Can you think of any tropes, memes, plot devices, and so forth that everybody “knows” are constantly repeated ina given genre, but which, in fact, are not?
Well, this is the thread for you!
What brought this to mind for me today was Marvel’s Civil War. At its very beginning, the SHIELD agents tasked to bring in un-registered heroes are called ‘cape-killer.’ At the time I thought 'Why, exactly, would ‘cape’ be synonymous with ‘hero’ in this universe? There are far more un-caped super-types than caped.
I don’t think this exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s bugged me for a while. I used it as 1/2 of a Teemings column.
Jules Verne put Giant Squids in several of his books. You’d certainly think so, from the movies and comic books. There are quite a few of them, even in books not nominally based on 20,000 Leagues – they show up in two different versions of Mysterious Island and The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (based on his “For the Flag”), and in every version of 20,000 Leagues. It’s also in the View Master slide set of the story, and some comic book adaptations (although not the Classics Illustrated version)
But, in fact, Verne didn’t use a really huge squid or octopus, even once. Not even in 20,000 Leagues. He did have a number of larger-than normal “polyps” attack the NNautilus at once, and they were driven off by the crew with axes. But that gigantic cephalopod is strictly a creation of the movies.
So is another Verne attribute – the balloon in Around the World in 80 Days. There isn’t one, in the book. But Mike Todd put it in his movie version, and subsequent versions have retained it, so that it also shows up on the covers of editions of the book. But it’s not in there. Verne DID, of course, write about balloons, even before the first of his Voyages Extraordinaires, which was “Five Weeks in a Balloon”. And in subsequent books, kike “Robur the Conqueror”. But not in AtWi80D.
And don’t get me started about Fu Manchu’s moustache. Despite the fact that those long, thin , stringy black moustaches are called “Fu Manchus”, the fact is that not in any of Sax Rohmer’s stories does he have one. He’s clean-shaven.
All right have it your way*, but I still say that Dr. McCoy was the universe’s leading authority on interspecies venereal diseases!
CMC fnord!
*I think the entry on Drill Thrall Shana summed it up “sex was prevented only by the script, the censors and time slot.” that, more than Kirk’s self control, is why there was no banging of green chicks.
This one has long since become a common trope, but the notion that sunlight is deadly to vampires does not come from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, other early vampire fiction, or vampire folklore. It was invented for the movies.
In the novel Count Dracula had more power at night and apparently didn’t like to get up before sunset, but there’s one scene in the book where he does go out in the afternoon with a hat on. Similarly, in Sheridan LeFanu’s earlier novella Carmilla the title character sleeps until after noon but does go out in full sunlight.
The first vampire to be killed by sunlight was the title character in the 1922 German film Nosferatu. Even there it’s not totally clear that sunlight alone is deadly or if it has to be combined with the self-sacrifice of a pure-hearted woman. In the 1931 version of Dracula with Bela Lugosi then Dracula doesn’t seem to like sunlight but is killed with a stake. The movie that seems to have popularized the idea that a vampire could be killed by sunlight and sunlight alone is the 1958 Dracula with Christopher Lee, where Van Helsing dramatically pulls the curtains away and forces Dracula into the sunlight.
Since then it’s largely been taken as a given that vampires can’t go out during the day. There are notable exceptions (the novel and movie The Hunger in the '80s, the 1992 Dracula with Gary Oldman, and that awful Twilight series), but “sunlight kills vampires” has become a well-established cliche. I suspect Anne Rice’s decision to make her vampires vulnerable to sunlight also helped to keep this idea going for the past few decades.
I think you may have misread the OP. It’s not “things shown in the movies that have no factual basis.” The Timmy-down-the-well thing and Kirk-was-always-banging-green-chicks thing are exactly the short of thing I meant.
Good analysis, up to the end, where I disagree. The movies that popularized the “vampires dissolving in sunlight” were the Universal films of the 1940s – they used it in ** Son of Dracula**, where Lon Cheney, Jr. as Count Alucard gets it that way, and again in House of Dracula, where John Carradine as Drac dissolves.
I’ve often wondered if the folks at Universal saw Nosferatu, or came up with the idea on their own. Certainly vampires were killed in flicks (and stories) after Nosferatu were made, but not by sunlight (Vampye, Dracula’s Daughter, Mark of the Vampire, London After Midnight – sorta, for those last two – and others). If it were up to that silent film to start the meme, it wouldn’t have been able to do it – it was poorly distributed, and Stoker’s widow’s legal actions to have all copies destroyed didn’t help. I suspect that they were motivated by the same logic as “death rays” and “disintegrators” in the movies – if you dissoilve in sunlight you leave a minimum of bloddy scraps to annoy the Hays office. Comic books and printed fiction picked up the meme from the movies
But by the time Christopher Lee dissolved in Horror of Dracula it was pretty well established.
I guess it depends on what you mean by really huge. As I recall, those “poulps” weren’t large enough to grab the submarine, as you often see depicted, but I seem to recall from the book that they were large enough to grab a man with a single tentacle and pull him off the deck.
