Friday, February 29, 2008

Possibly The Nerdiest Thing I Have Ever Posted

This keeps popping back into my mind like a bad penny, even a month later, so I expect that I need to write it down to settle it.

In the movie Juno -- which I blogged about last month -- the title character says "Thundercats Are Go!" when her water breaks.

This of course is a conflation of two entirely separate geeky catchphrases:
It is unclear whether Juno herself -- far too young to know either of these minor pop-culture icons in their heyday -- made this error, or if it was a slip on the part of the screenwriter, Diablo Cody. (I suppose it could also be a deliberate mistake.) But now the record has been set straight, and I can stop thinking about this very stupid minor point.
Released into the wild

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I wondered whether it was deliberate or not. Juno would be too young to have seen those shows, but these pop culture things have a way of seeping into people via osmosis. I'm too young to have seen Thunderbirds, but somehow was well aware of their catchphrase decades before that bad Bill Paxton version. So maybe Cody was tweaking the reference to have it make sense in the situation but have Juno get it wrong.

That's the danger of putting references from one's own generation into the mouths of today's kids. I've seen other instances where high school kids in movies make '80s references and it's clear that the writers are in their 30s. Of course if I wrote it I probably would have her asking the kid to "transform and roll out" or for her family to "Assemble!", so I can't really talk.

Fri Feb 29, 11:50:00 PM 2008

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