On Aug 16, 4:21Â am, "RNeill"
cs.commode> wrote:> As I often have posted: no matter how many times I watch a TRF episode, I
> continue to spot minutiae I missed in all the previous viewings. Â The
> other night I watched "Just Another Polish Wedding" for about the 20th
> time and saw things that it made me feel stupid I hadn't picked up on
> before.
>
> 1) The voice on the opening answering machine message sounds like Jack
> Garner.
>
> 2) The county employee who hires Jim to find the musician is the same guy
> who was supervising the digging up of the deceased's back yard. Â
>
> 3) Since Marcus sometimes uses the last name 'Hayes,' Gandy's giving him
> the nickname 'Gabby' makes him 'Gabby Hayes,' just like the veteran cowboy
> sidekick actor.
>
> 4) Not only does Gandy continue calling Jim 'Rockfish,' Marcus starts
> referring to Jim by that name, too, in the scene outside Jim's trailer.
>
> 5) On any other show, the family involved in the wedding would just be
> stick-figure plot functions. Â On TRF, we get a surprising amount of
> not-really-necessary backstory about and insights into them.
>
> --
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I think it's really fascinating how we get caught up in good stories
when we originally experience them--the suspense which makes us have
"willing suspension of disbelief"--and are swept along often without
noticing the kinds of pick-ups you list--sometimes blatant and
compromised rough carpentry in the story construction (usually
economic-driven shortcuts)--until we have repeated viewings. I think
magicians sometimes rely on this "quirk" of the mind: for example,
there's a card trick that periodically makes e-mail rounds in which
David Copperfield shows a set of five cards in the Jacks-to-Kings/
Clubs-to-Hearts range and says to focus on one of the cards and ignore
the others--concentrate hard on getting those others out of you mind--
and then he'll show you the cards again but this time YOUR chosen card
will change, proving he's read your mind through the Internet. As you
probably know, what's happened is that ALL the cards have changed, so
no matter your choice of cards, your chosen card will always change.
At first, your mysteriously evolved cognition, trained by eons of
natural selection to survive by focussing on the few (and hopefully
the most vital) features in a scene, e.g., the glimpse of tawny fur of
the preying tiger behind the nearby thicket near the watering hole,
not the water itself or the flora and fauna, out of the thousands if
not millions of actual details in that scene, will cause you not to
notice that the other cards, still in the Jacks-to-Kings/Clubs-to-
Hearts range, also have changed. Reminds me of cost-efficient design
strategies by technologists creating sophisticated virtual reality
scenes, say a room with shelved books in which the titles on the
spines aren't clearly visible because that's not something you'd
typically focus on when you look at that scene; or in "Gladiator" the
simulated Coliseum in which the thousands of spectators are just icons
that don't move because first-time audiences aren't likely to notice
it since their "Gestalts," spurred by the story suspense they're
caught up in, will cause them to assume the people are real people. It
DOES make you sense how much we have "one-track" minds. In producing
deadline-driven TV eps, I'd guess, there are bound to be lots of these
kinds of things. It's fascinating to uncover them.
