In 2017 IMDB pulled the plug on its message boards. One of the most useful ones was “I Need to Know,” where you could post a fragmentary memory of a movie or TV program, and the experts could usually identify it pretty quickly.
I used that forum many times when someone on this page asked for a TV/Movie id and hit a brick wall. When IMDB closed the forums, they said that the new place to ask questions would be *community-imdb.sprinklr.com. It’s pretty good, but not all of the experts went along with the move. And there’s probably also been a fair amount of attrition due to mortality. But such is life. . . and death.
But now that site has announced that they will be closing the “I Need to Know” forum at the end of the month. No more questions, although they will preserve the ones already asked. They recommend asking AI instead.
[And I still have an unidentified animated short that remains unanswered after over 25 years!]
*Maybe. There might have been a different site between them.
I’ve got one 57 years old. I fear I will never know.
Other than that, this board is great for these questions. Everyone should come here! I’ve seen “I vaguely remember this movie, all I remember is some guy reading a book in a semi truck driving through Tennessee”* and in ten minutes you have the correct answer!
*not a real movie, or memory
If you need it, there’s always r/TipOfMyTongue on Reddit.
I hated that. I loved those message boards.
I did, too, but consider the headache of maintaining and moderating the board. If they had charged for membership in order to cover the cost of keeping the board open, I would have gladly paid it. Because I did use the board a lot and it was the place to find people who really knew their movies and TV shows. But for a free forum? Forget about it.
It probably still requires a lot of time and effort to keep it updated and as accurate as it is.
ChatGPT is pretty good for details on movies and TV shows.
I still use the IMDb every day, pretty much constantly whenever I’m watching TV. I always have it open to whatever show/movie I’m watching, and keep track of the actors, and especially the trivia. I’ve contributed quite a few items over the years to trivia and to goofs.
I liked them as well. They were great for questions I had about some television show I saw last night. I could post my question or comments here but often no one else saw it, but on the IMDB forums, I could be sure someone had and could offer an opinion.
Reddit does seem like a good place for this kind of thing. It’s not the best place to have conversations, like we do here, because of the format. But if you’re trying to get an answer to a question that’s usually a good place (depending on the quality of the particular subreddit of course).
This is the answer for these kinds of questions. If you want to know “What was that movie where this vaguely remembered thing happened”? post it at r/TipOfMyTongue
It’s worth mentioning that narrowing down virtually anything of which you have a half-remembered recollection – a movie, TV show, book, or historical event – is one of the things that AI is very good at. With the technology we have today, it seems almost quaint to rely on humans to jog our memories!
My memory of that message board was that 80% of all questions were either about The Lathe of Heaven, or Starchaser: The Legend of Orin.
The most common ones in the first couple of years were:
“What was the movie about the monster that caught on fire in salt water?”
“What was the movie about the giant turtle and the girl?”
“What was the movie that had a man that was part half-track?”
“What was the [old silent cartoon?] about a farmer and some mice?” (Memory is fuzzy on this one, as I never saw it.)
The first one about the monster baffled even the experts for over a year. Everyone remembered it, but nobody could think of the title until finally someone dug it out from an old TV guide.
The 9/11-related boards were a great way to keep up with the conspiracy theorists. I’ve seen some refugees from there try the same shit here and get chased out.
The issue with Reddit, for me, is they are always so picky about how you post. I don’t mind towing the line but I just don’t understand the Reddit culture I guess. Whenever I try to post a question, I seem to always get a “you’re question was deleted because ‘it was not formatted right/broke some other obscure posting rule’” message.
Although, I do read it a lot. Most of the questions I have, have already been asked anyway.
You forgot “SE7EN” threads. Those threads would go on for ever! Passionately arguing about every little nuance of John Doe’s motivations. I think one thread got so heated a college teacher go fired for what was said.
I wonder if those treads are readable via the Wayback Machine (not that I would know how to use it) ?
Do tell.
was it The Day of the Triffids (1963) ?
I want to know the details on the TV montage which appears in Midnight Cowboy. Last I recall looking it up, there was no information. Any help? I haven’t tried AI yet…
The World Beyond (1978) Episode title: “Monster.” It was a pilot for a supernatural sort of series that was not picked up.
My unknown animated short:
It was some sort of early “Claymation” animation as I recall. A young boy had quit eating, and as a result of his getting lighter and lighter started floating away. The townspeople gathered and figured out that he needed to eat to bring him back down to earth, so they started tossing food up to him, and eventually he had eaten enough to land safely.
I saw this on “Mr. Bill’s” kiddie program (WLOS - Asheville NC) in the early 1980s. It could have been 10 years old, and it might have been 30.
Title might have been something like “The Boy Who Quit Eating” or “The Boy Who Floated Away,” but no guarantee.
Is this any good? I’ve not seen the film, so I can’t tell if it’s a complete list.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064665/movieconnections/?ref_=tt_dyk_cnn#features
That’s some of it. But I really want to go moment by moment. There’s an exercise show, snippets of commercials, what appears to be a cardinal or a bishop asking, “Do you think god is dead?”, a monster movie…
There’s another moment in Midnight Cowboy where Jon Voight is forlornly watching late night TV and sees some sort of talk show where the guest is demonstrating how to dress up a dog like a child. Can’t find the reference to that either.
Unless it doesn’t know either, in which case it’ll hallucinate completely fictional answers. But you can double-check the AI’s return (which should have enough detail and specificity to do that), so at worst you’ve just wasted a little time on a rabbit trail and know not to ask the AI that question again (for a while).
Unlike the IMDb message board where questions were answered by random internet posters, because that’s guaranteed to be 100% correct! 
The word “hallucination” existed in the language long before AI.
Anyway, I was just trying to provide the helpful tip that AI (ChatGPT, usually) is indeed very useful in identifying works based on weak clues. I often have foggy memories of some half-remembered movie, TV show episode, or short story, and ChatGPT has never failed to correctly identify it. In one case it told me (correctly) that “you’re thinking of {name of TV show} but you’re conflating two different episodes”. It then proceeded to clarify which event happened in which episode.
