What is it with Hollywood and railroad roadnames?
I'm watching "The Fugitive"--again--on TV (Ion), and we're just past the celebrated train-wreck scene. So why is it that the locos here were decorated with the name of a completely nonexistent road, "Illinois Southwestern"? Were the producers somehow afraid of, what, being sued by a real road if they used their name?
Sheesh. This is as bad as that totally STUPID convention of using "555-xxxx" for telephone #s in movies ...
Actually, the 555 numbers are genuine, and allocated for filming.
Yup. And you can bet your donkey that they *would* have been sued if they'd used a real name, too!
BTW: That train-wreck scene was filmed with miniatures built (and crashed) just for the occasion by the late Jack Sessums; a neighbor of mine who lived just down the canyon.
~Pete
On 12/5/2010 7:22 PM Twibil spake thus:
I see he's got an IMDB entry:
I didn't even know that there *was* any such thing!
~Pete
On 12/5/2010 7:42 PM Twibil spake thus:
Oh, yeah; IMDB is the Google of movie info. Now owned by Yahoo! or some such.
Thanx for the info.
Now I can find out who played Robbie The Robot in "Forbidden Planet"!
~Pete
Yes.
And you may notice that in older movies the cars are carefully styled to be a generic composite of actual brands. Until the car makers realised that offering real cars was a cheap form of advertising.
Wolf K.
As long as they don't burst into flames and incinerate the occupants, ala Pinto. Or accelerate madly on their own like Toyota.
That's because the on-broad software was written in English and Japanese, so the 'puter developed neuroses....
Wolf K.
The same applies to airlines in movies and tv.If you see a plane with a made up name on it,you know something bad is going to happen to it.
There's one airline you want to stay away from, that's Oceanic Airlines. One of their planes was taken over by islamic terrorists and another crashed on a mysterious island in the South Pacific. I know there was a third incident, but I can't remember the details.
Fred Ellis
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