There is no portion of the third panel that I understand.
It’s pretty safe bet, though, that the discussion will contain — and possibly even lead with — spoilers for “The Usual Suspects.”
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Comics I Don't Understand 
Of course – ’cause I have this bookmarked . . .
Actually, I have this ‘transition’ every morning because of Fibromyalgia . . . altho not to THAT extreme.
Does Mallet think The Usual Suspects is an obscure movie? *Is* it an obscure movie? Or does Mallet think Marathon running is an obscure hobby? Is it?
So the joke is that marathon runners (apparently) after running will stumble about for a week or so but will suddenly snap back to normal within ten steps. The woman says the is the Keyser Souze transition (obviously from the final scene of The Usual Suspect). In a meta-joke Caulfield points out the people who will get it, the intersection of marathon runners and people who have seen the Usual Suspects, is really select, only 2%
But is it? I’m not a marathon runner but I know several and I assume most people have one or two close friends or office workers who regularly (once or twice a year at least) run marathons. And the Usual Suspects is still a very well known movie isn’t it? I’d say the knowledge intersect is much higher than 2%.
However, it’s possible the phenomenon of snapping back from the aches of a post marathon stumbling are not as common or well known as Mallet assumes. Or maybe it is… I’ve never noticed it.
Andréa has shown us what Miss Plainwell is talking about. I’ve never seen The Usual Suspects, but I’ve seen plenty of Keyser Söze references around the Internet. I never fully got them and seem to have conflated Söze and Tyler Durden (I’ve never seen Fight Club either). After watching the clip (which explains it all perfectly), I spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure out who the second cop was. First I thought it was John Pankow, then Dean Stockwell. I finally figured out it was Dan Hedaya, but it was hard since I only really know him as Nick Tortelli on Cheers.
Anyway, as for explaining Caulfield’s comment. He’s just pointing out that 2% of the population is going to get the joke. Andréa’s in the 2%, Bill isn’t.
Can we poll the usual suspects (heh, heh) here at CIDU to see what our percentage is?
So far:
Get it: Andréa, Woozy, larK
Don’t: Bill, DemetriosX
So far, we have 60%, not 2….
Don’t think I’ve ever consciously heard of a movie called THE USUAL SUSPECTS, and definitely have absolutely no memory of ever having heard of Keyser Söze, whatever s/he or it or them is or was or are or were.
One in a thousand Americans ran a marathon in 2016 (507,000 presumably including duplicate listings for repeat runners) so it’s a fair guess that 4 percent have ever run a marathon. I suspect the number who have done both is a LOT smaller than 2 percent; although the overlap would be higher because 80 to 90 percent of both groups are men.
larK, I don’t think we’re a good representation of the general population.
Regarding Frazz, I saw the movie, and remembered the Keyser Söze reveal, but his walk wasn’t what stuck in my head about it and this was a CIDU for me. I doubt even being a marathoner would have helped.
And now you won’t be able to watch it ’cause you saw the ending. Although, knowing the ending would put a completely different spin on the movie. For me, those few moments at the end are the best part, which is why I had it bookmarked for revisiting every once in a while. (As with “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, the scenes with Kevin Spacey are the best, once I separate the actor from his misdeeds.)
I was COMPLETELY gobsmacked by that scene; in fact, I don’t remember much ELSE about the movie, other than I was completely confused by it . . . and never bothered to rent it again to figure it out.
I’ve seen the usual suspects, but like Andrea, all I really remember was the ending. I think there were some clever moments and double-crosses but I’m vague on the other parts.
lark: But when Bill asks for an explanation of a comics, obviously the answers are biased towards people who understand it. I didn’t understand the comic, but it wouldn’t bother to write a comment saying “I don’t understand the comic.”
Well, OK, I just did write a comment saying that, but you get my point.
Well, that’s why I’m asking in this case that the lurkers step forward!
And whether or not we’re a good representation of the general public, I can’t figure if we’d skew toward the “we understand obscure references, because we’re comic geeks” or toward the “we don’t understand the references, just look at the name of the site we frequent”.
So what the heck!
Got it: Andréa, Woozy, larK, beckoningchasm
Didn’t: Bill, DemetriosX, Shrug, Winter Wallaby
Other: billybob, B.A.
50%
(Future posters, add your self to the tallies in your comment!)
Is there supposed to be a prize for the most obscure joke to make it past the editor? Even if every single runner had seen the movie, I think Caulfield is wildly overestimating the number of marathoners in the population. There are about 325,000,000 people in America, 2% of that would be 6.5 million. It would take over 200 large marathons (approximating the size of the Boston marathon) to accumulate that many runners, and that doesn’t count repeaters, either.
Kilby. Don’t have to *be* a runner. Just have to know a runner. ANd surely there are a tens of thousands of *small* marathons every year. Seems my friends are *always* talking about some marathon or half marathon they are training for one weekend or another.
ANd you don’t even have to know a runner. You just have to take the strips word for it that after a marathon the runners ache and limp and stumble for a week (and recover in a ten step moment?? I’m still finding that heard to believe…. but even so, the strip explained it perfectly clearly so it’s I can’t claim to have no idea what it *could* mean— just that I doubt its that well known).
And don’t have to have *seen* the Usual Suspects but just have to know about the ending which is on the majority of movie lists of memorable surprise endings. All due respect to Shrug and B.A. this is *hardly* an obscure reference. Maybe not Norman Bates’ mother or Luke I’m your father well known, but currently more well known than “plastics” or “rosebud”. And about on par with seeing dead people.
(Hmmm, don’t have many people talking about the Crying Game any more…. do we?)
Got it: Andréa, Woozy, larK, beckoningchasm
Didn’t: Bill, DemetriosX, Shrug, Winter Wallaby, Bookworm
Other: billybob, B.A.
Somewhat less than 50%….
Never heard of the movie. Did the STFW step for that name and came up with an article that was way too much to wade through to figure out an obscure joke. (A *deliberately* obscure joke.)
“I finally figured out it was Dan Hedaya, but it was hard since I only really know him as Nick Tortelli on Cheers.”
Mr. Watori from Joe Vs. The Volcano, an underrated movie in my opinion.
C’mon, the point is (as always) that Caulfield is WAY smarter than the rest of us !
I saw the film when it came out – and even met Christopher McQuarrie, the writer, in Luxembourg a year or so later when he passed by a project my brother was doing – and when I first saw the cartoon strip I got the Keyser Söze shuffling-to-walking-OK reference. But I don’t get the “stumbling for one week and then within 10 further steps walking OK” suggestion. Do marathon runners do that? Or is it that every day the marathon runner starts out stiff-limbed on waking, and takes a few steps to get walking smoothly? But the wording doesn’t make that daily reference sound plausible.
Christopher McQuarrie more recently turned to directing, including the last two Mission: Imposssible films.
An award for the most obscure mainstream, syndicated comic… the notion intrigues me.
But . . . who can judge obscurity (other than Jude [the Obscure])?
I’m not sure I recognize Dan Hedaya, but I think I saw Giancarlo Esposito walking by in the station!
When I first saw the movie I was completely underwhelmed about the ending. I thought the main substance of the big reveal twist was supposed to be obvious from the beginning! (I just mean who is whom.) But on a much later rewatch, I thought there was something very clever and artful in the part of the reveal where we see the elements that prompted various inventions in his story, and how the cop is putting it together.
Man, the idea that The Usual Suspects – an award winning, commercially successful movie popular with both critics and audiences – would be obscure is so strange to me. (Of course, if he really wanted to leave out the ‘I’ve heard of this movie, but I haven’t seen it’ contingent, she’d have called it the ‘Verbal Kint Transition’. Of course, maybe he’s part of that contingent.)
larK, I think we understand obscure references not because we’re “comic geeks”, but because we skew toward just knowing a lot of diverse sh t.
“Man, the idea that The Usual Suspects – an award winning, commercially successful movie popular with both critics and audiences – would be obscure is so strange to me.”
Kamino Neko, some perspective: when the movie came out, I was 2.
Yes, calling it the ‘Verbal Kint Transition’ makes more sense, now that you mention it. But Keyser Söze is somewhat better known (and more fun to say), perhaps?
Librarians know a little about a lot . . .
So… we’re hundreds of librarians?
No, I was commenting on myself.
I last ran a marathon in 1991
My wife ran one the next year. As she lay prostrate afterwards, she kept imploring “Let’s go dancing.”
We did not.
@B.A.: “So… we’re hundreds of librarians?”
Our name is Legion, for we are many. Well, we are Several, anyway.
(Five years retired after almost forty years as a U of Minnesota reference librarian.)
I’ve heard of the movie and the character, but had never seen it so I didn’t know he stumbled around then stopped.
On Mallet’s Facebook page, he admits this one is too esoteric:
“Check us out, indeed. We just entertained 2% of the population, and probably pissed off, at least a little, 80% of the 2% who know that Keyser Söze was played by the now outed-as-awful Kevin Spacey.
“And I’m fine with all of that. Spacey gets no royalties from my fair-use mention of his character in someone else’s movie, and everyone should see that movie, even if I spoilered it a little bit. It’s a terrific movie with one of the best ensemble casts ever. Some great scenes. One in particular. One that is, albeit not portrayed as such in the film, every week-out marathoner’s dream.
“Speaking of marathons, good luck and great times to anyone participating tomorrow in the Detroit Free Press Marathon. Layers. It’s warm in the tunnel, and cold coming out, especially if you’re soaked. And enjoy the Keyser Söze walk when it comes next week.”
Fine, I give up. I’d rather talk about The Crying Game:
We went as a family to see it, because all the critics were raving about it. I was at the end of my teens, so it turns out it was an uncomfortable movie to be seeing with mom & dad… Anyway, we clearly had no idea what it was about, let alone the secret ending that we weren’t supposed to reveal to our friends. Except, it totally failed to work on my father. See, he was a doctor, a radiologist, and as soon as he saw the Jaye Davidson character, he said, “that’s not a woman, the hips are all wrong, that’s a man”, long before we even knew who this character was, how significant they were going to be to the story, none of it. So a double strike out: an uncomfortable “family” movie, and no shock or surprise, my father could see right through it from the very start…
(Then there was this friend that we had to coax to try to get to watch The Sixth Sense; we played it in the office after work, and just before the big reveal that makes the whole move stand on its head, he said, “You know what? I don’t have to watch this; it’s too disturbing, the Münchhausen by Proxy stuff, I get it, goodbye,” and nothing we could say could convince him to stay for the crucial final 10 minutes… We couldn’t give it away, there were others watching who hadn’t seen it yet.)
(And isn’t Münchhausen by Proxy just a little too exposed as a movie/TV cliché at this point? I think I’ve pointed it out two times recently as this is what the big shocker is going to be — if it’s so over-used, it loses it’s ability to shock and misdirect.)
“Man, the idea that The Usual Suspects – an award winning, commercially successful movie popular with both critics and audiences – would be obscure is so strange to me.”
I;m …. absolutely floored.
“On Mallet’s Facebook page, he admits this one is too esoteric:”
Esoteric???? I’m flabbergasted.
“Kamino Neko, some perspective: when the movie came out, I was 2.”
Well, My Fair Lady, West Side Story and Breakfast at Tiffanies all came out before I was born. ANd Planet of the Apes and the Graduate came out when I was 5. So… that’s not much perspective.
You can put me in the “Didn’t” group. I did see The Usual Suspects, but that was 23 years ago, I didn’t like it very much, and I have never seen it again. I remembered the Keyser Soze character but not anything about a limp. Nor did I know anything about marathoners stumbling briefly and then walking normally.
I did, however, get Caulfield’s punchline — that the strip had just made a joke that only 2% of the audience would be entertained by.
lark. My local movie reviewer didn’t like the 6th sense and refered to it as a “mediocre ‘Incident at the Oxbow Bridge'”. And that was enough of a spoiler to utterly ruin the 6th sense for me. *sigh*
In fact, it’s received some notoriety (or at least mention) lately because of the “outed-as-awful Kevin Spacey”.
“So… we’re hundreds of librarians?”
At one time my usenet .sig was:
—
If televison’s a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who
won’t shut up.
— Dorothy Gambrell (http://catandgirl.com)
Kamino Neko, you seems to be saying you were surprised Usual Suspects was so obscure today. I was pointing out it might actually be older than you think.
The other films you listed are a different story because everybody thinks of them as old films.
Never saw the movie (and of the five Woozy listed, I’ve seen Planet of the Apes…I think), didn’t get the joke, did get Caulfield’s punchline. Which is pretty much par for the course for Frazz’s pop culture strips, for me.
On the other hand, I know the _story_ of three of Woozy’s films, and a vague idea of the theme of another. I truly know nothing about either The Usual Suspects or Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
BTW – of the five reveals Woozy mentions earlier, I know two and a half of them (I know the line “I see dead people” but have zero idea where it comes from or what it references). I don’t know plastics or Norman Bates’ mother – no idea where plastics comes from, I know vaguely what movie Norman Bates was but a) am not coming up with the name and b) have no idea what the reveal about his mother is/was.
I’m really bad at modern pop culture, _especially_ movies. I kind of expect not to know them – there’s an extra thrill when I can actually identify a movie or actor (I do crossword puzzles with Mom, and modern actors are _hard_. The only harder category is modern sports figures – neither of us has a clue).
B.A. you are responding to woozy, not me.
But your dismissal of my and woozy’s comment suggests you’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick. Neither I nor woozy suggested people should know the movie because it just came out – it’s because it’s a classic. Multiple Oscars, multiple BAFTA awards, as successful as a film of its type could expect to be. It’s not ‘holy cow, it’s 20 years old’, it’s ‘holy cow, it only took 20 years for people to forget it’.
The point of my 5 movies were that when I was BA’s age those movies would have been about the same age as the usual suspects is now. And they were “household words” and although I had only seen one of them I would have known recognizable details of all of them.
Jjmcgaffey, I suppose we must admit when it comes to pop culture movie references you are a bit below average. And I suppose I must embarrassing acknowledge I am (surprising to me) above average. And I suppose my age makes me further geeky. But… I’m not *that*out of touch.
And for eff sakes. We are talking “the usual suspects” not “tank girl”.
For what it’s worth. My 20/30 year old friends (who didn’t know mr. Natural, [or peanuts and Calvin and hobbes]) all knew TUS. (Although they don’t know when harry met sally).
A little late adding my vote, but I immediately caught the Keyser Söze reference, and while I don’t hang around with marathoners, I do relate to the ten step stumble, as that is about what it takes to get all the kinks worked out and my back straightened any time I get up after sitting for awhile. Getting old s*cks.
My take is that Jef Mallet was just indulging in a little self-deprecating humor with the 2% figure.
The ending for The Usual Suspects blew me away, The Sixth Sense not so much. Very early in the movie I noticed that the Bruce Willis character never seemed to appear directly with the other characters, other than the boy, so I spent most of the movie fixating on this. It wasn’t until the lead up to the big reveal that it dawned on me why. Kind of a well, duh moment for me.
And finally, forget percentages of users familiar with the movie, what is the percentage of librarians that show up here? It’s got to be higher than a normal cross section of the population. While I am not a librarian, I do have an MLS (I got sidetracked into computers, what can I say?). My mother was a librarian, and I married a librarian, and before we go all Freudian here, we were practically married before I found out she wanted to be a librarian – this was well before either of us had gotten an MLS.
I’m in the 98%, never having seen The Usual Suspects or run a marathon.
When I saw the Sixth Sense, someone I was watching with said just before we started “I think you’ll like this movie, it’s good a really good twist.” Without that hint I’m sure I would have been surprised by the twist. With the hint, about five minutes into the movie, I turned to that person and said “Is the twist [censored]?” She looked really uncomfortable, and muttered “no,” and then I knew how the movie ended.
guero, I have an MLS as well but got sidetracked by computers as well.
Winter Wallaby, I hate it when I’m told there are twists. It makes you think, I wonder what it is and… well, there are only so many permutations….
And for all my apparent defense of the Usual Suspects, I actually didn’t like it that much. The number of permutations where *very* finite.
Geeky, things we did in the 70’s before VHS. We– we being only my weird one friend; nobody else on the planet did this– would buy books (dead trees) of photographic stills of movies with the dialog written below each photo so a book would contain the entire dialog and accompanying stills of the movie; then we would buy a record of the movie sound track. And we’d read the book while listening to the record.
This in no way captured the essence of experiencing a movie, but it was so logical that we forced ourselves to utterly believe it was the exact same thing. So I was reading the picture book of “Psycho”. A third friend asked me what was going on and as the movie stills were very blurry I described what I thought I had just seen: “The woman’s in the shower and the hotel owner just stabbed her”. My friend immediately jumped up “That’s not the hotel owner! Does it look like him! See the dress! That’s the mother; not the hotel owner! You’ve got it all wrong! You won’t understand the movie if you are mistaken about that!” (without motion it was really hard to get the sense that that was what the movie was trying to portray. And *every* still was so dang *blurry*.)
I wondered why he was getting so upset but shrugged it off.
Never saw the Usual Suspects. In reading this I sort of figured that Keyser Söze was a marathon runner as the name sounds like it should be.
Years ago a friend was going to see Letter to Brezhnev and another friend said to her, “ahh, it’s said at the end when she dies”. Friend no.1 was annoyed but went to see the film anyway and spent the last few scenes of the film increasingly tense about how ‘she’ would die and [spoiler alert] in fact she doesn’t die – a sort of meta-spoiler for a non-twist.
With Sixth Sense I don’t recall anyone telling me the twist, though I did know it before I saw the film. I thought I read an advance review in the UK’s BFI filmnerd mag Sight and Sound where “Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists”. http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/248 nonetheless seems a bit too subtle to give it away. Maybe it was the plot of Se7en I was thinking of, where they do explain everything more clearly. https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/04/18/seven-1995-sight-sound-review/
My favourite film of all time is A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven in the USA), which started production on the day Japan formally surrendered at the end of WW2, and 12 years before I became a matter of life myself.
However I am not, and never have been, a librarian, nor do I know any librarians. I have been in and used libraries, I must confess. But I was younger then, and more idealistic and carefree.
I’d say one can’t complain about spoilers after 5 years. One can expect them to be everywhere the book, movie, play, TV show, etc is mentioned. I’m not saying to spoil it in conversation with someone you know hasn’t seen it, but they can’t complain if they run into spoilers.
I didn’t get the strip (other than the line about entertaining 2% of the population), I haven’t seen The Usual Suspects, and I don’t consider it a particularly famous or classic movie. Its US box office was $23 million, which was not a huge amount in 1995. The critical consensus is favorable but not overwhelming. From the Wikipedia article it sounds ridiculously complicated, yet with a stunningly obvious reveal.
@woozy: “This in no way captured the essence of experiencing a movie” Oh, I don’t know; it sounds closer than my usual way of learning about movies and TV shows I never watched (and bestsellers I never read) back in the day, which was to study the MAD parodies of same.
Unfortunately, some time a few decades ago I stopped reading MAD (and NATIONAL LAMPOON and such), and as a result have been even more Out Of Touch with large areas of poular culture for much of my life. (Though I’m good to really good with American and quite a bit of English popular culture of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, in part thanks to extensive listening to old time radio — I’ll “get” more jokes/references to, say, LUM AND ABNER than I will to things like the Kardishan clan.)
As with jjmcgaffey, though, crossword puzzle clues involving recent movies (and actors and directors) or recent music and musicians or sports figures (other than baseball) are generally a real pain for me to suss out.
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2018/10/24
I hear you on MAD. I think there are still several films I’ve never seen that I know the plot only because of MAD (Willard, Rosemary’s Baby, Being There….)
The thing about Sixth Sense — and most films with a twist — is that once the ending occurs to you at all, you know for a certainty that it’s correct.
This was the first time I had even *heard* of Citizen Kane:
Before I saw the Crying Game, our local columnist wrote “Forget about the twist everyone talks about. They should put a warning that the movie contains that stupid story about the frog and the scorpion. Twice!”
So I went to the movie gritting my teeth knowing I was going to here that dumb story about the frog and the scorpion crossing the river… twice.
So thankfully relatively early on about about 10 or 15 minutes in Forest Whittaker extrudes the final “‘I can’t help it’ said the scorpion, ‘It’s in my nature'” and I exhale a sigh of relief that that’s one telling done.
Then I sat through the rest of the movie anticipating the second telling. … And I sit in anticipation… and I sit in anticipation
and finally as the movie pans away from from Stephan Rea in prison telling to Jaye Davidson and Steven Rea begins “A scorpion comes to a river that he can not cross…” and the camera pans away and the theme music starts and the credits start to roll.
Damn! After warning me of frog/scorpion dread the columnist could have *told* me the second time would be in the closing credits!
Annoyingly, the same columnist a few months later in a fit of pique gave away the Famous TwistTM. His reasoning was that he was always irritated about being told there is a twist forcing him to sit through a movie obsessed with thinking about the twist rather than just enjoying the movie. …. And yet, he had made me do the same thing with the stupid frog and scorpion story. Which wasn’t told twice. It was told once. And it was begun to be told a second time.
SHEESH
A week before our first trip to London (1983), where we already had our tickets to see The Mousetrap, Ian McKellen was on some talk show and told a story about an American tourist in London — in a cab on his way to see Mousetrap — being totally obnoxious, and as he was getting out of the cab the driver said “Oh, by the way, gov…” and told him the ending.
How incredibly stupid was this? The whole point of the anecdote was that the driver was doing something to get back at a rude passenger, and this !@#$ just did the same thing to the entire viewing audience.
I have hated Ian McKellen ever since.
And the sequel…. which may be een more apropos
.
I’ve seen The Mousetrap in London and I can’t remember the ending or whodunnit. Those sort of spoilers often fade with thyme.
If only ‘thyme’ worked on fading other memories . . .
My once and current partner* had a genuine time-thyme incident with her then-young daughter… she was cooking to some sort of dinner deadline and said out loud “I need more time!” and her biddable kid went out and brought her a sprig of thyme from the herby bit of the garden.
*We were bf and gf in 1977 and 2-3 years afterwards, having met as teenagers at art college; after 36 years off (though we always kept in touch, and with other college friends) and in her case a failed marriage (in my case no marriages) we got back together again about 3 years ago.
According to Cracked.com, the concept of spoilers was invented as a marketing ploy for the movie “Psycho”.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-reasons-spoiler-alert-going-away-forever/
Authors were not always so concerned about spoilers. Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” gives away the ending right in the prologue. Any time you went to a play that was billed as “The Tragedy of …” you knew what was going to happen at the end.
Cliff-hangers were another marketing ploy, in 19th century serialized novels and later in movies and TV. But the novelists and filmmakers didn’t much care if the first people who paid to read or see the next installment told their friends about it or not.
Cracked.com notwithstanding, I don’t think you made any friends blabbing about Rosebud.
Or The Mousetrap.
As I mentioned before, I stopped reading Born Loser when he told the ending of The Mousetrap.
Oh, and that was well over 20 years ago, and I *still* remember the spoiler even though I’ve never seen the play. If only it *would* fade…
Maybe we need a new editions of all famous books with spoiler alerts inserted as “appropriate.” For the Bible, for instance, we don’t want to spoil the outcomes of the Garden of Eden story (THEY EAT THE FRUIT!) or Abraham’s dilemma (ISSAC LUCKS OUT) or the trial before Pilate (BARABBAS WINS IN A LANDSLIDE) or, of course, the Book of Revelations narrative (MOST OF US ARE GOING TO BE IN BIG TROUBLE, ESPECIALLY PEOPLE WHO MAKE ‘BIBLE’ JOKES LIKE THESE).
Also, spoiler alerts for “Dick and Jane” (SPOT RUNS, JANE SEES SPOT RUN, JANE ENCOURAGES HIM) or Euclid (YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT THE SQUARE OF THE HYPOTENANSE OF A RIGHT TRIANGLE TURNS OUT TO BE EQUAL TO! COMING SOON TO THIS THEATER, AND FEATURING YOUR OLD FAVORITES, A, B, AND C!)
I’m SO GLAD I wasn’t drinking my morning coffee when I read that . . . ‘-)!!
And more from my quotes file (this time with the actual author):
I always post specific spoiler warnings:
SPOILER WARNING FOR SCENE WHERE BUTLER CONFESSES ROBBING LADY TILSIT
or
SPOILER WARNING FOR SURPRISE MURDERER SMILBY
or whatever. We must be considerate!
– Kip Williams
I saw The Mousetrap in London myself, last year. No spoilers here: it isn’t that great. In my opinion.
My dad told me about the ending of “The Sting” before he took me to see it for the first time. I suppose he was worried about the effect that the gunshots might have on me, but I still wish I could have had a chance to experience the “reveal” without prior knowledge. I would rather have had such a warning for “Butch Cassidy“.
Heh, speaking of spoilers, sort of: Saw Jesus Christ Superstar live a few years ago; mentioned it to sister-in-law, told her “They did the alternate ending!” and she bought it for a moment.
Bill, re Mousetrap: he not only told them that the cabbie gave away the ending, but HE gave it away too, obviously–that seems like it shouldn’t have been the point of his story, so yeah, extra hate points!
I often wish ‘Christmas Carol’ would have an alternate ending . . .
I’ve never seen “The Sting”. I didn’t know it had a “surprise ending”… oh well.
I saw the Mousetrap in the 80s… I remember thinking it was very strange to be sitting in something that such a cache as a story no-one can speak about and thinking it was a bit surreal to actually have a “noodle incident” explained.
But I *honestly* only remember three things about the play. (no spoilers) 1) In the playbill, Dramatis Personae: under Scene: and Time: it claimed it took place in “Agatha Christie time” which I thought was cute. 2) in Act I Scene I five minutes in there was a scene where the radio announcer describes a suspicious character and as he does so the maid on stage is moving clothing from one closet to another and each article of clothing is exactly what the radio announcer is describing. 3) I remember thinking it was a fairly typical and average Agatha Christie escape but not astonishing. I did wonder who it compared with productions in the past. And I wonder how it compares with productions of now.
I remember absolutely *nothing* else.
Oh wait… is that the play where they confuse Christopher Wren with Christopher Robin? Or was that a Shaw play I saw at the same time…. Geez, I was such a *good* little tourist.
Darren – Same here. Charade, a movie I love now – if it is on TV we watch it – I knew only from Mad Magazine and Robert was surprised of that.
Some years ago (within the last 10 as it was after he quit his job) it was playing at the 1:00 Monday afternoon $1 including popcorn and soda classic movie at the chain theater we used to go to. I had been trying for years to get him to go to one of their movies (before he quit work, I tried to get him to go while on vacation) and he had refused as he does not like to go to the movies during the day. I kept saying “But, it’s Charade!” and he finally agreed. We went every week after that. Finally seeing Charade on a full size screen in a theater made it even better.