy Story 3 is. (Okay, I know what Toy Story is, with Woody and Buzz. I know about the little green army men. But I don’t know Toy Story 3, or what the aliens look like.)
They were in Toy Story 2. They were hanging from the rear view mirror in the car.
They looked like this.
I assume that Rilchiam’s talking about the rubber aliens from the grabber machine in the first film. They’re small. They’re green. They’re alien. That much is obvious from looking at them. But it wasn’t till he saw them explicitly labelled as such that he connected them with the well-known expression “little green men”.
I always assumed that, “Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni” was a nonsense line from Yankee Doodle. Thanks to the SDMB, I finally found out that macaroni was slang for very stylish, so the song was basically calling Yankee Doodle a rube.
Exactly. Thank you to Chronos and Peter Morris for providing links. Also, I’m a she. And I didn’t see the LGM in the TS3 trailer; I’m just hoping they show up in the film.
“You saved our lives. We are eternally grateful. You saved our lives. We are eternally grateful. You saved our lives. We are–” “Shaddup!”
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I’m sorry, I have a cold.
A straw hat! What a clever disguise. I can already see him now, lifting his glasses and confiding, “It is I, Vlad the Impaler!”.
But Eddie Izzard’s point is, the standard vampire rules say no sunlight. And then suddenly Dracula announces quite casually that the can, in fact, walk around during the day. It’s that “Hey! you can’t change the rules like that!” feeling. And anyway a low-powered vampire is just a nutter in the park.
These options have already been mentioned.
But black and white (or tinted) film rather rules out green screen or blue screen, don’t you think?
The camera doesn’t really move that much during the whole scene. So other solutions would have been possible.
The question is, was the reflection left there by accident or on purpose? I still think they simply did not care that much for the reflection myth. After all, what did it matter in 1922?
I’m not familiar with the Eddie Izzard bit in question, but Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula obviously wasn’t intended to be just another standard vampire movie. The title certainly suggests they were interested in doing a film version that was more faithful to the book, and in the book Dracula can go out in the sunlight. Of course this version of Dracula was wildly different from the book in other ways – the title character was given completely different motivations, and Mina and Lucy were also significantly changed from the novel – but either way it was clearly not supposed to be a “classic” style vampire movie and shouldn’t have been expected to follow all the same rules.
That’s just it - there are no rules except what movies (or other works of fiction) usually agree on. But I’m not sure if Coppola’s Stoker’s Dracula really stands apart - in the end it’s just another vampire movie. And apparently the DVD is a bit different from the theatrical release, but that’s another story.
And a lot of vampire lore has no problem having their Vampires go out during the day.
Vampire myths have them sleeping during the day, but it was no more fatal to them than to Dracula.
Neither Dracula, Carmilla, nor Varney (3 of the more famous 19th century fictional vampires - where most of our ideas of what a ‘proper’ vampire is come from) are in any way prevented from going out during the day - Dracula is explicitly weakened, but able to walk about without issue. Neither of the others have even that.
The idea that it was fatal was created by Murnau.
Even post-Nosferatu, a significant amount of vampire fiction has ignored that particular addition, for various stylistic or practical reasons - going back to pre-Nosferatu sources; wanting to make their vampires more biologically plausible; wanting to make their vampires stronger; not wanting to tell a story that’s entirely nocturnal or indoors; to ratchet up the fear when a vampire proves that the 20th century assumption that vampires can’t stand sunlight is wrong.
Even among vampire stories that do have the sun as fatal, a lot include the idea that stronger ones can handle it for a while, or conversely, that stronger ones are more susceptible, because they’re further from life; or that there are variant types, who have different weaknesses.
I don’t remember the details, but I think that all you need is colored filters, not actually colored film. Still, the same is true for Technicolor, and it took a good while for anyone to figure out that trick, so while they perhaps could have done greenscreening, they probably didn’t.
Ralph Wiggim voice: I beat the Beatles!
Being the OP, I just want to say that most of my threads die and few even reach two pages. This thread makes me very proud (and astonished).
Not a surprise – as a group, those of us who “partake of café society [/fake upper-class french accent]” are creative, observant, and critical.
AND, more importantly, we’re used to our significant others rolling their eyes when we start a sentence with “Wow, I just realized that…”
So we post here instead…
I’m not sure it really stands apart either, but it was apparently intended to. And it is in some ways the most faithful film adaptation of Dracula (most others omit some of the main characters and action), although in other ways it’s dramatically different (romantic Dracula!).
It is funny that having Dracula walk by day seems weird/innovative to some viewers when it is directly from the book.
As I’ve mentioned on here before, it’s not totally clear even in Nosferatu that sunlight ALONE will kill a vampire. Count Orlock is the first vampire to be killed by a ray of sunlight, but there’s all that business about the willing sacrifice of a pure-hearted woman too. Sunlight is arguably just one part of a sort of vampire-killing spell. Maybe if the Count had just happened to be caught out in the sunlight then he’d have been fine. Alternately, it could be that the opportunity to suck the blood of a pure-hearted woman is the only temptation great enough to make a vampire stay out past his bedtime…although if that were the case then it would seem that an unwilling women would do equally well. Perhaps vampires prefer to be gentlemen about the whole neck-biting thing?