Sunday Morning Puzzle #97 --- Sneaky Shells

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This week’s puzzle is yet again a list of movie titles with something in common. The movie titles have been broken into “shell doublets”, and the doublets alphabetized. Shell doublets are created by pairing the first and last letters of an entry, the second and second-to-last letters, and so on.

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Example:

STAR WARS
SS TR AA RW
AA RW SS TR

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3 Problems:

  1. The common factor in each title has been replaced with the common factor from another title.

  2. In order to increase the challenge, the outermost shell doublet from each altered title has been reversed.

  3. There are eight extra shell doublets that are not part of any of the titles at all.
    A Mitigating Circumstance:

The extra shell doublets can be used to spell out an appropriate description of the movie titles.

Can you discover the movie titles and the description?

  1. CS DO DS DS EH RG TA

  2. AB DL EA IB LA OL PR RE YM

  3. ER NE NM OD OH OO SS TH XU

  4. AA AU BS CC OL TJ

  5. CA OE RC TT WF

  6. AE BM EK EU HI LL NT SB TL TT UA

  7. DA EI EO GO HP IF RH RO TP UG WH

  8. AB IE IH LN NE NG OL

  9. ED EO OR RA RE SB TA TR TW VE YO

  10. AG AR BF CI EE KR LH TB

  11. AA AF AR DN EI HS NE NH PR PZ RA RA RB TO TO YK

  12. AC CO EF EI GU HY MF NS TA

2

huh?

3

Ellis Dee, let me give you an example:

Say the common factor was “Kinds of Fruit”.

You could have

Orange County

Pearl Harbor

Under the Cherry Moon
These could switch to:

Cherry County

Orangel Harbor

Under the Pear Moon

4

WHEE 12 new opportunities for MM!

5

Grrrowl… no solution yet.

Some hints:

  1. There is never more than one extra shell doublet in any one entry.

  2. The extra shell doublets appear in order, from outermost to innermost, starting at entry 1 and ending in entry 12.

  3. Most of these movie titles are quite well-known.

6

Nice kitty! I’ve figured out three of them so far, but it’s slow going. I’m not sure if I have the dogged determination to see it through.

7

Omphaloskeptic:

May I recommend another method. Once you have guessed the common factor, try and think of some films (or just some common factors) that might appear here. Be like the tortoise and not the hare:

Slow and steady wins the race!!

8

OK, I got them all. I tried your method but it didn’t work very well for me. Most useful, after I solved the short cycle (#5,#2,#8,#3), was to guess the description, allowing me to figure out which doublets were extraneous. The long cycle (#6,#7,#11,#9) still took me a while, especially since I hadn’t heard of #7 before.

9

Awesome Omphaloskeptic!!

This does rate as one of the more difficult Sunday Puzzles to be sure. I knew that getting a title naturally led to getting another, but I wondered if anyone could get them all. You are definately “King of the Forest”!

Movie #7 is to be avoided at all costs at the rental counter. I was a big Twin Peaks fan, and looked forward to that movie coming out. Alas it was a huge disappointment.

But what was I to do…?

The Toxic Avenger didn’t have the right number of letters.