Oh hi Mark!
In the Star Trek Writer’s Guide that you could buy when TOS was runnng, one of the questions was:
Are you guys on LSD.
The answer was
We tried it, but we couldn’t keep it lit.
So LSD jokes go way back.
The Lethal Weapon movies were landmark, trendsetting action films, but are filled with cringe-worthy stuff now, mostly having to do with a) playing L.A.P.D. brutality for laughs and b) Mel Gibson generally. The scene in the first film in which Riggs and Murtaugh are theorizing that the victim who’d set the plot in motion may have been a lesbian, and Riggs casually says that that’s disgusting, is a standout.
As is the scene when the house they’re approaching explodes, setting Rigg’s shirt on fire. When Murtagh jumps on him to smother it, Riggs, not realizing he’s aflame, asks, “What are you, a faggot?”
There was a similar scene in the first Bill and Ted movie. It’s shocking to think how a comment like that was acceptable so recently. It’s completely cringeworthy now.
If the OP includes scenes that may have seemed normal at the time but are just bizarre now due to time moving on…
I love Brian De Palma’s Body Double, but the scene I find hilarious is at the video store (which I’m pretty sure was the Tower Records video annex on the south side of Sunset Strip…the same place was used in Amazon Women on the Moon, I think) where Craig Wasson goes to find a copy of Holly Does Hollywood. He asks if they have VHS (!!!) and the clerk is like “We got VHS, Beta, half-inch, whatever you want.” Wow. I don’t even remember anything beyond VHS and Beta, and Beta was on the way out by the time that movie came out.
When I watched “Dr. Strangelove” with a group of military officers, this line got some unintended laughs:
…we are plowing through every possible three-letter combination of the code. But since there are seventeen thousand permutations, it’s going to take us about two and a half days to transmit them all.
Something similar with Free Enterprise (which if you haven’t seen if you’re any kind of Trekkie, you’re missing out) the characters talk about their vast collections of SF movies – all on laserdisc. That format was already getting dated by the late nineties when this movie came out. Mind you, early DVDs had certain pixelation problems when the format transfer was not done correctly (have a serious videophile of that era explain “black bloom” to you, in tones that remind you of someone describing leprosy, and you’ll see what I mean). But having an entire collection of movies on these multi-disc platters the size of dinner plates… you practically needed to buy a second house.
When seeing the theatrical re-release of Return of the Jedi in the early thousands, this exchange got a funny-with-a-side-creepy reaction:
Emperor Are you sure?
Vader I have felt him, my master
Emperor (turning around with a strange expression on his face): Strange that I have not.
It didn’t hit that way in 1983.
Friend of mine devoted an entire room (floor-to-ceiling shelves) to his 12" LaserDiscs. And his other formats he was sure would emerge victorious: BetaMax tapes and HD-DVDs (they were competing with Blu-Rays).
But I’ve got to admit, the LaserDiscs did look good, even if you had to take a break in the middle of a film to switch to Disk 2.
Yeah. Freeze-framing on those was like freeze-framing 70mm film - almost never any blur.
My friend had nearly as many LDs, but he had to get rid of them all when he moved. It was getting increasingly hard for him to find a player for them.
A few years back, the local Goodwill (which I love for their great selection and low prices) had a Laserdisc player. It was $199. At that time, I visited once a week. The Laserdisc player was there for at most 6 days before being sold.
Or Mickey Rooney doing the same thing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Say hello to my little friend.
I thought me and my friends were the only ones that ever saw that movie. i hate to admit it, but we watched the sequel too.
I thought that was pretty obvious, even as a teen. Cairo was a walking talking gay stereotype.
I wonder how many people recognized Wilmer as Rick’s mafia friend Icepick in Magnum P.I.
It wasn’t quite as obvious in 1941, since the censors allowed the use of “gunsel.”
But that was a somewhat obscure bit of slang back then. Hammett used it in his original magazine serial (later republished as a novel) because he was sure that the magazine censors wouldn’t be aware of its real meaning, probably thinking it meant something like “gun slinger”.
Also apparently there was a secondary “safe” meaning of “newb inexperienced at this life” that he could keep in his back pocket if questioned. “I mean naive in the ways of crime, honest!”
Also, Austin Gunsel was a former (1960s) treasurer for the NFL and former FBI agent, possibly the most famous ‘gunsel’ if such a thing is possible.
Just doing a browse of the word ‘gunsel’ in newspaper archives, they pretty much all match up to someone’s surname.
I had a lot of laserdiscs, which was really folly on my part, and I regret the money I spent on them. Even had a bunch of Criterion editions: the one for Brazil was five discs and you could strap it your chest and use it as a flak vest if the ened arose. There was some spectacular artwork on the occasional LD: the Natural Born Killers box set and The Killer Criterion set were both gorgeous.
Sold them all for pennies on the dollar to a used book/movie store many years ago. I only kept two, for sentimental reasons, though I know they’ll never see the inside of a player again: a small indie film that I crewed on, that AFAIKT has never been released on DVD or BluRay, and the Japanese pressing of the 3-hour cut of Until The End of the World, because the packaging is so cool.
Yes, they used that music originally. It was a farce, not even a regular comedy. So the music is not sucking out the seriousness; it’s preventing seriousness from happening.
And I think what really makes Stallone’s presence ironic is that he almost always plays good guys, and when he strides into a scene the way he does in this, it’s usually to straighten something out and deliver some well-deserved beatdowns. It’s a trip to see him causing trouble instead of settling it.
Kind of like when I re-watched Lady Jane after many years of seeing Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard. He’s Jane’s martinet father, who wants to get her married off and is prepared to back up his “expectation” with violence if necessary. Yikes! Yeah, that authoritative tone can work two ways. And, for that matter, in Band of Brothers, when David Schwimmer was the hard-ass captain who trains the recruits. His character is harsh, bordering on sadistic, but it’s for a purpose: to toughen the guys up, and to give them a common enemy. So that New Yawk patois, that was so humorous when he was Ross, was downright menacing when he was Captain Sobel.