I Saw it in a Movie

Back in 1990 my dad took my sister and me to the movies alot.  We had seen Joe Versus the Volcano, The First Power, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, The Rookie, The Freshman, Mad House, and Lord of the Flies all that year.  This particular time I was seeing a movie I was real excited about.  I had amassed a collection of action figures, seen them on TV, and now I could see them on the big screen!  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the Movie was out.  Heck yeah!  I mean, “cowabunga!”

So, the movie was great.  I thought it was the best movie ever made.  I even bought a book about it from our school book fair.  I especially thought Casey Jones at the end did the funniest thing ever. 

The Turtles (actually it was Master Splinter) defeated Shredder, he falls off a roof and ends up on a trash truck.  “Oops!”  he gets squished.  I thought it was so hilarious.

Anyway, as much as I loved the movie, something didn’t sit well with me.  After getting dunked in water, Donatello brags that turtles are amphibians*.  What?!? Turtles are reptiles!    It’s one thing if Michelangelo would have said that, but Donatello?  He’s supposed to be a genius!  This was careless and disturbing to me.  Was it big enough to ruin a movie?  Well, no, but…it was distracting.

1998’s Saving Private Ryan was a great movie.  There is a stat that comes up that says something like, “every day 1,100 World War II vets die”.  Something like that.  That may have (maybe) been true in 1997 or 1998, but it’s certainly not true much longer after that.  For years after that movie blog posts and news stories in print and on television (national and local) would cite that statistic as fact.  But how could it be?  There is a limited number of veterans.  At some point the number has got to come down, right?  That pool has gotta get more and more shallow.

The National World War II museum says that in 2017 there were 558,000 World War II vets left.  Or about a year and a half’s worth if that 1,100 per day figure still holds strong.  It’s just not true anymore.  But pay attention and see if you hear that figure brought up again next Veteran’s day.

Those are a couple examples of bogus things we all learned from movies.  But what about something that’s nearly universally learned by everybody of my generation?  For this I turn to 1995’s hit movie Clueless.

Rest in Peace Brittany Murphy.

Everybody learned “sporadically” because of that movie.  Hell, even to this day I use the word “sporadically” sporadically.  Thank you, Alicia Silverstone.

1989’s Lethal Weapon 2 taught us all one thing.  Mention that movie to anybody my age or a little bit older and we’ll say, “Diplomatic immunity!”.

We learned that high level members of foreign governments could do whatever the hell they wanted without getting in trouble.  This was outrageous!  I’m not sure how much truth there was to this, because come on, horrible abuses would certainly bring a chill between governments. But still.  This movie made everybody skeptical of otherwise selfless public servants.

It really is true that we are gullible.  We will believe just about anything we see in movies and on TV, unless it’s a politician.  Take a moment and think critically.  What is the context of a questionable fact or statement?  Is it part of a point to move a narrative along?  Is the person making the dubious claim an expert?  And remember that writers are people too.  They are not perfect and probably nobody fact checks a movie script.  Apparently though, nowadays “factchecking” is a four-letter word.

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*After writing this I fired up the Filmrise app on my Roku player and fast forwarded TMNT to the scene I wrote about.  The line was not there.  But I distinctly remember it.  Unless this is a case of Mandela effect  it must have been in the book I bought about the movie, or maybe in the cartoon.

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My sharp dressed self and some distant cousin.  Summer, 1991.

If I picked one song for this post it would be...