It’s really funny when the “mysterious power” is something like a computer, which was terribly exotic pre-1980, or so. Getting an electrical shock near a computer used to give you strange computer based powers, but now it just gives you a momentary owwie.
And fries the computer, causing a loss of some critical information. The rest of the plot is trying to find the now-reclusive genius who worked for the company from 1960-1990, and knows the information (and reveals that the searchers had it all the time-- it was in a cabinet next to the computer on a 5.25" floppy), or to locate the notebook, or whatever, where someone committed the info to writing-- or even the small out-of-network device that contains the information.
Oh, and not to mention, practically every TV show that was on air from 1972-1982 has an episode where someone gets an outrageous bill that was computer-generated, and when they go to complain, the employee in charge insists that the computer does not make mistakes.
Alternately, someone may be declared dead, drafted, deported, etc., due to a computer spitting out a letter to that effect, and “the computer does not make mistakes.”
Lou Grant (a show I loved unconditionally, FWIW) had an episode where a power failure wiped out the memory of the server and all the storage entirely-- apparently it was still bootable, but all user-generated content, which is to say, every story anyone was working on, was gone. I was not actually clear whether people were not hitting “save” often enough, or the power failure somehow selectively deleted all non-OS data, and no one was saving to floppies.
The message was clear, though: can’t trust these flippin’-flappin’, new-fangled contraptions! Hrumph!
I believe that was also the episode where one of the older reporters refused to use an electronic word processor (a VDT in the day) and, when the power outage occurred, one lone typewriter was heard pecking through the darkness. Somehow this one instance was supposed to validate all the extra time composition staffers had had to spend typesetting this guy’s work because of his obstinacy.
A luddite way of thinking that was much more prevalent at the time.
That was it.
Anyone else giving up on Grey’s Anatomy for this sin? This week they had two people in comas/fugue states, and almost the ENTIRE episode was their hallucinations. The main character’s been talking to people who are dead for months now.
It’s really lazy writing… “Hey, we don’t have to show this character’s moral conflict, we’ll just have them explain it to their dead boyfriend…”
This example is less egregious than others that have been cited, but I’m reminded of the movie Bring it On. The main character is a white girl who has just been chosen as the new captain of her San Diego high school’s competitive cheer team. The newest member of the squad, who just transferred from a school in inner-city Los Angeles, storms out in disgust during practice when she realizes this team’s routines were stolen from her old school’s cheer team, a talented group of mostly black girls who have never been able to afford to go to the competitions those rich white girls from San Diego have sweeped year after year. The new girl does realize the brand-new captain wouldn’t have known this, as it was her predecessor who did the stealing, and she decides to show rather than tell her. So we see them getting onto the I-5 N ramp, presumably mid-afternoon on a weekday, heading for a destination some 100-150 miles away…
OK, it might be doable. I’ve done more or less the same drive myself several times, though I try to aim for early morning or late night when there’s less traffic-- that can mean the difference between a 3+ hour and a mere ~2 hour drive. If school let out at, say, 2:20, cheer practice began at 2:30, and new girl stormed out at 2:45, they could be getting on the freeway by 3, and make it to LA in time to see the cheerleaders rallying the crowd at an evening basketball game. But for a SoCal native like me, the length of that drive wasn’t something that just occurred to me after the fact; it took me out of the narrative at the time I saw it. I just kept picturing the hours of awkward suspense:
Captain: Uh, so, where are you taking me?
New girl: You’ll see.
Captain: (seeing signs for Orange County) Well, like, do you think we’ll be home for dinner? Because I should probably call my mom… and the rest of the girls on the squad, who we left standing around in the middle of practice…
Yeah, the FBI sez that like 2 or 4% of murders are committed by rifles of all sorts, from lever action deer rifles to AR15s converted to fully auto.
On TV, and in movies, it’s very common for rooms to be divided by beaded curtains. I have never seen anything like that IRL.
i did once but it was more like a closet/storage room in my bosses bedroom cause thats where she kept the boxes of used video games we sold out of her house and swap meet and since she was wheelchair bound it was easier to have those than an actual curtain/drape …
I haven’t seen anything like that since the mid-70’s. I think it used to be more common than it is now.
Yes, this was seriously common in the early 70s. It was a “hippie” thing. My parents were a little too old, having been born in 1940 (m) and 1930 (f), but I had friends whose parents were flower children, and had these in their homes. I also had babysitters (I was born in 1967) who were college students in the early 70s, who had these. Usually babysitters came to us, but once in a while, I’d be dropped off with them, so I’d see their “pads.”
“Shared space” was a thing. Having a doorway without an actual door, so that it was more welcoming to visitors was a thing. My brother went to an intermediate school, the edifice of which was built in 1970, and it was all “open” spaces, because, 1970. None of the rooms had doors, and the rooms didn’t even have full walls-- all the walls stopped so there was an open foot or so at the top of every one, and many were foldable walls, so you could have a bigger room, and teachers could “team teach.” My brother said there was always a problem with noise-- you couldn’t hear your own teacher over all the noise coming in from other classes.
I’ve never seen that on TV or in real life. But then, I’m of an older generation, and I think my mother would have taken one look and said “One more bloody thing to dust” .
Back in the 60’s & 70’s it was fairly common. No longer.
Back in the '70s, I was briefly a housemate of a trio who had an “unconventional” lifestyle, and my room was separated from one of the male’s by a drape. I was sometimes woken in the morning by the sounds of him boffing the other guy’s wife or one of his several paramours.
I won’t go into details here, but the thought of possibly being invited to participate in a ménage gave me the willies! 
Non-Blockbuster video stores used to have the separate room with the adult videos, separated by beads in the doorway-- to allow for easy comings and goings of customers while having the salacious covers be somewhat hidden from the kiddies. Sometimes they’d be those swinging Western saloon-style doors but most often beads. This was a thing probably into the 90s.
At least, that’s what I heard was in that mysterious room behind the beaded doorway 
I realize now this is bad phrasing. What I meant was “one of his several paramours, who included the other guy’s wife.”
You could always tell when a session had ended. The trio had a big mutt whose head would snap around as the women came down the stairs trailing pheromones. Ew! 
I had a beaded curtain hanging across the door to my dorm room in college. I thought it was really hip. In reality, it was kind of a pain in the ass. You’d sometimes get slightly tangled in it while crossing the doorway, or you’d drag part of it along with you and then it would swing around and hit things.
I think this has pretty much died out now that people are more familiar with computers, but in the, I guess, 1960s through the 1990s, every shot of a computer in a movie showed multiple tape drives, with the reels of tape rotating back and forth. This was often used to indicate that the computer was “working”. I guess they were Turing machines.
At least actual 60s mainframe computers did use tape reels:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html
Whereas a lot of old tv and movie computers used to have rows and rows of colored rectangular lights that flashed seemingly at random, and didn’t have any actual purpose as far as I know, like a lot of the comuters in this article:
Oh sure, I used many computers with tape drives during that period. But tape drives are used to get data into and out of the computer. They shouldn’t be rotating back and forth while the computer is processing something. And they normally rotate in one direction; if they’re moving back and forth, someone laid out the data on the tape very poorly.