Jenga’s a pretty good example of what I was thinking of, but I was really just focusing on what rules of thumb a time-traveling “recruiter” might use absent much qualitative detail about a particular life — like, just census records or something.

Of course that’s true on an individual basis, but statistically, somebody who has children can not only potentially influence the world themselves, but multiplies the number of potentially world-influencing agents. I didn’t mean to make a pro-“be fruitful and multiply” value judgement — it just seems like basic…

Over-40 “recruiting” would also reduce the number of recruits who would have subsequently had children, thus exponentially reducing the number of paradoxes produced by their demise.

So Judge Doom was actually Christopher Lloyd’s second “creepy gangster” role.

I get it now. Though I don’t think there’s anything in the film that clearly favors one interpretation over the other, save the historical fact that The Green Hornet was cancelled in 1967 — So, naturally Tarantino would expect his audience to be nerdy enough to recognize that at once.

Not just a flashback from an unreliable narrator, but pretty explicitly the  daydream of an unreliable narrator.

I think I might be remembering later years... like, the late ‘80s on, when everything was satellite fed. Earlier than that -- my real childhood in the ‘70s -- local affiliates might have been working with physical tapes, and been prone to run whatever was literally handy, which gave local programmers more discretion,…

I feel all the more frustrated by this feature’s departure due to my own erratic ability to enjoy and contribute to it, owing to personal scheduling, computer/Kinja issues, and such. I particularly valued the frequency and content of Mr. Vago’s participation in the comments, as well as the overall commentariat here.

In my memory of the old days of syndication and reruns, it’s unclear to me how much attention was paid to the popularity of individual episodes. I think they pretty much just ran them on a chronological loop anyway. The hesitance about running stories was probably focused on the perceived irregularity of viewership --…

McDuffie may have also had in mind Philip Jose Farmer’s “Wold Newton Family”, and that too has mutated into various degrees of self-parody over the decades.

I believe there was already a stage version of this before the screenplay makeover. I saw a community theater performance some years back, and it pretty much defined “prosaic”.

Besides bigger mountains and an absence of kangaroos, that would be a more difficult difference to discern.

I would absolutely pay to see Michelle Pfeiffer deploy her whip skills in the film version.

Must have been higher up than it looks, for an almost 80 year fall. ;)

And, of course, one might not see the sides of a machine at all, depending on how the arcade is arranged. But the appearance in the game raises the question of diminishing returns in advertising placement. At some point “brand awareness” turns into brand ubiquitousness, and then fades into brand invisibility.

It’s interesting to me that I remember Tapper from ‘80s arcades, but had no recollection of the Budweiser marketing until it was mentioned here — I guess that’s a fail on their part?

Once, when I was taking my daughter to an amusement park on a family road trip, and feeling shaky recovering from a nasty bout of stomach flu, I made the choice of Powerade for a walking around beverage — nothing carbonated seemed palatable, and I was really feeling an “electrolyte” deficit. I haven’t developed an…

Parts of John Barry’s score are tear-inducing.

Not to be confused with the superior 3-D Stake From The Heart.

The “musical-like” sequences of 1941, and the opening scene of Temple of Doom, certainly convinced me that Spielberg needs to direct a full-blown musical some day.