TV Goofs

The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
My Dad's pet peeve was how much ammo people would shoot. He'd point out when someone with an automatic would shoot more ammo than they could carry. That and it bothered him how the bad guy always climbs somewhere high, just so they could fall off. LOL
 
Why is it OK to kill every one of the bad guy's/gal's minions without a second thought, but you can't even think of shooting the bad guy/gal until you have a very dramatic scene?

For sure. All the Bond villains would have won if they had just shot James when first captured instead of devising some complicated manner of death.
 
Why is it OK to kill every one of the bad guy's/gal's minions without a second thought, but you can't even think of shooting the bad guy/gal until you have a very dramatic scene?

Yeah, that one is a classic. But usually it works the other way. The bad guy has a clear opportunity to just shoot the good guy in the head from behind. But instead, he wants to capture him and gloat, giving the good guy's helpers time to show up and rescue him.

The quintessential one of these in an otherwise phenomenally good movie is in Goldfinger. Goldfinger straps bond to a table, and sets a laser to slowly work its way up from Bond's crotch to his brain, killing him slowly, with excruciating pain.

In one of the best scenes in any Bond movie, James stoically looks at him and asks, "Do you expect me to talk?" And Goldfinger laughs and replies, "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."

Okay, well, why not just shoot him in the head while he lays there, strapped to the table? Not as painful, of course. but definitely more effective.
 
Here's a good one. In one episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, a guy kidnaps the Liberty Bell and holds it for ransom. He has it in a truck, wired with explosives. They pay him off, but then he has a heart attack and dies before he can tell them how to defuse the bomb.

Oscar has to offer clemency to a jailed safe-cracker, who is the only person with the knowledge to defuse these bombs. They discover the truck has two other bombs that need to be defused before they can get to the one under the Liberty Bell. With me so far?

So, there is a tense scene where Steve, the criminal, and a bomb squad chief defuse the first bomb. Whew! Lots of sweating. But it took a long time, and now they don't have much time to get to the other bombs.

On the second bomb, here's where it gets silly. They reach a point where they need to do a delicate operation, and it fails. The timer on the bomb starts to rapidly count down to zero at a high rate of speed. So, Steve Austin grabs the entire bomb, and throws it about 100 feet up in the air, where it explodes harmlessly.

What?! Then why didn't he just do that with the first bomb? Why did they waste all that time on it if it wasn't powerful enough to kill everyone in the vicinity?

Steve: Oscar, the bomb under the Liberty Bell will go off in 20 minutes. I could grab the other two bombs, set them off, and throw them way up into the air to explode harmlessly, and then we'll have the whole 20 minutes to work on the main bomb. What do you think?

Oscar: No, better to spend 15 minutes defusing the first bomb, and then hope we can work something out.


:facepalm:
 
any chase sequence will entail a fruit stand, a large pane of glass, or a rack of clothing. I recall seeing a movie on the telly 'Night of the Lepus' where a squad car changed from a Ford to a chevy and back again everytime the squad car got airborn.
Rex
 
Also gotta love the commercials.

Can you hear me now?

If you don't buy our product, you don't love your family.

Try Damitol. Ask your doctor. Side effects include blindness, insanity, and death.

And my personal favorite...

You're an idiot. Buy our product.
 
Any TV show, or movie that shows a large truck driving at speed though heavy gridlock, and flipping the cars that it hits out of its way. The exception to this, of course, is Mythbusters which showed how it would have to be done by adding a "plow" to the truck.
 
If you've ever been quoted in the paper, you know how inaccurate the rest of the material must be.

Same for if your industry or profession is ever represented on screen.

Off the top of my head Matrix II and Mr Robot come closest in many aspects.

Basically most other depictions of computing range from utter fantasy to offensive idiocy.
 
any chase sequence will entail a fruit stand, a large pane of glass, or a rack of clothing. I recall seeing a movie on the telly 'Night of the Lepus' where a squad car changed from a Ford to a chevy and back again everytime the squad car got airborn.
Rex

You are ok with the giant rabbit premise, but the number on the car gets to you?
 
JAG is the only place where I've ever seen a Lawyer take off in a west coast squadron F-14A on the east coast, change planes midair to an F-14B from an east coast squadron while dogfighting over the Pacific, then change planes midair AGAIN to fly without refueling and land an F-15D on a carrier in the Persian Gulf.
 
JAG is the only place where I've ever seen a Lawyer take off in a west coast squadron F-14A on the east coast, change planes midair to an F-14B from an east coast squadron while dogfighting over the Pacific, then change planes midair AGAIN to fly without refueling and land an F-15D on a carrier in the Persian Gulf.

How many pilots fly around without oxygen masks on?
 
Tire tracks and contrails in any Western....

With the exception of "Back To The Future III" for the tire tracks. Oops... This was a TV goof thread, not a movie goof thread... My bad.
 
Last edited:
Watch someone dive through a window. Imagine him trying to do it in reality and bouncing off the window. Then imagine him throwing himself at the window hard enough to break it and being sliced to shreds on the way through.

I want the magic clothes you sometimes see. The ones in which you can walk out in the rain, possibly even roll around on the ground, and they still look dry and good as new.
 
I watched a movie on Turner Classic Movies last night.
Hellcats of the Navy. I thought it would be about aircraft carriers and airplanes.
Nope, it was about subs.
Ronald Regan was the captain.
Got a cuncushion.
After laying in bed a week unconcious, his face all sweaty...
His hair looked like it was just washed, and there wasn't one hair out of place and well groomed.
So unrealistic. Good movie though.
 
I watched a movie on Turner Classic Movies last night.
Hellcats of the Navy. I thought it would be about aircraft carriers and airplanes.
Nope, it was about subs.
Ronald Regan was the captain.
Got a cuncushion.
After laying in bed a week unconcious, his face all sweaty...
His hair looked like it was just washed, and there wasn't one hair out of place and well groomed.
So unrealistic. Good movie though.

You almost no one has messed up hair on TV. I used to think it was silly to see women who had perfect hair, but I think it is even worse with men these days. I can't recall the last time I saw a guy in a fight, or just after a fight or some sort of foot chase, who had messed up hair.
 
So, what other TV shows have you going to Google to check facts?
Oh, man, there are just so very many things where reality doesn't match public perception.:

[video=youtube;nyDMoGjKvNk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyDMoGjKvNk[/video]

[video=youtube;vM1QgwaKv4s]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM1QgwaKv4s[/video]

These are just two of the segments from this particular episode:

[video=youtube;Zd5rul6EdF0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5rul6EdF0[/video]

[video=youtube;90RajY2nrgk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90RajY2nrgk[/video]

"Diamonds are expensive because they're rare.":

[video=youtube;N5kWu1ifBGU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5kWu1ifBGU[/video]
 
Last edited:
My 17 year old son caught his one last night on Hawaii 5-O. A guy was shot in the upper arm, then used his belt to apply a tourniquet. However, he applied it below the wound, not between it and his heart :facepalm:
 
Pretty much anything with aircraft in it is a waste of time for me and just plain frustrating. I think "The Final Countdown" got it pretty close technically so I enjoyed it. As did "Tora-Tora-Tora" and "The Battle of Britain". I watched an episode of Scorpion a couple weeks ago, it was the second and last one I'll ever see! They took an XB-70 out of a museum, flew it to Bulgaria, --why you ask-- because it was old analogue tech and the entire US military had been hacked---The bad guys were in Bulgaria. I suspect the XB with it's size and that six pack landing might draw a little attention. Later in the end we just took off and did a short field landing in the woods---AT NIGHT!!
 
Miraculous hacking accomplishments like creating and uploading a virus into the computer of the giant alien mothership in Independence Day.

An excellent show that makes a point of being as accurate as possible at least when showing computer screen text is Mr. Robot. However, the destruction of backup data via the hacking of a thermostat and loss of temperature control wasn't credible.

It's an exceptional series which: "follows Elliot Alderson, a young man living in New York City, who works at the cyber security company Allsafe as a security engineer. Constantly struggling with social anxiety disorder, dissociative identity disorder and clinical depression, Elliot's thought process seems heavily influenced by paranoia and delusion."

This is only part of one of his dream sequences. At its end which is not shown, he's at the head of a very long table with his family and friends in the middle of an otherwise empty street in an old part of NYC. In the not too far distance is a skyscraper nearly centered on the street they're on. At the end of the sequence portion not shown, it collapses like a WTC tower on 9/11. BTW, the clip does not contain any spoilers since they abruptly and crudely cut out the ending I've described which is not much of a spoiler anyway.

[video=youtube;lQdbz8bJLdE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQdbz8bJLdE[/video]
 
There's and episode of The Six Million Dollar Man showing stock footage of a Saturn V engine start that switches to Saturn 1b then back to Saturn V. In another episode--filmed at Edwards AFB, starring Eric Estrada, Steve Austin finds an inert spent FFAR and throws it across the dessert to take out a step van. The rocket flies straight and level despite the fins remaining undeployed.
 
RTCoyote reminded me of another thing that is annoying... How often do missiles look like glowing rods with glowing fins. I'm looking at you Airwolf.
 
My 17 year old son caught his one last night on Hawaii 5-O. A guy was shot in the upper arm, then used his belt to apply a tourniquet. However, he applied it below the wound, not between it and his heart :facepalm:

BTW, did you ever notice that McGarrett and Co could always squeel their tires when driving on a sandy beach? Must either be the hardest packed sand ever or the thinnest ply tires ever created!!! ;)
 
There's and episode of The Six Million Dollar Man showing stock footage of a Saturn V engine start that switches to Saturn 1b then back to Saturn V. In another episode--filmed at Edwards AFB, starring Eric Estrada, Steve Austin finds an inert spent FFAR and throws it across the dessert to take out a step van. The rocket flies straight and level despite the fins remaining undeployed.
Oh, yeah, I don't know how many times I've seen that and far worse on TV. Even someone not into rockets can easily notice that. Tells you what they think of their audience, doesn't it?
 
RTCoyote reminded me of another thing that is annoying... How often do missiles look like glowing rods with glowing fins. I'm looking at you Airwolf.

Now that you mention Airwolf. A Mach one capable helicopter??? A physical impossibility because of the air flow disruption as an airfoil passes through Mach one.
 
Back
Top