When you hear the phrase form ("Person) and the (x)" what does it bring to mind?

Triggered by the thread “Lucy Worsley and the princes in the towers” I automatically thought of Harry Potter titles before thinking of it fitting Indiana Jones titles, too.

  • I think of Harry Potter and The Thing in Question.
  • I think of Indiana Jones and The Thing in Question.
  • I think of a different media/cultural reference.
  • It never brings to mind a reference at at all.
0 voters

If I’m not already well familiar with the name of the person, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll think of it in terms of a band name, such as Buddy Holly and the Crickets or Tami and the Stoat Wranglers.

Lead singer and the sidekicks.

? and the Mysterions
Sam the Sham and the Pharoes.
Tommy James and the Shondelles
Paul Revere and the Raiders

gawd I’m oid…

I thought Lady and the Tramp, might not exactly fit, but that’s what I thought. Then I thought Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox.

Yeah, definitely Lead Singer and the Band Members.

Benny and the jets.

(B-b-Benny! Benny!)

Pop culture: Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers.

From my junior high school days: an 8mm home stop-motion movie that my brother and I made with some friends: “Z Pete and The Incredible Mess”

If it’s [Name] and the [thing], I’m likely to think about Indiana Jones.

But, for [Name] and the [plural group], then, yeah, band names. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, etc.

“Smokey and the Bandit.”
“BJ and the Bear.”

Tripler
“Warren Harding and the Teapot Dome Scandal”

Another vote for Band Name—that was my first thought upon seeing the thread title, before reading the OP.

Two came right away to me:

Beauty and the Beast.

James and the Giant Peach.

My cultural references go back to the Hardy Boys (books, not TV series) and there have been too many different ones over the years for any one to spring to mind. So I voted none at all.

Now that I’ve seen the OP’s examples (and a few of the others in the thread), I’m wondering how common it is to use the “Main Character and the Thing In Question” pattern for the entries in a series of books or movies, and who did it first.

It goes back at least as far as the Danny Dunn books beginning in 1956, although not all of the books in the series have titles that fit that pattern, although most of them do. A few, but by no means all, of the even earlier books about Freddy the Pig have “Freddy and …” titles, and only some of those are “Freddy and the…”

Josie and the Pussycats. :woman_shrugging:

First that came to mind was “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge), but I’m a big fan of fairy tales in general and the Grimm brothers in particular.

Hedwig and the angry inch.

“Title Sequence” from “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

Good movie, that I only ever learned about through a brief mention in another good, obscure movie—James Gunn’s first superhero movie, The Specials, a documentary about the 6th or 7th best superhero team in the world.

I don’t know much about the movie, although I did see it.

I just really liked the quirky name and somehow it stuck with me all these years. Whenever someone mentions getting a freebie [whatever], I always mentally tack on “and the bean”. Which keeps the memory alive.