NaughtyByNurture

In "The Quest for Peace" Superman decides to rid the world of the threat of nuclear war by collecting all the nuclear weapons and throwing them into the Sun, which would presumably detonate them. In the movie this makes Nuclear Man, but in reality the results would be much worse. In the 1950s and 1960s NASA experimented with the affects of detonating nuclear weapons in space. What they found was that because there wasn't any atmosphere to slow the nuclear explosion, the radiation would travel farther and produce a higher frequency of radiation than those weapons detonated on Earth. They also found that the farther out into space they took the weapons, the more you intensify its radioactive levels and reach. In 1987 when the movie came out there were 61,662 total nuclear warheads worldwide. If Superman detonated all of these bombs in the Sun that means high levels of radiation would spread across a huge expanse of outer space, having untold negative consequences on planets and other celestial bodies. When the radiation of all those nukes reached Earth it would have disastrous consequences. Although the radiation would be burned up in the atmosphere, and thus wouldn't be a high enough level to kill anyone, the radiation hitting the atmosphere would release a giant Electromagnetic Pulse. This EMP would knock out power grids and communication networks, potentially on a global scale. Superman may have ended mutually assured destruction, but he basically created a dystopian hell-scape where space is ruined with radiation and the world doesn't have power.

An audience member asked about the song "On the Robert E. Lee" in this version of the movie. It's a reference to the song "Waiting for Robert E. Lee" from the original film. This is representative of the insane choices this remake made when it comes to what to include from the original. The most obvious of these choices is the inclusion of black face. In this movie Neil Diamond is forced to don black face in order to perform in a black-owned club. One reason black face originally became a practice was because segregated theaters would not allow African Americans to perform. So, this movie's weird choice to make black face a necessity because of some deluded concept of reverse racism is a whole extra level of offensive. Today, "The Jazz Singer" is discussed along with "The Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind" as an example of early cinema whose racist portrayals had lasting and negative effects on attitudes about race. But even without the benefit of hindsight, when "The Jazz Singer" came out in 1927 it was protested by the NAACP for its racist use of black face. If something is seen as racist in 1927, it's probably not a good idea to include it in 1980. Even the remake "White Christmas" had enough sense to remove the black face scene from the original "Holiday Inn" - and that movie came out in 1954. This definitely falls into the "what were they thinking?" category.

OK so in the movie we learn that time travel exists and that the Time Enforcement Commission police force is tasked with regulating it. While the only people we see in this organization in the movie are the cops and one programmer, they must employ a HUGE staff of historians working countless hours at libraries, archives, and universities. Just taking the New York City stock market scam as an example – the historic records of the New York Stock Exchange are at the New York Public Library in the Financial Services Resources Collection. This collection includes 44 different record groups, with tens of boxes of records in each group. So to investigate JCVD’s partner you would need at least one person, but more likely a team of people, pouring over all of this content, which isn’t digitized so you couldn’t word search it or research remotely. Plus it is very unlikely that these records would even contain individual stock sales. You’d have to hope that a newspaper took note of someone buying rather than selling in ’29 and wrote an article on it. But that would be in a whole other collection. So from this stock market example we know for sure they are employing experts on 20th century financial history. And from the opening scene in George in 1863, we know they have 19th century military historians on staff. But they would also have to have countless experts in every period of American history, plus experts in pre-American colonial history (which would require knowledge of Native tribes and English, French, Spanish, and Dutch colonials), and experts in pre-contact history, which is terribly difficult to know because there is no surviving written record. (And even if there were, many of those languages are dead!) Also in this movie they show that people can travel not only through time, but also through space. So they need people who are experts in GLOBAL history since the DAWN of time. It’s also worth noting that despite doing all the heavy lifting, the historians on staff are clearly not very high up in the organization, or at least they aren’t involved with Time Cop hiring, because if they were then rookie-cop Sarah Fielding, a woman of color, would not be approved to travel in time. It would be incredibly dangerous for her to travel to almost any place or time in American history before the 1980s. It’s almost as if the logic of Time Cop is flawed...