Corrected entry: Kirk tells Gillian he can't pay for the meal at the restaurant because they don't use money in the 23rd century. However, in Star Trek III, McCoy tells the captain of the alien ship, "Price you name. Money I got."
Mike Lynch
29th Sep 2023
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
9th Sep 2023
The Big Bang Theory (2007)
The Vengeance Formulation - S3-E9
Corrected entry: Sheldon caused thousands of dollars of damage to university property when he exacted his revenge against Barry Kripke in an act of blatant vandalism. Not only does he get Barry, but also the university president and other dignitaries. Sheldon would have certainly faced a disciplinary hearing, along with paying for the damages he admitted to causing. But nothing of the event is mentioned after that.
Correction: Nothing about it is mentioned in the show. Doesn't mean that he wasn't punished. He's lucky he held his job, probably. That's all we know.
4th Jan 2023
Superman (1978)
Corrected entry: Never once does Superman fly in rain or snow or any other form of bad weather. The same is true for the sequels that followed.
Correction: He flies during the storm to help AFO after getting struck by lightning.
21st Apr 2023
Star Trek (1966)
Requiem for Methuselah - S3-E19
Corrected entry: Mr. Flint grabs the Enterprise out of orbit and transfers it onto the table. We assume, because the ship is small, it doesn't weigh much. However, Star Trek canon states the Enterprise weighs 190,000 metric tons, size not withstanding. There's no way that small table could hold such a massive weight.
Correction: We have no idea of how the technology he uses works. If he can shrink the ships down to a miniature size and instantly put everyone in suspended animation, there's no telling if he can alter the weight as well. Not to mention the fact that if he has such advanced technology, he could have a table that's able to bear the weight.
The old "Fantastic Voyage" problem. There are only 2 ways to make something shrink - either you reduce the physical size, and the mass stays the same, in which case the Enterprise on the table now has neutron-star level gravitational pull, OR you delete 99% of the atoms and keep 1 out of every 100 (sampling), like reducing a bitmap image in size. And just like that image, when the Enterprise went back up to full scale, everything would be "chunky."
5th Nov 2019
Common mistakes
Corrected entry: Whenever a man goes into the ladies' restroom to talk to a woman, it's always conveniently empty.
Correction: This is more of a cliche than a mistake. I have entered hundreds of public restrooms in my life and a good number of them have been empty when I did. It's not a mistake for a movie to show an empty ladies room in a particular scene, no matter how many other films do the same.
4th Nov 2021
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)
Corrected entry: Zira puts the blocks together to form the stairs that will allow her to get the banana, but only stares at it. When the female scientist asks why she won't eat it, Zira says she loathes bananas. Bananas grow in tropical climates near the equator. New York City, where she lived in the future, is in a subtropical climate zone, and not grown there. How would she loathe bananas if she's never eaten one before?
Correction: There is too much we don't know and too many possibilities to declare this a mistake. Perhaps they have trade with lands further to the south. Perhaps the climate has changed and land around New York is now hospitable to bananas. Perhaps in the two thousand years between our time and hers, a strain of bananas developed that thrives in temperate environments.
18th Oct 2021
You've Got Mail (1998)
Corrected entry: At the end of the movie when Kathleen found out that Joe was in fact her online love interest she confessed to him she hoped it was him all along. However, in real live, most women would be furious and feel betrayed by his lies and manipulations.
Correction: The fact that you said most means some wouldn't, so just by that statement it's not a mistake, and certainly not a factual error. But a character doing something different from what you assume others would do doesn't constitute a mistake.
4th Dec 2019
Common mistakes
Corrected entry: When a man proposes to a woman and gives her an engagement ring, it always fits perfectly on her finger.
Correction: Choosing a ring takes a while as the man/woman will always try to find the "perfect" ring. It's likely that the recipient's partner will know which ring size to choose. This does make sense as the couple will have known each other for a few years at least.
29th Dec 2019
Kelly's Heroes (1970)
Corrected entry: When Kelly convinces the German tank commander to blast the door open so they can get the gold, an 88 mm shell at that close range would have blown the bank apart. But only a relatively small hole is through the doors and the gold in the middle of the floor lies undisturbed.
Correction: If the shell fired was a high explosive shell, then yes, maybe the bank would have been blown apart, as you say. Since the German tank commander just needed to "blow a hole through that door", then an armor piercing shell would have done the job (as was likely ordered by the Tiger commander) with little damage to the interior of the bank.
Your suggestion doesn't fit the facts since there's no hole in the back of the bank.
22nd Oct 2019
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989)
Corrected entry: When Indiana Jones is told about the tablet discovery by Donovan, Indiana says the three knights who find the grail during the first Crusade are French. When Indiana meets the last knight at the end of the movie, he speaks perfect English, and with an English accent.
Correction: He's also almost 900 years old and imbued with power by God Himself. I think a simple language would be no big deal at all.
How is he imbued by power from God?
How else do you explain him being almost a thousand years old?
Drinking from the cup. How does that make him speak English?
The Grail is imbued with the power of God because it held the blood of Christ. One would think that since he is essentially the God-appointed guardian of the Grail, he would have any knowledge needed to guard it.
Thats a lot of assumptions. The cup grants immortality, that's it. It doesn't make you a polyglot.
He's the appointed guardian of the Holy Grail, an artifact that grants eternal life and is protected by miraculous and physically impossible traps. The guardian is given whatever power needed to keep the Grail in the chamber.
He doesn't have to do anything to keep the cup in the chamber. The seal does that.
I suppose you can make the case about God giving the knight the ability to speak English, but why in an English accent? I would think he'd speak in a French or American accent.
Why? An American dialect is no more neutral than an English one. People who speak with a French accent do so because they are still using rules and habits learned speaking French when trying to speak another language.
Because languages and the people who speak them change over time, especially that long of a period, by the immigration and emigration of people, influence of other languages, etc... What he would have spoken then would have been Old French, not modern French. While they do share a modicum of similarity, they are not mutually intelligible due to changes in grammar, syntax, and word use. Old French, for instance, contains far more influence from the Germanic Frankish language and Celtic Gaulish than modern French.
A French accent from 900 years ago would sound nothing like a modern French accent. In the same way, what we consider to be a modern proper English accent is actually a fairly modern phenomenon designed to distinguish upper from lower class people.
5th Sep 2019
Common mistakes
Corrected entry: Whenever a character comes home at night to their house or apartment, every single light has been left on.
Correction: I wouldn't really call this a mistake. Especially depending on the area they live. Often times people leave their lights on when they are away to make it appear that people are still home so it's less likely they get broken into and robbed.
Agreed. My family frequently left lights and/or the TV on when we were away when I was growing up.
Yes, leaving lights on in your home when you're away is normal, but it seems that every single light in every room is a common occurrence in movies and TV shows.
Could you give some examples? I don't remember ever seeing this happen. It certainly doesn't happen every time.
1st Jul 2019
Common mistakes
Corrected entry: When men wake up in the morning they often look clean shaven.
Correction: Also, key word is look. Some men have light colored facial hair that doesn't reveal itself to the eye. But can to the touch.
25th May 2019
Common mistakes
Corrected entry: Whenever someone comes home with some groceries, a baguette is frequently seen sticking out of the bag.
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Correction: They don't use money in the Federation, but that doesn't mean that other alien cultures don't use currency for illegal activities.
wizard_of_gore ★