Todd also has a problem with this: “I just don’t get it.”
That phrase is most closely associated with Apollo 13, but there’s no brides on that mission.
The other phrase closely associated with that movie is ““Failure is not an option”. This is a line written for the 1995 film Apollo 13, spoken by actor Ed Harris as Gene Kranz, though the real NASA Flight Director never actually said it during the mission.
Gene Kranz did motivational speaking after he retired from NASA, and adopted that phrase in order to create a bond with his audience. I heard him speak at one of our corporate sales conferences. Good speaker, but in the business we were in, failure certainly was an option. In fact, we were in the process of having our stock decline from $44/share to $1.30 a share and constantly shedding employees.
It’s not the joke or anything, but it seems to me that two brides at the same wedding might present a problem.
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I agree with Joel, it appears that the brides are dueling over who gets the groom. It’s not especially funny, but that’s par for the course in Close to Home. It might be time for the groom to have a Barney moment and ask the two if they would agree to share.
P.S. The caption is a famous misquotation, the actual words spoken by Swigert and repeated by Lovell were “…Houston, we’ve had a problem…”
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“[I]t seems to me that two brides at the same wedding might present a problem.”
Not if they’re marrying each other.
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@Atanwat: interesting that of the two most famous quotes from that fine movie Apollo 13, one is the misquotation you noted and the other wasn’t actually said by Kranz.
In both cases, though, I have to give the screenwriters credit for improving on reality.
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I feel like this phrase has become a way to add a bit of levity to an obviously tense situation. It is usually used as an understatement when it is obvious there is big trouble.
I find it interesting the brides are nearly identical. Same bouquet, dress, vale, shoes, etc. That is unlikely to be part of the joke and just the way the artist was drawing brides that day.
With 1 groom shown, I think it is likely they are fighting over the same groom, but there are other possibilities. Maybe they were marrying each other or perhaps the church overbooked and these brides are fighting over that.
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The Wikipedia page (see the link @2) notes that the misquotation existed long before the movie was made, and that the screenwriters used it because it was so prevalent that audiences would expect it. The difference is that we all now know that there was a major emergency, but at the time, the astronauts had only heard a loud noise, but did not yet know whether that meant that a “problem” still existed.
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As someone from Houston… I’ve heard this phrase more than enough for one life.
In regards to Close To Home, there was a time when the phrase/movie quote was somewhat commonly used by folks commenting on about any problematic situation. That time was largely over by 2000, but I expect most of Close To Home’s audience remembers the 90s heyday of the phrase well enough to maybe perhaps think “yeah, I can see how someone might wryly say that in this situation…”
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Houston is the name of the groom. He is being informed by his pilot that his nascent-launching trip to the moon is experiencing unexpected difficulties. It will take some sharp mathing and improvisation to get him safely back on the ground.
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I wonder if two brides somehow scheduled their weddings for the same day and same time, and that’s what the fight is about. The groom is not important.
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“Houston, we have a problem” is like “Play it again, Sam” and “Elementary, my dear Watson”. It works, even if it’s not exactly what was said.
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Here’s today’s Carpe Diem with another go at the perennial line:
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