Not sure if it counts as sci fi, but before I saw Get Smart (the 1965-70 series), I didn't know it was about a guy by that name. But then I guess, nobody would.
Retro Sci Fi Urban Legends, Misconceptions, and Assorted Errors
- Thread starter Laura Cynthia Chambers
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Missed it by that much.
Ah, the old "quote a character's catchphrase verbatim where appropriate" trick!
Sorry about that, Chief.
Don't tell me nobody else has anything to post on this thread...
(Seriously, though, what else has everyone got?)
(Seriously, though, what else has everyone got?)
When I first saw 'Return of the Jedi' (aged about 5 or 6 years old) I misunderstood what was happening in the scene with Oola (to say nothing of the scale difference) and thought that Jabba ate her. It wasn't until I saw it again on VHS many years later that I realised it was a frog he shoved into his mouth.
Does that count?
Does that count?
Yeah. Eeek.
Did anyone talk about starship orientation in space? How space encounters between ships almost always have them lined up like they are on an ocean rather than in a vacuum. For that matter, how vessels often fly through space like airplanes rather than vessels in a vacuum?
Yeah. That irked me a little. Of all the scifi movie makers out there, it seemed that only George Lucas realized there is no up or down in space.
Is it because it's kind of disorienting (in scenes that are not meant to be) for the enemy to be flying upside down from the movie watcher's perspective?
Uhh, you mean the guy who made the scene in Revenge of the Sith where everything inside the Star Destroyer tips sideways when the ship does? And that's not counting all the animated episodes where smoke rises from a damaged spaceship as it sinks. Star Wars not only has up and down in space, it has gravity and atmospheric convection in space.
(And yes, I'm aware of the fan handwave that the ships were hovering in the upper atmosphere rather than actually orbiting. It doesn't count if it isn't stated within the story.)
Granted, Lucas wasn't perfect about it. But he was a damn sight better about it than Star Trek ever was. He did have ships-fighters and whatever-occasionally coming in technically upside down relative to the rest of the world. Star trek never did that.
Aside from the Falcon hiding sideways on the hull of the Star Destroyer in Empire (which might just as easily have been Leigh Brackett or Lawrence Kasdan's idea as Lucas's), I'd say that was mostly just about Lucas wanting the ILM team to emulate the maneuvers of WWII fighter pilots, who would often do flips and loops and dives and so forth. Keep in mind that Star Wars space battles emulate war-movie dogfights while Star Trek tends to draw more on the Age of Sail or submarine movies.
Also, Trek has done it occasionally. In Enterprise, we sometimes saw the shuttlepod dock sideways or upside-down relative to the internal gravity of an alien ship, depending on where its docking port was located.
Not a Star Destroyer... that would be the opposing side. Also, they were in Coruscant's gravity well.
He's not? I guess I was today years old when I learned it!
The Lost in Space Robot is Robby the Robot's "kid brother." They were both created by art director Robert Kinoshita, so they have a family resemblance. The LiS Robot's name is Model YM3-B-9, or just B-9, which was a pun on "benign."
Robby did guest star on LiS twice, as an evil alien robot in "War of the Robots" and a prison-ship robot in "Condemned of Space."
Robby did guest star on LiS twice, as an evil alien robot in "War of the Robots" and a prison-ship robot in "Condemned of Space."
My Classical History prof was baffled when confronted by a couple of students who had never heard of the Crucifixion. He couldn't wrap his mind around that. I told him it's quite possible in modern society to not know about this (or at least not much about it) if you come from a family that isn't into religion and you only get into the non-religious aspects of holidays.I'll cop to getting much of my religious education from Biblical movies and Dracula flicks.
"What's holy water, Dad?"
I swear, I had never heard of Communion wafers until I read Dracula in sixth grade and my father had to explain the whole bread into flesh, wine into blood business to me, since I had somehow managed to make it to age twelve without hearing about it before.
As for me, I worked on a production of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1981, was confused about some of the songs, so I dug out the New Testament I'd been given in Grade 5 (all kids that year got one from some religious group pushing their beliefs in public schools) and read the Gospels.
It helped me figure out what the songs were about, but it opened a whole new can of worms for my atheist self who'd just become a diehard fan of Carl Sagan's Cosmos...
"Get Smart" doesn't only refer to Maxwell Smart. "Get smart" is a slang expression that's been around for decades and of course it means "don't be stupid."
We see on the show that while Smart can be smart, he can also be really dumb. Agent 99 was the real brains of CONTROL.
I did not know that---I always thought it was the same robot.
