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It has to be discouraging for an actor to know that very few performers ever get famous, and the ones who do, don't stay famous. That has to be even more depressing when they realize that there are inanimate objects, from sound clips to buildings to old pairs of pants, that have IMDB listings longer than most working actors. How? Well... #5.
This Set Look Familiar?
There was a span of a couple of decades where, if you wanted a big shootout in your action movie, by God it would take place in a factory. Grated catwalks, steam rising from the ground, huge pipes snaking overhead. Valves. You know, like the first three Alien movies, where a spaceship, space colony and space prison all looked like abandoned steam plants.
There's a reason for that. The alien "nest" in Aliens was actually an abandoned power plant in London. And that's not the last time you saw it; in Tim Burton's first Batman movie, where Jack Nicholson becomes the Joker during a shootout at Axis Chemicals? It was shot at the same damned power plant. They even re-used some of the sets James Cameron left behind.
But that building has nothing on the old Battersea Power Station, also in London. It's turned up in The Dark Knight (the "warehouse" where Rachel Dawes got blown up) as well as Children of Men, 1984, Full Metal Jacket and episodes of Dr. Who and Lost.
Hey, you want to set your movie or TV show in a high school? Head to Van Nuys.
Does that look familiar? It should, if you've seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or Grease. Or The Wonder Years. Or Christine. Or half of the episodes of other TV shows that happen to take place in a school. That's Van Nuys High School, and we're guessing it's pretty damned hard to get an education there when every other day there's a film crew shooting a damned coming of age dramedy.
But probably the granddaddy of all reused California locations is the venerable Bronson Canyon. Not, surprisingly, named after epic mustache/firearm wielder Charles Bronson, Bronson Canyon has been used as a cheap ass "rock with a cave entrance" location since 1919. It was the entrance to the Bat Cave in the old Batman TV show:
And has since turned up in Star Trek VI, Army of Darkness, Cabin Fever, The Scorpion King and countless others. And Sometimes it Gets Weird: The most baffling recycling job has to be the way the sets from the 1969 Barbara Streisand musical Hello, Dolly! somehow got reused in everything from The Towering Inferno to the Planet of the Apes sequel to Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Last Action Hero. Holy shit, if Hello, Dolly! had included a factory scene, Hollywood would have never had to build another set. #4.
Fake Companies
Let's say you're trying to make a movie featuring a plane hijacking, a plane crash or anything bad happening to a plane. For some reason, the airlines just aren't willing to pay a product placement fee for the privilege of being shown as horribly dangerous, so you've got to invent your own. But do you really want to pay the art department a million bucks to design something that isn't going to be seen for more than a second, when that money could instead go toward the coke budget?
No, and therefore pretty much every time Hollywood needs to depict an airplane crash or a huge flying fireball, they fly Oceanic Airlines. You probably know them from Lost, but Steven Seagal was sucked out of an airlock on Oceanic Flight 343 in Executive Decision and Chuck tells us an Oceanic flight was shot down by a surface-to-air missile.
How long has Hollywood they been doing the fake brand thing? Well, X-Files fans may remember the Cigarette Smoking Man's brand was Morleys, but that ersatz brand has been cranking out imaginary cigarettes for almost half a century. This smooth, delicious, totally-not-Marlboro-at-all brand first appeared waaaaaay back in 1963, when William Shatner was fighting a giant panda on an airplane wing in The Twilight Zone. And they've turned up as recently as Burn Notice.
And Sometimes it Gets Weird: We can understand why no airline wants to be in a hijacking movie, and why TV networks aren't big on endorsing a certain cigarette brand (after all, cigarette TV ads have been banned for almost 40 years). But why in the hell can't they show someone using Google when it's time to, you know, Google something? Instead, the most popular search engine in the TV universe is something called "Finder-Spyder", which utterly dominates the search market in Heroes, Prison Break, CSI, Dexter and at least a dozen other shows.
We can't wait for "Spyder-Maps" or "F-Mail" to turn up, since TV people talking about Internet concepts don't sound enough like clueless jackasses. #3.
This Sounds Familiar...
One of the most important parts of film making is also the one the audience almost never thinks about: sound effects. In just some random shot of a guy and a girl walking down a sidewalk, you not only have redubbed dialogue to cover for the fact that Scarlet Johansson farted over one of the dude's lines, but layers of sound added in under it. From cleaner-sounding footsteps, to the sound of passing cars, to crickets chirping away in the distance. You don't notice it, but you'd sure notice if it wasn't there.
Luckily sound technicians have a sound effects library, a huge stockpile of everything from lion roars to children's laughter to rain on a tin roof. And that shit gets used again and again and again. When you think of an ominous clap of thunder, you're thinking of "Castle Thunder," a clip that has been in continuous use for 70 damn years. It was recorded for Frankenstein in 1931 and since then you've heard it in Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, First Blood, Citizen Kane, Die Hard 4 and, well, pretty much every fucking movie that has had thunder in it since your grandpa was a toddler. Film scores get their own share of mileage, too. Need a dramatic hunk of music that can build excitement for anything, ever? Just try "Lux Aeterna" from the Requiem For A Dream soundtrack. If you didn't see Requiem then you heard it in the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers trailer. Or in the trailer for I Am Legend, or The Da Vinci Code, or The Fountain or Man on Fire or the game Assassin's Creed. Or maybe you heard it in ads for Lost or when the judges walk in during every episode of Britain's Got Talent. That bit of music from Requiem for a Dream is now one of the most popular bits of trailer music ever... but, ironically, it was not in the trailer for Requiem for a Dream.
And Sometimes it Gets Weird: Still, all of these ain't got nothing on the Wilhelm Scream: A dude screamed into a microphone about 60 years ago and it's been turning up in movies ever since. It was originally recorded for a movie called Distant Drums in 1951 as a series of "pained screams" which were recycled for a few movies, and then lost until about 20 years later, when Ben Burtt found the scream on a reel labeled "Man being eaten by alligator" and stuck it in Star Wars, as the sound of a Storm Trooper falling off a ledge. Burtt included it in every Star Wars and Indiana Jones movie, and it's been a running in-joke with sound designers ever since, showing up in everything from Poltergeist to Pirates of the Carribean. So who originally recorded the scream? There is a story that a couple of shady crew members on Distant Drums actually kidnapped and killed a hobo in Santa Monica, and recorded his shrieks. That however is untrue and in fact we just made it up. The scream is most likely Sheb Wooley, a character actor who was in that film and who, by the way, sang the "Purple People Eater" song some of you heard growing up. You'll have that in your head for the rest of the day now. You're welcome.
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Well, if Kubrick destroyed all his sets and props from 2001, then he must have gone out and bought some new Djinn chairs for A Clockwork Orange....
I'm pretty sure there's another scream that's used almost as much as the Wilhelm, but I've had trouble finding it. I know it mostly as the scream of a dying marine in Starcraft, but it turns up in a lot of stuff.
Wow. Disney sure likes to rip off its own scenes, most notably in "Robin Hood."
Yeah, the impression from that video at least was that Robin Hood (the first cartoon begun after Walt died) stole a lot of stuff from older pictures, especially the two immediate predecessors (which were done largely by the same animators), with some ripoffs from Snow White as well
I'm seriously too lazy to read all 246 comments to see if anyone else mentioned this, but Grease was shot mostly at Venice High and not Van Nuys High.
was van nuys the school van halen used for the hot for teacher video?
Nice, but you made one mistake that I found (I'm sure there are more, which other equally Serious Internet people will find).
The spacesuits from 2001 were re-used in the TV series Babylon 5. Now, that may have just been the show's creators paying homage, but I'm more likely to believe that they just re-painted the old ones. The show's creator is a bit coy about it on the site you can find by googling "babylon 5 space suits."
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In Star Wars: A New Hope, and Star Trek Nemesis, there is a battle scene that takes place in a corridor. Both scenes are so similar (and in both, someone ends up diving into an open hatch to escape), that it is impossible to ignore the fact that Trek simply recycled the idea almost exactly from SW. Also, all of the Trek movies borrowed heavily from each other in costumes, sets, scenes, etc. A couple of them even use the SAME shot of a Romulan ship blowing up! (Or maybe it's Klingon, I forget now.)
"When you think of an ominous clap of thunder, you're thinking of "Castle Thunder," a clip that has been in continuous use for 70 damn years."
I ALWAYS notice this sound in movies. Every time there's a clap of thunder, I just know it's going to be that same goddamned boring thunderclap that's been used for decades. How hard would it be to get someone to record thundery noises during an actual thunderstorm? Or to simply steal them from those Discovery Channel shows about storm chasers?
This is really nice.
They reused Jurassic Park dino-screeches and roars for the animals in Avatar...
What about the invisible Bird of Prey that gets blown up at the end of Star Trek 6 and then 78 years later all over again in Star Trek 7?
Stephen Spielberg used an old-timey dinosaur roar at the end of Jaws(when he blows up), and at the end of Duel, when the truck goes over
I thought it was hilarious that the TV series "Firefly" re-used the "Starship Troopers" uniforms for the Alliance military uniforms/gear. I'm sure there are people out there with pretty detailed lists of what's been used and where - I'd love to see those lists!
To be fair, when you make a beautiful dress like Cate Blanchett is wearing in that photograph, it is not only going to be too beautiful to destroy, it also probably cost a lot of money to make. So yes, you ARE going to Febreze it and throw it in storage.
Good point!
Especially in a movie like Elizabeth, with a production budget that wouldn't buy a new car.
I quite frequently notice sound effect similarities. I think the sound that Wall-E's house made when the huge door opened was the same as the platform sound effect from Bungie's Marathon series. Also from Marathon, Morgana's Revenge (a mod of Marathon) uses the door opening sound from Alien as its door opening sound.
There is a delighted scream that shows up in f**king everything.
It's been in TV shows, movies, even VIDEO GAMES. It's one of the screams from the title screen in Roller Coaster Tycoon, that's where I first heard it.
I lol'd at the gynecological tools being used as dental tools.
But, seriously, why does it matter that things get re-used? Yeah, the whole Disney thing is really lazy, but it makes sense to re-use props and sets, even sound effects.
IM surprised "bishops countdown" ( the end music to aliens right b4 the fusion generator explodes) wasn't a part of this list it was probably used in more trailers than lux Aeternia..
I knew about the sound thing. With the Requiem for a Dream song to the Wilhelm scream. I hear the Wilhelm Scream all the time. Not sure why it's called Wilhelm though. It's in the first Indiana Jones, and...yeah a bunch of f**king movies.
It's called "Wilhelm" because it was first screamed by a character named "Wilhelm," as you could see if you watched the embedded video in the article.
"the Wilhelm scream!!!!" finally I have a name to put to the soundbyte! that's been buggin me for 20 years now!
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