Corrected entry: Towards the beginning, when Marty returns to 1985 and walks up to Biff's hotel he runs into the town drunk and refers to him as "Red." Red was the mayor in 1955, shown in the first movie when a campaign van is driving around the town square saying "Re-elect Mayor Red Wilson".
A nameless member
31st Dec 2009
Back to the Future Part II (1989)
Correction: This is not trivia, this is part of the plot.
Correction: The names of the mayors are mixed up in this entry. The 1955 mayor was Red Thomas and the 1985 mayor was Goldie Wilson.
No that's the point. Red Thomas has fallen on very hard times in this alternate timeline 30 years later and has become the town drunk.
Bob Gale said this isn't true, the name was improvised.
11th Dec 2020
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
Audio problem: The ghost of Christmas past says "these are but shadows... they are what they are - do not blame me." Her mouth keeps moving after she stops speaking.
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Suggested correction: No, it doesn't. When she finishes this speech at 45:16, there is an immediate cut to Scrooge. We can only see the back of the ghost. Her mouth is not visible.
Suggested correction: A mouth can move without speaking, not an audio problem but a puppeteering problem that is not a mistake.
A puppeteer problem would still be a mistake.
Maybe for the puppeteer, but in the movie it is no problem because a mouth can move without sound coming out. So what exactly went wrong?
But practically speaking people (or puppets) don't just flap their mouth open and closed with no reason. The overwhelming probability is simply that there was a dubbing error or a line was cut and the dialogue didn't fit with the mouth movement.
The mouth opens 1 extra time. That's all.
But it's glaring enough to be noticeable. Regardless of how or why it happened, it's a mistake.
In the version on Disney+, there is an immediate cut to Scrooge as the spirit finishes her speech. We only see the back of the spirit's head. Are you seeing something different on other versions?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBDqCFyugW0. I got the scene right here, it's at 1:50. Judge for yourself. I can repeat that part over and over again, but to be honest, sometimes it looks like there is an extra movement. Sometimes I can't see it. Even if it was, muppets move their mouths without speaking all the time.
21st Oct 2020
Quantum Leap (1989)
Star-Crossed - June 15, 1972 - S1-E3
Question: Al tells Sam that he's there to prevent the professor and his undergraduate student from having a shotgun wedding and ruining both their lives. That implies she got pregnant. Sam succeeds in keeping them apart. Um, does that mean he prevented someone from being born?
Answer: He means he's there to prevent there ever being the need for a shotgun wedding-that is, to stop the affair before there is a possibility of the girl getting pregnant.
Which would erase the child from history. That's my point.
Answer: Not necessarily; it could also mean that someone such as Jamie Lee's (the student) father discovered that the professor was having a sexual relationship with her and coerced the two into getting married.
This doesn't answer the question. You just described what a shotgun wedding is.
I think their point is that the "shotgun" aspect might not be due to a pregnancy, simply a forced attempt to legitimise an otherwise scandalous relationship.
My point was that a "shotgun wedding" doesn't always happen because an unmarried girl becomes pregnant; it can also happen because someone "stole her virtue", i.e had sex with her without being married or at least engaged to her. There's no reason to believe that Jamie Lee was, or would become, pregnant as a result of the affair or subsequent marriage.
The term "shotgun wedding" means a forced marriage due to unexpected pregnancy. It's sometimes even used when the woman is pregnant but it's planned or the wedding isn't "forced." In common colloquialism (especially in the 80's when the script was written), it doesn't refer to a force marriage just because of premarital sex (which the term "make an honest woman" is used for).
No, in the 1926 Sinclair Lewis novel 'Elmer Gantry', they talk about shotgun weddings, when a groom is forced to marry a woman because he took her virginity. Obviously, the term usually refers to a pregnant bride, but I see zendaddys point.
10th Oct 2020
Back to the Future Part III (1990)
Question: Marty shows Doc in 1885 the image of the tombstone, and he says that he wished he'd paid Buford off. Why can't he just round up 80 dollars to give to Buford and apologise for not doing that in the first place?
Answer: Adjusting for inflation, $80 back in 1885 is equivalent to about $2,143.65 today. Not something you can just conjure up easily, least of all back then. And Marty couldn't just take 1985 money back to 1885 and expect people to accept it.
Except that Doc was in 1885 and could have just gone to the bank and withdrew the $80's.
How? He arrives in 1885 and magically has the equivalent of $2,100 already in a bank account? He presumably borrowed it from Buford in the first place precisely because he didn't have that much cash available.
Doc didn't borrow money from Buford. He time-traveled with a briefcase filled with currencies from different time periods, including the 1800s. Doc had shoed Buford's horse for $5, for which Buford never paid him. When one shoe later came off later, causing Buford to be thrown, Buford shot the horse and demanded Doc pay him $75 for it and $5 for a broken bottle of whiskey.
Where would have get the $80 from? You're assuming he had the $80 available to him. The bank wouldn't just give out the money for free.
You can't take out $80 in 1985 money, and give it to someone in 1885. It would look like play money to them. U.S. currency looked a lot different back then.
Well he could technically get that amount worth in gold or silver.
And, as stated, since Doc was in 1885, more specifically, eight months in 1885, he could have just taken the money out of the bank considering he had a job as a blacksmith.
In Back to the Future 2, Doc shows Marty a briefcase full of money from different time periods, including various mid-1800 currencies, that he carried with him in the DeLorean. (There are online screen shots of the contents.) Doc refused to pay Tannen the $80 because he never owed it to him. Tannen was extorting him.
Answer: Buford was a crazed gunfighter, even if they paid off the $80 that wouldn't have satisfied him. He loved to shoot and kill. He wanted a showdown to show people he is to be feared and not messed with.
26th Jul 2004
Cube (1997)
Question: Anyone who has the Cube DVD, is it really true that if you put the DVD disc upside down in your player, that there is another film on it?
Chosen answer: Having just tried it with my copy (Region 1), no, it doesn't appear to be true.
Answer: I have heard that you can often have a short film by the same director on the other side of the DVD.
Simple way to tell is if there's printing on top. For a DVD to be double sided, both sides will have the same blank shiny surface. Any writing, like the name of the film, etc. will render the top level unreadable.
11th Sep 2010
Predator (1987)
Question: Why didn't Arnold and the rest of the commandos take thermal goggles or sensitive listening devices with them on the mission; wasn't the technology available?
Chosen answer: It's the jungle: thermal goggles would have too much interference due to the high ambient temperature and sensitive listening devices would have picked up too much ambient noise from the wildlife. When filming the movie they had to hose the area down with ice water just to cool it off enough to get the footage for the Predator's heat vision. Presumably, his technology is more advanced than our own, so the high jungle temps didn't interfere. Plus of course, their original mission was meant to be very straightforward, with no need for high-tech equipment.
Answer: During the 1980's thermal googles worn on the face had not been produced. As far as the team wearing night vision goggles (infrared) that wouldn't have given them an advantage against the predators cloaking device. Infrared works off ambient light and they do not detect heat; there isn't much ambient light at night in triple canopy jungle and they are worthless during the day. The spectrum the predator used in the movie is thermal not infrared.
Infrared and ambient light are different. Night vision goggles use ambient light, amplifying whatever light there is, from the moon, stars, etc. Infrared and thermal are the same thing, working on heat rather than visible light.
15th Sep 2007
War of the Worlds (2005)
Corrected entry: In the final scene where the military begins to fire Javelin anti-tank missiles at the tripods, the missile flies a straight path. But; a Javelin is a "top attack" missile, meaning it goes vertical and comes down at a steep angle to hit a tank in the weakest part of the armor, so they would do the same thing to the tripods instead of a straight flightpath.
Correction: The Javelin missile has both a top attack mode and a direct attack mode (as documented in the publicly available U.S. Army, FM 3-22.37 "JAVELIN MEDIUM ANTIARMOR WEAPON SYSTEM"). With no evidence that the top armour on the tripods is particularly weak, the military have apparently decided to try the direct attack mode, possibly in hope of immobilising the tripods by damaging the leg structure.
As a Javelin operator it's drops always.
Via Wikipedia: "The Javelin's HEAT warhead is capable of defeating modern tanks by attacking them from above where their armor is thinnest (see top-attack), and is also useful against fortifications in a direct attack flight." If you've got evidence that Javelins are incapable of direct attack, please post it.
It should be noted, the source cited on Wikipedia is not an official US military or Lockheed site and there's no indication where that page got their information. Lockheed Martin's website about the Javelin does not mentions direct attack, only top-attack (nor does Raytheon's).
The direct attack capability is widely documented, most officially in U.S. Army, FM 3-22.37 "JAVELIN MEDIUM ANTIARMOR WEAPON SYSTEM": http://www.survivorlibrary.com/library/fm_3-22x37_javelin.pdf, which is where the two graphs on the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin) documenting the top attack/direct attack flight profiles come from.
31st Aug 2020
Judge Dredd (1995)
Other mistake: Dredd tells Judge Hershey that lethal range for bullets is 300 meters "you're safe" straight after people were being shot and wounded on the ground at that distance.
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Suggested correction: Wounded, but not dead. He says they aren't lethal, he doesn't say they can't hit you though. His logic is that they can't be killed by the bullets so therefore they are safe.
Presumably the Judges also have body armour which will protect from extreme range and hence lower power bullets, which civilians wouldn't have.
This. That statement about how it would be lethal even though they're 300 meters away always bugged me (on multiple sites), of course it might be injurious or even lethal to civilians, but I'd expect that Judges would wear armor that would protect them.
They were shot dead, extremely obviously. Huge holes in the stomach.
22nd Jan 2004
Jaws 2 (1978)
Continuity mistake: In the scene where Chief Brody comes home drunk, Deputy Hendricks comes over to express his sorrows. When he's leaving/already left, Both Ellen & Chief Brody comment on Hendricks as "Poor Jeff." In the first Jaws film, Brody calls him Lenny. Jeff is actually the first name of the actor who played Hendricks.
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Suggested correction: It was a retcon from the filmmakers. Originally his name was Lenny, and then they changed it to Jeff. Same thing with The Mayor's children in the first movie. In the sequel, he only has one son; Larry Jr.
Not really a retcon, simply a mistake. Not every change, intentional or not, can be hand-waved away as a retcon.
The correction is valid. The person who submitted the mistake didn't watch the scene. They never said "poor Jeff", it was "poor Hendricks." But both Martin and Ellen call him "Jeff" in the scene and his name is said 3 times. Plus, if you read over the original script, the name "Jeff Hendricks" is mentioned 4 times.
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Correction: He actually says "Brett" - the joke being that Brett from the normal 1985 (the town drunk) is exactly the same in the alternate 1985. Hes the only one who hasn't changed, hence the way Marty says his name.