JoelSchlosberg

The podcast variously describes the Stephen King source as a "short story" and a "book"... while quite a few Stephen King-based movies from The Shawshank Redemption to The Mist are expansions of stories that are intermediate in length between the two (with Stand By Me and Silver Bullet explicitly crediting their sources as novellas or novelettes), The Running Man is juuust long enough to qualify unambiguously as a full-length book. It runs to about 200 pages in its various print incarnations, while novellas run to about 100, and doesn't need to be padded (or super-thin like the installments of The Green Mile) when it's a standalone book. And it's called a novel in the credits.

Nobody's mentioned a blatant issue with the "RED G. BLEU AND PRIMARY COLORS" credit: red and blue are primary colors, so they wouldn't be a separate group with the primary colors! Unless this is like "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark" where Indiana Jones is one of the group that raided the lost ark but is named twice because reasons.

Don't think that anyone has pointed out the physics of the drop pods making a sharp turn at very fast speed. That combination would produce a massive amount of centrifugal force that, if not enough to squash the passenger so that they would only be seen again in a rerun, would produce severe injury or at least disorientation. And the turn is there for no apparent reason!

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's is longer. To make the uplink code look better in comparison (while still being short enough to be memorized). Two words: Heavenly Creatures. Plus opera and classical music in general has storylines more violent than the genre's hoity-toity reputation. The March to the Scaffold in Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique has the protagonist marched to the guillotine for a public execution for murder. And the music actually has sound effects for the blade slicing off his head and the decapitated head bouncing to the ground!

Some questions about the uplink code: Why is it so short? Is the random letter B in there because, like online passwords, it's supposed to mix in letters and numbers to make it harder to guess? (And many online passwords say a password that short isn't secure enough.) OTOH, what if the code is longer than they expected? Harold Weiss sure is confident that Amber Mendez will be immediately able to keep a random alphanumeric sequence in her short-term memory. What if she's the sort of person who can't remember phone numbers without writing them down?

Am I the first to point out that the 3 hour time limit given to Running Man contestants makes no difference whatsoever? There's never any point when the 3 hours is almost running out, or any sense that the stalkers have to try harder to kill the runners as the limit gets closer. Or any attempt by the runners to run out the clock. In fact, when the contestants go to the underground's hidden base within the game zone, why don't they just camp out there until the 3 hours are up?

HDTGM asks why Ben Richards doesn't "go underground" after escaping from prison. But he already is with the underground, he merely has to stay there! His explanation for leaving them is not exactly well conceived: "No thank you. My brother's going to get me out of the city. Plus I'm not into politics, I'm into survival." Aside from the retroactive irony of "I'm not into politics", what if his brother isn't around to meet him (which is exactly what happens)? And wouldn't he be safer with rebels who are already in hiding than with family, the most obvious place possible for the authorities to look? Also, how is Ben going to travel with his brother without an extra travel pass like the one he later takes from Amber Mendez? Which itself doesn't make much sense: if he can use Amber's pass ("You won't be able to do squat. You don't have a travel pass." "You do. [takes Amber's pass] Now I do."), why does he take Amber along? That both requires a ruse to explain why Amber doesn't have her own pass, and risks her pointing him out. Granted, she could go to the authorities if he left her behind, if he's too chivalrous to leave her tied up at her exercise machine until she starves. But she wouldn't have to know exactly where he was going, or be with him in a high-security public place.

The box sure looks like a board game from its dimensions... ...but is it? If it is, why does Killian call it the "home version"? That sounds like it's the home console/computer version of an arcade video game... which is one of the prizes in the Running Man-inspired arcade game Smash TV!

When the credits to the show-in-the-movie roll, they are worth a closer look...

Killian directly says multiple times that winners have fully paid their debt to society. Like ex-jailbirds who have "served their time".

But the cameras magically disappear whenever the rebels are up to anything, as pointed out in the Ruthless Review of this movie:

Maybe he bought the suit from Harry and Marv from Home Alone 2!

I was reminded of a scene in Innerspace, where the overly telegraphed nature of the joke is what makes it funny. Martin Short is a hapless supermarket cashier who describes in great detail how he has a recurring dream that when running up the tab for a specific customer, the amounts go ridiculously high, making her so pissed off that she pulls a gun out of her purse and shoots him. Then one day, that same customer arrives at his counter and this happens: But the smaller bill is just clumsily set up for such a literal payoff. It would have been funnier if it had been a $900 bill.

The whole culture around security pre-9/11, both in fiction and in real life, was lax in ways that are hard to imagine ever flew (no pun intended) in hindsight. As noted in a 2000 column by James Randi:

That could explain it. The detector is so overreactive that they don't bother to investigate every false alarm, and the regulars know that.

Well, it's Strange Invaders for kids (and is a book cover, not a poster). Am I the only one who remembers it from childhood? It is the sort of image you never forget if you first see it as a kid, when grownups are mysterious and alien creatures. (As in Men in Black when Will smith says that he always suspected his teacher was from Venus before having any idea that might be literally true. Or in Jack in the Beanstalk, where the giants are literally on a larger scale and on a higher level than Jack.) It is hard to believe that new editions have different artwork!

Nobody's mentioned that the credits/poster font is the one seen in almost all Woody Allen movies, Windsor. Was it not as associated with Allen back then, when he had only been using it for one decade rather than four?

Bag-eye monster also has a career as a cover model for Baen Books: http://i.imgur.com/Xi6Dyd6.jpg Why didn't they come up with a more impressive look for the one alien we get to see? It looks like a puppet. Even though that was still the era of creature effects that often did not allow showing the full body in one shot since the puppeteer needed to be somewhere (e.g. the Rancor in Return of the Jedi, or the Gremlins in their first movie), the better-made movies came up with clever ways to disguise that fact and to give the critters interesting things to do to make them seem livelier. But this one looks like something you'd see in a puppet show! (If anything, it's less impressive, since they had already figured out how to show the Muppets doing stuff like riding bicycles with their legs visible via marionette techniques.) Say what you will about Howard the Duck, the Dark Overlord's true form is a genuinely elaborate special effects creation.

OTOH, if they are traveling fast enough to get from another galaxy to Earth, the distance between Saturn and Earth should be passed in a microscopic amount of time, certainly less time than it takes to utter those lines of dialogue about Saturn. Like that Futurama episode where Fry counts down the launch to the Moon, but he's at the Moon before he can even count to 3.

Even in science fiction where faster-than-light travel to other star systems is routine, traveling to another galaxy is usually a big deal, for instance the aliens in the Star Trek episode "By Any Other Name" who hijack the Enterprise to get back to their galaxy are far in advance of Kirk and crew. Heck, not being able to easily travel the distance within a galaxy was the whole premise of the entire Star Trek show Voyager! But as Isaac Asimov noted, treating "from another galaxy" as being the same as "outside the solar system" is just a total lack of understanding of scale, like saying that anyone who isn't from your neighborhood is "from another continent". The lightning's 1.21 gigawatts of power enable the signal to travel back in time (which is the same thing as traveling faster than light in Einstein's relativity), thus giving it enough time to travel to the galaxy and back by the present! After all, was, like this movie's score, by Alan Silvestri. Who also did the score of Carl Sagan's Contact and the new version of Cosmos! As well as Mac and Me, Cop and a Half, Super Mario Bros., Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, The Delta Force, and The Clan of the Cave Bear (also starring Daryl Hannah)!

Why (in non-lawyer terms) did they leave off a writer's credit for Matinee? That's one of the only Joe Dante movies that was not mucked up by studio interference. Unlike Explorers which doesn't even have a proper ending in what script made it to the screen! (Which also revolves around alien contact prompted by humanity's radio output. And which, as it happens, was one of the only other big roles for... Amanda Peterson!)

Of those, I've only heard of Can't Buy Me Love. While it's not particularly famous in that era's teen-movie cycle, Amanda Peterson is well-remembered as one of the teen idols of the time, and that's one of the few movies she had a big role in. As for Seth Green, I have no idea if I noticed him in it. Oh and the alternate title of it definitely does not pass feminist muster: Boy Rents Girl.

I assumed that Lovitz was like Randall Peltzer (the dad in Gremlins), inventing all sorts of wacky devices that never seem to work well enough to be actually commercially viable, but keeping on doing so just for the fun of it. And guess who directly addressed the issue of whether rich people who have other jobs should hire chauffeurs? Jimmy Durante! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUOQjxAxUyo&feature=youtu.be&t=1m10s (1 minute 10 seconds in, if the time stamp doesn't work)

BTW, why isn't Lovitz on the poster? He's listed in the credits on the bottom (and Hannigan is not), and was well known from SNL at the time. If anything, he'd better fit the "OMG look at Basinger!" role than Hannigan does.

^ Unless the comedy is not funny. But then the unfunniness has a way of leeching in to attempts to make fun of it! There's a reason why stuff like MST3K steers clear of bad comedies. It occurs to me that this particular comedy is oddly un-self-aware. In the decade between Flash Gordon and Total Recall, sci-fi movies increasingly tended to acknowledge and play with their own ridiculousness, but the playing-out of its far-fetched premise (as opposed to humor in the comedic situations it sets up) is surprisingly straightforward, without winking at the audience.