Things that are out of place in movies

[Miss Chicken]

or on TV.

Last night I went to the cinema to see the movie "Arctic Blast". It was a B-grade movie in which the plot was very similar to "The Day After Tomorrow". The main difference is that the majority of the story was set in my home city - Hobart, Tasmania which was the first city in the world to freeze. Now movies set in Hobart are few and far in between so there was a reasonably good turnout to see the movie though I don't think it will be shown in many cinemas outside of Tassie (more likely it will go straight to DVD).

Any way at one point the movie showed what was meant to be the Emergency Response Centre in Sydney, Australia. This is the building they showed

People in the audience chuckled because we all recognised the building as the Menzies Research Centre/School of Medicine which is located in the heart of Hobart. Somehow it got moved to Sydney in the movie.

This got me to thinking about other things that I have seen in movies/TV shows that I realised straight away are out of place. I remembered one episode of Bonanza in which Little Joe gave his old teddy bear to a little boy that the Cartwrights were looking after. I knew the teddy was out of place (or more correctly out of time) as the teddy bear didn't exist until 1903.

So I am asking people to give examples of other things, people etc that you yourself have realised are out of place in movies.

 

[Canadave]

On a related note, Fringe has been using the very recognizable Vancouver Public Library as the alternate-Manhatan headquarters of Fringe Division. It's rather noticeable, especially because it seems very much like a Vancouver\West Coast building, and not really like something you'd expect to find in Manhatan\ Manhattan.

 

[Gary Mitchell]

In Die Hard 2, the action took place in Dulles International Airport, which serves the Washington, DC area. I was surprised when John McClane used a pay phone in the airport that belonged to Pacific Bell telephone company.

 

[scotpens]

In Die Hard 2, the action took place in Dulles International Airport, which serves the Washington, DC area. I was surprised when John McClane used a pay phone in the airport that belonged to Pacific Bell telephone company.

Fire the script girl!

Anachronisms in movies could fill a hundred threads. In My Favorite Year, there's a dinner scene in which Al Jolson and Al Capone are both mentioned as if they're still alive. Problem is, Capone died in 1947 and Jolson in 1950 -- and the story takes place in 1954.

Otto Preminger's Southern potboiler Hurry Sundown is set in 1946, but an early scene features a Sikorsky S-55 helicopter, which wasn't produced until 1950.

In Chaplin starring Robert Downey Jr., when Charlie Chaplin returns to New York in 1952, the liner shown is the Normandie -- a French ship which was destroyed by fire in New York harbor ten years earlier.

Oh, and what about James Cameron's Titanic? Leo DiCaprio's entire performance was an anachronism. He walked in out of another movie.

I don't think it counts as something "out of place," though, when one real building or location stands in for another one, as long as 99 percent of the audience doesn't know the difference. For example, Terminator 2 has a long, continuous chase sequence that was filmed in at least three different L.A. locations that are dozens of miles apart. If you don't live here, how would you know?

 

[Finn]

I found the subway scene very jarring in Enemy of the State where Will Smith and Gene Hackman is being chased. One moment, they went into Union Station, a place very familiar and intimate to me and all of my university, and suddenly it cut to some subway station which was obviously not part of the DC metro system.

 

[Gaith]

I don't think it counts as something "out of place," though, when one real building or location stands in for another one, as long as 99 percent of the audience doesn't know the difference. For example, Terminator 2 has a long, continuous chase sequence that was filmed in at least three different L.A. locations that are dozens of miles apart. If you don't live here, how would you know?

As opposed to the middle of the car chase in Bullitt, when the cars are headed through the Marina, towards the Golden Gate Bridge... and only shots later are deep inland, with no water in sight. Then there's the Voyage Home scene where Kirk and Spock walk in the Marina (in San Francisco), discussing how to get back to SF.

The scene in The Aviator in which Cate Blanchett takes DiCaprio home to her upper-crust family, who're mind-bogglingly rude to him, is to high society what Fringe is to used-car sales.

The Social Network... as if any Harvard student, no matter how offbeat, could fail to recognize Bill Gates on sight, much less during a whole lecture.

Then there's the bit in The Hurt Locker where the guys investigate a Green Zone bombing by jogging into the slums, without crossing any wall or like obstacle... which is only the whole frickin' point of the Green Zone!

 

[Ruaidhri]

I love in the first season of Battlestar Galactica how there is a shot of deserted Caprica City while Helo is wandering around, and there is an office tower with a ScotiaBank logo right at the top. I didn't realize the colonies had a branch!

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Anyone who lives in California could dig up tons of examples...

Dustin Hoffman driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge in The Graduate.

The nonexistent bell tower at San Juan Bautista in Vertigo.

The strangely mountainous Kansas of Jericho.

The episode of the new Bionic Woman where somebody from San Francisco decides to hop over to Idaho for dinner!?! And in general, the hilarity of them trying to pass off Vancouver for San Francisco.

 

[Trekker4747]

It's not in the tone of other things mentioned here but for "out of place" I'm going to mention Kirk's "time travel dream" in The Voyage Home. One huge "WTF?!" moment.

 

[milo bloom]

It's not in the tone of other things mentioned here but for "out of place" I'm going to mention Kirk's "time travel dream" in The Voyage Home. One huge "WTF?!" moment.

I see this all the time and I don't get it. I was 12 when TVH came out, and I knew then it was supposed to be a sort of time-travel induced hallucination of the future. It was a little avant-garde for Trek perhaps, but the constant calling out of it on the internet just baffles me.

 

[Trekker4747]

It's not in the tone of other things mentioned here but for "out of place" I'm going to mention Kirk's "time travel dream" in The Voyage Home. One huge "WTF?!" moment.

I see this all the time and I don't get it. I was 12 when TVH came out, and I knew then it was supposed to be a sort of time-travel induced hallucination of the future. It was a little avant-garde for Trek perhaps, but the constant calling out of it on the internet just baffles me.

I "get" what it was supposed to be and why it happened it was just very out of place and seemed just put there to be "ooooo edgy and artstic!" But, in the end, the scene is just bizzare and doesn't fit with the tone of the movie or really with anything at all really. It's just... there. All of the sudden we get this crazy, artsy, scene involving cloud-heads, falling flaming dummies, and pond reeds along with lines that will come much later in the movie. Where "we" just seeing it or was Kirk and the rest of the crew seeing it? (Because it pretty much goes un-mentioned.)

It's just out of place. I "get" it but it doesn't make any sense for it to be there.

 

[od0_ital]

Watchin' Machete at the theater, since it was filmed in & around Austin, was surreal.

I especially liked how they made downtown Austin look like an illegal day laborer ghetto.

 

[scotpens]

I love in the first season of Battlestar Galactica how there is a shot of deserted Caprica City while Helo is wandering around, and there is an office tower with a ScotiaBank logo right at the top. I didn't realize the colonies had a branch!

At least, in this shot from the Star Trek TOS episode “Operation: Annihilate!,” the director or D.P. had the good sense to block the top of the white building from view. The location was the headquarters of TRW Corporation in Redondo Beach, and there was a huge red TRW logo at the top of the tower. (It was replaced by Northrup Grumman’s logotype when that company bought out TRW in 2007.)

 

[Gepard]

In Die Hard 2, the action took place in Dulles International Airport, which serves the Washington, DC area. I was surprised when John McClane used a pay phone in the airport that belonged to Pacific Bell telephone company.

Fire the script girl!

Anachronisms in movies could fill a hundred threads. In My Favorite Year, there's a dinner scene in which Al Jolson and Al Capone are both mentioned as if they're still alive. Problem is, Capone died in 1947 and Jolson in 1950 -- and the story takes place in 1954.

Otto Preminger's Southern potboiler Hurry Sundown is set in 1946, but an early scene features a Sikorsky S-55 helicopter, which wasn't produced until 1950.

In Chaplin starring Robert Downey Jr., when Charlie Chaplin returns to New York in 1952, the liner shown is the Normandie -- a French ship which was destroyed by fire in New York harbor ten years earlier.

Along the same lines, there was a made-for-TV biopic of John Denver that had a scene of him playing with his kids, using a Super Soaker that was manufactured only a year or two before the film was made -- and several years after Denver died.

 

[Greg Cox]

Not a movie, but there was an episode of M*A*S*H in which Radar is shown reading an AVENGERS comic book--which, of course, wasn't even being published during the Korean War!

And pretty much every movie set in Seattle in which people are shown commuting to work on the Monorail--as though it's an actual means of mass transit and not a glorified tourist trap left over from the 1964 World's Fair!

 

[Trekker4747]

Not a movie, but there was an episode of M*A*S*H in which Radar is shown reading an AVENGERS comic book--which, of course, wasn't even being published during the Korean War!

Well, the series itself ran longer than the Korean War, so...

 

[scotpens]

The famous "Trouble" patter song from Meredith Willson's The Music Man contains the lines: “Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corn crib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?”

The Music Man takes place in 1912, seven years before the magazine's premiere issue. Of course, the anachronism was in the original stage show and is simply repeated in the 1962 film version.

BTW, Captain Billy's Whiz Bang was the foundation of Fawcett Publications, which gave us Marvel Comics.

 

[Hamon]

Sorry I didn't watch it. But due to discussion I will says, it is awesome.

 

[OptimusPete]

An episode of 'In Plain Sight' tried to pass of downtown Albuquerque as Staten Island NY

 

[Caliburn24]

The most recent one I can think of is the scene in the Hurt Locker where one of the soldiers is playing Gears of War years before it is actually released.

Doesn't effect the movie one bit, it could have been any video game, but it bugs me for some odd reason.