I've been lurking around this forum for years and thought it was about time I posted. Hello everyone!
Having watched countless 80s movies I've noticed that certain things keep cropping up over and over again. Thought it might make a good game to identify the biggest cliches and list all of the films they are evident in.
I'll start with an easy one: Blatent Nike trainers/sneakers product placement. There are a million films I could mention but my entrant to kick things off will be Back To The Future. Doc Brown and Marty both wear Nikes and anyone who's got the DVD will know that the trailer is more like a Nike advert than a film promo.
Any other Nike endorsing films you can think of? (More cliches will follow when (if) this subject is exhausted).
Posted by Chris the CandyFanMan (Member # 3197) on :
Can't think of any specifically offhand, but I'm sure that any film with a close-up of the characters' feet for no apparent reason would be likely candidates.
If you're looking for more cliches to follow this one up with, there's always the sad nationality cliche: anyone who isn't American is either embarrassing comic relief, particularly if they happen to be of Asian decent (note the first Police Academy and John Stamos's Never Too Young to Die), or bent on destroying us by any means necessary, particularly if they're Russian (since they seem to have been the most destructive ethnic group by sheer number of portrayals in the 80s, Red Dawn perhaps being the biggest example). In the latter case, no matter how elaborate their plans nor how many of them they are, they can be EASILY defeated by any well-muscled American with a LOAD of guns and ammo--so much in fact theat we're left puzzled how he was able to get all of it the first place. Worse, he will not simply be happy achieving whatever his preliminary mission is; he will only be satisfied when he's laid every single "bad guy" low (any Rambo sequel with their 70 or so bodies per film), often saving for the main one an implausible multiple death that involves first blowing him away and then letting him suffer a more exotic death (shoving him off a very tall building (Die Hard), running him through with a sharp impliment (Commando), having him eaten by crocodiles (Romancing the Stone), etc.).
Along those similar lines, you also cannot trust military technology whatsoever, to the point where you wonder where they ever came up with the idea of using them in the first place. Whether it's supposedly superintelligent global thermonuclear war supercomputers that can be easily hacked into by high schoolers as in War Games(indeed, very few "classified" computers in movies are even remotely secure) or robots that can gain artificial intelligence and run amok from a simple power surge as seen in Short Circuit, you're left believing that its a miracle the regular military ever accomplishes anything (and why bother when you've got the aforementioned burned-out and trigger-happy psychos to do any tough job for you cleanly).
[ 27. January 2007, 22:54: Message edited by: Chris the CandyFanMan ]
