One of the interesting things about Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories is that he made up a set of fake brands for items, and used them consistently, rather than promoting any real brand.
So Archie drove Wolfe’s Heron sedan, his gun was a Marley. Among the many locks cited was a Wingate. And Wolfe drank Remmers beer.
I like the fact that Archie cites the use of “Ciphogene” gas as a fumigant (maybe a made-up chemical instead of a brand name), and that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle cite the use of this gas in their novel The Mote in God’s Eye.
Morley cigarettes: As Seen on TV in hundreds of shows like The X Files, The Twilight Zone, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Malcolm in the Middle, American Horror Story, and Beverly Hills, 90210!
Who can forget those iconic commercials of the rugged Morley man, riding up on his unicorn and lighting up a tasty, refreshing Morley cigarette.
There are a whole bunch of prop brands that if you start looking closely, you’ll start seeing all over the place in sitcoms, cop dramas, etc. They do this so they don’t have to negotiate rights for something as silly as a sitcom episode where someone drinks a beer or uses detergent. I mean, when they do put Budweiser in a movie, you can bet that Anheuser Busch/InBev/whoever has paid a pretty penny for the privilege. And in some cases, the company may NOT want their product being used by the villain or something along those lines.
I used to think that Morley cigarettes were an ‘X-Files’ invention, since the Smoking Man famously smoked that brand, and they showed up again on ‘Breaking Bad’ because Vince Gilligan included them as sort of an Easter egg.
But when I looked up Morley Cigarettes before I made that post, I was surprised to find that the fictional brand has actually been used in many TV shows, movies, and video games, dating all the way back to ‘Psycho’ in 1960. It’s the ‘Wilhelm Scream’ of fictional brand props!
And is still true in Japan. It is very common to have only one beer on Tap. You just ask for 生ビール (Nama biiru) and they serve you the one beer they have on tap, usually from one of the major beer companies like Asahi, Kirin or Sapporo. You can get a variety of other beers but they are in bottles or cans.
The same is true in most regular bars/pubs in Germany. So this “I’ll have a beer” thing in movies never bothered me, I even never noticed it before this thread, because that’s normal to me.
This was now going on 40 years ago now but when I was stationed in Germany we always ordered beer by type. Pils, weizen, alt… Sometimes they had something exotic like Guiness. Mostly it was the variety of whatever the local brewery was. Ein Pils bitte was the usual order. I’m sure there were fancy bars somewhere with more variety but not where I went. Bar culture might be much different now I don’t know.
No, that’s basically still the same in German bars. Of course there are many local differences, in some regions Pils is the standard, in others Alt (Lower Rhine region) or Weißbier (Bavaria), and don’t ever order Alt in Cologne or Kölsch in Düsseldorf.
One of the clubs i frequented served Eichbaum. We were kind of in between Eichbaum and Binding areas. I felt a strong pang of nostalgia when I heard the brewery was shutting down after 350 years.
Speaking of ordering drinks in a bar, I think this may have been mentioned already (maybe even by me!), but something I see all the time that bugs me is: someone orders a drink, then something comes up…not even an emergency, usually. They might just check their watch and say “eh, it’s getting late. I better get going”. Then leave their untouched drink.
WTF? I don’t care if someone says there’s a gas leak in the bar and it’s about to blow up-- I’m finishing that drink I just paid for before I rush out of the building.
Hitmen always take a few seconds to make sure their guns are loaded before they get on with the job. You’d think they’d see to this important detail before they even leave home.
We watch true crime docs pretty consistently. It’s not at all unusual for crime scene investigators to find fired casings AND an unfired round or two at a shooting. It seems likely that the shooter cycled the action even though he/she already had a round chambered. If I were a hitman (and I don’t know where to apply to be one, to be honest). I’d probably double-check or chamber another round myself if i had the time and noise wasn’t a problem.
