Sunday Morning Puzzle #87 ---That's Incredible!

This week’s puzzle is a list of twelve movie titles with something in common. The titles have been broken into “doublets”, and the doublets for each title have been alphabetized.

Example:

AM ER IC AN BE AU TY
AM AN AU BE ER IC TY

Problems:

  1. Prior to being broken into doublets, a [7-Letter Key Word] occurred. As a result, the common factor in each title was changed. This change Is rather surprising, but not without precedent.

  2. Once the altered titles were broken into doublets, some additional changes took place. If a letter from the key word appeared in any doublet, the other letter in the doublet advanced 1 letter in the alphabet. In the event the other letter was a “Z”, then the “Z” became an “A”. If both letters were key word letters, then both letters were advanced one. Then, as explained before, the doublets were alphabetized.

Can you discover the original 12 titles and the nature of the transformations?


  1. EO EW FM HS SB SY

  2. EO GO LE MM NJ ON ON TE

  3. IE IT MB ND NF NT OT SM TI

  4. BN FS HE IO JN NG NJ RA SW UR WU

  5. AO CP LE NO PI PR QI SN TN

  6. AO FM FN GA GR IO ND OW PM SN TH YZ

  7. AT AZ BS CI DO EE NN RH SO TA XI

  8. BD IE IH MB NB NO OC QL TA UV

  9. ET ET EW MJ NG SJ

  10. CL DS EC FB GR IP MB NG PM SF TA TE TH TU WE

  11. AC AV BM BN FS GN OE ON PC TS WI

  12. AO CI CL CU EO II IO NG


The first sentence under “Problems:” should read:

  1. Prior to the titles being broken into doublets, a [7-letter key word] occurred.

Sorry for any unintended confusion.

( Here’s five more, though the common factors in the original titles are more specific…)


  1. AU BU DY EE HO IE NT RH UN

  2. BO FB IE MP NF NO NT ON RE UX WO

  3. CL FD GE IA IT MJ ON TH

  4. AH FD IA IE IO MM MQ OE TH

  5. AU BD EO IO MV ON PR TC TH TH UI


Maybe if you gave the movie title for number 1 we might have a chance?
Or if you got this from a site, a link for clearer instructions?

Sorry if the instructions are vague. Maybe I hit the bottle to much before writing them the first time. Let me try and be clearer.

First off there was a list of movie titles with something in common. The movie titles were altered based on a 7-letter key word to be determined by the solver. The nature of this change is part of the challenge. The transformation occurred to the common factor of each title.

The new titles were then broken into doublets. Now, these kind of puzzles are still rather simple to solve at this point, so a further change was needed so as to present a good workout for the SDMB solver.

Here’s how the coding works:
+++

If a letter from the key word is also a letter in any doublet, the other letter advances one place. If both letters are in the key word, both letters advance.

Now say the doublet is “TO”.

If neither “T” nor “O” is in the key word, the doublet does not change. If a “T”, but not an “O”, occurs in the key word — the doublet becomes “TP”. If an “O”, but not a “T” occurs in the key word, then the doublet becomes “UO”. If both letters are key word letters, then the doublet changes to “UP”.
+++

The alphabetizing of the new doublets was the final concealment method. Only wordsmiths seeking an especially tough challenge should proceed.

Using logic, you may be able to determine the identity of most of the key word letters, and then deduce the key word. I can think of another method or two to use as well, but I want to see what the solvers can do. This is a 5-star difficulty puzzle to be sure. I’ll be interested to see who solves it first.

However, Bippy the Beardless, revealing even a single title away would certainly give away the whole show.

And the challenge for me will be to write an entire set of posts without writing “to” for “too” or using “Here’s” for “here are”. Sigh.

Said Bippy, “Maybe if you gave the movie title for number 1 we might have a chance?”

Number one’s not a good one to start with. Try number six. Although it has nine changed letters, it is at least a fairly well-known title, and the unchanged letters are sufficient to suggest both the title and the thing that the common factor got changed to.

This idea of changing the common factor could use an illustration, I think. So, if the list of movie titles were

Chicken Run
Father Goose
Duck Soup

then the common factor would be poultry. The fowl-related word in each title would be replaced with a word from some other list without regard to making a whole lot of sense in the finished product. Let’s say they’re to be replaced with, oh, I don’t know, what goes with barnyard birds? How about sauces? Okay, so then we might end up with Bernaise Run, Father Mornay, and Bechamel Soup. Then these rather silly expressions would be encoded according to the plan already amply explained by Biotop.

It takes quite a lot of deciphering to recover the original titles after they’ve been through all that, which is why I’m still working on numbers 10 and 12 and haven’t even started on the new ones. It will be a [7-Letter Key Word] if I get it all done by tomorrow.

Peregrine: I see you are working some magic again. Well, well. I’m sure you klnow the two you are missing. Numbers 10 and 12 are, perhaps, kissing cousins—or at least you’d think with their backgrounds they might be friends.

A few of the titles are from older or more obscure movies, but that’s nothing to whine about…is it? Heh. Heh. And I’m sure everyone, by the way, has heard of #1, especially since the remake was so popular.

All I can say is…HOO HOO!

Finished!

Here are the first five altered titles (and original titles):

1. Syrah’s Eleven (Ocean’s Eleven) 2. On Golden Semillon (On Golden Pond) 3. Islands in the Merlot (Islands in the Stream) 4. Swimming Gewurtztraminer (Swimming Pool) 5. Cold Pinot Noir Manor (Cold Creek Manor)

I’ll wait a day or so to post the rest in case anybody wants to have a go at unravelling them.

Biotop you bugger (said nicely), I got the word ‘eleven’ but the lack of vowels made me doubt it was right.
Sorry, just a whine.

Peregrine:

Once again you come up smelling like a …rose. I thought that perhaps this puzzle would have to age for a long time before it was solved, but you have uncorked the solution to a very difficult challenger.

I’m curious… what method(s) did you use to get the answer? I thought that perhaps the best tactic to solve this would be to use logic to determine the identity of the key letters and then the key word. Once the key word was discovered, then the rest would eventually follow. Another idea would be to look for “THE” assuming that some titles would contain those consecutive letters, and therefore there’d have to be a TH or TI or UH or UI or HE or HF or IE or IF…and that such a method would lead to some of the key letters or to a few words such as “Islands” or “Creature”.

Anyway, Congrats again. And Bippy, getting the “ELEVEN” was good work, I doubt many solvers could discover the “SYRAHS” to go with it without first stumbling upon the theme.

I sould be able to post by the end of the night. Please wait til then if you can (unless your’re another new solver)
Thanks

Gonna have to disagree with starting with #6.
I got as far as The first 3 words and didn’t know the title. I knew the substitute, but that was only obvious because I figured out the “theme” Anyway, I’m just not sure that’s a popular title, and I really like movies. On to #7!

PS, how do you do spoiler boxes? I feel like a :wally for asking, but I really don’t know.

Click and move your mouse over the spoiler box, as if you were going to copy and paste its contents. I agree #6 aint obvious (yes I know another whine), I got words but know idea of the movie title.

No, I meant how do I write one. Like, I got #6 and I wanted to post it in a spoiler box.

I’m glad to see some other solvers in here, so I’ll refrain from posting solutions for now. The_Llama, to make a spoiler box, type {spoiler}, then the stuff you want to go in the spoiler box, then {/spoiler} (but with square brackets instead of curly ones).

Biotop, I’m sure I did look for some "THE"s early on, and that may have been what led me to attack the ones I did first. I suggested number six because that was the first one to crack for me. I could see a whole word coming out of a rearrangement of the last five doublets. That word suggested a title, which I easily formed by altering some of the remaining doublets. Even the changed common factor revealed itself with just a little playing around.

At this point I had six of the seven letters of the key word, and an example of the substitution. I think number two sorted itself out about then, and around the same time I was messing with the six letters trying to think of a word I could make out of them with one addition. Something that would fit the phrase, “a [7-letter Key Word] occurred”. Soon everything was clear, except number 10, whose substitute I had never heard of, and number 12, which, well, I don’t know what my excuse is for that one.