Tag: movies

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If you went out to the movies in the US during 2009, there’s a good chance you saw a turn-off-your-phone PSA in which a movie about “robots from space” tries to negotiate blowing up Mount Rushmore.

In a case of life imitating art, the National Park Service is currently battling Transformers 3 — a movie about robots from space — over just what they can and can’t do with a national monument!

Okay, you can’t blow up a national monument, but…

Bill Line, Park Service spokesman, said the producers “have asked to do some things that simply are not done on the National Mall,” among them staging a “car race” along the Mall’s gravel paths and flooding it with artificial light in order to shoot at night.

Apparently it’s not unique to Transformers 3, but a fairly frequent battle between the park service and film producers, which means Sprint’s video isn’t just a funny story, but a bit of an in-joke to those familiar with the industry.

Hmm, any chance the new movie will have a chorus singing “Robots from space!” in the background?

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Here are some of my contributions to today’s Twitter meme, #greatquoteswithdear. You can probably figure out how the game works…

  • “Damn it, dear, I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer!”
  • “Damn the torpedoes, dear. Full speed ahead!”
  • “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes, dears.”
  • “Hello, dear. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
  • “I aim to misbehave, dear.”
  • “I came, I saw, I conquered, dear.”
  • “Kneel before Zod, dear.”
  • “Madness? This is Sparta, dear!” ← (this one’s my favorite)
  • “More weight, dear.”
  • “Something wicked this way comes, dear.”
  • “The same thing we do every night, dear: Try to take over the world!”
  • “Why so serious, dear?”
  • “Yippee-ki-yay, dear.”
  • “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, dear?”

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Myth Adventures, Phil Foglio’s comic-book adaptation of Robert Asprin’s fantasy/comedy novel, Another Fine Myth, is being serialized as a free webcomic [Edit: no longer available.], in the same format as Girl Genius. I remember spending a lot of effort tracking down the mid-1980s books on eBay, before they finally reissued the collection.

The title of that first novel was originally going to be Another Fine Mess, from the Laurel and Hardy catch-phrase, but someone misheard it and Robert Asprin decided he liked that version better. It turns out that “Another fine mess” is actually a misquote itself, according to this the New York Times article on why we misquote movies (via @johannadc). It was originally “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”