Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
As Jeremy Clarkson noted when he interviewed Goldblum for the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car segment, "How did you know you had the right lead?!". Yeah, because all extraterrestrial spacecraft use the same USB ports we use here on Earth, don't they?
A few that come to mind for me:
1. Gary Busey playing three different Fender guitars in The Buddy Holly Story, none of them made when Buddy was actually alive. The Bronco wasn't even introduced until the early 60's, Buddy never played a Telecaster, and the Strat is very obviously a CBS era model, with the large headstock.
2. Michael J Fox morphing, in the space of mere days, from an incompetent Eddie Van Halen wannabe to a seasoned guitarist well versed in Chuck Berry licks and capable of leading a pickup band flawlessly through a song they've heard before. I'm not even going to bring up the fact that he's playing a guitar that didn't exist in 1955, or the fact that he probably wouldn't have been able to play that guitar solo on it, either.
3. Scuba divers diving alone. First rule of scuba diving is you never dive alone. It probably happens, there's always people doing stupid stuff, but we're supposed to buy marine biologists, military men, environmentalists, and other "responsible adults" ignoring safety rules for the sake of pushing the plot of your lame TV show or movie along.
4. I don't care that the word "parsec" was misused in Star Wars. That's besides the point. I don't know, for instance, how many times on Flipper, Sandy or Bud should have gotten the bends, because they didn't take a surface interval between dives. In one episode, Sandy goes down, gets nitrogen narcosis, Flipper has to "help him back to the surface" (in fact, Sandy seems to be ascending just fine on his own, Flipper isn't doing much of anything), then almost immediately goes back down and goes even deeper than he did the first time. Then after the commercial break, he goes down a third time! Uh yeah, you better have a decompression chamber on call if you're gonna do dren like that!
Oh and let's not forget all the lapses of scientific knowledge in the movie The Black Hole (everything from playing meteorites flying through space to humans being exposed to open space and surviving).
And there's that scene at the end of Easy Come Easy Go where "Elvis" (more likely his stunt double) "pumps" air into the bad guy's wetsuit (itself a physical impossibility) thus turning said wetsuit into a balloon, sending the baddie rocketing to the surface. The guy should be dead, or at least comatose, from an embolism, but he seems to be just fine when we see him a little later.
5. All those times on Lost In Space where they kept encountering the same spaceships, the same antagonists, etc, and neither the kids, the robot, the pilot, nor the scientist or his wife remember seeing them before. There's three different episodes with Robbie The Robot in them, and in each one, Robbie is supposed to be a different baddie. Gimme a break!!!!! Speaking of Lost In Space...
6. The entire Quantum Leap series. Complete ignores every single rule of time travel established by every single science fiction writer who ever wrote a good time travel story. The law of averages suggest that if you run around time/space and keep saving children from dying, or marriages from failing or whatever, at some point, you're gonna end up saving someone who grows up to be a serial killer or a crazy general or politician who leads the country into Armageddon, or at the very least, a smooth jazz musician.
7. Things where costumes change in ways they shouldn't. In Corvette Summer, there's a scene near the end where Mark Hamill saves Annie Potts from a pornographic short film shoot. He drags her out of a hotel, with her wearing a red and black wetsuit, and into his car, and they immediately speed off back to California, with the looney tunes who stole Mark's Stingray in hot pursuit. Now, I bring this up, because late into this scene, there's several shots where Annie's outfit changes. Oh, it's still red and black, but now it looks more like Uhura's uniform from Star Trek. Then it reverts back to her wearing the wetsuit. It's like they shot the scene, decided later they needed to insert some new shots, so instead of renting the wetsuit again, they just stuck Annie in a top that kinda sorta looked similar to the outfit she wore in the earlier shot.
8. One of the common things you see in a lot of movies and TV show: people climbing out of the water, and like a minute late,r they look like they've never been in the water. Hair looks perfect, maybe they're wearing what appear to be brand new wetsuits, all bone dry. And even worse, there'll be shots where, for instance, you'll see the diver unzip their wetsuit jacket, then the very next shot, it's fully zipped again, then another shot of it unzipped, and so on.
9. In a Barnaby Jones episode once, a guy in regular street clothes on a boat, somehow changes into scuba gear, including a full wetsuit with a hood, slips into the water, murders a diver, then slips back onto the boat, takes off his scuba gear, dries off completely, and slips back into the same clothes he had on before, all in a matter of minutes. Dude, have you ever put on a wetsuit?! I have. It'll take you like 20 minutes just to do that! Taking one off is almost as bad! Forget about toweling off and getting back into his regular clothes.
10. In The Blues Brothers, the orphanage should have been tax exempt, because it was run by the church. But then reportedly, at the time the movie was being made, there was talk that such exemptions might be lifted, so maybe the movie was playing off that.
11. Again in The Blues Brothers, the Nazis really should have been driving Volkswagens (well, maybe not should, but it would have been a good history joke, since the Volkswagen was founded by the Nazis).
12. As far as deus ex machinas go, coming back to Flipper, how about every episode having Flipper somehow being able to rescue whoever it was who needed rescuing. In one episode, a diver (again, diving alone) nearly dies of carbon monoxide poisoning, because he's diving with contaminated tank. So, how the frell does the damn dolphin know the diver needs saving?! In some of the other episodes, I could see that the dolphin would see a situation (say an unconscious diver, or a mini-sub trapped in more than 150 feet of water) and then go alert the kids or Porter or whomever, but how the frell does anyone figure out what Flipper wants? OK, I could buy like after the third or fourth episode, someone saying "OK, when Flipper gets like this, that means someone's in danger", but there's at least one episode where someone who has no prior knowledge of Flipper's..."ability", let's call it, manages to deduce Flipper wants him to come save a diver suffering from the bends (a diver who, once again, was diving on his own, instead of with a dive buddy).
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