Sgt. Joe Friday catches a paroled convict suspected of shooting a police officer and uses an iconic threat to keep him motionless.
Friday: [brandishing a shotgun] Flinch, and you’ll be chasing your head down Fifth Street!
Dragnet 1967, S1, E11 - “The Shooting”
One of Dragnet’s funniest lines (from The LSD Story episode) albeit not intentionally:
“Marijuana’s the flame, heroin’s the fuse, LSD’s the bomb.”
My hubby and I still say this to each other occasionally.
I quoted something from that at our last game, and no-one knew what I was talking about. sigh
That line was from the 1980s! (May 8, 1989, to be specific - I saw it when it was first broadcast)
“For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn.”
– Twilight Zone (The Monsters are due on Maple Street)
Cons were around long before Star Trek, but the show did introduce them to visual media.
The precise time and place of the first science fiction convention is a matter of some dispute. The idea and form was clearly anticipated in Robert Bloch’s short story about a large convention of writers, “The Ultimate Ultimatum” (Fantasy Magazine, August 1935), “It was a big convention. Lovecraft was there.” Sometime in 1936, a group of British fans made plans to have an organized gathering, with a planned program of events in a public venue in early 1937. However, on October 22, 1936, a group of six or seven fans from New York City, including David Kyle and Frederik Pohl, traveled by train to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where for several hours they visited a similar number of local fans at the house of Milton A. Rothman. They subsequently declared that event to be the first “science fiction convention.”[5] This small get-together set the stage for a follow-up event held in New York, in February 1937, where “30 or 40” fans gathered at Bohemian Hall in Astoria, Queens. Attendees at this event included James Blish, Charles D. Hornig, Julius Schwartz, and Willis Conover. This event came to be known as the “Second Eastern” and set the stage for the successful Third Eastern held in Philadelphia on October 30, 1937, and the subsequent Fourth Eastern held on May 29, 1938, which attracted over 100 attendees to a meeting hall in Newark, NJ and designated itself as “The First National Science Fiction Convention.” It was at this event that a committee was named to arrange the first World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1939; formalizing planning that had begun at the Third Eastern. The “First National”, which included the participation of a number of well-known New York editors and professionals from outside fan circles, was a milestone in the evolution of science-fiction conventions as a place for science-fiction (SF) professionals, as well as fans, to meet their colleagues in person.
Same here!
“Eldrad must live!”
“You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”
The first line of the TV show The Outer Limits is still etched on my mind and it (and the subsequent narration) is a classic.
The first line: There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. All the while the only thing on the screen at the time was a sine wave.
For those interested, here’s the rest: If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly, and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to . . . The Outer Limits.”
Unforgettable. If you’ve never experienced it, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guYkoQLsCgY
Almost two hundred responses and no one has gone for “More cowbell!”
Ah, the Luftwaffe- The Washington Generals of the History Channel. - Homer, The Simpsons
To be fair(ly pedantic), “More cowbell!” isn’t a freestanding line in that sketch. (Though I’d nominate “I got a fever! And the only prescription…is more cowbell!”)
I was going to submit “Submitted for your approval…”, but I wasn’t sure if it qualified as a “scripted fictional line”.
Homer again: “Oh man, we killed Mr. Burns! Mr. Burns is going to be so mad!”
Probably not what you remember, but The Saint’s assistant Hoppy Uniatz once said that his father never knew who his mother was. And it was in the books, not the TV show.
“Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” - David Banner.
I’m pretty sure that line didn’t originatein the comic books.
My favourite Norm-ism:
Woody: Hey, Mr. Peterson! How go things on the road of life?
Norm: I dunno, Woody, I can’t find the on-ramp.
“Vulcans… never bluff.”
The Doomsday Machine
Yes, Prime Minister, “A Conflict of Interest”;
Hacker: Don’t tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country, the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country, the Times is read by the people who actually do run the country, the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country, the Financial Times is read by people who own the country, the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
Sir Humphrey: What about people who read the Sun, Prime Minister?
Bernard: Sun readers don’t care who runs the country as long as she’s got big tits.