I was just channel surfing and saw my most hated cliche of all time – people sinking in quicksand. How many times do people have to sink in quicksand for the world to step up in protest and say – Quicksand does NOT exist! Not only is there no such thing as quicksand in nature, the show Mythbusters was unable to even manufacture such a substance. Another one is the crime scene with a chalk mark outlining where the body was lying. Again – never existed in history. I have challenged people on both the quicksand and the chalk marks and they get angry. But really, no one has ever given me an example of ANY police department outlining dead bodies in chalk. They take photographs instead. One last one, though I could go on forever, is the movie binocular view. When you look through the binoculars in a movie, you see two round circles connected like a figure 8. In real life, you look through binoculars, and you see just like normal, only farther away. Someone, who had maybe never used binoculars in their life, decided to put up that stupid figure 8 and black out the rest, and movie producers have copied it for all time.
I lied I guess, one more – Admiral Yamamoto never said, “I fear we have done nothing but awakened a sleeping giant from its slumber.” This line was written for the movie Tora Tora Tora. It has never been found in ANY of Yamamoto’s writings, notes, or heard by any of his colleagues. And yet, now every Pearl Harbor film quotes him as saying, when they are really quoting some imaginative screen writer. Sigh…
Michael Bradley - Time Traveler 