Title drops in movies
titledrops.net
titledrops.net
However, over two decades later, with the re-boot movie series Rebuild of Evangelion, in the final scenes of the final movie, the protagonist name-drops the words "neon genesis" in appropriate context. I've never grinned as hard in movie theater.
Genesis is for as beginning to the new era. It's etymology is Greek for "origin, creation, generation" which is a sort of an "era". Plus a looser translation provides the extra wordplay and thematic heft with the Angels due to Genesis being first book of the Bible.
Not a translator but I write a lot of poetry, and that's what would be going through my mind as I see the difference between the literal translation and the English decision and the additional capabilities this translation gives. In my mind, the initial translator 100% intended this "gap", which is less a gap and more of an additional layering.
Since "evangelion" and "genesis" clearly are taken from Greek, so was apparently "neon".
They are both modern english words even if they have roots in ancient greek.
> but different grammatical genders: neon (νέον) is neuter, while γένεσις is feminine.
νέον and γένεσις are gendered but neon and genesis are not.
But in the re-make movie whose plot extended beyond the original series, it's clear he absolutely had that meaning in mind. That made having the title drop a cathartic experience. It felt like it wasn't 100% planned out, but rather a happy accident turned into a bit of a nod towards the global audiences, while still having the "the meaning was there all along" vibes.
"It" may be the the special case here, as it is a very common word by itself but that a movie is named like this is notable enough for it to be included.
Ni!
I guess "Them!" is also affected by this, and maybe The Thing or The Birds...
He specifically calls out `"real"` title drops just a few sections later.
"What's interesting about the (Fiction) list here is that it's pretty international: only two of the top ten movies come from Hollywood, 6 are from India, one from Indonesia and one from Turkey. So it's definitely an international phenomenon."
Here the writer slides seamlessly from talking about movies with title drops to talking about movies with single-word titles which are also the name of the main character, but is still saying things like "What's interesting about this list..." and "...an international phenomenon," as if those are remotely the defining characteristics of the list he just gave. (The defining characteristic, again, is "movies named after the protagonist." That's all.)
Then there's a section break. Since the article clearly outed itself as parody right before the break, I think it's totally reasonable for anyone to stop reading it at that point. (Although maybe not 100% reasonable to come back and comment on HN about it, except maybe to express disappointment and save other people the bother of reading that far themselves.)
Anyway, after the break the author says, "You might have noticed [an icon on each movie that is] named after one of its characters." But scroll back up and you'll see that icon is missing from 4 of the movies in that list of 10: "Saina", "Nussa", "Arif v. 216", and "It". Of those 4, 3 are clearly named after a main character. The fourth (like "Ecks vs. Sever") is named after two characters (Arif and 216) but the graph shows that the author is counting instances of the name "Arif" alone, not instances of the phrase "Arif v 216".
So not only is the article trying to be funny, it's not even playing by consistent rules — it's a parody of an academic paper but also just flat-out lying about the data! That's not only annoying but uncool.
I would actually be interested in reading a real article on the phenomenon of title drops in movies, e.g. by someone who'd gone through a bunch of movies and tallied which of them contain title drops. But the linked article is just garbage.
While scrolling, I was surprised by Arif V 216. As I've seen the movie, there is no chance of such a high count of title drops. Skimming the instances, it was just showing the name "Arif." I returned to HN comments to check whether it was mentioned, and only you did.
Cool idea, lazy execution.
I'll bet he ingested a file full of known real names in order to know whether the title was a character's name, thus "Nussa", "Ecks vs Sever", etc not showing as "titles matching names".
The sibling comment that he should have at least manually checked his top 10 list is VERY fair, however.
That said, Barbie is a funny case indeed, as it's named after about half of its characters :P
It is a silly one to include, because the word it is picked up by their analysis. Need to remove all hits except where the characters are referencing Pennywise directly.
I also noticed that in some cases a namedrop was registered where the eponymous character speaks, e.g. ALIENS: hisses. These need to be removed as well.
Movies where the name of the movie is the name of the leading character needs to be removed as well, or at least filterable from the list.
All of this makes the site a little less interesting imo. A good title drop in a movie is a fun little easter egg, especially if the name a bit more conceptual, e.g. The Phantom Menace. The way this site is set up at the moment makes it a bit more difficult to find those really good title drops.
An unacknowledged partial title drop for that movie is that "Lord of the Ring" (with no s at the end) is uttered.
Source? I can't find anything.
And in the darkness bind them.”
The three Elven rings were made in secret by Elves, and were untainted by Sauron. Disregard the TV show, which shows a version contradicting Tolkien.
This is the reason at the end of the Return of the King, with Sauron defeated, Gandalf, Galadriel and (Cirdan?) are able to openly wear the three again. Had they been tools of the Enemy, they would never have been worn again.
In chapter one, Many Meetings, Gandalf tells Frodo:
> Yes, I knew of them. Indeed I spoke of them once to you; for the Black Riders are the Ringwraiths, the Nine Servants of the Lord of the Rings.
And in chapter two, The Council of Elrond, Glorfindel says:
> And even if we could, soon or late the Lord of the Rings would learn of its hiding place and would bend all his power towards it.
In the final chapter (The Grey Havens) of book six, the Red Book is also titled by Frodo “THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING”. Now there’s a title drop.
(Just in case it’s not obvious: I’m talking about the books here, not the movies. Never seen ’em.)
Found the quote by googling, he was scolding Pippin, not Frodo, and it was "Ring" singular after all:
> "Hurray!" cried Pippin, springing up. "Here is our noble cousin! Make way for Frodo, Lord of the Ring!"
> "Hush!" said Gandalf from the shadows at the back of the porch. "Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. The Lord of the Ring is not Frodo, but the master of the Dark Tower of Mordor, whose power is again stretching out over the world!"
(Book II, Chapter I)
Also in Peter Jackson's movie.
The Ring is referred to as The Ring, The One Ring, The Ruling Ring, and a few other things, but I do not think it is ever referred to as the "Lord" of anything.
An analogy: when someone writes a song and then they need to name it, they will frequently choose a word or phrase that appears in the lyrics. When Leonard Cohen sings “hallelujah” in the song of the same name, is that a “title drop”? I assume not.
What does the article purport them to be? Right at the top I see:
> A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in.
That makes no distinction if the title or the script came first. The article does call out movies who do that in a cringe or obvious way (like Suicide Squad, which had prior art) but also includes movies where that is unavoidable, such as Barbie.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter which came first. As soon as you make a line and a title the same, the line becomes a title drop. The audience sees the final product, not the process.
> An analogy
That analogy doesn’t work. Songs are typically repetitive and a few minutes long. Everyone expects them to name the title. A movie, on the other hand, is an experience that asks suspension of disbelief from you, it tries to engross you in its world over the course of multiple hours. When a character title drops, in a second you’re suddenly and forcefully pulled back from the illusion and reminded you’re watching a movie.
It seems to imply a concerted effort to mention the title of the movie in the script in a meta, fourth wall breaking sort of way.
In some cases that's obviously true - Hot Tub Time Machine, Suicide Squad from their examples - but other times an untitled script just needs a title and it's plucked from the script.
I think there's a distinction there, because the latter is less of an Easter Egg sort of thing and more "ok now we need a title."
It makes zero difference to the movie watching experience if the script line came from the script or the other way around. While you’re watching the movie, the effect is exactly the same. So even if you took a line of dialog to make your title, it becomes a title drop nonetheless because the audience doesn’t know (nor should they care) which came first.
> Unsurprisingly, movies named after one of their characters have an average of 24.7 title drops, more than twice as much as the usual 10.3.
And this thread started exactly with the point of what the article considers title drops.
The article also highlights the interesting case of “movies named after a character with single title drops”. I’m willing to bet that in those movies, if the name is proffered late enough in the runtime, it may feel like a title drop because the the audience suddenly becomes aware the name had never been said before. When the name is said all the time or once but too early (so you’ll be primed to expect it more often) then the effect is bound to be lessened.
I disagree; if it's a quote that serves the narrative and isn't jammed in as a reference it doesn't have the same effect as the meta examples. Less of a fourth wall break.
¹ I hope it’s obvious I’m excluding cases where someone deliberately seeks behind-the-scenes information. We’re talking about having only the result of the work as context.
More generally we are not limited only to the film when trying to categorize based on this distinction. The distinction exists even if it is not always discernible.
That said, I think trying to construct separate lists based on this distinction would be nearly impossible.
Certainly not true in the case of a work adapted from another source like a novel. The words "The Fellowship of the Ring" are never uttered in The Fellowship of the Ring, and Peter Jackson's ham-fisted insert there was obvious even to people who hadn't read it, but especially to those of us who have.
And, by that token, if the dialogue suddenly seems awkward and stunted for no other reason than to insert the title, most people would probably conclude that the title came first.
imo it does matter and is the difference between cringe (sometimes intentional) and not
On the movie front, No Country for Old Men does something similar.
What is much more interesting is that 11.5% of movies named after their protagonist never mention them by name. I guess I can imagine a few edge cases where this would be usual (protagonists not usually called by their name due to their position, like kings, and movies with little talking), but it's surprising that there are that many.
Aliens (1986)
(Aliens hissing)
I assume this to be a joke. I've never found any reference of anybody doing this online, or anybody even discussing this one story from the show. But holy shit does it make my skin crawl.
It's actually said eight times in the movie (I ctrl+f'd an .srt file). The page mentions the methodology was to use opensubtitles.com, but not how which specific version was to be used from that website was chosen (because opensusbtitles.com lists tons of possible files for each language depending on what version of torrent/etc they match). It is possible that the download script used accidentally chose non-English .srt files sometimes for some films.
But then opensubtitles couldn't be used to analyse that.
Smells like the old internet!
Runpee.com for when best to pee during a long film, Mr Skin for nude scenes (Flesh of The Stars in Knocked up fiction) … and titledrops.net for title drops.
The last line of My Dinner with Andre is "my dinner with Andre." I think that only works because the whole movie feels like a stage play, and there's something very stagey about that choice.
"And yet, now that I am an old, old man, I must confess that of all the faces that appear to me out of the past, the one I see most clearly is that of the girl of whom I've never ceased to dream these many long years. She was the only earthly love in my life, yet I never knew, nor ever learned, her name."
One thing they deem to be a movie “sin” is the fact that movies will often have a line of dialogue in which they'll say the title of the movie. Whenever a movie does this, the CinemaSins Narrator will exclaim “Roll Credits,” as though the title of the film can only be mentioned in the absolute last line of dialogue.
https://popculturalstudies.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/in-defen... highlights some examples.
> 00:23:19 it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you, Robocop 2
(It's a shame there's no nice way on Twitter to sort by number of favorites. You can approximate it by searching for "from:<accountname> min_faves:<number>", but it doesn't correct for the number of followers the person had at a given point. Which is a problem with subreddit "top" sorting, come to think of it, as it strongly weights recent posts when the subreddit was more popular. Always wished they'd fix that.)
Yes, it's a game, but from one of two series that cemented video games as a cinematic medium, when developers so desire. 35 years of build-up, and a love letter to the whole series, including (especially) the ones people derided (FNC). Also, interesting because it's not a direct quote of the title, but still something that everyone who got to this point recognized immediately.
I really like a credit drop a la Gaspar Noe just rolling the credits mid way through Climax.
I like the idea of a surrealist scene in a restaurant where the credits are just tucked away in a menu. Maybe it's been done
The closing music choices are excellent.
Michael Bluth: "Your average American male is in a perpetual state of adolescence, you know, arrested development"
Narrator: "Hey! Thats the name of the show"
> Chachi: "Look, this is not the first time I’ve been brought in to replace Barry Zuckerman. I think I can do for you everything he did, plus skew younger…"
> Narrator: "No one was making fun of Andy Griffith. I can't emphasize that enough."
73
00:13:32,095 --> 00:13:34,055
No... Look!
74
00:13:47,068 --> 00:13:47,600
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
75
00:13:47,610 --> 00:13:49,987
<b>The Scarlet Bond</b>
<b>That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime</b>
76
00:14:04,627 --> 00:14:05,992
Find him?!https://preview.redd.it/in-the-netflix-original-series-resid...
edit: oops, just noticed the article also mentions the meme
I only know this because of the fun honest reviews made of it.
It's even worse than I remembered.
That dialogue is from the book. The book gets its title from the dialogue. The film has the same title and dialogue because it's based on the book.
There is no point where script writers are sat down trying to figure out how to work the title into the dialogue.
This is a fun idea but I also appreciate the extra effort to make it nice to explore!
¹ Literally
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
C'mon it was half the content of my comment and you still refused to acknowledge it. What do you want
"titles containing a colon are split and either side counts as a title drop. So for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring either "Lord of the Rings" or "Fellowship of the Ring" would count as title drops"