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My Lovely Horse posted:A classic: Travis' mohawk in Taxi Driver is a Vietnam war thing. Special forces would cut their hair that way just before going on serious assignments. If you were a regular grunt and you saw a guy with a mohawk, you'd steer well clear cause that guy was about to get into some serious poo poo. Except Special Forces is the Army and Travis was a Marine.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:11 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 18:47 |
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Why point out exactly one dated reference in Blazing Saddles and have that reference not be Hedley Lamarr's name and everyone getting it wrong? because i find myself saying it sometimes when im surprised lol
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 22:54 |
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SimonCat posted:Except Special Forces is the Army and Travis was a Marine.
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# ? Oct 13, 2019 12:04 |
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My Lovely Horse posted:I mean, okay, but that's the stated production reason for the haircut. Might not have been Special Forces, maybe I'm mixing things up in my head. Force Recon, which is pretty much the Marine version of Special Forces.
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# ? Oct 14, 2019 12:22 |
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MightyJoe36 posted:Force Recon, which is pretty much the Marine version of Special Forces. LoL, no. Not even close in level of training and expertise.
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# ? Oct 14, 2019 13:49 |
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For the purposes of a movie, close enough.
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# ? Oct 14, 2019 13:55 |
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Why point out exactly one dated reference in Blazing Saddles and have that reference not be Hedley Lamarr's name and everyone getting it wrong? I only know her as 'Hey, remember that actress referenced in Blazing Saddles? Here's an article about how she invented a guidance systems for torpedos in WWII' My Lovely Horse posted:A classic: Travis' mohawk in Taxi Driver is a Vietnam war thing. Special forces would cut their hair that way just before going on serious assignments. If you were a regular grunt and you saw a guy with a mohawk, you'd steer well clear cause that guy was about to get into some serious poo poo. I think that's a good reference and thanks for the explanation. I'd come to associate that haricut as a 'Travis Bickle' haircut and not get the reference to Vietnam, And I don't think it matters whether he was actually SF or not. It's part of the uniform that he is dressing himself up in before the final scene and illustrates his mindset and how he is preparing for actual battle.
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# ? Oct 14, 2019 14:01 |
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Anne Whateley posted:There's so much Agatha Christie where the linchpin is like "as everyone knows, the train to Essex runs only on the half-hour!!!" This reminded me of one infuriating line from The Seven Dials Mystery in which the main character is introduced. Her name is Lady Eileen Brent, but everyone calls her Bundle, "for obvious reasons."
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# ? Oct 15, 2019 14:26 |
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spacing in vienna posted:This reminded me of one infuriating line from The Seven Dials Mystery in which the main character is introduced. Her name is Lady Eileen Brent, but everyone calls her Bundle, "for obvious reasons." I googled this real quick to find answers, and instead got a wikipedia article that says another character is called Codders "because of his eyes."
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# ? Oct 15, 2019 22:28 |
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There are several episodes of I Love Lucy whose central plot conceit is based on Lucy recieving an allowance from her husband.
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# ? Oct 16, 2019 16:24 |
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:There are several episodes of I Love Lucy whose central plot conceit is based on Lucy recieving an allowance from her husband. Speaking of I Love Lucy, there's an episode where they have to take the New York City subway, and Ethel is aghast that Lucy would suggest she go on the subway in her blue jeans. When I was a kid I thought it was because people used to dress up to take public transportation, but now I'm pretty sure a lot of it was due to the fact that women wearing pants in public (as opposed to a dress) was frowned upon. Still, the idea that there was a dress code of any sort for going on the NYC subway system is crazy compared to today.
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# ? Oct 16, 2019 16:46 |
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I was reading an old book that mentioned "Macaulay's schoolboy" for someone who knew a lot of esoteric stuff. Macaulay was a 19th century historian, who often included the phrase "as every schoolboy knows," usually followed by something that most history teachers don't actually know. I suspect it was just an excuse for him not to look up a citation. But the point is that any schoolboy who knows everything Macaulay says he knows would be the king of the nerds. But no one reads Macaulay anymore, so no one's heard of his schoolboy.
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# ? Oct 16, 2019 19:37 |
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spacing in vienna posted:This reminded me of one infuriating line from The Seven Dials Mystery in which the main character is introduced. Her name is Lady Eileen Brent, but everyone calls her Bundle, "for obvious reasons." I always assumed that was a deliberate joke about upper-class Brits acquiring stupid nicknames in early childhood and/or boarding school and just going by them indefinitely.
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# ? Oct 16, 2019 21:56 |
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It's because she's a bundle of energy.
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# ? Oct 17, 2019 14:52 |
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In Superman (1978), Clark rushes to find a pay phone and stops because it's an modern one without a booth. I don't think actual phone booths exist much anymore (the last one I used was in the 1990's) so the joke might be lost on younger people. Anything with public phones is going to confuse the heck out of people born in the last 10 years.
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# ? Oct 17, 2019 19:54 |
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Nevermind the actual phones on screen, is the whole thing about Superman changing in phone booths even still that much in the public conscious anymore?
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# ? Oct 18, 2019 10:23 |
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I don't think it is. I always wondered as a kid how he was managing to change that fast in such a small space without banging his elbows on the sides, though (and then accidentally destroying the booth).
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# ? Oct 18, 2019 11:16 |
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Applewhite posted:See also: the floppy disk “save” icon, the handset phone shaped “phone” symbol and TV icons with rabbit ear antennas. This reminded me of a story from a superintendent on a boarding school of sorts, where a student came into the office, noticed a floppy disc laying around, and was like "why'd you 3D-print the save icon?"
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# ? Oct 18, 2019 11:52 |
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My Lovely Horse posted:Nevermind the actual phones on screen, is the whole thing about Superman changing in phone booths even still that much in the public conscious anymore? The Deadpool 2 teaser referenced it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVJX7jTIPsc
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# ? Oct 18, 2019 11:56 |
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duckmaster posted:When one of the passengers has another cup of coffee and his wife thinks to herself, "Jim never has a second cup of coffee at home...", this is a reference to a Yubon coffee commercial from the same time period which used the same line (implying that her husband has a cup of coffee away from home because it's Yubon and their coffee at home is undrinkable). That then becomes a running joke through the film, "Jim is never sick at home..." etc. At the end of Falling Hare with Bugs Bunny the plane runs out of gas and he says "You know how it is with these A cards" Those were stickers people had to put in their car window during ww2. It meant you could only get 4 gallons of gas per week.
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# ? Oct 28, 2019 13:20 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKcpodt0YCU "I've got a brand new pair of roller skates, you've got a brand new key." I'm just old enough to remember having a pair of metal skates that went around my shoes as a kid. They'd clamp on, and you would use a key to tighten them. Another thing is any mention from old movies or TV about "Green Stamps." Many stores particularly grocery would give you trading stamps when you bought something, instead of coupons or member cards. The most popular were S&H Green Stamps, although there were others (I think I remember one called GreenBax). You'd collect them and paste them into books, and when you had enough you could take them to a redemption center and trade them for stuff ranging from jewelry, small electronics, or bigger stuff (which was almost impossible to get that many stamps). I remember trading them in for a electric alarm clock. They faded away sometime in the early eighties. That makes me remember, Tube Testers! Back when TV's had vacuum tubes, many people would fix their own TV's. Since the vacuum tubes were the most frequent things to fail, there were tube tester kiosks in just about every drug store or grocery store. You'd bring your suspect tubes, plug them into sockets on the kiosk and press a button, and the analog readout would tell you if the tube was bad or not. I remember going there with my Dad many times.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 00:45 |
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Oh god, tube testers. Having to spin the little wheel to match up the tube to the settings. "Knob A goes to setting 3, knob B to 6, knob C to 1, volts to 2.8" etc.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 02:00 |
Applewhite posted:William Gibson discusses it in newer editions of Neuromancer. The famous opening line "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" has almost become a lost reference. Younger readers may picture a steady, solid blue of a flatscreen with no input rather than the ominous, turbulent gray of CRT static. Unrelated to the thread topic, but anybody who likes sci-fi should check out the intro in question. Gibson talks about the difficulty of future-proofing your version of the future, leaving you with a story world that is crazy advanced in some ways, except whoops the author didn't foresee portable computer phones with high-speed internet access becoming ubiquitous within 3 decades, which would have trivialized some big problem the protagonist had. It's an interesting problem for sci-fi authors.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 02:27 |
The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror IV" has several of these - more than one of which would have been lost on a lot of the audience at the time. First, and most obviously, the framing story is heavily inspired by the Rod Serling show Night Gallery, which didn't have nearly the cultural impact of The Twilight Zone and is fairly obscure as a result. The middle segment (Terror at 5 1⁄2 Feet) being based on an original Twilight Zone episode ("Nightmare at 20,000 Feet") is also an example, although you don't have to realize that it is a reference to get the story. Third, there's a segment during the middle of the episode where Bart tries to inform Otto that "there is a gremlin on the side of the bus", only for Otto to see Moleman driving along and ram him off the road. Moleman was driving a (helpfully labeled) AMC Gremlin, a model of car that was last manufactured in 1978 by a now-long-extinct manufacturer.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 02:27 |
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SimonCat posted:LoL, no. Not even close in level of training and expertise. Force Recon was dissolved in 2005 and turned into MARSOC which falls under the Special Operations Command umbrella.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 06:01 |
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Nostalgia4Ass posted:Force Recon was dissolved in 2005 and turned into MARSOC which falls under the Special Operations Command umbrella. Did you know that a marine fresh from boot camp has the same training as an Army Ranger?
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 11:19 |
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SimonCat posted:Did you know that a marine fresh from boot camp has the same training as an Army Ranger? Wow! This isn't true either.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 15:47 |
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Nostalgia4Ass posted:Wow! This isn't true either. Did you know most boot Marines believe it is?
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 18:37 |
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SimonCat posted:Did you know most boot Marines believe it is? Strangely enough, this also isn't true.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 18:43 |
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Your slap fight over a haircut is totally worth making GBS threads up a cool thread over, thanks
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 19:12 |
Kilroy Was Here. I was a kid in the 80s watching Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon and I just kept on seeing that in so many places. Back then I had to ask my dad what it was. It was lost on modern audiences before we were really a modern audience Also another good one, in Wargames, Matthew Broderick's computer had a LOT of references that were ultramodern at the time but lost by the early 90s, e.g. acoustic coupler modems and the external box sound card thingy. Maybe more about an older-media reference lost today, the use of the phrase "pinko" without some form of referencing it to being communist would probably cause head-scratching and googling. Maybe even WITH referencing communists.
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# ? Oct 29, 2019 20:12 |
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MJP posted:Maybe more about an older-media reference lost today, the use of the phrase "pinko" without some form of referencing it to being communist would probably cause head-scratching and googling. Maybe even WITH referencing communists. This makes me wonder if the reference could maybe shift its target while still retaining the same general direction. "Pink-haired SJW" is a pejorative meme on the right. I could see someone hearing "pinko", not getting the reference to communists, and still end up being mad at roughly the same people.
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# ? Oct 30, 2019 17:16 |
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Tree Bucket posted:I googled this real quick to find answers, and instead got a wikipedia article that says another character is called Codders "because of his eyes." Codders is because he has googly fishy eyes like a codfish. Dudes basically got the innsmouth look.
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# ? Oct 30, 2019 20:34 |
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I saw WarGames as a kid and was confused by a scene where Matthew Broderick does a little payphone hack to make a call for free https://youtu.be/zkMX4s6ZstQ I had to ask my dad at the time because I had never heard of this trick but apparently it likely wouldn't have worked at the time the movie was made either. Theres of course the added layer now that today payphones basically don't exist.
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# ? Oct 31, 2019 05:44 |
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And additionally, of course, he uses a discarded pull tab.
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# ? Oct 31, 2019 08:42 |
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Baseball's got a ton of these.quote:can of corn
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# ? Nov 1, 2019 03:11 |
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RagnarokAngel posted:I saw WarGames as a kid and was confused by a scene where Matthew Broderick does a little payphone hack to make a call for free Possibly the only youtube comment that isn't utterly worthless: quote:Hicken65
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# ? Nov 1, 2019 17:05 |
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Schweinhund posted:it was also the same actress from the commercial Here's the actual commercial if people are interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ4kCF22O2w
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# ? Nov 2, 2019 21:43 |
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Applewhite posted:See also: the floppy disk “save” icon, the handset phone shaped “phone” symbol and TV icons with rabbit ear antennas. Yeah it blew my mind recently when I found out the 25 year old I work with knew the save symbol but has never used floppy discs. Maybe also the SMS tone being in morse code?
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# ? Nov 3, 2019 21:23 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 18:47 |
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inokichi posted:Maybe also the SMS tone being in morse code? what sms tone?
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# ? Nov 4, 2019 00:16 |