Mine is a recent MasterCard commercial, that’s themed after the Wizard of Oz, in which a woman makes online purchases while a tornado heads her way. It’s obviously supposed to refer to Oz, since her other purchases are a sweater for her Aunt Em and a dog dish for Toto.
The woman buys shoes for herself. The color? Silver.
It would have been SO easy to decide to make them red as not to confuse the movie people, but to go ahead and make/keep them silver… I was impressed, especially considering the shoes were sequinned, like the ones in the movie.
On one episode of Star Trek: Voyager two characters step off a turbolift, walk down the corridor for about 90 seconds while having a conversation, and then walk into Engineering (which is a fairly big room). All in one shot. Considering how the entire ship looks the same, they didn’t need to build a set nearly that big. It impressed me, because it was so easy not to notice.
On the British “The Avengers” episode called: From Venus with love. The villains use a laser gun to kill their victims. When John Steed and Emma Peel arrive to capture the baddies, the criminals use the proper safety goggles a real laser technician would. I liked that detail.
Cleopatra, the version with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Rex Harrison.
Most of the Roman characters wear the stereotypical short-sleeved, short-skirted tunics. Julius Caesar, however, wears a long-sleeved, long-skirted tunic. According to the history books, this was an actual quirk of Caesar’s. It was an old-fashioned style, and many of his contemporaries made fun of him for it.
Also, Cleopatra’s handmaidens were named Eiras and Charmian. These names came from Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra
Schenectady, originally, though he hasn’t lived here in years.
Back to the OP:
In the film Brewster McCloud, Margaret “Wicked Witch of the West” Hamilton is a murder victim. As she is discovered, the camera pans down the body and you discover she’s wearing ruby slippers.
John Barth’s novel The Sot-Weed Factor is a wildly imaginative historical novel about Ebeneezer Cooke, the fictional author of a poem “The Sot-Weed Factor.” It was quite a few years afterwards that I discovered that both Cooke and the poem were real. Also, the McGuffin for the novel is the search for the secret of the sacred eggplant, a way for a man to improve his sexual prowess by taking an eggplant and . . . well, anyway, this totally bizarre plot element turns out to be taken from an actual sex guide of the period. If you read the book, that little revelation is mind-boggling.
There was a nice little touch in one episode of Alien Nation. Part of the premise, of course, is that the aliens have different tastes that we do. In one scene, George (the alien) is talking to Matt (his human partner). We see him through a window in the police station, and as they talk, George takes a sqeeze bottle of mustard and squeezes it out onto something that’s obscured by a wooden rail. They continue to talk, and George comes out holding a cup of coffee. If you weren’t paying attention (and nothing is done to call attention, since the scene is about their conersation), you wouldn’t realize that he was putting the mustard in his coffee. (Later episodes made this preference more specific.)
In the early Hill Street Blues episodes, Johnny LaRue has a serious drinking problem. He eventually goes to an AA meeting, and Frank Furillo is there. At first, I thought that was just a cheap dramatic trick – no one had ever mentioned that Furillo was an alcoholic. But I realized that, in all previous episodes, every time people were drinking, Furillo ordered a club soda. (Of course, this fact about Furillo was referred to from time to time, but never before that episode.)
In the opening sequence of Courage Under Fire, while Denzel Washington’s armor unit is preparing to make their night assault at the beginning of the Gulf ground war, he and his officers are standing around in a circle finalizing their plan of attack.
His friend, the one who later dies, stands alone leaning against an Abrams gently clicking his wring against the armor.
There is absolutely no mention made of this in the film, but someone in the production of the film was obviously aware of the stereotype of West Point grads tapping their ring on nearby objects to remind everyone of how special they are.
For that reason, Pointers are called (by people who don’t care for them) “Ring-Knockers.”
I thought that was a really impressive detail that can easily go unnoticed and has no bearing on the film … but is neat to see.
I would guess that their preference would have been ruby slippers. But for that they would have needed permission from MGM (and MGM would probably have wanted money).
The book, on the other hand, is in the public domain.
In the comic strip Foxtrot, the youngest son, Jason, is a serious geek. In one strip, we see his math test (he’s in elementary school) where he figures the volume of a rectangle by using a definite integral. In another strip the father is holding an empty coffee cup and staring at some pages of computer code; he made the mistake of asking Jason for java.
I know calculus and I know Java programming, and the strip gets them both right. There have been other things, too. Either the guy who writes the strip is a major geek himself, or he’s got one on the payroll.
In Chinatown, Jack Nicholson is quickly flipping through the contents of a wallet and we oh-so-briefly get a glimpse of a $2 bill–unusual now but fairly common for the time period of the film.
In the original Star Wars film, I was always impressed by the fact that the space hardware was all a bit grungy. It seems that the typical space film always has sparkling-white spaceships and so forth, yet I feel that the lack of dirt and grime makes the scenes look false. (other films have beat-up ships, but this was the first I saw that did).
In Pulp Fiction, when John Travolta goes to open the briefcase, he lays it down on the counter upside-down and then quickly flips it over before he opens the latches. I know, this one is truly a small detail, but it’s just this sort of thing that Quentin Tarantino sprinkles throughout his work that makes the characters seem more realistic.
The set design inThe Royal Tennenbaums is truly amazing. Take a look at the arrangement of the plays that Margot has on her shelf - it’s on screen for just a brief moment, yet one can tell that there was time and effort put into its presence.
I have an older Sony VCR and I notice that the upper semicolon blinks when it’s the first 30 seconds and the lower semicolon blinks during the latter 30 seconds.
In the movie Alien, they built an extensive set for the Nostromo. Literally, to get where they needed to shoot, the film crew would have to slog through hundreds of feet of interior set, all crammed into a single warehouse. It gives the movie a very nice claustrophobic feeling and makes for a more believable atmosphere. So many scifi movies seem to get by using rearrangleable walls and matte paintings…
Robot Arm: consider Bill Amend seriously plugged in. He did an “all your base are belong to us” strip within in weeks of that hitting its peak, and he even recently did an Ellen Feiss strip.
One of my recent favorites is in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. After loading a saved game, your character stretches and yawns, as if he was just waking up.
Yes, it was quickie profit-from-tragedy glurge, but The Pennsylvania Miners’ Story (and whatever “creative” consultant came up with that title needs to be fired) was so incredibly right-on with the workaday details of the interiors and wardrobe that it was obvious that they practically copied photos of the interviewees’ homes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen movie interiors on television that looked so authentic for this area.
A scene that always impresses me…
From the original Dirty Harry, when Harry catches Scorpio in the middle of the football field, shoots him in the leg and then “interegates” him.
The camera shot pulls back from the two characters seemingly forever, out of the stadium, into the sky.
They must have had a helicopter, just for that one 10 second “pull back”
Yep, he is a genius. He spent something like a weekend in Lousiana/New Orleans and came away with Passionfish, which captures patois and local atmosphere so well.
It impressed me, because it was so easy not to notice.