Tape recorders had counters on them. Rewind it to “103” or whatever, and you hit the right spot. A friend of mine did a scene from a play in drama class, where he listened and talked back to recordings on a tape player, and had to hit the right spot several times. He had numbers on a list on the table in front of him, and was very sneaky about looking at it. It really appeared that he was randomly stopping it in places.
I assume that murder suspects take the stand on TV far more than IRL.
Somebody upthread mentioned how when overhead lights are turned on in an industrial or warehouse setting there’s a loud noise involved with it for some reason (I don’t know how to search within a thread and this has gotten too big to scroll though to find it).
Anyway, I just saw this on a show we started watching called “The Head” on HBO Max. People helicopter to a research station in the Antarctic after the dark winter is over. Communication to the outside world had been mysteriously lost with the 10 people who overwintered 3 weeks before. (I don’t think this is a spoiler since it happens early in the first episode, but I’ll blur it just in case). When they get to the station they have to get the generator going again-- they show a hallway with banks of ordinary looking fluorescent lights in the dropped ceiling-- behind translucent plexiglass panels, like an ordinary office light setup. When the generator came on they lit up one by one down the hall, and they did so with a loud dramatic “WHOOMP! WHOOMP! WHOOMP!” sound. Uhh, fluorescents don’t do that-- they buzz a little when coming on, if anything. They also wouldn’t come on sequentially, they’d all flicker on at once.
Somewhere in the remote history of Hollywood, a Foley artist recorded a prison cell door closing and thought, “That sounds just like a light coming on!”
I believe that’s the notorious “Aunt Jemima Treatment.”
Once again, it depends.
A typical wall switch isn’t hefty enough to control and entire warehouse full of lights. So, the switch is used to control a contactor, which does the high-current switching. New ones are pretty quiet, but older designs could be very, very loud. I’ve jumped when a contactor I was standing next to closed, because I thought that something in the panel exploded.
This may very well be true and counter the original post I referred to, but in my specific example it was pretty silly, because as I said they looked like groups of ordinary office-style fluorescent lights, and it was the repeating sound of individual banks of lights turning on in a row down the hall, not the sound of a big switch being flipped.
Sure. Just like how when a city is shown experiencing a power failure, it fails in “chunks.” I think that the whole area with t power failure will go off at once.
No, I’m pretty sure that involves pancake mix and syrup and high heat, not spatulas.
Right, exactly!
That’s what I was going to say- battery technology is pretty ancient stuff for the most part, but the electrical circuitry in cars is a lot more advanced than it used to be. Back in the day, if your battery wasn’t putting out the nominal 12 volts (13.8 actually), it would still try to start- you might have been able to start your car with say… 11 volts or something like that. So it would crank slowly, etc… but still start- that’s the old style warning signs.
Now there’s probably something in there that prevents the car from working if the voltage is below some specific voltage. Probably not really something to do with the starter itself, but more likely with the electronic ignition or engine computers needing specific voltage to work properly.
So your car will start fine, until the voltage drops below that threshold, and then it’s dead as a doornail, or so it appears. In reality, it may be making 11.8 volts or something just a hair lower than the day before.
Keeping the same furniture in the same spot for years.
What, you don’t do that? I figure, once you’ve found the optimal position for all the furniture, why change?
My parents, grandparents, and in-laws never once moved their furniture over the course of decades. We moved into a new house when I was around 11. They sold it when I was around 25. Nothing changed in those 14 years.
My wife, on the other hand…
Yeah - movie geography in general can be pretty amazing.
A friend and I went to a test screening of Admissions (Tina Fey, Paul Rudd) and one feedback we both gave was that the moviemakers seemed to think that Princeton, and somewhere in New Hampshire, could be travelled in an hour or two of driving. It’d be a minimum of 5 hours and then only if traffic was nonexistent.
Deep Impact had numerous errors that even I spotted (Richmond is nowhere near the beaches) and IMDB cites others.
Bones (TV series) had the cast travelling to all sorts of terrains that do not exist in the same time zone as Washington, DC.
It’s rarely the defendant/suspect - its always the brother/sister/spouse/mistress of the dead person that has framed the suspect/defendant.
If I’m ever asked to testify by Matlock - I will not take the stand - no way no how.
I saw another one and thought of this thread:
People losing a loved one and then having ongoing realistic hallucinations of that person. Not dreams or “I forgot for a moment that she was gone and thought I saw her” sort of things, but full conversations. I can think of at least a few examples just off the top of my head, not even counting ones where something supernatural or sci-fi really is going on and the person is actually a ghost/clone/computer interface/zombie.
I know, say, if someone has Alzheimer’s, that they will sometimes think people are alive when they aren’t, but I’ve never known it to happen in the movie sense where someone goes about their regular everyday life and then also chit-chats/argues/has sex with the image of their deceased loved one when nobody else is looking.
The sheer amount of crimes done by criminals with fully automatic weapons in American fiction. Yes, it’s possible to acquire a full-auto or modify a semi-auto but it’s so much easier to just use a “normal” semi-auto. Even people in real life who deliberately wanted to use guns in terror attacks like the Las Vegas shooter had to use a weird work around to get an automatic-like fire rate (bump stock) than actually procuring or modifying a gun to be full auto.
Hypnagogic hallucinations. Happen mostly when you’re waking up, perhaps when you’re going to sleep or are drunk. Not so much when you’re in the kitchen making dinner or buying stuff at a store.
Has anyone mentioned this? Some frightful mysterious power (used to be nuclear radiation, then UFO’s, and in the 1970’s - toxic waste) rearranges someone’s MOLECULAR STRUCTURE and they become a incredibly strong monster that seeks out scantily clad young women - or a superhero who rescues scantily clad young women.
I expect to see a new rush of these plots based upon transformation by virus. What we fear becomes the magical power.