OK, it’s almost Friday by my watch, which means it’s time for me to commandeer this perfectly good Arbitrary But Fun Friday thing that Michael left unsupervised over there at his shuttered blog. The basic idea was that he’d pose a pop-culture question that was impossible to answer other than by way of personal opinion, such as “Loggins, or Messina?” And then a thread 673 comments long would develop. This was because it was fun, and if you don’t believe me, just look: it’s right there in the name.
Anyhow, I’m stealing bringing the idea to its rightful home because 1) I need to think about something other than canids and because 2) yet again, watching the toob yesterday, I was forced into a sort of cognitive dissonance as punishment for actually knowing something about the world: the video was of a bald eagle, the audio was of a red-tailed hawk. If you don’t know what an eagle sounds like, you think it sounds like a red-tailed hawk, because it’s apparently a federal law that everytime they show an eagle on television they have to dub in a red-tailed hawk cry.
But it’s not just red-tailed hawks and eagles. Oh, no. Filmmakers and TV producers bank on us not knowing anything in several different arenas. Like they assume we’ll fall for the notion that monkeys in the Amazon sound exactly like Australian kookaburras, or that Dustin Hoffman can drive on the west-bound upper deck of the Bay Bridge and end up on the east end of the bridge in The Graduate, or that John Wayne would pass through Monument Valley on his way from St. Louis to Denver. It’s like they assume no one even pays attention to geography, much less the actual natural history of a place.
I think my favorite such movie anomaly was in the film Deep Impact, which — aside from what was certainly one of the most heartfelt and profound performances of Tea Leoni’s career, in which she actually shows mild concern when she discovers the Earth is about to be hit by a comet — includes the Earth being hit by a comet. There’s a hero nerd kid in the movie who lives in DC, and when it’s announced that the impact tsunami is headed straight for the capital — where it expects to be greeted as liberators — said nerd kid hops on his moped and rides westward through massive traffic jams for 45 minutes until he’s in a ponderosa pine forest, in a landscape that looks remarkably like Vail in summer, at sufficient altitude that the mile-high wall of water couldn’t reach him.
Which, unless there’s a new Eddie Bauer’s Ponderosa Pine Experience at the Tyson’s Corner Mall Complex, which is about as far west as one can get from DC by moped in traffic in 45 minutes, is unlikely.
But you’ve probably got another such flub you enjoyed. It doesn’t have to involve natural history or geography, though that second field is rife with possibilities. We could be talking any of the sciences, or any other subject with which you’re familiar that some auteur got hilariously wrong. (There’s that ABC 9/11 special, for instance.) Where’d they mess up their basic research? Share! It’ll be fun. It says so right in the subject line.
Not my catch, but my better half’s: was unable to suspend disbelief to enjoy all the shooting and the techno music in The Matrix because of the utter thermodynamic implausibility of using humans as batteries.
For some reason, the first thing that comes to mind is the fictional “Georgetown” metro stop in No Way Out. It just seems so bizarre to go to all that trouble when they could have used any of the real ones.
And when Costner goes down the escalator he ends up in the Baltimore subway, but that’s understandable, since the Metro system is very uptight about filming.
the Metro system is very uptight about filming.
Well, Tim, I don’t really blame them: they had a lot of cleaning up to do after all those explosions in filming Space: 1999.
Computer flubs, especially the Magical Computer That Can Do Anything, are hardly remarkable. Yet the one in John Carpenter’s 1982 movie _The Thing_ was memorable. A character, having discovered that their camp is being attacked by a shape-shifting alien, sits down at what is apparently a desktop PC and quickly calculates the chance that one of the people has been replaced by an alien, as well as the most probable time for the creature to absorb everyone in the world. And the computer presents this result not as a table of numbers or something, but as a grammatical English sentence. I mean, wow. He must have really been a perfectionist to have bothered with that output formatting:
if (time_to_world_takeover >0) then
print “The world will be taken over in $x hours.”
else
print “The world is safe! The presence of a homocidal alien shapeshifting monster is of merely local concern.”
I’ve probably mentioned my (and probably Joe’s) fave to you already: watching The Duellists, during the hold-your-breath suspenseful climax scene where two guys are stalking each other with intent to kill through a complex of tall grass and ruins in Napoleonic-era France, and having the silence (and the movie-spell) shattered by the song of a strictly-Western-Hemisphere mockingbird.
Not strictly about geography, but certainly geographical: No one in the movie Raising Arizona sounds like he is from anywhere near Maricopa County, and by “anywhere near” I mean “within a 200-mile radius of.”
Those accents could best be described as lying somewhere between “totally fabricated” and “what dweebs from Minnesota might think West Texans sound like.” What they’re doing having characters living in the outskirts of Phoenix speak that way, I don’t know.
Oh, the magic computer. I think my fave was in War Games, where the megasupercomputer spoke in a bad cheap vocorder accent in Matthew Broderick’s bedroom in Seattle because Matthew Broderick had cobbled together a cheap vocorder to do text-to-speech, and then in the top secret hi-tech Cheyenne Mountain SAC HQ, with billions of dollars of black-arts budget and possible dozens of MEGAbytes of RAM in the room, the computer spoke with exactly the same cheap vocorder accent.
Also: After seeing that movie and Jumping Jack Flash, I started to wonder if people in REAL life would dictate to themselves the email they were typing.
Incinsistencies like that are iritating, but the only one I can think of is where a guy tied his tie twice in a german film. But chemists are so often portrayed wrongly in movies that I have long since stopped remembering.
I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska. Pretty much anytime Very Cold Weather is depicted onscreen I must shift my suspension of disbelief into overdrive….
Northern Exposure (set in Alaska, shot in Washington State) was rife with that—which was a pity; you could have some fun with things like ice fog and tires that go square when frozen, etc. They did try some of that I guess—it just never quite rang true.
I’ve mentioned this in other places, but I was really irritated by how in the most recent Pride and Prej with Keira Knightley they represented the Bennets as actually poor, instead of as a quite wealthy family whose daughters would one day be merely shabby genteel when the time came for another branch of the family to inherit their father’s property.
Sure, they weren’t as wealthy as D’Arcy, because he was equivalent to Richard Branson’s billions, but Mr Bennet’s wealth was at least equivalent to several modern millions in assets. Pigs in the house corridors? I don’t think so.
I’m bugged by people in movies running from oh-so-poisonous emperor scorpions (often in the desert of all places), screaming hysterically at milk snakes used as stand-ins for coral snakes and people calling millipedes centipedes or calling tarantulas Tarantel (German for Lycosa tarantula) in nature documentaries - which is usually the fault of the German dubbing. Oooh - and the loud squeaky noises rats, mice and sometimes rabbits make every time they show up on screen.
In Goldeneye (I think) James Bond drives his car through a parking lot in Hamburg, crashes through a window and lands several miles away halfway across the city. Nice one, Mr. Bond.
God, every time I try to explain the bald-eagle/red-tailed-hawk thing, people look at me like I’m crazy.
I’m glad it drives someone else nuts.
Me, I’m a sometime scholar of Islam. I don’t need movies for cognitive dissonance and irritating factual mixups; I have the news.
That, and as someone ho grew up on mythology and Classical lit, I can’t watch shows like Xena, or similar movies. They drive me absolutely up the wall, and it ruins the fun most of the time. (Especially when I’m with my costumer friend, who consistently points out anachronistic fabrics in period films, or that nobody had invented laces yet, etc. Egad.)
1) Cimino’s having the Deer Hunter boys end up in the Cascades after driving a few hours from Western PA. Although it gave him a more “scenic” and “spiritual” deer hunting scene, it was quite jarring in a movie in which he lavished a lot of attention on the details of the mill town. (Although, in fact, they were filmed in Ohio, and at one point an Ohio highway marker is seen.)
2) The ending of Planet of the Apes with a millions-of-years transformed landscape and coastline, and yet a recognizable Statue of Liberty miraculously survives and is exposed via erosion smack dab on the new shoreline.
Good catch on the WarGames voice, never noticed that one.
(So I’ve started to date the person who is now my husband, and I’m trying him out on old hollywood movies, because it’s sorta my thing, and) Mildred Pierce comes storming out of the beach house (because her husband and her daughter were making out inside) in a huge fur coat and flings herself into the big ass road boat of a car, and she’s turning the key and the engine won’t start and I look over to see how he’s taking this, it being pretty much the highest camp moment of pretty much the ur chick movie, and he’s not just engaged, he’s Clearly Indignant, and he says “That’s not what the engine in that car sounds like”
I have since discovered that many classic films in fact contain cars. FYI.
Where to begin. There’s the scenes in Moonstruck where they walk from Little Italy to Brooklyn Heights to Cobble Hill (where the bakery is) as if they are neighboring neighborhoods, without a friggin’ bridge to cross (one of the most beautiful and photographed bridges around, as it happens).
For anachronism problems, my favorite is the way people ride horses in ancient Greece and Rome with stirrups (I think this happens even in “Troy”).
Then there’s the problems with climbing movies, such as the plastic harness buckle breaking at the beginning of Cliffhanger; the weird alpine ascent of El Cap at the beginning of K2, the V20 Tom Cruise move in Mission Impossible, the nitro in Vertical Limit, the bolt belays that rip out in Vertical Limit, the tent at 26,000 feet where you can breathe without any steam or frost in Vertical Limit….
Chris: Surely hero nerd kid was going WEST, not east, hm? Or else he’d have more problems than just failing to find ponderosa pine.
Stormcrow: The mountains in “The Deer Hunter” were always favourites of mine in the “misplaced scenery” category. I was going to mention that one ‘til I saw that you did it first.
So I’ll pick the American flags in “Chariots of Fire”. The movie takes place in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. The American team is there, of course, and there are American flags all over the place. 50-star American flags.
Woo-hoo! The Return of ABF!
One of the 3 episodes, total, I have watched of X-Files concerned “the mysterious Lake Okoboji” in northern Iowa. The lake they showed in the episode was obviously somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—the footage was shot at twilight and featured evergreen-clad mountains rising from the shores. The real Lake Okoboji is basically a glacial indentation on the prairie. It isn’t mysterious in the least.
Continuing with the prairie theme, my other favorite is the depiction of Mankato, MN in Little House on the Prairie. I’ve been to the real Mankato and it isn’t in southern Colorado (or wherever the location was).
Barry, thanks. fixed.
Charles, that was Visalia, CA.
This isn’t exactly a scientific mistake, but it grates on my nerves every damn time.
I love Star Trek (which of course has many awful science problems from which to choose), but hearing William Shatner/Patrick Stewart intone “...to boldly go where no one has gone before!” makes me cringe.
It’s “to go boldly”, people! Did NONE of the writers on the original series have a Strunk and White’s around?
I grew up in Anchorage. Don’t even try to watch ABC’s new “Men in Trees”.
I don’t have one of my own but…
JP Stormcrow said:
“2) The ending of Planet of the Apes with a millions-of-years transformed landscape and coastline, and yet a recognizable Statue of Liberty miraculously survives and is exposed via erosion smack dab on the new shoreline. “
Personally, I love the Spaceballs explanation of that incongruity.
One of my big bugaboos rears its ugly head on almost every medical show—drama or comedy—that I’ve ever seen.
“He’s flatlining! Where’s the defibrillator?”
If he’s flatlining, the defibrillator will just cook the non-beating heart.
Oh man, I just remembered one:
In Jerry Maguire (a film for which I have not yet fully forgiven Cameron Crowe), the Renee Zellweger character is reluctant to ask the Tom Cruise character for a ride home from the airport because she lives “way out” in Manhattan Beach.
Manhattan Beach is all of 6 miles from LAX. Theater goers in nearby Hermosa Beach (where I viewed this movie) were not persuaded.
Most people from Philadelphia don’t call their city “Philly.” The members of the Philadelphia Police force certainly don’t introduce themselves as “Philly PD” like they do on Cold Case.
Please, please folks! Some of us actually work in the industry! These aren’t documentaries, they are works of fiction. Try to find it “fun” to see the tricks being pulled.
(BTW, my favorite thing is listening to the nonsense psychological jargon used to explain somebody’s actions/motivations. Hitchcock’s old movies are full of it. Very funny watching today).
two movies filmed in neighorhoods I lived in at the time:
Another Brooklyn movie - a good movie btw-Smoke, had its fair share of such schisms. Example: the location of the shop was far south Park Slope/Windsor Terrace but at one point William Hurt runs out of the shop and is on a sidewalk that is in reality some 20 blocks north on Seventh Avenue.
And Slacker cuts up Austin like a crazy quilt. People walking down San Gabriel turn a corner and are on Guadalupe and 31st.
But perhaps the ones that startled my attention originally were the apparently unlimited capacity of a six-shot revolver to shoot dozens of rounds in a single scene without reloading.
Those punks were just feelin’ lucky.
My particular pet peeve is with movies that have ridiculous changes that happen in a short period of time so that some apocalyptic scenario can play out in the “near future”. This is in no way limited to cinema. E.g.:
The Strange Days, human have no only mapped the sensory brain to the extent that they can manipulate it, but they’ve also developed a non-invasive method of recording and transmitting these impulses—by the far-future time of the year 2000. For all its flaws, though, this one was at least a pretty good flick.
In Demolition Man, humans have FORGOTTEN HOW TO HAVE SEX in fifty years. There are still people ALIVE from before the moronalypse, and yet no one has sex. NO ONE HAS SEX. A standup comedian leads a ragtag group of rebels? All restaurants are Taco Bell? Working cryogenics? I can accept all of that, but the moment that they try to take away sex is the moment that they realize there are tyrannies no one will submit to, even Americans.
1984, for that matter, posits a world in which massive social upheaval has fused the entire globe into three superstates with no real rivals but themselves, in the massive timespan of less than forty years—the book having been written in 1948.
spyder, I don’t consider the second category you mention an error, really. Like itwasntme points out, it’s part of the business of making a movie, even though it’s hard for us who know those locations to suspend our disbelief. Which is kind of fun…
If the movie has captured my interest in other ways, I’m more than happy to extend as much slack as necessary to explain away certain inconsistencies. And then, if the movie is good enough, I’ll share favorite scenes with those who have also seen the movie. And then realize things like:
Independence Day where you can upload a virus from a Mac to a completely unknown and alien computer that will completely overwhelm all systems throughout the entire fleet. Sheesh.
BTW, I think they fixed the “to go boldly” in the series Enterprise at least at some point. A speech or scene within it.
I’m always willing to vociferously defend the right to freely split infinitives. In fact, I’ve run across one or two beautiful sentences in my time where recasting to unsplit would have utterly destroyed the poetry.
But “to boldly go” is just clunky.
Independence Day where you can upload a virus from a Mac to a completely unknown and alien computer that will completely overwhelm all systems throughout the entire fleet. Sheesh.
Not only that, but: Why would this super-sophisticated and advanced alien race allow one of their 50-year-old ships into their mother ship without knowing eaxctly who and what was on it?
Look at it this way.
It’s a warlike, nihilistic group whose sole purpose is to extract all resource wealth regardless of the consequences to the planet or the organisms living on it.
So they’ve got Michael Chertoff running Mothership Security.
O man, y’all just reminded me of another.
The West Wing. The President needs to be called; he’s vacationing, taking a fishing trip on Lake Oswego, in Oregon, and this idyllic wildernessy lake is shown.
“Lake Oswego” is an affluent suburb of Portland. It has a sort of big pond in the middle of its yuppie “downtown” called “Oswego Lake.” ...there really isn’t a Lake Oswego to go fishing on, let alone a scenic wildernessy one, unless you’re fishing, from a car, for bad public art.
Also, more entertainingly, I just recently saw part of the filming of the upcoming Into the Wild, with Sean Penn, and Feast of Love, with Morgan Freeman. Into the Wild had some scenes that took place at Emory University in the spring, and were filmed at Reed College in Portland, OR in the autumn. Some poor techie was put on a cherrypicker to individually, lovingly pull the yellow, red, and orange leaves from the trees that might land in their shots. And Feast of Love again used scenic, neo-Gothic, leafy Reed College as a stand-in for the downtown campus of Portland State University.
Keep an eye out.
My faves are:
Every time a dog is shown on screen, it’s whining, making some sort of vocalization.
Every time a horse is shown, it’s nickering.
When mostly, in the real world, both of them are silent most of the time.
The noises are like ... the canned laughter that accompanies sitcoms, to let all us Stupids know that what we’re seeing is funny.
It’s like we wouldn’t recognize a dog or horse without the audible signpost saying “Here, Stupid, This Is A Dog.” “Here, Stupid, This Is A Horse.”
It’s a warlike, nihilistic group whose sole purpose is to extract all resource wealth regardless of the consequences to the planet or the organisms living on it.
So they’ve got Michael Chertoff running Mothership Security.
That explains the negligence of letting Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum fly the old ship right in, no questions asked, but it doesn’t explain why the aliens weren’t bugging Bill Pullman’s conversations with Smith.
How about “to go where no man [sic] has gone before, in a manner consistent with the schtick of the blustering ham actor playing the star of this show.”
Chris, are you talking smack about Shatner?
In Deep Impact, that was Frodo (Elijah Wood) frantically motorcycling to the super-secret ponderosa grove atop the Shenandoah Mtns.
I think you could just make it in time on I-66 at 90 mph, starting at 3 a.m. But then you’d have to fight off Dick Cheney’s guards protecting his private grove and secret hideout.
Joe Biden praised Morgan Freeman’s performance in that movie, playing US President “Tom Beck.” “He was so articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
I had trouble with one of the endings of “Return of the King” when Frodo and Sam spend a lot of time within arms-length of free-flowing lava rivers, without becoming baked-hobbit cutlets for second supper. And then a taxi-sized Eagle comes by and effortlessly airlifts away both Gandalf and Frodo with a couple of casual wing-flappings.
you guys have a lot of time to watch stuff, and also, you keep track.
all i can offer is that every courtroom scene ever filmed is wrong. perry mason was riviting, but when is the last time you heard of a spectator confessing in a real court? never, is when.
real lawyers [usually prosecutors] often use the “isn’t it True that XYZ?” question. the most dramatic real-life responses are generally along the lines of, “huh? what are you talking about?” or, “it’s been a while, i really don’t remember.” for every moment of courtroom drama [“if the glove doesn’t fit, you must Acquit!”], there are many hours of waiting around, then hours of boring questions and answers.
i’ve seen amazing things happen in court, but they usually play out in slow-mo, and are not very camera-worthy. one exception was the time a State’s Testifying Star Witness [well-known in this courthouse, albeit usually in a different position in the courtroom] was in a *very* happy mood testifying, and he impeached the heck out of himself on cross examination: “cocaine? well, i just can’t GET enough COcaine!”
some of the observing lawyers and courtroom regulars checked their watches, and suddenly had urgent appointments requiring them to leave the court silently but swiftly, whereupon a batch of sheriff deputies, defense lawyers, and spare court personnel fell into laughing heaps in a back hallway, hands over mouths because the soundproofing was less than excellent. THAT is a high moment in court, my friends.
There are probably a hundred examples just in the film LA Confidential. The location of Danny DeVito’s office was right across the street from where I used to work. The motel where the male prostitute is killed, across the other street. The apartment where the prostitute and starlet were busted for pot, two more blocks away. Several of the bars were within half a mile. Do these location seem like they’re right next door in the film’s plot? Shall I go on?
But, this is the case for all films made in Los Angeles.
Oh, and in the Green Berets, the sun sets in the East.
1. Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon did NOT go down with the Titanic. You’d think a director who lovingly reproduced doorknobs and cutlery would get the art right. Said painting is hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, right now. It was not purchased by Kate Winslet and taken aboard the Titanic.
2.Every single movie about New Orleans that I have ever seen gets the geography wrong and worse, gets the accent all wrong. I could hardly make it through Oliver Stone’s “JFK” because of the accents. (Stone, like Cameron, obsessively researched a million other details - why not this one?).
3. Finally, no one should ever be forced to watch a movie with me that is set in museums. I sputtered and snickered through the new version of the Thomas Crowne Affair, with its absurd notions of museum security. Sliding metal doors in every gallery? Toxic gases? Laser alarms? Sheesh. And then, and THEN: Crowne grabs a painting off a wall, kicks it out of the frame with his knee (his KNEE) and folds it into a briefcase, from which it eventually emerges unscathed. I. Think. Not.
Frankly, I’m still flabbergasted that eagles sound like that, and not like I thought they did.
Oh, one more movie thing that bugs me: when two people are on the phone, the other hangs up, and there is an instant dial tone. Everybody knows this is not the case. You get a click-and-silence, not a click-and-dial-tone.
Incinsistencies like that are iritating, but the only one I can think of is where a guy tied his tie twice in a german film.
Tie-knotting scenes distract the hell out of me, for some reason. Tying a knot is complicated; I don’t know why any director would subject herself to such a continuity nightmare. If a character had actually looped and flipped and tightened that tie as many times as is usually depicted throughout a scene like that, the knot would be the size of a baseball.
Nice!
Unfortunately, I can’t remember any specific examples offhand, although if I remember correctly, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was full of errors, as well as outright absurdities (and the usual Indian Jones racism).
One thing, although I suppose it’s become a convention and so really isn’t a flub, is the way two native speakers or German or Arabic or Chinese will speak English to each other, but with accents to signify that they’re really speaking their native language. Of course, it gets even better when they speak English to one another and are overheard by a third or fourth character, perhaps a prisoner, who wouldn’t understand them unless they were speaking English. Also, as Xopher pointed out above, the way that aliens from across the universe speak English—but usually with a British accent. Another convetion: the way that a British accent can stand in for any vaguely sinister foreign accent.
My brothers and I tend to keep track of the best voice-overs we’ve heard when movies are shown on television. For instance, at the end of the second Die Hard, when Bruce Willis lights the gas trail to blow up the plane, he says on a television version, “Yippie ka yay,” and then, in an obvious Japanese accent, “Mistah Fawcon!” Or in The Usual Suspects, when they’re all reading the line, “Give me the keys, you f**king c**ks*cker”—on tv they say, “Give me the keys, you fairy godmother!!” And when Steven Baldwin’s character flips out, he says, “Give me the keys, you fairy godmother-lover-mother!!” My personal favorite was probably a snippet of one of the Die Hard movies I saw with Samuel L. Jackson in it. Bruce Willis gives him a gun to shoot at the bad guys, and Jackson’s guy asks how to fire it. Willis says, “What, you don’t know how to shot a gun?,” and Jackson’s character replies, “Not all black people know how to use guns, you racist melon farmer!!”
1. Star Wars, Episode IV sports many shots where the boom is visible at the top of the shot. Also, Luke Skywalker yells “Carrie” near the end of the film instead of “Leia.”
2. Few things in films urk me more than when a sailor is called a “soldier.”
As no one has mentioned these American Englishisms, I can:
In Mary Poppins, despite being set in the London, shows an American robin in the window whistling. Not a European robin. Knowing both kinds of birds, an American robin would never be that sociable whereas European robins are inquisitive and friendly.
In Robin Hood, Hood manages to walk from Dover to Nottingham in something like a day. It is about 300 miles. Also it was filmed in Yorkshire where the countryside, while English, is not the same as in Nottinghamshire.
At the end of “Stand By Me,” when Richard Dreyfus finishes typing his memoir into the PC, he types THE END, smiles, and turns off the computer.
Without saving the file.
Also, in “Becket,” they put Eleanor of Aquaitaine in a silly horned headress from an era 100 years later. It’s clearly meant to make her look like a silly cow, because the movie’s focus is on the relationship between Henry II and Thomas Becket, and women are there just for set decoration.
Whew! It was good to get that off my chest!
Xopher, you my friend too. Totally.
The errors in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves are endless and endlessly entertaining.
What about in “Bringing Up Baby” where Cary Grant the supposed paleontologist spends the film trying to retrieve what he calls the “intercostal clavicle” of a dinosaur? There ain’t no such bone—the clavicle (collarbone) is not located intercostally (between the ribs). Furthermore, the bone that is shown in the movie is some kind of limb bone—I think it looks like the humerus of an elephant. It’s clearly fresh bone, not fossilized, too, from the way they’re handling it—fossilized bone would be much heavier (and fragile).
You know that roaring lion in the logo at the end of MGM movies?
It’s actually a tiger roar you’re hearing….or so says a friend of mine, who runs a major Hollywood sound studio. (I spent many years as a sound designer for live theater.)
Tiger roars are very useful. They’ll spice up threatening sounds, sending shivers of visceral warning up the spine of any self-respecting primate. The sound of the tornados in “Tornado!” for example—that’s a tiger roar mixed in with the wind howl.
I have to admit that I have used/abused the red-tailed hawk cry myself…it matches people’s mental imagery well. And much as I’d love to collect species-specific sounds when possible…well, Orange @ #64 said it: eagles sound goofy! So do many species (unless you happen to catch them in a poetic mood).
Designing sound effects is a lot like writing—you’re dealing with creating effective symbol sets. The difference is that the sounds we use as symbols in sound design haven’t been formally abstracted into an alphabet (yet). Though there are certainly patterns of use in media, some of which folks have noted above.
Here’s to ABF Fridays! I like this one better than that Accented Guy’s, too. I could toss in any number of examples from medical dramas, because the mysterious and elusive Janet Lyon, a former RN, also doubles as the Medical Mimesis Police and gets infuriated at every medical-emergency scene that’s woefully illiterate or unintentionally silly. (As opposed to the final medical emergency scene in Soap Dish, of course, involving an impromptu brain transplant on a table with no surgical instruments. That’s just genius.) But for my money, the worst has to be John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, for repeated references to the 69th Street Bridge. No, wait, it’s even worse than that: they escape over the 69th Street Bridge. What, did someone phone in the script over a really bad connection? I imagine Carpenter asking someone to get ahold of that Simon & Garfunkel 69th Street Bridge song to use on the soundtrack. . . .
A flub within a flub, perhaps, and diagnostic of extreme bio-geekery, but…
There was a jungle scene in that god-awful Tarzan rip-off “Greystoke” where the apes (of no known species - first bit of berkery) were milling about in a pre-lapsarian fashion in a clearing - in the foreground, a fallen tree serves as a perch for a desert iguana (Dipsosaurus dorsalis). A desert iguana. In equatorial Africa. I ask you. ERB would have spat blood.
Oh, and that first Indiana Jones movie - money for old rope, I know, the entire series is one long concatenation of inaccuracies - when he fell into that Egyptian tomb complex and was faced with a clutch of snakes - never mind that many were harmless, non-desert New World species, but a number were actually Scheltopusiks, not snakes at all. Just sort of snaky. The external ears and moveable eyelids gave them away. A true verisimiltude-killer.
(Tacks off sniffily, adjusting anorak)
Oh yeah, the biology and medicine are always really bad.
Sort of like the eagle/hawk thing, the Pacific tree frog (Pseudacris [Hyla] regilla) is the sound of night-time all around the world.
Here’s the call of Aquila audax, the Wedge-tailed Eagle of Australia. Unsuprisingly, they have been recorded attacking similar craft before.
(Thanks for picking up ‘Arbitrary But Fun Friday’.)
To amplify #14 above, the “mountains of Pennsylvania” weren’t the only problem in The Deer Hunter:
AFTER the boys drive overnight to go deerhunting (in the Cascades!), our hero is sent to fight in Vietnam, and is soon captured by the enemy: and we see him surrounded by a crowd of Filipino soldiers. My immediate reaction was: who the hell are these guys?
The Vietnamese and the Filipinos look as much alike to my eye as would a crowd of Spaniards standing in for a crowd of Russians. It was more distracting than seeing the Cascades stand in for the Alleghenies, or than hearing a hawk stand in for an eagle.
Sound in space. To be honest, it doesn’t bug me because the sound effect are usually so awesome, but I really loved “Firefly” for getting it right (and for many other things).
My faves are:
Every time a dog is shown on screen, it’s whining, making some sort of vocalization.
Every time a horse is shown, it’s nickering.
When mostly, in the real world, both of them are silent most of the time.
The noises are like ... the canned laughter that accompanies sitcoms, to let all us Stupids know that what we’re seeing is funny.
It’s like we wouldn’t recognize a dog or horse without the audible signpost saying “Here, Stupid, This Is A Dog.� “Here, Stupid, This Is A Horse.�
Hank, this is one of my pet peeves, too - along with the requirement that all cats on screen must be accompanied by a “mrrreaor!” sound.
There was one glaring inaccuracy that I recall shattering my precarious suspension of disbelief - the movie was Troy, and it was already rather disbelievable—and then…
A group of Mediterranean peasant-types walked by, leading…
Llamas.
Hey, don’t be harshing on Tea Leoni. I’m so in love with her.
Implausibilities: Every goddam thing that in any way involves science or medicine!
<UL>
<LI> Steve Austin’s bionic arm can pick up a car engine, but it doesn’t rip out of his non-bionic shoulder.
<LI> When The Hulk gets angry and flexes his muscles, his mass increases by a factor of about 3.
<LI> Numerous superheroes are capable of suspending in mid-air without bouyancy or thrust.
<LI> Anyone possessing “ESP” is thereby capable of doing essentially anything potentially involving the mind. There are no actual psi skills; you can just, you know, do stuff.
<LI> Mentally ill persons likewise exhibit any and all stereotypical symptoms. There are no actual distinct mental illnesses, you just do crazy stuff.
<LI> Luckily, being mentally ill also endows you with either (a) unrecognized profound insights, or (b) some sort of savant power, usually involving memory.
<LI> Contact with the most technologically sophisticated alien civilizations, using the most advanced emprical-science-based discoveries, invariably reveals some hidden religious dimension to the universe, and it turns out to be something on the order of a 5-year-old’s Sunday school homily.
<LI> Strict scientific investigation of profound mysteries - death, ancient tombs, alien civilizations - invariably reveals some hidden supernatural dimension to the universe, and it turns out to be either spooky ghosts or something on the order of a 5-year-old’s Sunday school homily.
<LI> Computers spontaneously develop intelligence and language skills if you expose them to enough input.
<LI> Every computer, robot, PDA, telephone, and toaster has compatible interfaces and uses the same operating system, including the ones that arrive from distant galaxies (Independence Day); you can therefore take control of any one of these devices by means of any other one.
<LI> Alien computer operators never seem to have installed their anti-toaster firewall, and are helpless as you take control of their computer with a talking robot and/or household appliance.
<LI> Talking computers routinely parse ambiguities of spoken language but burst into flames when confronted with the Liar Paradox.
<LI> Advanced civilizations have developed technologies capable of spanning the galaxy, as well as talking robots, but are still required to perform routine and insanely dangerous tasks - such as replacing the fuel rods in a live power reactor - by hand.
<LI> Data the talking robot has no emotions or comprehension of human social interaction, but somebody went to the trouble of building him a working cock and programming him with “a variety of [sexual] techniques and positions”. (OK - maybe I do believe that one.)
</UL>