Yes, you’ll need to have seen the Milton-Bradley boardgame “Guess Who?” and this scene from the Quentin Tarantino flick Pulp Fiction to be in on the joke:
In an earlier article, I wrote about the cleaned-for-TV version of Samuel Jackson’s famous in the movie Snakes on a Plane. Here’s an even better-known line – Bruce Willis’ battle cry from the Die Hard movie series – as edited for prime-time television audiences:
You have to keep in mind that there is no character or concept in the movie named “Mr. Falcon”; the words seems to have been picked randomly. He might as well have said “major factor”, “motor fixer” or even “mojito freezepop”.
(And whoever did the voice rework did a terrible Bruce Willis impression. He sounds more like a young John Travolta saying “Yippee ki yay, Mr. Kotter.”)
For reference, here’s the non-Bowdlerized version:
Inventive as the attempt to come up with a prime-time TV-friendly substitute for “motherfucker” in Die Hard 2 is, it doesn’t hit the creative new heights achieved in this clean-up of The Usual Suspects’ “lineup scene”:
I think it might’ve worked better had they simply bleeped those words out.
Once again, in the name of completeness, here’s the unedited version:
Snakes on a Plane, even when you take into account that it’s supposed to be a big dumb action movie aiming to be a cult film, wasn’t all that good. Apparently it’s been made worse through its bowdlerization for TV, where Samuel Jackson’s famous line has the profanity (and personality) drained from it:
“I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane?”
Anvil! The Story of Anvil was the one documentary I really wanted to catch at last year’s Hot Docs film festival. If you watched Canada’s MuchMusic station in the 1980s and its heavy metal segment, The Pepsi Power Hour (hosted by the mullet-sporting JD Roberts, who later became CNN’s silver-haired John Roberts), you might [...]
I really like the abstract works that designers like Saul Bass created in the 1960s. Here’s an example of Bass’ work – his poster for the Hitchcock movie Vertigo:
Someone who goes by the nom de plume of “Spacesick” likes ‘60s abstract graphic art as much as I do and has created I Can Read [...]
For some reason, this photo-comic in which “Mr. Miyagi” (played by Pat Morita in the Karate Kid movies) gives mad props to Barack Obama amuses me to no end. I decided to enhance it by adding a caption to the bottom":
Found thanks to Giles Bowkett.
Back in high school, after reading Space-Time and Beyond for the umpteenth time and drinking one too many zombies with my friend Henry, we came up with a theory:
In the infinite set of universes, there had to exist a particular universe in which the events in our lives were being watched as a TV show.
We then made a solemn vow to live the kind of life that got high ratings.