That's how I get through a lot of interminable staff meetings.

I'm pretty sure that "Hong Kong shantytown" in Police Story wasn't just any shantytown, but the "Kowloon Walled City" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… — which is one of the most awesomely cinematic places that has ever actually existed. I'm sure it must have inspired the Judge Dredd comics.

I remember my friends and I hearing that Robocop was in the lineup for that summer, knowing nothing about it but the title and basic concept and thinking it sounded kind of kid-oriented, and then being amused and baffled on hearing that it needed reediting to get an R rather than X-rating.

If that would mean Lily Magnum's arch-nemesis could be Wo Fat's granddaughter, I'm in!

Highway…
To the…
Danger zone.

And it sounds like it might have been ripped off by Douglas Adams or one of his co-writers as the inspiration for the Doctor Who plotline, "City of Death".

Ah, but he was smart enough not to actually build it, much less try to fly it! He was really a Renaissance troll, waiting to show up in the crowd at the first attempted demonstration and laaaaugh…

I won't dispute that, but the nature of the Internet is such that there have to be many, many people out there who first encountered it after seeing Ferrell's bit.

I wouldn't say that the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage started the "half-glimpsed creature" trope — That Bigfoot is pretty brazenly out in the open, doing the walk popularized years later by Will Ferrell. "Half-glimpsed creatures" as a horror trope had been a fixture of low-budget features that couldn't afford a…

Supposedly some of Mata Hari's paramours cooked up a plot to thwart her execution by having her enter the courtyard wearing only a trenchcoat and shed it in front of the firing squad, on the premise that no true Frenchman would shoot at such a target.

Without much blood… but a lot of singing and dancing!

I used to get charged with that so much, they confiscated my hair!

I'm guessing a major traffic violation, or something else involving a convertible with tail fins…

And Mike left no living will, though I doubt he would have been terribly concerned about "death with dignity".

I think the factors that would make an existence like this "hellish" for
a human are related to higher consciousness. A sensory-deprived chicken
would be not so much frightened as mildly confused, and that's leaving
aside the fact that Mike probably lost such consciousness as he ever
enjoyed at the moment the axe fell…

Or perhaps he just arrived at it independently or picked it up conversationally. I just stumbled across Mike Tyson's "Everybody has a plan until they get hit", which is very similar to von Moltke's "No plan survives contact with the enemy", but it somehow seems more likely to me that Albee read Menckin than that…

That kind of sounds ripped off from H.L. Menckin: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”— A Little Book in C Major (1916)

And certainly Foreman might have felt like his own feelings of exposure and ostracism resonated somehow, and made that theme appeal to him, but the specific narrative and context seem pretty enormously remote to me to conclude that it's meaningfully "a statement about" the McCarthy era. With a broad enough brush it's…

The "blacklist statement" seems like even more of a stretch to me in this case than it does for The Crucible, beyond the basic theme of being abandoned by frightened friends (which isn't especially specific to the McCarthy era). I think references to it as such speak more about the concerns of commentators at the time…

My suspicion is that in '84, the red/communist association might have been perceived as playing in to the hands of the hawkish Republican base, and someone at ABC might have felt like they were being "fairer" by taking that onus off the Democrats. But it could as easily have been a determination by coin-flip, and it's…