Silly, weird, perhaps unanswerable questions about movies and TV

She turned up in an episode of Benson to answer that question.

Her body is alive, but comatose. Her spirit is an apprentice angel.

In Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, why does Qui Gonn try the Jedi Mind Trick on Wattoo? Shouldn’t part of learning the trick be learning what races are immune to it?

Ahem…puts on Star Wars nerd hat*

There are like tens of thousands of species inhabiting the SW universe making memorizing hard. Also in the Clone Wars show Wattoo’s species is revealed to be kinda xenophobic and isolationist, it is possible Wattoo is one of the few living on another planet making him unfamiliar to Qui Gon.

Also, it’s possible that even though it doesn’t work on most of a species, it might work on particularly weak minded specimens. No harm in trying.

In the original Back to the Future how did an all white high school in the year 1955 allow a “colored” band to play at their prom?

It wasn’t a big deal back then.

Well, not until Doc Brown went back and screwed things up in the 1880s.

It wasn’t a big deal in 1955? Either I’m being whooshed, or history is being rewritten. Segregation was de facto law back in the 1950’s and early 1960’s.

How does Sargent Snorkel keeping ending up hanging by a tree over a cliff?

Either I’m being whooshed, or you missed my second sentence.

So that means the school had no black janitors or lunch ladies? It was a hired band, not a bunch of students.

They just green-screen him in.

I thought the little sister killed him while she was high on something. Or else that gambler guy killed him and framed the little sister, so that he would have control over Lauren Bacall’s character.

Or something.
Roddy

The school owned the band. It didn’t hire it.

Why would anyone NOT come out of warp/ hyperspace with their shields up?

Was that the case in Hill Valley, California?

I always had the impression (could be flawed) that most of the segregation and Jim Crow laws were primarily Southern things, and really never were the case in the North and West.

The real mystery of that scene is why a German bad guy speaking to a German bad guy needs to resort to English to get him to “shoot the glass.”

I don’t think so. He explicitly states that the first proton torpedo “impacted on the surface.”

The usual justifications are power limitations or some handwave about the properties of hyperspace interfering with shields. For whatever reason, they have to drop into normal space in order to raise shields–though I would agree that it would be logical to do so as soon as possible every time, just in case.

Segregation wasn’t legal, but it was pretty much de facto. School integration didn’t start until 1954, and I remember racial riots in school in the late 1960’s. It wasn’t like someone snapped their fingers and VOILA–total integration.

I do think a 1955 school would be lily white, except possibly for the cleaning and kitchen staffs.

Certainly if you can’t tell yourself, you shouldn’t care. I mean, it’s not like it changes the taste.

The band were performers, not attendees. Would segregation prevent that?

Because the physics won’t allow it?

He was drafted. Then caught the deads.