Concerning the “Jesus Saves” optical illusion, or whatever it should be called, I have yet to locate the actual image, but have come across two that approximate the way it looks:
At this site the lower picture (in color) shows the type lettering used.
If you recognize this thing, and I seem to recall it from pre-internet xerox-stuff-to-death-and-pass-them-along days at work, at least let me know I’m not hallucinating. If you can link to the actual picture/image that would be cool, too.
This reminds me of one of the funniest bits from the book The Know-It All: One Man’s Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs, a very funny true story about a regular guy’s quest to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. He attends a MENSA meeting, and while there, he overhears two guys debating why Captain Picard is bald: is it because there is no cure for baldness, or is it because Picard prefers it that way?
Slight hijack back to The Doors… I remember a certain tag line:
“There are things known, and things unknown, in between are The Doors.”
Was that from the Val Kilmer movie, from old concert or album sales campaigns, something The Doors used in an album, from that poem, or just a Classic Rock Radio thing?
Speaking of Jean-Luc, look for the Picard Maneuver. Every time he stands up, he tugs down at his uniform tunic to make sure it isn’t bunching up. Makes a great drinking game.
Similarly, David Caruso’s character Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami has the habit of dramatically taking off his sunglasses. Sometimes he’ll put them on, just to dramatically take them off a moment later. It’s not something I noticed until I saw a YouTube compilation of many such occurrences, and now it stands out.
Blazing Saddles is pretty much my all-time favorite film. I’ve watched it 30 or 40 times easily since I was a teenager, and have just about every line in the film memorized. But it wasn’t until I forced my then-girlfriend (now-wife) to watch it with me that she laughed at a line whose obvious significance I had completely missed through all my viewings to that point (despite the fact that the line is repeated within a very short time span, if I recall correctly)
What line was it, you ask?
“As chairman of the welcoming committee, it’s a pleasure to present to you this laurel…and hearty handshake…”
It’s a quote from Aldous Huxley (the actual line is “…and in between are the doors of perception”). The line was used (without the “perception”) as a slogan for the Doors in the '60s.
Not exactly–Huxley’s use of the phrase “doors of perception” is in turn a reference to Blake’s “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
I didn’t know until quite recently the Milwaukee Brewers logo is not just a glove, but a combination of the lower-case letters “m” and “b”.
My brother–who’s now in his thirties and has been a huge football fan since he was a kid–was amazed I could always tell which end of the field the ball was on. That’s because he didn’t know that the little arrows next to the yard line numbers always pointed to the nearer goal line.
I was watching a Minnesota Vikings football game with a friend some years ago, and he suddenly blurted out “Oh, those pictures on their helmets are supposed to be horns! I never knew that!” And he (and I) had been watching NFL football for twenty-some years. When I asked him what he had thought they were before, he said “Well, I don’t know; maybe some Nordic fertility symbol…”
How about the logo for Infinity cars? I’ve seen that thing thousands of times over many years, and only recently did I smack myself in the forehead when realizing that it’s a road, going off to infinity…
This doesn’t entirely count, since it wasn’t after the hundredth time, in fact it was the first time, but I totally wouldn’t have noticed if not for the circumstances.
I listened to The Who Sell Out and Tommy back to back one night a couple weeks ago, and realized during It’s a Boy that It’s a Boy is pretty much identical to the last minute or so of Glow Girl off of Sell Out (only, it’s a boy, not a girl).
It took me repeated viewings of Animal House before I got this:
The scene where they enter the courthouse, Otter holds up his “briefcase” and gives a smile and a thumbs-up. I just figured he was saying “Look! I’m pretending to be a lawyer!” I finally realized that it was the exact briefcase that contained the giant dildo from earlier in the movie. (“She’ll take this seriously.”)
