But then they mess with the cliche when it doesn't help as much as he'd hoped.

Prefect translations. If you've ever played "round trip translation" you know why this shouldn't work.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"The only way to explore the universe is to go and look." - Brian Cox
Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

You know something I've been wondering about? What was the first appearance of the whole "in museums, after dark, stuff comes to life" thing? The movie was based on a 1993 book, and the author says he thought up the idea independently, but I found the premise in a book about the Smithsonian from the seventies. And there's a Norman Rockwell painting from the 1950s where a night guard is eating a sandwich in a museum under a statue of a horse, and it sort of looks like the horse is looking down at him.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"The only way to explore the universe is to go and look." - Brian Cox
Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

The motif occurs in H.P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald's 1932 short story "The Horror in the Museum". I would not be surprised if there are even earlier instances.

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The other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauve-y shade of pinky russet

Okay, that's good. Now I know it goes back at least two decades more than I previously knew.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"The only way to explore the universe is to go and look." - Brian Cox
Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

This one drives me crazy. Every time they need a shot of the Earth from space, they use the Apollo 17 Blue Marble. I just read an Iron Man comic that did this. Seriously, couldn't the cartoonist at least have changed the clouds so it wasn't blatantly obvious?

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"The only way to explore the universe is to go and look." - Brian Cox
Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

Just thinking about this, the last dying act of any zoo keeper is to open the cages of lions and tigers, so they can stock the hero in the dead city.

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Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, people want to be entertained.

You're right. Also, animals just plain escape a lot more than in real life.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"The only way to explore the universe is to go and look." - Brian Cox
Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

Is that a cliche? how many films has that been in?

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

Two that I can think of off the top of my head are Twelve Monkeys and I Am Legend.

12 monkeys doesn't really count though, as that was part of the plot.

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

I've recently started watching NCIS and I've seen a few anti-cliche's in it, if there is such a thing.

The best one was three investigators enter a small cabin that was the obvious scene of a gun battle. They find a dead guy tied to a chair, then one hears a beeping sound. The most senior member looks under the bed and sees something that looks a lot like a few blocks of plastic explosive and a detonator. All three go running from the house, with the last to leave diving over the hood of the car to safely. I was in already expecting the perfectly timed escape when the screen faded slightly.

The next scene shows them all huddled behind the car, one has started whittling. The conversation is about whether there really was a bomb and if the senior member might need glasses. It blew up just as the bomb squad arrived.

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I'm not gullible because I'm a Leo.--Actually said to me by a co-worker
Never trust anyone with 'The' for a middle name. --Said to me by a guy in Denny's at 4 am.
The difference between planning and pessimism can only be seen in retrospect. -- One of mine
Truth ain't like puppies; a bunch of them running around and you get to pick the one you like best." -- Emerson on Pushing Daisies

which leads me to ask why it was beeping?

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

Somebody had fun outsmarting the cops?

I hate it when computer screens are projected onto people's faces. The only time that happens is if you stand in front of a beamer, and it's NOT comfortable to read that

Oh, and other bad programming/hacking clichés. And the supersmooth GUIs everywhere.
The system in Iron Man kicked *** though. I want a hologram CAD!

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

All shots of Earth from space will be copied from the Apollo 17 Africa-and-Antarctica picture.

__________________
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"The only way to explore the universe is to go and look." - Brian Cox
Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

I've seen quite a few recently that are simple CGI shots using a sphere colored with NASA's 2002 Blue Marble textures. The giveaway is the distinctive ocean colors, not found in the Blue Marble: Next Generation and similar datasets, which use a solid blue color for all deep oceans.

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The automatic equation of radical [artistic] style with liberal politics and of conservative style with reactionary politics is a historical myth that does little justice to an agonizingly ambiguous historical reality. -Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

I wish the guy who drew an Iron Man comic I recently read could have copied that instead of the same old, really undisguised A17 picture. It really says a lot about your creativity as an artist if you can't even find another picture to copy, let alone think of one yourself.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"The only way to explore the universe is to go and look." - Brian Cox
Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

Fairies, Elves, Trolls, that live in magical forest inside of caves and hollow trees, and similarly Superior Alien Intelligences, that have mastered time travel have advanced considerably further on the Evolutionary path.

Can someone please come up with future sci-fi that does not involve aliens who reach Earth and make contact via worm-hole or some metaphysic device? How about sci-fi with NO aliens, just lonely humans trying to survive on Mars?

As for aliens, they might as well come from hollow trees, or off a speck of dust to which Horton was listening.

Who knew

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*

Say it isn't so!

All those WWII movies are ruined; ruined, I say.

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"All natural, huh? So is lightning." - Mike Rowe