4 Nostalgic Callbacks That Make Zero Sense in Their Own Movies
Roughly 93 percent of the box office is devoted to showing the audience famous icons they recognize, rather than to the far more interesting task of blowing our minds. But today, let me take off my elitist hat, the one that makes me demand that movies be “good.” Let’s also set aside our fan hats, the ones that insist movies be “respectful.” Let’s look at some movies simply as viewers who say, “Please, just let it make sense.”
Because sometimes, we cheer when we see the return of something that we associate with an old movie we love. But in the world of the movie itself, it means nothing.
‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’
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A bunch of beats in Top Gun: Maverick call back to similar stuff in Top Gun. Among them is a scene where Maverick looks at the young’uns jamming together to “Great Balls of Fire.” Playing the piano is Rooster, the son of Maverick’s old friend Goose. The scene makes Maverick think about how Goose and the old gang rocked out to that same song years ago.
But why is it the same song? Why must these recruits be singing this very song, from before not just when they were born but before when their parents were born? Surely any scene of them singing together, regardless of the song, would have brought memories flooding back to Maverick just fine.
It’s not a special song Goose passed down to his family. It surely wasn’t even the only song he and Maverick sang together — it just happened to be the one they sang in the scene that made it to the movie. Even if it were a special song to Goose, his son wouldn’t remember that, having been two years old when his dad died, and it would mean nothing to all the other recruits. And it’s surely not the one anthem of the Navy. They have but one such anthem, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and it’s by the Village People.
If the movie wanted to maintain the tradition of TOPGUN recruits always singing hits from 30 years in the past, this crew should have been singing “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers. Or, if they really wanted to screw with the lines between reality and fiction, they should have sung “Danger Zone.”
‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’ and the Mischievous Marshmallows
Ghostbusters: Afterlife does the legacy sequel thing where new characters worship the original characters and their icons. That's rarely how we enjoy these movies (the proton pack was supposed to be a fun dick joke, not a sacred weapon to be handed down like a lightsaber). Though, in a story that takes all this seriously, you could say it does make sense. The public would revere tools that defeat the restless dead, even if it was funnier back when they didn’t.
Making less sense is one particular scene, which the studio liked so much that they released it as a teaser before anything else:
Those are little Stay Puft marshmallow ghosts. They’re like the Stay Puft marshmallow man from the first movie, except now there are a bunch of them and they’re little.
But the first movie didn’t introduce Stay Puft marshmallows as some recurring ghost variety. The god Gozer (who comes back in this movie) asked the guys to choose his form, and one of them chose Stay Puft, thinking it’s the most harmless thing imaginable. This backfired when the marshmallow form turned out to be just as huge and monstrous as anything else they could have chosen.
How do we get from there to anthropomorphic marshmallows playing in a supermarket? Those don’t even appear to be true souls of the dead. We will never have an answer until Marshmallow Men, the explanatory streaming series that will be released late in 2026.
‘Solo’ and the Treasured Weapons
We mentioned just now how Luke’s lightsaber in the original Star Wars was supposed to be a special weapon with a long history. A few decades later, and every single element in the series was considered iconic, so the series treated everything with nearly as much reverence. That includes, of course, every lightsaber.
In Solo, Darth Maul is back (no explanation provided, unless you followed every bit of expanded Star Wars media), and he reveals himself by lighting up his iconic double-sided lightsaber. It’s iconic — to fans of The Phantom Menace. But why he feels the need to show it off in this scene is a mystery. The movie’s revealing his identity to the audience, not to anyone in the movie itself, as they were all already well aware of who he was. And he’s not using the weapon to threaten anyone. He’s on a Zoom call, and no one on the other end is within cutting range.
Equally confusing is the attention the movie gives to Han Solo receiving the gun he’ll wield in later adventures. The scene consists of just someone handing it to him, but the movie treats this as a momentous moment because this is the gun we recognize from the other movies.
Nothing in those other movies suggested this was a treasured gun that the man kept close to him his entire life. The guy was a smuggler. The implication was always that he must have just bought the gun, from some guy who sells guns, and if he loses it, he’ll buy another because there’s nothing special about guns. In fact, blasters being interchangeable junk was sort of a plot point in the original movie. Maybe I needn’t have set aside that elitist hat and fan hat because this scene could anger all types of viewers equally.
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ and the Iconic Eyewear
Movies will assure us a character treasured their accessories long before the one time we see them with it, and also long after. Consider Deadpool & Wolverine, which left in plenty of long pauses so we can cheer when characters don their iconic gear. During one such scene, Laura puts on the pink sunglasses that we saw her wear in Logan.
“Aw,” I see people commenting in the above video. ”She kept them because her father gave them to her!” But that’s not what happened. These are sunglasses we saw her just steal from a gas station one day, the implication being that stealing stuff like that is routine for her.
A pair of cheap glasses you get from a gas station as a kid will almost certainly break or get mislaid before many years have passed. I say “almost” because the only way they won’t is if you store them somewhere safe, but if Laura did that, they wouldn’t have been on her when she got pruned out of her universe and sent to this void. Also, a pair of glasses that stayed snug on as a little girl wouldn’t even fit her head now. The production tried giving Laura’s actress Dafne Keen the actual sunglasses from Logan first, but that didn’t work because she’d grown.
We really do get attached to costuming, and to eyewear in particular. Think of Wolverine putting on his cowl in this same movie. We cheer because we finally see Hugh Jackman wear that, 25 years into playing the role. But the characters shouldn’t see anything significant in this moment. Listening to them, you’d think this represents Wolverine assuming the noble burden of killing after a long break, but he just killed a bunch of people in the previous scene. It was the same one where Laura put on the sunglasses, and those were more significant kills since those guys actually stay dead.
But at least those were cool fight scenes. For a truly sad attempt by Marvel to make us cheer for eyewear, look to Secret Invasion, the Nick Fury show that later movies might pretend was just a dream sequence. Nick Fury spends most of the show without his eye patch. But then, right when he’s ready to return to the fight, he dons it again, retrieving it from a special compartment where he stored it in a cemetery.
It’s not some magic or sci-fi eye patch. It’s a thing he wears over his eye, and anyone who’s missing an eye owns a bunch of them. Rather than hiding it somewhere safe, like a special weapon, he would have several of these in a drawer whether he’s fighting or not, for the very routine purpose of covering his eye.
I myself own two eye patches, just in case I get invited to a pirate party. It’s been years now since the last invite, but I remain hopeful.
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