JoelSchlosberg

It's not unheard of for a school to have even K-12 grades together. For instance, Hunter College Elementary School (K-6) and High School (7-12) are in the same building. Lin-Manuel Miranda is among the famous alumni who were there from age 6 all the way to graduating high school.

Well, by the early '90s Arnold Schwarzenegger's image had been domesticated, with Kindergarten Cop and Last Action Hero (whose kid stand-in for its own intended audience casually goes to a Schwarzenegger movie, not even with his family, but completely unsupervised).

But that's not a contrived reference to Shaq's difficulties making free throws, like the grenade in Steel! So it only half counts.

There is an Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Not knowing what happened to Elizabeth, Ariel and Jake is also reflected in their suggestion that Paul Glaser might have written the movie in response to going through a divorce! It was just an offhand could-be-factually-wrong thing, but ouch.

Yes. Then some of the dialogue would be comprehensible!

Ironically, Short Circuit 1 has an opening very similar to that of Steel, with military hardware being demonstrated to a female senator. But then Johnson entirely ignores the military plotline in the sequel.

The other "WTF, is this really directed by the same guy who made V?" movie is on: Short Circuit 2. Does anyone know how Kenneth Johnson's film career wound up so much less impressive than his TV work?

Those sequences were all the rage for a while. (At least Steel doesn't subject us to the atrocity that was ) It is understandable that it could be more interesting back when 3D computer graphics were a novelty, with shiny "flying logos" a neat way to show off the 3-dimensionality to an audience used to flat graphics. I was tickled to see a throwback to it in that that consisted solely of a close-up shot flying around a detailed CG version of the glass slipper.

Although a lot of other comics characters with secret identities didn't get the memo either. Victor Fries was Mr. Freeze, Otto Octavius was eight-limbed Dr. Octopus, etc. Heck, even Batman took, well, forever to figure out that "Myster-E-Nigma" was "the Riddler" even with clues. But the most ridiculous one of all is a Flash villain who uses rainbow beams of light as his weapon. His real name: Roy G. Bivolo.

Doom had been out for 4 years by then.

So, what IS the deal with how this movie fits in to the Superman universe? If it was going to tie in to an unmade Superman movie, why are there no indications that Superman (or any other superhero, or any supervillain) ever existed as a person in-world rather than as a fictional character? Dropping the phrase "man of steel" out of context is an in-joke that isn't supposed to refer to Superman in-movie. The Superman tattoo doesn't mean that Superman is real rather than an icon, especially if John Henry Irons is supposed to plausibly be Superman. Even the one time they do actually say "the S word" it's more of a fourth-wall-breaking joke to the audience, in the manner of another DC movie of the time's "This is why Superman works alone." At least the Halle Berry Catwoman movie went all the way in never referring to any other aspect of the Batman universe besides Catwoman herself.

Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. The opening compares him to Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King Jr. And it goes up from there!

Yes, Giorgio, anyone?

Here is Shaquille O'Neal's big podcast, "The Big Podcast with Shaq". Adam Sandler makes an appearance (episode 6, 10:51 in). He responds to his movies being described as "a jobs program for Dan Patrick and Shaq" by offering work to anyone who calls him, and Shaq suggests various movie remakes he wants to co-star in with Sandler.

I was getting flashbacks to a different Trek character:

Re the guy visualizing movie clips, I took that it was supposed to suggest a free-association thinking style in line with hyperlinks and the nonlinear nature of computer multimedia, as opposed to the linear nature of traditional media.

On the Blu-ray special features, one of the hacking consultants says that he met Penn Jillette after winning a contest where Penn challenged hackers who read his column to hack into his personal computer.

When the movie lists the most common passwords, I was surprised that none of them turned out to be a simple multiword phrase, like the still-common "letmein".

In the Blu-ray extras, Emmanuel Goldstein (the editor of 2600 magazine, not the character in the movie) insists that it's part of the director's intent to get the hacker scene "completely accurate": "There are things like the flare gun incident. That was real. That really happened."

Moreover, Wozniak and Jobs started out by selling devices to make free phone calls: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/10/steve-jobs-first-business-was-selling-blue-boxes-that-allowed-users-to-get-free-phone-service-illegally/

He also appears extensively in the Blu-ray's behind-the-scenes documentary. And a copy of 2600 magazine is visible in the movie.