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SimonCat
Aug 12, 2016

by Nyc_Tattoo
College Slice

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.

It's well documented and there's even a bit on the wikipedia page. Still, you'd probably think Travis gave himself a punk haircut.

Except Special Forces is the Army and Travis was a Marine.

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20 Blunts
Jan 21, 2017

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?

(or do people still know who Hedy Lamarr is these days?)

because i find myself saying it sometimes when im surprised lol

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

SimonCat posted:

Except Special Forces is the Army and Travis was a Marine.
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. :shrug:

MightyJoe36
Dec 29, 2013

:minnie: Cat Army :minnie:

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. :shrug:

Force Recon, which is pretty much the Marine version of Special Forces.

SimonCat
Aug 12, 2016

by Nyc_Tattoo
College Slice

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.

MightyJoe36
Dec 29, 2013

:minnie: Cat Army :minnie:
For the purposes of a movie, close enough.

Shut up Meg
Jan 8, 2019

You're safe here.

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?

(or do people still know who Hedy Lamarr is these days?)

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.

It's well documented and there's even a bit on the wikipedia page. Still, you'd probably think Travis gave himself a punk haircut.

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.

spacing in vienna
Jan 4, 2007

people they want us to fall down
but we won't ever touch the ground
we're perfectly balanced, we float around
til no one is here, do you hear the sound?


Lipstick Apathy

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."

:argh:

Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys

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."

:argh:

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."

:argh: :argh:

BIG FLUFFY DOG
Feb 16, 2011

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.


There are several episodes of I Love Lucy whose central plot conceit is based on Lucy recieving an allowance from her husband.

LifeLynx
Feb 27, 2001

Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time
Grimey Drawer

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.

Hobologist
May 4, 2007

We'll have one entire section labelled "for degenerates"
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.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

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."

:argh:

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.

Disappointing egg
Jun 21, 2007

It's because she's a bundle of energy.

Krispy Wafer
Jul 26, 2002

I shouted out "Free the exposed 67"
But they stood on my hair and told me I was fat

Grimey Drawer
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.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

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?

tinytort
Jun 10, 2013

Super healthy, super cheap
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).

Tias
May 25, 2008

Pictured: the patron saint of internet political arguments (probably)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

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?"

Shut up Meg
Jan 8, 2019

You're safe here.

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

Schweinhund
Oct 23, 2004

:derp:   :kayak:                                     

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.
it was also the same actress from the commercial



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.

Cerebral Mayhem
Jul 18, 2000

Very useful on the planet Delphon, where they communicate with their eyebrows
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.

Queen Combat
Dec 29, 2017

Lipstick Apathy
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.

Shine
Feb 26, 2007

No Muscles For The Majority

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.

Gnoman
Feb 12, 2014

Come, all you fair and tender maids
Who flourish in your pri-ime
Beware, take care, keep your garden fair
Let Gnoman steal your thy-y-me
Le-et Gnoman steal your thyme




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.

Hekk
Oct 12, 2012

'smeper fi

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.

SimonCat
Aug 12, 2016

by Nyc_Tattoo
College Slice

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?

Hekk
Oct 12, 2012

'smeper fi

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.

SimonCat
Aug 12, 2016

by Nyc_Tattoo
College Slice

Nostalgia4Ass posted:

Wow! This isn't true either.

Did you know most boot Marines believe it is?

Hekk
Oct 12, 2012

'smeper fi

SimonCat posted:

Did you know most boot Marines believe it is?

Strangely enough, this also isn't true.

Scudworth
Jan 1, 2005

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons, and make super lemons.

Dinosaur Gum
Your slap fight over a haircut is totally worth making GBS threads up a cool thread over, thanks

MJP
Jun 17, 2007

Are you looking at me Senpai?

Grimey Drawer
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 :stare:

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.

wizzardstaff
Apr 6, 2018

Zorch! Splat! Pow!

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.

Pookah
Aug 21, 2008

🪶Caw🪶





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."

:argh: :argh:

Codders is because he has googly fishy eyes like a codfish. Dudes basically got the innsmouth look.

RagnarokAngel
Oct 5, 2006

Black Magic Extraordinaire
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.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

And additionally, of course, he uses a discarded pull tab.

Animal-Mother
Feb 14, 2012

RABBIT RABBIT
RABBIT RABBIT
Baseball's got a ton of these.

quote:

can of corn
A high, easy-to-catch, fly ball hit to the outfield. The phrase is said to have originated in the nineteenth-century and relates to an old-time grocer's method of getting canned goods down from a high shelf. Using a stick with a hook on the end, a grocer could tip a can so it would fall for an easy catch into his apron. One theory for use of corn as the canned good in the phrase is that a can of corn was considered the easiest "catch" as corn was the best selling vegetable in the store and so was heavily stocked on the lowest shelves. Another theory is that the corn refers to the practice in the very early days of baseball of calling the outfield the "corn field", especially in early amateur baseball where the outfield may have been a farm field. Frequently used by Red Barber, a variation, 'A #8 CAN OF GOLDEN BANTAM' was favored by Bob Prince, Pittsburgh Pirates' announcer. The phrase was also used by Yankee announcer Phil Rizzuto and Red Sox and then White Sox broadcaster Ken "The Hawk" Harrelson. Also, a phrase used to refer to something that is not challenging. Informally, can of corn may be used as a phrase to describe mild excitement, personal acknowledgement or recognition of significance.

Shut up Meg
Jan 8, 2019

You're safe here.

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

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.

Possibly the only youtube comment that isn't utterly worthless:

quote:

Hicken65
1 month ago
It seems odd that a 1983 movie depicting events in that time frame would have utilized a 3-slot payphone. The Bell System spent the entire 1970’s decade replacing these with single slot phones. Odder still is the fact that the phone is arranged for prepay service (no dial tone until sufficient change has been deposited). Again the Bell System spent the 1970’s converting to Dial Tone First (DTF) to accommodate free emergency calling, which meant you could reach an operator by dialing zero (or 911 if available) without depositing a coin. What the actor (Matthew Broderick) did would have worked (and often did) in the 1950’s, but by the early 1960’s, the payphones were modified to prevent this type of fraud. It is highly unlikely that an unmodified phone would be in service in the 1980’s. The movie also depicts a PVC or neoprene coiled handset cord. This would have been replaced with an armored cord in the early 1960’s, especially in an isolated outside booth. The handset receiver and transmitter caps were cemented to the handsets, and in my experience would not be broken free by banging the cap on the payphone shelf. Even the Bell repair technicians couldn’t get them off. Their instructions were to replace the entire handset if they discovered a transmitter or receiver problem.

But lets suppose he was able to get the transmitter cap off. Would he be able to get dial tone using the method he did? The answer is yes. Here’s how dial tone is provided in a typical prepay setup. The payphone line is configured in a ground start arrangement. There are two wires connecting the payphone to the central office (CO). These are called the tip and ring. In the idle state, the tip wire is open (electrically dead) at the CO end. The ring wire is connected to one side of a relay winding. The other side of the winding is connected to negative 48-volt battery. This relay is called the line relay and each payphone has its own dedicated line relay. If the ring wire gets grounded at the payphone, the line relay will operate. The operated line relay initiates a sequence of events to occur in the CO that will connect dial tone to the payphone line. The ring wire is normally grounded by the depositing of a coin at the payphone. The coin drops down into the hopper (a coin storage bin) where it hits the hopper trigger, deflecting it downwards. The deflected trigger closes a pair of contacts. One of these contacts is connected to ground and the other contact is connected to the payphone circuitry, which provides a path to the ring wire. The grounded ring wire causes the line relay to operate and a dial tone request is initiated. Both the handset receiver and transmitter form part of the payphone circuit path that leads to the ring wire. By removing a cap and taking out the receiver or transmitter, the contacts for these devices are exposed. Grounding any of these contacts will result in that ground reaching the ring wire and operating the line relay. So grounding these contacts bypasses the normal ground path through the deflected trigger contacts. Broderick removes the transmitter unit to expose the two transmitter contacts. He finds a piece of metal, a pull-tab from a can, and connects one side to one of the transmitter contacts and the other side to the payphone housing security lock. The housings of all payphones are grounded. This is done to protect the payphone users from foreign voltages that reach the payphone via its tip and ring wires (this includes such things as crosses with electrical utilities or lightning strikes). The housing ground passes through the pull-tab, through the transmitter contact and on to the ring wire. The line relay operates and he hears dial tone through the handset receiver, replaces the transmitter unit, screws the transmitter cap back on and proceeds to dial his call.

Broderick would have been able to get dial tone, but would not have been able to use the rotary dial. Another fraud prevention mechanism built into these phones since the late 1950’s was a short circuit across the dial pulsing contacts. This was performed by a normally closed set of contacts associated with the hopper trigger. This short circuit was only removed when the hopper trigger was deflected by the deposit of a coin. So when Broderick started dialing, he wouldn’t be able to break dial tone and the call wouldn’t go through.

He could have tried “pulsing” by quickly tapping the handset’s switchhook up and down. However, this is nowhere near as easy as tapping the switchhook on a deskphone. It takes considerable practice to successfully dial a call this way.

Epicurius
Apr 10, 2010
College Slice

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

inokichi
Nov 3, 2005

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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Scudworth
Jan 1, 2005

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons, and make super lemons.

Dinosaur Gum

inokichi posted:

Maybe also the SMS tone being in morse code?

what sms tone?

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