Wednesday, January 21, 2009

So That's Where that Line Came From?




Julia reading.








Maybe everyone knows this but the line "The plane, the plane, the plane is coming" heard every week on FANTASY ISLAND, seems to have come from THE DEVIL AT FOUR O"CLOCK, where a boy on the island runs in and tells Spencer Tracy. I am watching this as I wash the floors. I thought you need to know this--for anyone who remembers FANTASY ISLAND, that is. Weird with Ricardo Montalban just dying.
What other lines are stolen and was this one common knowledge?
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9 comments:

Lisa said...

I've discovered lots of movie lines that I didn't realize were quotes or I didn't know where the quotes came from. There were several in "Apocalypse Now" that I learned came from poems many years later, like this one from the Dennis Hopper character that comes from Kipling -- he said it like a quote, but I never knew the source:

"If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; . . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same . . . Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it."

or I didn't know that Marlon Brando's quote was from T.S. Eliot's, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at the time:

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."

1:53 PM
Gary Dobbs/Jack Martin said...

But are you concentrating on the floors or the movie?

2:08 PM
pattinase (abbott) said...

Lisa-Those lines seem more worth stealing.
Gary-My eyes are down, my ears are out.

2:30 PM
John McFetridge said...

My wife took a minor in film studies in university and she told me when one of her friends saw Casablanca for the first time she said, "It was okay, but it was really just a bunch of famous lines strung together."

If something sounds familiar and I can't place it I go with Shakespeare or the bible - very Northrup Frye of me, I know.

4:22 PM
Sepiru Chris said...

Lisa,
The Rudyard Kipling quote is from his poem "If"

first stanza... second half of third stanza ...third line of last stanza.

When I was young, every older British gentleman I knew (they were all gentlemen to me, though likely not in reality) would recite this poem to me.

Pattinase,

Thanks for having your ears out, it is fun to find the sources of things.

Tschuess,
Chris

8:04 PM
pattinase (abbott) said...

Love "If"

8:23 PM
Charles Gramlich said...

I had no idea. Never saw that movie. But I watched Fantasy Island.

12:03 AM
Cormac Brown said...

"I'm getting too old for this sh*t!"

-Sgt. Hulka in "Stripes."

Jeez, I miss Warren Oates, he and Lee Marvin seemed like they were just as tough in real life. At any rate, this line was relentlessly ripped off, the "Lethal Weapon" series being the worst offender.

10:45 AM
pattinase (abbott) said...

I loved Warren Oates and Lee Marvin too. They practically spit their lines out and it felt real.

4:23 PM

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