It was only about on my fifth or sixth reading of Dune that I realized Thufir Hawat was on the verge of bringing down the House Harkonnen by the end.
How so?
Really? He’d been working to that end since he was captured. He had both the Baron and Feyd-Rautha all but at each other’s throats and was subtly giving wrong information to key people. I haven’t read Dune in years but IIRC he even has a scene where he’s thinking about his plans and the destruction of House Harkonnen in revenge for the destruction of House Atreides is explicitly stated as his goal. And he came close…he jiggered with the data he’d been gathering so that the Baron would go to Arrakis unprepared for the real situation. He almost managed to get Feyd-Rautha killed by convincing him to not have the slave drugged in the arena duel. He managed to convince F-R to try to assassinate the Baron with the needle in the slave boy’s thigh. Pretty much everything that happened that could have seriously affected House Harkonnen from the raid on Arrakis forward was Hawat’s doing. Not only that, but at the very end he refused to use the gom jabbar against Paul, which was the last act that DID bring down both Harkonnen and Corrino by denying them the death of the enemy who had bested them.
“The Game” (from Damn Yankees) contains the verse:
It took me years to realize that “it” didn’t necessarily mean “your mouth”…
I don’t know about giving wrong information, but the Harkonnens were already at eachothers’ throats. That’s how they roll, and the Baron would have demanded no less from his heir.
I don’t remember that at all, I’m afraid.
No, Hawat tipped off the Baron about the assassination attempt because F-R hadn’t consulted him (Hawat). The Baron explicitly thinks to himself “it would’ve worked, if Hawat hadn’t warned me.”
As for the arena duel, Hawat is clearly working both sides, hating both of them, but he hates the Emperor more, and the last remaining Atreides, Lady Jessica, most of all. Wheels within wheels . . .
It seemed to me that he was willing to go through with it up until the moment Paul called his bluff, acknowledging that Hawat was there to kill him and offering to allow him to do so.
I always thought the point of the Hawat subplot was essentially an illustration of the GIGO principle. A mentat like Hawat is supposed to be completely logical and therefore presumably immune to any tricks. But Harkonnen figure out how to subvert Hawat by feeding him false data.
The denouement was when Paul revealed the true situation to Hawat, thus breaking the Harkonnen illusions and making the point that the Atreides were stronger than the Harkonnens because their morality was based on the truth. And by metaphor, showing that the Imperial system was illusory and the Fremen system was based on reality.
So Paul’s shattering the Harkonnen web of lies and freeing Hawat was a parallel to his shattering the Imperial political system and freeing the Fremen.
You just BLEW MY MIND! 
And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!
In Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me they give some semblance of continuity with Austin’s partner (“Vanessa is a fem-bot”) But they don’t seem to with Felicity for Goldmember.
Then I realized: duh, Felicity’s with Past Austin. Or she’s with Present Austin and we’re watching Past Austin in Goldmember.
In the 1984 classic “Red Dawn,” there’s a scene where the Wolverines come close to town to talk to Ben Johnson. He tells them that it’s not safe for them to go into town, that some people had had their throats cut and (paraphrasing) “Rumors say it’s you.”
I have seen this guilty pleasure of mine dozens of times over the years, and only in the past viewing a month or so ago did I realize that he was not telling them “Rumors say it’s Jews.” Which made no sense, obviously, and didn’t account for their reaction after he told them—but that was the way I had heard it almost thirty years ago, and that’s the way I had kept hearing it. :o
Morgan Woodward, the actor who played the chain gang “Boss” with the reflective glasses is referred to as “The Man With No Eyes” in the dialog. KneadtoKnow was extending the metaphor to wikipedia’s entry on “Cool Hand Luke” referring to it as “The Online Encyclopedia With No Eyes.”
I’m not sure this is quite so “obvious” since it depends on being “in the know” about the Beatles’ intentions, but here goes.
If you know the Abbey Road album, you know about the little snippet “Her Majesty” at the very end (in fact, AFTER “The End”). It starts with a rather loud chord, then Paul singing about how he’d like to tell the Queen he loves her but needs to be drunk first.
Well, it seems that this was supposed to go in the Abbey Road Medley in between “Mean Mr. Mustard” and his sister “Polythene Pam.” Mean Mr. Mustard (and yes, I know there’s a poster here by that name) gets taken out by Pam to look at the Queen, where he “always shouts out something obscene.” (The loud chord we hear at the beginning of “Her Majesty” is supposed to be the last chord of “Mean Mr. Mustard.”)
Listening to this medley recently, I realized…if the song order had gone as the Fabs had intended, “Her Majesty” is pretty much the kind of thing Mr. Mustard might have yelled out at the Queen. (Well, it isn’t obscene, exactly, but it is irreverent.)
If you use a sound editing program like Audacity, you can clip the silent sections off the beginning and end of “Her Majesty” and then paste it right into the transition between “Mean Mr. Mustard” and “Polythene Pam”. It fits in there perfectly.
Hopefully I’m not re-treading old ground; I read most of this thread, then got excited to post my own observations and wanted to do it before I forgot them.
Anyway…
In “Jaws”, Quint’s boat is called the “Orca”. Orcas are one of the only animals ever seen to kill a Great White Shark. I didn’t clue in on that ever, it had to be mentioned in a documentary before I got it.
In “Fraggle Rock”, they would have a session each episode wherein the Fraggles would receive a letter from the adventuring uncle who was out in the real world. His name was “Uncle Travelling Matt”. As was discussed earlier in this thread, (Matte (filmmaking) - Wikipedia, “travelling matte” is a special effects term, and also describes the process that would have been used on Fraggle Rock to put 'ol Matt into the various places he visited.
I always remembered his name, and one day as an adult, clued in about that little in-joke.
Also, a gobo is a template that’s placed in front of a stage light to project a shape.
The other day at work, a coworker said to me, “I’m so tired…”, which prompted me to start singing, to myself, The Beatles’ song, “I’m So Tired”. I got to the lines where John sang,
“I’m so tired, I’m feeling so upset
I’m so tired, I’ll have another cigarette
And curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid get”
Now I should mention that I was a huge Beatles fan as a teenager in the 1980s, and have probably known that song since I was 14-15 years old. But at that age, the only thing I knew about Sir Walter Raleigh was that bullshit story about him laying his cloak on a puddle so that the queen could walk across without getting her dainty feet wet. So I never really understood why Lennon was cursing him.
I’m in my mid-40s now, and in the last several years I’ve taken more of an interest in history. So as I got to those lines in the song, it suddenly dawned on me: Raleigh was the guy who introduced tobacco into England after a trip to the New World! Now it made sense: Lennon was cursing Raleigh for the cigarettes he was smoking.
I never noticed annie had a big head until I read this post.
Really? It was so obvious.
I have kept a daily journal for almost 50 years. The other day I realized the word “journal” comes from the French jour, meaning “day.”
Big stupid head (sometimes)
Not a creative work, but it took me a stupidly long time to realize cocoa butter moisturizer smells like chocolate because cocoa is what chocolate is made from.