And you don't stop ...

'Cause you can't stop ...

Because you have mental problems.

Kyle Cooper, who created the film's title sequence, compared Sable to Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man. There were thousands upon thousands of pages of this stuff, almost all of which didn't the make the movie, beyond being scattered about in the background of John Doe's apartment. The most screen time this work saw was an eight-minute montage pocketed away on the DVD. But when Se7en ran out of money and couldn't shoot the title sequence they originally wanted, Kyle Cooper finally suggested using it.

"OK, jeez, I'll do it. Just stop trying to lick my eyeballs."

So sure, it all ultimately served some kind of purpose, but you could just as easily have outsourced the journal writing to heartbroken teenage girls and called it a day. Most fans would never have noticed the difference. It took a truly dedicated artisan to look all this crazy in the eye and say, "I want you inside me."

The Thief and the Cobbler is the most ambitious cartoon you've never heard of. Just take a look at this clip. That is some seriously impressive CGI, right? Isn't it amazing that they could do all that way back in the '70s?

Oh wait, they couldn't.

That was all drawn by hand, every frame of it. Due to creator Richard Williams' crazy attention to detail, legal issues and the fact that every scene has at least twice as many hand-drawn frames per second as any other cartoon you've ever seen, Thief holds the world record for longest production ... at more than 30 years.

To be fair, 29 of those years were spent chaining mescaline, PCP and drain cleaner.

So why didn't this movie change the world, spit right in Disney's eye and kick start Pixar three decades in advance? Why, Hollywood bullshit, of course! With his movie nearly 85 percent complete, some of Williams' investors suddenly got scared, took the rights away from him and replaced every animator involved in the project. He could only watch as his 24-year labor of love was hurriedly completed by a bunch of scabs with a harsh deadline and no budget. In the end, Williams' film was mangled into an incomprehensible mess and released right around the same time as Aladdin, where it was widely regarded as a cheap rip-off, because the two were so damn similar ...

Disney's contribution to the villain character: "Make him browner."

Except the opposite is true, of course: Williams did it decades earlier, all by hand, and uphill -- both ways.

Everybody knows Scott Pilgrim was as full of video game references as it was quirky women with inexplicable girl-boners for Canadians. What you may not have noticed, however, were the recurring number themes running throughout: Remember how Scott fights seven "evil exes," and progresses through their seven respective levels? Well, each one of those exes is himself a number, and everything about him reflects that fact. Scott is the exception, so he's zero: He gets called zero, he drinks Coke Zero and he wears a shirt with "zero" on it.

"It went to 0.5 when the girl changed her mind halfway through."

Matthew Patel, the first evil ex, has only one eye (or at least it appears that way, because of his haircut, which we'll call the Emo Combover). He poses by pointing in the air (with one hand) and gets called "that one guy." Lucas Lee, the second, stays in trailer #2 and says it'll take "two minutes to kick your ass" and that the staircase he grinds down has "like 200 steps." Todd Ingram is in a three-piece band and, like Scott, also wears his number on his shirt.

And we want to punch his smug face three (3) times.

The Roxy Richter fight happens in a club called "4," the Katayanagi twins (numbers 5 and 6) turn their music up to 11 and have five syllables in their last name (six with the first name) and the final, seventh boss is Gideon (whose name starts with G, the seventh letter of the alphabet). All right, you know what? This all seems like reaching. Even we're not buying it anymore. Nobody's that crazy about numbers, save for Rain Men and certain species of felted vampire.

This is probably all just weird coincidence.

Except director Edgar Wright verified every one of those claims; it was all his insane pet project during filming. It turned the corner from subtle to overt during the final showdown, starting from the moment Scott walks into the club:

Seven.

Seven, seven, seven, seven.

Seven!

Seven hundred!

Seven billion!

Numbers are fun! Ah, ah, ah.

Likewise, the B-52 bomber he constructed as a set for Dr. Strangelove was described by some U.S. Air Force personnel as "absolutely correct," which worried them a bit, since the B-52 was still totally classified at that point.

"The bombs actually will not work without a cowboy."

But possibly the strangest and most unnecessary detail Kubrick ever insisted upon was the war room in Dr. Strangelove. While the set was being constructed, he decided (on what we'll call a Kubrickian whim) that the top of the table should be covered in green baize. "It should be like a poker table," he said, "there's the President, the generals and the Russian Ambassador playing a game of poker for the fate of the world."

Which would be totally reasonable and merely representative of his keen eye for detail and metaphor ... if the film weren't shot entirely in black and white.

That's a very green-looking black, though.

But Neo, like every man, was predestined to fail this one: They're wandering through some kind of business district, and every pedestrian is in a boring, drab suit, save for that pretty girl. Of course he's going to focus on her and notice the agent. We, the audience, only passed the test because we were once removed, and could view the scene objectively.

Except we didn't pass, either. Not at all. Because we didn't notice that every person in that scene is a doppelganger:

A frumpy doppelganger.

We could write that off as repeating an extra for a different shot, if it weren't for this ...

Two blonde women on either side of Neo, two sailors in the back.

The truly crazy part is that this wasn't CGI: the Wachowski's spent two whole days in Sydney trying to hunt down and cast real identical twins just for this scene. The idea was to show the viewer that Mouse, who created the code, was a lazy programmer and copy/pasted a bunch of characters instead of designing unique people. But really, since basically nobody in the audience noticed the clone armies either, it just proved that God could've gotten away with a whole lot less work by simply palette-swapping humanity. Turns out we would've been mostly cool with it, so long as there were hot girls in red dresses strutting about.

Ghostbusters may be the perfect genre comedy. A ludicrous premise, great comedic actors and lots of improv -- those were the cornerstones of this classic. Except there are three things missing from that list: Research, realism and detail.

Wait, what, in Ghostbusters?

Do not stick marshmallow fluff in the microwave, kids.

Yep: As an audience, we all thought that Bill Murray and the rest of the cast were just making up gibberish for their supernatural scenes, but it turns out that most of the film is based on the actual paranormal research of comedian Dan Aykroyd.

According to the DVD commentary, Peter Venkman's treatment of Dana is actual advice for treating a possessed individual (it's all about maintaining control over the demon inside), and even the technobabble was real: The word "ectoplasm" predates the film, and was first coined by a Nobel Prize-winning physician. It referred to "a substance exuded from spiritual mediums to facilitate spirits' contact with the living world."

It's basically dimensional lubricant.

Why, in the book A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts and Ghostbusters, written by Peter Aykroyd, you can learn about the history of the methods that the Ghostbusters use in the film, and keen eyes will also observe that holy shit Dan Aykroyd's father wrote a book about being an actual ghost buster.

Amazon
With a cover cameo by a half melted Stay Puft man.

That's right: Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brother and Conehead, is actually a second-generation demon hunter, like a Van Helsing or a Simon Belmont or a real-life Dean Winchester from Supernatural.

Substantially less dreamy, of course, but we can't all have CW cheekbones, can we?