McGill University has a pretty exptensive trail of underground tunnels. Montreal winters are, I’ll go out on a limb and assume, even harsher than Boston ones, and to be able to get from the north end of campus to the library without freezing your 'nads off is a lifesaver. I don’t remember them being very fancy, just a step or two above janitorial service tunnels, but like everything else on that campus (and in the city), I assume they’ve been renovated since then.
Not clear to me. I’ll agree that Rochester NY winters are worse, because they’ve got that lake effect snow. Nevertheless, MIT had a better tunnel system than Rochester.
But this isn’t a (literal) race to the bottom. Anyplace with lots of snow is going to have lots of tunnels and gerbil tubes.
One of my personal top ten movies.
I watched it for the first time the 1991 between my freshmen and sophmore college years. I was spending the summer with my parents in a town where I didn’t know anyone and was in a somewhat vulnerable state. Seeing a movie about how cool it was to be a science nerd was exactly what I needed at the time. After watching it I immediately rewound the tape and watched it again. That is the only time I’ve ever done that with a movie.
[Grumpy old guy] Nerds these days have it so easy, what with their big bang theory and superhero block busters. Back in the day all we had were Urkle and Screech. [\Grumpy old guy]
Similar for me…I was in Physics, and one of the physics labs was open all-hours with a lot of supplies freely available, including tanks of Nitrogen. Policy was lab-use only of course, but still brought a few dewars home for fun and parties.
That gets back to what I said about Real Genius being exaggerated in the right direction. Urkle and Screech were exaggerations of some aspects of nerdity, but only some, with the result that they didn’t look like actual nerds, to nerds. They were what non-nerds thought nerds looked like. But the characters in Real Genius, and later in Big Bang Theory, were nerds’ nerds.
Sadly, the line I use the most is a casual “well, lasers are a young science,” followed by looking like it just dawned on me that I slipped up and mentioned something I wasn’t supposed to say.
No, never in a context that’d make sense.
I agree here: as someone noted upthread, the other big “nerd movies” from the '80s (Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science) stereotyped the nerd characters, and made fun of them; Real Genius embraced them for their nerdiness, and never actually made fun of them for being nerds.
They made fun of Kent (one of the antagonist characters), but that was because he was an incompetent sycophant, and a general weirdo, not because he was a nerd.
I’m kind of torn on Big Bang Theory; while I really enjoyed that show, and its celebration of nerd culture, it absolutely poked fun at the characters. Though, as I think about it, what it was primarily making fun of wasn’t their nerdiness, but their other character flaws (Sheldon’s OCD and lack of social skills, Leonard’s insecurity, Howard’s womanizing and mommy-complex, etc.)
Big Bang Theory was pretty solidly on the Urkel/Screech side of the line for me. Really hated that show.
Speaking of steam tunnels, at the building where my office is (a really old building in downtown Tacoma, WA) we have steam tunnels underground. I’ve had to go down there as the IT guy because it’s where the demarc for various systems (phone, internet) are located. Brick walls, dirt floor, and little bulbs in wire cages spaced far apart. It looks like something from an Eli Roth film. I’ve never had any interest in exploring them.
Real Genius was a favorite growing up, I was pretty young when it came out and I remember it was introduced to me as what cool nerds look like. It also gave an impression on me of what college might be like. My life never lived up to any of that. (My college experience was more like the show Community.) But I still think of this film fondly.
This movie is in my top 5.
To this day, if somebody asks me if I run, I respond with “only when chased.”
I saw this movie too late — just a few years ago. It mostly made me think how totally not fun or interesting my time in college was. And I was too old to crush on the girl usefully. As I recall, she was at first hyperactive and weird and somehow didn’t understand bathrooms and what they were for very well, and later she shifted to just standing around in the background. And there was an Asian guy who did a lot of standing around but I’m not sure whether he ever got to say anything.
But at least I saw the whole thing. I also finally saw Buckaroo Banzai a few years ago, and stopped at the halfway point because I hadn’t been enjoying anything in it yet. I still haven’t worked up the courage to try Young Einstein.
Loved The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. But then, I was right in the demographic. I could identify with the music, the clothes, and the locations.
No idea if it originated there, but apparently at MIT various “hacks” are common enough for there to be an explicit code concerning unauthorized exploration:
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/misc/ethics.html
Exploring some steam tunnels one night, I came across a machine room littered with empty beer bottles and chip bags. This did not sit right, so on my next trip I took a couple of bin liners and cleaned the place up…
I still periodically pull up the end credits and play them on Youtube.
There’s also this:
I’m still waiting for Buckaroo Banzai against the World Crime League.
I can’t vouch for its quality, but:
And it’s funny. Smart funny.
Just because it’s not as cold as Back East, there are a lot of tunnels connecting buildings in certain areas. Like County-USC (formerly known as General Hospital or Big G) Hospital. I had a friend who worked there who said those tunnels were dang weird.
As a teenager this was one of those movies I wanted to live in. How has it not been turned into a TV series by now?