Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2010 December 12

Welcome to the Wikipedia Entertainment Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 12

Timing rules in 1972 NFL

There is a video on Youtube of the last bit of Super Bowl VII. The Redskins turned the ball over on downs to the Dolphins with 15 seconds left. The Dolphins offense and Redskins defense both came onto the field and huddled up. But before the Dolphins ran a play, the refs wound the clock and the game ended.

Nowadays, the Dolphins would have to take a knee before the clock would run. Were the timing rules different then? -- Mwalcoff (talk) 02:24, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

It appears that the final play was a sack of the quarterback on 4th down, and according to NFL rules, that does not stop the clock if it's in the final two minutes. My guess is that such a rule is to prevent a team from taking a sack on purpose. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:39, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

A quarterback sack does not stop the clock within 2 minutes, but a change of possession does. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 14:48, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

I have an NFL rulebook from 2007 that states the following in Rule 4, Section 4: "Exception: After the two-minute warning of a half, the game clock shall not be stopped: ... (j) When a down is completed during which there is a change of possession."

My original comment was based on the 2002 reference on this site:[1] I wonder if they mis-stated themselves? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:30, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

There used to be a rule that after a sack, the clock stops until the ball is respotted. This is still the rule, except in the last 2 minutes, when the clock does not stop after a sack. However, the clock still stops for a change of possession. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 15:33, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

I looked in Google for a comprehensive history of NFL rules and wasn't able to find anything about it. This is where we need Jayron32, who's an NFL guru. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:47, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the only such "comprehensive" rulebook I know of is David M. Nelson's The Anatomy of a Game, which only covers the history of the NCAA rules to 1991. I am not aware of any such comprehensive book for the NFL. The NFL Record and Fact Book only contains current rules, at least the copy I have (which is a few years old). --Jayron32 23:30, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

This[2] might be the answer you're looking for. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:50, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, that answers the question. The NCAA experimented with running the clock after changes of possession a few years back but canceled the rule change after coaches complained. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 17:52, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

I wonder if the play that ended the Super Bowl actually had something to do with that rule change. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:08, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Cult classic films

How can I find Disney cult classic films on here(Wikipedia)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.176.141.172 (talk) 04:48, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Which ones are you looking for? You should be able to just search for the article using the film's name. --McDoobAU93 05:11, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

There's List of Disney feature films, and Category:Disney films. There doesn't seem to be any way to automatically filter out the ones that aren't cult classics, but the category is only two pages long. (Why can't I link to a category in the same way as an article?) 81.131.22.149 (talk) 07:20, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

If you put a semicolon before Category it works; [[:Category:Disney films]] shows like Category:Disney films. Grsz 11 07:24, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

The reason you can't is because typing them in normal link fashion is how we categorise articles. 90.195.179.14 (talk) 10:24, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Using a link without an extra semi-colon works fine in an edit summary. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 19:48, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

That's a colon not a semicolon. - Sussexonian (talk) 22:06, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Right on. I semi-apologise for my half-error. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 22:56, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Isn't that a rather half-assed apology ? :-) StuRat (talk) 06:45, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

What cheek! -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 20:31, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Viva Las Vegas on LP

What LP did the Elvis Presley song "Viva Las Vegas" first appear on? This is surprisingly hard to find out.—Chowbok ☠ 06:18, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean worldwide, or in the US? Maybe Worldwide 50 Gold Award Hits Vol. 1? Ghmyrtle (talk) 10:11, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

I'll bet that was it. Thanks!—Chowbok ☠ 19:20, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Movie progression

Speaking of film series, why does it seem that films in a series decline in quality as the series progresses? THe classic example is Jaws: Jaws original was good, the II was OK, they should have stopped at or before III, and IV was a complete blunder. I ask because the first few Harry Potter were excellent, but the most recent is not very good. I'm sure this happens with other series too. Thanks 24.92.70.160 (talk) 18:54, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

The page called Jumping the shark might give some insight. In the creative arts in general, it seems like what happens is that someone gets an idea, presents it well, and inevitably others (as well its originator) attempt to copy its success. To my mind, the last worthwhile film in the Star Wars series was The Empire Strikes Back. Everything after that was top-heavy with special effects and a lack of original ideas. TV series often wear out their welcome, as the saying goes. One notable exception was The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was deliberately cancelled by its producersd after 5 seasons, while it was still at the top of its game. Many TV and film producers don't quit while they're ahead. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:00, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Where Harry Potter is concerned, is it also possible that the quality of the books has declined over time? I have to ask, because I've not read them. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:02, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Nope, the content actually gets more interesting with each book, but in the movies they continuously cut out more and more of the book to fit the time limit of the film. It wasn't a problem for the first three films because the books were rather short, so nothing much is left out of the films, but from the fourth installment on, the films start have a rushed quality to them. I stopped watching after "Order of The Phoenix". I heard they didn't even include Dumbledore's funeral in the sixth film, so that pretty much ensured that I wouldn't pay to see it. I've yet to see "Deathly Hallows", but the fact that they're splitting the film in two at least gives me hope that the franchise will end on a high note by not leaving out the important aspects of the book. 24.189.87.160 (talk) 08:11, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

There are two different kinds of book and movie series. One kind is a planned series, where the author writes the first one with the plan that there will be exactly three (or some other number), and even though they tell independent stories, they fit together to make a harmonious whole. The second kind is the open-ended series, which has no such overall plan and continues until fresh ideas are exhausted or too few readers/moviegoers are interest. An open-ended series may start out as a single book/movie intended as a standalone work and later be developed into a series. Publishers like to call any series of three books a "trilogy", even if it's an open-ended series that just happens to have stopped at three (or even a single big novel published in three volumes), but the term trilogy is better reserved for the planned type. Similarly with "tetralogy" and the other terms for other numbers of works.

And the point of this is that planned series -- real trilogies and so on -- tend to be immune from the sort of rot we're talking about with open-ended ones. And according to Rowling, Harry Potter was a planned series -- a heptalogy. So it's not surprising that people who like the books tend to like all of them. The movies have been more uneven, both because the books got longer and the movies didn't (as mentioned above) and also because they have been made by four different directors. --Anonymous, 09:37 UTC, December 13, 2010.

You're right about the change in directors having an effect on the quality of the films. I know I'm in the minority with this opinion, but Chris Columbus was my favorite director for the films. I don't like David Yates' style. 24.189.87.160 (talk) 17:54, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Also, the stuff that was cut out of the early films (because it didn't seem important) sometimes turned out to be important setup for events in later books. We know that occasionally Rowling put her foot down and said a character really needed to appear for reasons that would become apparent later, but sometimes a character was just hardly there, any important lines were given to another character, leaving this character uncharacterised for film audiences, and thus meaningless if they came in later. Or apparently unimportant subplots and scenes were left out, and then later things relied on you knowing about them or our characters knowing about them. 86.161.208.185 (talk) 01:05, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Part of it has to do with Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crud) and regression to the mean. Most books/movie scripts/tv pilots are crud, so either don't get made, or don't get attention. The ones that get attention are the ones that get made. Then when they go to make a sequel, you're back to hit-or-miss, "90% of everything is crud" territory. Given the basic concept behind the series has been proven to be sound, you might get slightly better odds (say 60%-70% being crud), but you're still rather unlikely to repeat the statistical fluke which made the original the standout that it was. -- 174.24.216.113 (talk) 19:55, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Partially, it's sheer probability. In general, Only better-than-average movies get sequels. So it makes sense that the general trend would be downwards. (If you only remake movies that are 99% awesome, you've only got a 1% chance of making a better movie, but a 99% chance of making a worse one.) This effect is even worse with remakes!

Specifically for the Harry Potter movies, though, a big factor might be the length of the books. The first movie was pretty much a direct translation of the book with only a few scenes removed. However, towards the end the books got huge, and had complicated plots that didn't really work in a two hour movie. They still had to make the movies though, because they were so hugely popular, so they did the best they could to cram all that plot into two hours. APL (talk) 19:53, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

See Sequelitis. I'm not sure it offers much of an explanation, though. Still. 90.195.179.14 (talk) 20:50, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

There are a couple things in play here. The first is that Jaws and many other books and films are written as stand alone stories and not part of a larger story arc. They were never intended to be a series. So you have a completed story where all the ends are tied up and then to try to carry on that success, you have to dream up some reason for the same characters to get into a similar situation yet again.

The second thing is with the HP books. The first book could easily be converted into the film because, as with the first book of any series, a lot of it is taken up with describing the characters and setting up the overall world of the fiction. Whereas you can use 2-3 pages to describe a room or person, the same can be summed up in just a few seconds with film. With the later books, more of the book is taken up with the plot. Plot elements are harder to all fit into a film. And for the record, I liked all the books with the second and fifth being the weakest. And I feel the same about the films thus far as well. Dismas|^(talk) 00:39, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

There's one more thing to say, namely that when a sequel is as good as (or better than) the original, this creates a demand for more sequels. Once there are a couple of bad sequels, demand tends to drop and that tends to end the series. So you may get a series that begins with more than one good movie (or bok), then declines, then ends, and still the last ones are the weakest. Two examples: the four Superman movies with Christopher Reeve, where the first two are about equally good and the others are poor, and the six Thin Man movies, where the first two or three are excellent and the later ones still good but certainly not as good. I think many would say that the six Star Wars movies also follow this pattern. --Anonymous, 09:20 UTC, link fixed 09:39, December 13, 2010.

An exception to the norm may be the James Bond series. 92.29.117.8 (talk) 10:41, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

That will very much depend on the viewer. Younger people whose first exposure to Bond was Pierce Brosnan or Roger Moore might see a Sean Connery film on TV and think "How quaint: the later ones were obviously so much better". Whereas, those who were there at the start know that there is only one James Bond - Sean Connery; all the others are cheap imitations. However, these were all made from different stories, and they're not "sequels" in the sense this question is asking about. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 20:35, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I have to question the original assumption: "The first few Harry Potter [movies] were excellent". Hmmm, coulda fooled me. Same with the books. The first half or so were formulaic--following the same plot points and even structural outline rather rigidly. The later ones shift from the Importance of Sports and Teenage Hijinks That Are Never Really Dangerous to something a bit more serious--and even deep, what with the motif of the lust for immortality and how it twists people. Not that any of it holds a candle to the Lord of the Rings--considering alone immortality, lust for power, and salvation through the "small people". Okay, I'll stop. Suffice it to say the early books/movies are pulp, the latter ones verge on a bit of depth. Note, of course, there were three long movies for the Lord of the Rings, which as a whole can't be many more pages than the final Potter book. Faithfulness to the book in detail is out of the question. Pfly (talk) 11:34, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

At the movie studios, the rule of thumb they have always observed is that a sequel earns about 2/3rds of the revenue of the previous movie. There have been many exceptions, of course. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:32, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

One thing that's visually disturbing about a lot of these CGI-heavy films is how dark they look. I'm sure that makes it easier to do the CGI stuff, but it leaves the films nearly black-and-white in appearance. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:54, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I think that's more of a style thing than a technical thing. Dark looking films have been in style before. 72.10.110.109 (talk) 23:13, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not so sure. Even before CGI, dark backgrounds were used quite a bit to hide various things. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:24, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

One reason why they are darker is that they are switching over to digital capture instead of traditional film, and it isn't yet able to capture dark scenes well. Unlike with film, everything in shadow tends to go completely black. I expect this problem to go away as the technology improves. In the meantime, one way around this to just compensate with increased lighting. StuRat (talk) 06:24, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I've noticed that the 2nd in a series is often as good, or better, than the original, with steady declines after that. Some examples are the Terminator series, the (original cast) Star Trek movies, and, perhaps the most obvious case, the Alien series (can anyone guess my favorite genre ?). I attribute the 2nd movie's quality to increased budget, due to the success of the original, and also to the cast "hitting their stride", meaning they know the characters and don't need the same level of practice for each scene. Meanwhile, the creativity well hasn't quite run dry yet, for most of the writers. StuRat (talk) 06:31, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Redneck American trio sitting at table eating (comedy) seen on UK tv recently

I'd like to know what programme it was. I saw a snatch of it late at night (possibly Channel 4) recently, just before the programme ended. I was half asleep at the time. Three American redneck people were sitting at a table close to the camera. In the middle was a smallish mature man talking to the camera. On the right was his younger wife who kept wriggling her cleavage at the camera. On the left was a younger thickset man who appeared to be eating spare ribs with sauce. Behind them to the right was a large window. The mature man was talking about his wife, including something about sauce. When the dog (?) made a noise the woman and thickset man would rapidly say something, reflex-like.

Does anyone know what programme it was from please? Or if I can see it online anywhere? Thanks 92.28.249.229 (talk) 19:21, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Wild guess, but you might be referring to Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and/or Larry the Cable Guy. They've done a number of things together. I remember they had a sketch comedy/variety show on US television, but I'm not remembering what it's called. -- 174.24.216.113 (talk) 19:47, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

That was called Blue Collar TV. Adam Bishop (talk) 01:01, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I have looked through the programme listings for Channel 4 for more than a week, so it must have been on ITV or BBCs 1 or 2. 92.28.245.105 (talk) 22:10, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I've just seen the same characters on the British comedy sketch show The Morgana Show on Channel 4. I must have seen the second episode on the 7th. December. The mature man was a heavily made-up woman, and the actors were British. 92.29.123.139 (talk) 23:36, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Angels We Have Heard on High

I found at least two hymnals with a slightly different melody of "Angels We Have Heard on High" that looks like this:

Anyone know the origin of it? It sounds almost like a counterpoint to the more familiar French melody. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Otters want attention)} 19:26, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

That looks to me like the opening of Angels from the Realms of Glory which is sung to a very similar tune (though apparently not in America). Here is a site which describes the two tunes it calls Gloria and Iris (read the 'About' tab for Iris). - Sussexonian (talk) 22:03, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

This[3] site (on a page linked from "Angels from the Realms of Glory") says "French carol, 18th Century". In the Church of England, the tune "Regent's Square" is generally used for the hymn "Christ Is Made The Sure Foundation"[4]. Alansplodge (talk) 14:07, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Freaking Brits, why can't you use the same melodies as everyone else? :D Seriously, your excuse of a tune for Away in a Manger sounds like a cheap knockoff of James Murray's tune. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Otters want attention)} 22:10, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

The alternate tune for "Away in a/the Manger" is good for those of us with a vocal range of about 3 notes. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:52, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

...making it perfect as the first carol taught to little children. I am also bound to point out that the usual British tune is recorded in my carol books as being of American origin :P I always thought it was weird that the two 'angel' hymns had basically the same tune, and user to wonder if one was just a looser translation of the French than the other: my Oxford Book of Carols has resolved many such ponderings, and I thoroughly recommend it. 86.161.208.185 (talk) 00:54, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Weren't most of those melodies old pub songs anyways? Googlemeister (talk) 15:37, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Not as such: many were old carolling tunes that had distinctly more pagan lyrics (Forest Green for Oh little town) or at least non-Christmassy (Tempus Adest Floridum for Good King Wenceslas). Some came from popular tunes that had previously been attached to many different popular songs, since a popular way of selling a piece of paper with song lyrics written on was to set it to a popular song (God rest ye merry, gentlemen is to the phenomenally popular tune sometimes known as London). And severally of the popular modern carols are set to music by proper composers who you've probably heard of like Mendelssohn who wrote the music to Hark the Herald Angels Sing, or Holst who wrote the music for [[In the Bleak Midwinter). And then While shepherds watched their flocks by night was the only carol allowed in churches for years thanks to the Puritans, and only because it was such a literal recounting of the Bible. The words were often printed in the back of the Book of Common Prayer, and each parish basically sang it to their favourite tune, so early carol collectors found dozens of versions. On Ilkley Moor is, in fact, a pub song that came from a Yorkshire parish's tune for While Shepherd's Watched! Carols, like nursery rhymes, are a fascinating mixture of sources, and keep many tunes alive as a living tradition that would otherwise live only in books and in the minds of people who sought them out. I strongly recommend The Oxford Book of Carols and The New Oxford Book of Carols: it's really amazing. 86.161.208.185 (talk) 17:17, 14 December 2010 (UTC)