Obvious things about a creative work you realize after the millionth time (OPEN SPOILERS POSSIBLE)

Cafe Society
1621

Ozy also casually refers to “sensitives worldwide” – plus, if you take him seriously when he’s tape-recording that observation about Burroughs using the cut-up technique and shamans divining with goat innards, he seems to honestly believe that he’s just another practitioner in a long picking-up-subliminal-hints-of-the-future tradition, emphasizing that he’s not mundanely trendspotting by way of rational analysis.

(Note, too, that he apparently authored a book on the need to understand spiritual disciplines before discussing the power of dreaming and the subconscious – so he presumably believes his anyone-can-do-this-stuff pitch encompasses psychic woo.)

1622

Tanks.

1623

Just recently I noticed that Lois Griffin on “Family Guy” wears earrings. Thought it was something new until I saw reruns from past seasons where she was wearing them.

1624

In Django Unchained, Schultz keeps his warrants and bounty notices in a *cavity *in the big plaster tooth on top of his dentist wagon.

1625

Of course. Which is why, when he finally finds her, he says ‘Let’s go home’ - rather than ‘Let’s take you home’. They’re going home together.

It is pretty obvious that John Wayne was in love with Debbie’s mother - I just hadn’t made the next leap.

1626

My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic
Twilight: The time that night and day meet.:smack:
Sugarcube: A southern pony version of “sugar”

1627

It’s apparently important in the movie that John Wayne’s character doesn’t spell out things that you can figure out. Partly this is because it fits his character to not be good at communication and partly it’s because the filmmakers were trying to get some ideas across that would make it harder to distribute the film in 1956. That’s probably why nobody specifically says that Wayne’s character is the Wood’s character’s father and why Wayne refuses to say that Pippa Scott’s character (Lucy) was raped.

1628

In Batman: Arkham City, the tallest building in the game is probably the Wayne Enterprises tower. (I say “probably” because it’s out of bounds, I haven’t played the sequel, and Wonder Tower is, because it’s much closer, larger from Batman’s perspective. But I digress).

The defining feature of Wayne Tower is the giant W on it, with smaller letters “ENT” beneath.

I’ve played through the game at least 15 times and didn’t realize until yesterday that the Wayne Tower is west of Arkham City. Easy to remember: Facing the giant W, you’re facing roughly west. (The two towers are north, and the Gotham City Bank tower is south).

1629

I was just listening to my Christmas music internet radio station and the Muppets “Twelve Days of Christmas” came on. And I just realized…Gonzo has the third verse. His true love gave to him 3 French hens. His true love, Camilla the Chicken.

She rented him 3 prostitutes (FRENCH hens) for a Christmas orgy!

1630

That is so disturbing on so many levels!

1631

What an unusual thing for a girlfriend to do. (I think).

1632

It’s Okay – they’re only felt. Gonzo can’t catch anything.
Except clothes moths, maybe.

1633

Gonzo’s ho be pimpin’ it, yo.

1634

He certainly was THAT night!

1635

Moments before Khan signals for Enterprise to surrender, Kirk undoes the front of his tunic, creating a white rectangle … a flag of surrender.

1636

Don’t know if it’s obvious, and it’s certainly not intentional, but it might be the influence.
A.E. van Vogt’s classic SF short story Black Destroyer is, AFAIK, the first “alien loose on a space ship” story. as such, it probably inspired Jerome Bixby’s It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Alien, and other works*. The alien, Coerl, is intelligent (more so than other aliens hitchhiking on space ships), and eats phosphorus extracted from its victims. It calls the phosphorus id, for some reason.

Is it possible that speculating on an Id monster inspired the beastie, and the very plot, for Forbidden Planet? The creature has been called I]The Id Monster* by writers and critics for years (although not in the movie, nor, as far as I know, in the script). Black Destroyer was a highly visible story because, after its magazine publication, it appeared in the hugely influential SF anthology Adventures in Time and Space in 1946. This was the first major SF anthology, and it remained in print for years. several of the stories in it either inspired movies, or were closely related to them – Harry Bates’ Farewell to the Master (“The Day the Earth Stood Still”), John Campbell’s Who Goes There? (“The Thing”), Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore’s The Twonky (“The Twonky”), Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall (filmed twice under the same title, but really badly), the aforementioned van Vogt The Black Destroyer, which must have influenced “It! The Terror from Beyond Space”, and Raymond F. Jones’ Correspondence Course (which was not filmed, but has very nearly the same plot as his later story The Alien Machine, which formed the first part of the book “This Island Earth”, which was later filmed under that name. The Alien Machine/Correspondence Course part was the only part they got even approximately right in the film). Most of these films (excepting the Asimov adaptations) appeared in the 1950s, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the anthology hadn’t been batted around Hollywood as a possible source for movies. Moreover, van Vogt incorporated "Black Destroyer into his 1950 “fix up” novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle, giving it more visibility

*Van Vogt sued Universal for plagiarism over this. They settled out of court. Me, I think that Bixby had a better case (his story has a different plot altogether than Black Destroyer, but one very similar to Alien, right down to the killing-it-by-opening-the-airlock at the end. But Bixby never sued.

1637

In Star Trek:TOS City on the Edge of Forever, the landing party does a really lousy job of searching for McCoy. Kirk and Spock are immediately distracted by the guardian, while Uhura, Scott and the others fail to look behind the big rocks right in front of them that Bones sas hiding behind.

1638

The Swiss Family Robinson was shipwrecked. So was Robinson Crusoe.

1639

This one’s particularly funny, because the only reason the word “Robinson” appears in the title is to tell the reader that the story is just like Robinson Crusoe, only with a Swiss family. In the original story, the family isn’t even named Robinson! In modern terms, it would be like making a movie that’s basically Lord of the Rings in space, and then literally calling it, Lord of the Rings in Space.

Of course, pretty much all of the adaptations of the story have named the family the Robinsons, making it seem more like a not-very-subtle literary reference, and not brick-simple genre description it was originally intended as.

1640

I didn’t get the reference in Lost In Space until I saw the name of the Gold Key comic (and possibly the longest comic title of all time): “The Space Family Robinson is Lost in Space on Space Station One”.