Someone else mentioned video game noises–but the thread is kinda long and I don’t remember who right offhand (Ashley Sleepy!)
That bugs the hell outta me, too! Sometimes–I’ll see somebody playing a non-1980’s era videogame on a newer generation piece of hardware–but they always use the same retarded Atari 2600 noises from Pacman or Q-Bert or whatever.
I once saw them use those same 4 beeps while the camera showed the kid playing F-Zero on a Super NES! Don’t they realize how far digital music has come?! Nobuo Uematsu (A Japanese game music composer) has become a celebrity in his own right! The Hollywood Symphony Orchestra is recording a CD with his works on it!
The other thing that bugged me was the “dummied-down” GUIs in computers on-screen. The Sandra Bullock movie “The Net”. (Oh no! The evil computer virus is lowering the screen resolution! Now the graphics are all blocky and pixelized–what will we do?!)
That would be great if it was actually worth laughing at. Beer joke after fat joke after beer joke after fat joke after REALLY bad musical number gets old quick.
The Drew Carry Show has taught me that you can drink beer constantly every single second that you aren’t at work and never show any signs of alcoholism.
And (especially on soaps) everyone has a cell phone, and everybody gets through on their cell phones all the time! They never get a message that the call can’t go through or the caller is outside of the area, even if they are calling Europe.
It’s good to know that someone else appreciates that. Still have no idea why they use Atari noises though.
Secondly, have you noticed the effect being in a TV show or film has on computers? Either
The computer is massively difficult to use and some super hacker is required to do the simplest things (Well it took 3 days of work but I’ve accesed solitaire)
The computer does complex tasks with the click of a mouse (There, after pressing five keys my 2 dimensional drawing has become an animated 3-d model with orchestral backup)
I caught on to this a few years ago and have been ranting to friends and family a lot. I call it the “Continual Degradation of the American Male”. Commercials are the worst about it, with sitcoms being a close second.
It never fails, when the Male is wrong, the Female can harp on it for the full 30 min. BUT… in the rare situation when the Female is wrong, any mention of it is a serious no-no for the Male. OK, I guess that is true to life. Still annoying, though.
Soap opera stuff- If someone is having a drink like coffee, there is NOTHING in the cup. You can look right in there- empty as can be. Why can’t they put some liquid in it??
If you have to get out of bed after sex, you must gather the whole sheet up and walk around with it like a strapless dress. Hello?? Bathrobe???
Along the lines of the husband knowing nothing and the wife pointing it out. Now the dads know nothing and the kids are pointing it out. I’m tired of listening to these stupid 4 year olds tell their fathers about the nutritional value of frickin Cheerios. Doesn’t happen.
And how come every single computer you see in every TV show or movie has to be a Mac? Even in the awesome movie Office Space, the main character was running a Mac to debug code for Y2K. At one point in the movie he closes all his programs and returns to a C:> prompt. I’d like to know how that works…
I’m hesitant to post this–not wanting to piss anyone off or be too far off OP.
But…If you’re not a regular cast member and you find yourself being beamed down with Worf, Data, Ryker and Troi…um, you ain’t coming back.
Reminds me of this serial that I once watched. The good guys and the bad guys were having a gun fight…and the good guy was hiding behind a chain link fence as he was shooting!
I totally agree about the computer things that have been mentioned.
Computers are alternately shown as magical boxes that allow anyone to find any information in seconds, or as so sophisticated that only a super-genius “hacker” can do the simplest things.
Not only that, but it seems that the large majority of people on TV have Macs. I’m not a Mac-basher (usually, hehe) but come on! Don’t the majority of all computer users have PCs with Windows 9x installed?
Note how every machine on TV/movies has no noticable delay of any sort. Viewing a webpage? snaps fingers There it is, in less than a second. Opening a program? snap There it is! Booting up the machine? snap Again, just a matter of seconds. Downloading an MP3, or some other file? Less than a minute. I refuse to believe that so many people have a computer so much better than mine! (Not to mention that they apparantly have personal T1 lines.) grumble grumble
Not to mention when someone is shown using a flat-screen monitor, especially college kids. Even a 13-inch one of those things costs more than my entire system did!
RE: timing on soap operas. That’s cause they never really know when the cutting room is going to switch scenes. So, you end up doing a scene that may be 15 pages long, but will be chopped up into 7 different bits, so instead of a natural pause 'tween your lines and the other persons, you have these pregnant (sts) pauses.
But, the one thing that always fries me on cop shows: Cop goes to interview some one at their work/home, whatever. Phone will ring. IT’s for the cop.
I want to see another Naked Gun movie use this: Drebin goes to interview witness. Phone rings, it’s for him. Goes to lunch. Phone rings, it’s for him. He’s stuck in traffic, car phone in car next one over rings, it’s for him. He’s in line at the theater, cell phone of person next to him rings, it’s for him. He goes home, phone rings, it’s a wrong number.
They were probably able to afford it because Paul was a generally-out-of-work documentary filmmaker - and you know they make a lot of money - and Jamie was able to support them by becoming a full-time student at NYU. It totally added up.
Oh, and although the “Friend’s” apartment always irritated me, it was revealed on the “Joey and the Janitor Ballroom Dancing” episode that it’s actually an illegal rent-controlled sublet from Monica’s grandmother, which is how they can afford it with only Rachel’s coffee bar tip money. So they at least bothered to explain that two seasons in…
Other things (these from soap operas):
Constantly and redundantly state the full name and relationship of everyone in each conversation: “Joe, as you know you are my brother, and ever since we signed the contract to hire our sister Susie on as Web designer for our family’s company, Jabot Cosmetics, I’ve been thinking…”
A swimming pool is never to be used. You simply sit near the corner of it and let the light reflecting off the unseen water shine onto your face.
The sunlight at the beach is exactly the same as the light inside your house - too bright for indoors and too dim for outdoors.
Although you live in a palacial mansion, you spend all of your time in just one room, generally the living room.
When alone, always read aloud what you’re typing, or else type in such a way that the characters appear in a perfectly regular fashion, without errors and at constant speed, as the camera points at the computer screen screen.
From movies:
No matter what happens to it - slogged through mud, dropped in a pool, carried in the mouth of a dog - the floppy disk carrying the secret formula will always work whenever inserted into the nearest computer - IBM, Mac, Atari 2600, whatever.
You would probably be a bit more irritated if they used your phone number in a tv show or movie, and every moron in your area code that saw the show decided to dial that number.
That’s why the phone company set aside one exchange expressly for the entertainment industry to use. Sure, they could have used numbers that were not all in the same exchange, but what if a soap star said xxx-5194 instead of xxx-5195?
And area codes don’t work either - only certain areas require 10 digit dialing. It would be unrealistic for people in other areas to state an area code.
The never-reloading-in-westerns phenomenon is simple: it’d make for boring lulls in the action. Everybody swap magazines in auto pistols, and Dirty Harry uses his speedloaders, but with a Colt single-action revolver, it’s one round at a time:
flip open little gate on the side of the gun
insert cartridge
turn cylinder 1/6 turn
repeat 2. & 3. five more times
close little gate
fire
It takes forever (time is relative–see below*). It is shown in the gunfight at the end of the made-for-TV Purgatory on TNT, though; lots of shooting, then everybody ducks behind a building and reloads, then jump out and start shooting again.
*–In Vietnam, my dad thought he was taking too long (several seconds) to reload his M16 in firefights…then the guys told him he was firing again before the empty magazine hit the ground.
This is more true about soap operas, but I have noticed it on sitcoms as well: 95% of all the people on these shows are blonde. virtually every woman is blonde. there are usually what? 20-25 regular cast members on a soap, split roughly down the middle. So out of 12 or 13 women, say 11 of them are blonde. Not as many men, but a good majority of them tend to be fair haired or even having blonde highlights. In fact, they all seem to have the same hue and shade of blonde hair without even the smallest variation in coloring.
I realize that’s a small matter in the big picture (compared to say, the fact that 99.999999999% of soap and sitcom casts are causcasian/white), but it happens on such a dispropotionately high level that it can’t be an accident. do producers favor blonde actresses or actors for parts, and if so, why do they insist on perpetuating such an unrealistic aryan image?