JoelSchlosberg

Musicians on YouTube in 2005? Back then it was MySpace all the way. In fact that would be a great only-in-2005 premise: the plane goes nuts due to being overwhelmed by all the amateurish garage band songs on MySpace before Vevo and similar more professional online music sites displace it. Or gets a virus from MySpace's banner ads.

If he used drugs.

For a big studio movie, it's awfully cavalier about the plane pirating music. Kazaam basically does implicitly (as pointed out) but here it's stated outright. This was the mid-'00s era when TV broadcasts of Weird Al Yankovic's "Don't Download This Song" were bleeping out the names of the file-sharing sites in the lyrics, so it seems weird that they'd openly acknowledge the existence of piracy in a movie where it's not a main part of the plot. And if the plane really has all music ever at its disposal, why didn't they go all the way with its musical tastes? It should have been into Tuvan throat singing or some other offbeat international genre, like a live version of the Voyager record. Or if it wanted to go all-American patriotic in its music, how about if it was blasting century-old Edison wax cylinder recordings of John Philip Sousa marches? [media=''] [/media] Or how about if it decided that some bands were too awful to exist, and flew around the world trying to assassinate random untalented musicians while our heroes had to stop it? Now that would be a plot!

The ultimate irony of the whole "three in a group good, four bad" thing is that, as mentioned in Michael Crichton's Sphere, three-person groups have the problem of two of the group teaming up in a majority against the third:

Could it be that the apples were intended as a reference to the Garden of Eden? And the plane killing Jamie Foxx being the equivalent of Cain killing Abel? With Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel putting the human population at a composite number for the first time, is that the reason for the thing about primes being good and composite numbers like four being bad? When the commanding officer says he will lie to cover up what's happening with the plane, he bites into an apple, paralleling how Adam and Eve lied and literally covered up after eating the fruit of knowledge (which itself is kind of like how the plane goes bad from absorbing too much knowledge).

One prediction the movie got right about 2016: tensions between the United States and Russia, as shown in the line about how it would be interpreted as hostile to have the planes fly towards Russian airspace. North Korea sometimes appeared as a rival in '90s/early-'00s action movies like Die Another Day, but Russia was usually assumed to be an ally after the Cold War was over (as with the line in Terminator 2 about them being "our friends now").

Why does Orbit think his original name is "too earthly" when he designs planes, not spacecraft? Perhaps the plane is able to fly so high in the upper atmosphere that it's technically in space (as in the opening of Revenge of the Sith) but still.

The Three Stooges is also a bit of a dubious example given the existence of Shemp, Joe and Curly Joe, bringing the total to the composite number 6. Plus it didn't work out so well for these three: [media=''] [/media]Although with Number Five they make four, but then again Number Five is literally a prime number, but it's a good result from Number Five's point of view, and... I give up, the prime number rule makes no sense.

The list of examples of why primes are good numbers and four is a bad number includes the Three Musketeers. But in The Three Musketeers there are actually four musketeers: the protagonist D'Artagnan successfully joins the trio of Athos, Aramis and Porthos. Even if they don't know the original book, how do they not know the 1993 Disney movie?

"Top Gun it felt like there were real planes." That's because there were. Working with the military got Top Gun both convincing footage of authentic equipment and budgetary savings; Stealth wound up with neither.

The line "I have a bad reputation to keep" is almost the same as "I have a reputation to uphold", Hollywood's line about why he can't be publicly seen in a suit rather than his trademark flamboyant attire in the first Mannequin. Except that line assumed the audience could figure out the joke on their own. And yes, the delivery in Gods of Egypt actually particularly emphasizes the word "bad" in case merely spelling it out was not enough.

"The giant person never has looked good in any movie"? It looked good in 1940.

I noticed that the URL of the episode was "gods-of-egypt-2" and was wondering why the "2" was there if the crew has never done the movie before. Was there a hidden previous version of the podcast episode, something like the Clive Mantle Nuclear Man of HDTGM? But no, removing the 2 reveals that the movie has been on another Earwolf podcast... literally called "Yo, Is This Racist?" http://www.earwolf.c...e/gods-of-egypt Presumably the answer this time is "Yo, this IS racist!"

Plus to a Sphinx the British are common allies against the French.

Just put it on columns! (from Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit, page 12)

Do sequences whose characters are obviously practical effects, like kaiju suits or stop-motion in Harryhausen movies, also put you to sleep? [media=''] [/media]

Good point, a text-based game would have been able to offer a lot more depth. What's notable about E.T. on a modern rewatch is how little electronics period the kids have in 1982! They have lots of old-fashioned mechanical or stuffed toys, they have a TV, but the only notable interactive electronic toy is a Speak & Spell. There's not even an Atari 2600 hooked up to the TV, despite the obvious cross-promotional possibilities in the movie that famously incorporated Reese's Pieces. So whether the game was on an Atari 2600 or on an early home computer, Elliott wouldn't have been able to play it. However, a graphical game would not be impossible on that era's pre-8-bit hardware. There is a Halo game for the Atari 2600 that does indeed bring Master Chief to the 4-color-scanline screen! Yes, it really exists as an actual game that really does run on the original hardware: It can be played online here.

That's obviously not real, since graphical elements have more than 4 colors! The Nintendo Entertainment System could assign at most 4 colors to each individual sprite; that's why, for instance, Mario's hair is the same color as his clothes: The more technically-limited Atari 2600 could display only 4 total colors on each of the TV display's horizontal lines. (See here.) So there is no way that there would be an entire three hues used for that kid's hat.

Correction: purple is not the farthest color in the spectrum from green. Since green combines yellow and blue, and purple combines red and blue, they have blue in common. The farthest color from green is red, and the farthest color from purple is yellow.

The bartender said that it's a good game despite its source movie being "stinky". And that the place's Spider-Man 3 pinball may be retired soon because it's one of the least popular machines.

I just stopped by and sure enough...

On demand was not the original venue. The whole fake-blockbuster thing started... at Blockbuster. Yes, that Blockbuster:

I do my laundry at home, but will have to check out the games! Never heard of the place (I've heard that the other one is the only one of its kind in Manhattan but that one's fairly accessible too).

There's a NYC pinball place I've been meaning to go to that has not only the Shadow pinball machine, but ones for Demolition Man, Judge Dredd, and The Phantom Menace. (Then again, the video games for The Phantom Menace were actually pretty good as long as they concentrated/expanded on the movie's action scenes and avoided its dull mess of a plot.) I definitely was getting a theme there, but still wanted to play the hell out of the games (though my pick of the ones in this thread is definitely the Maverick one... such an underrated movie!) The have the Xenon machine mentioned in this thread too: http://www.modernpinballnyc.com/pinball-arcade-games/ Since I couldn't resist trying to find out, the cool row of pinball tables earlier in the thread is from a museum... in Poland! http://www.inyourpocket.com/krakow/krakow-pinball-museum_145115v So, who else has a local venue that has cool licensed pinball machines?

Kudos to the filmmakers for fully acknowledging the main author of the original pulp stories in the end credits: This was an era in which hero creators were rarely given proper credit: Batman was implied to be solely the creation of Bob Kane (growing up in the '90s I never heard of co-creator Bill Finger once), the contributions of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko to Marvel's stable of characters were downplayed, and DuckTales never mentioned Carl Barks despite taking most of its characters and elements and many plots point-for-point from his comics. And Gibson's credit was hidden in both the original pulps and paperback reprints by a "house name" pseudonym shared with other authors (like Nancy Drew's "Carolyn Keene") despite writing the vast majority of the pulp novels (at the rate of 2 novels a month, over 1 million words a year!)