Collisions with Reality

Yes, it’s been another week of mostly bad news. But there are still some lovely and interesting things out there:

• From Information is Beautiful, a collection of vintage infographics from old articles and textbooks. My favorite is this graphic from the 1930′s comparing the lifespans of many well-known animals:
  

• Via Flowing Data, I found the moviebarcode tumblr. Each frame in a movie is compressed into a sliver, such that a two-hour movie becomes a colorful barcode. Slumdog Millionaire becomes a series of blues and browns. Pinocchio and Dumbo both hit a broad, bright range of the spectrum. And in some movies, like Rear Window, you can see the static setting.
• If you’re interested in the weird history of punctuation, and Eats, Shoots and Leaves just wasn’t comprehensive enough for you, check out the Shady Characters blog. The entry on the pilcrow — the funny little “new paragraph” sign rarely seen nowadays — draws upon the interwoven histories of Christianity, Europe, and writing. Plus, it has quite possibly the greatest parenthetical comment ever:
  

  (“BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER” — one might forgive the Almighty for His melodramatic use of capital letters when one recalls that His subjects had not yet developed lower case)

I know this post does nothing but reveal what sort of nerdy blogs I follow. I’m okay with that.

Have a great weekend! And Go Blue (in the CCHA semifinals tonight! . . . what, is there something else going on?)!

Two posts in a week? What?

• This article about the Cowboys & Aliens trailer cracks me up, because while we were not at a midnight showing, we did see the trailer before seeing the Harry Potter movie in Santa Monica. Our audience was not laughing at the preview, but when the movie title was shown, at the end of the trailer, the entire crowd essentially went, “WTF?” We overheard one person asking her companion, “Is this a joke?”

• After watching Rudolph on Wednesday, and last night’s awesome episode of Community, I am ridiculously excited for next week’s Rankin/Bass-style episode of Community. If Alison Brie (Annie on Community and Trudy on Mad Men) isn’t already a walking, talking Rankin/Bass character, then I don’t know who is.
• Here’s a handy guide to the 2010 TV schedule for Christmas specials. Why the Harry Potter movies count as holiday movies, I do not know, but there you go.
• Speaking of Christmas specials, enjoy this flash back to 2003 with the Peanuts gang dancing to “Hey Ya”:
  

Happy Chanukah to those of you that are celebrating!

The movie Airplane! came out 30 years ago this week, and some deserved attention has been paid to it. I’ve watched this movie dozens of times, and it was one of the strongest influences on my sense of humor. Yet an important piece of the puzzle has been missing in the retrospectives.

There’s a great article in the NY Times about the making of it and its subsequent influence on parody movies. But although Abrahams sums up the movie thusly:

“There is one line in ‘Zero Hour!’ where a stewardess says, completely seriously, ‘The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner,’ ” Mr. Abrahams said. “That was the essence of the movie. We just repeated the line. We didn’t have to change a thing.”

the article never makes it quite clear that Airplane! is a line-by-line parody of Zero Hour!. Nearly every classic line in Airplane! — like, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking!” — is originally in Zero Hour!. Airplane! just takes the joke a few lines further. (“Do you like movies about gladiators?” is funny, and it’s somehow funnier because the start of that riff, “Ever been in a cockpit before, Joey?” is in Zero Hour!.)

I’ve always imagined that Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker wrote the movie after seeing Zero Hour! on TV late one night and riffing on it while drunk. And I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go and rent both movies and have a double feature, starting with Airplane!. I could quote dialog that’s in both movies all day (“But most of all, it takes respect! And I can’t live with a man I don’t respect.”), but it truly must be seen to be believed. There are so many small details that match up between the movies!

So here’s to Zero Hour!, a crappy little Canadian movie about the redemption of pilot Ted Stryker after the War, who’s able to land a multi-engine plane (“It’s an entirely different kind of flying, altogether!”) in the “sleet, with a little ice”, despite the plane handling “sluggish, like a wet sponge”, because he didn’t have fish for dinner. Without Zero Hour!, we’d never have Airplane!, and that would be a shame.