The movie It doesn’t have as many title drops as I would’ve expected. Also I don’t recall anyone ever saying The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in that film.
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".
How would the commenter know to bring it up without reading the article? This feels like dodging the question of "why is the determination of a title drop so bad?"
Why should colons be such special case? Why not treat commata or dashes the same way? (And conversely, did they count the one in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie title?)
I think the GP's point (badly made) may be that the Lord of the rings example is addressed explicitly in the article.
"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"
I'm imagining some film school student explaining how Barbie would have been a better movie, a real film even, without mentioning the character's name.
Exactly. If they had limited it to cases where "it" is referring to Pennywise, that would be one thing, but not when anyone uses a very common pronoun!
I guess this is the downside of making a data analysis thing as a side project to hopefully get something going, but not having the time to take care of all potential edge cases.
I guess "Them!" is also affected by this, and maybe The Thing or The Birds...
To be fair, the article starts out seeming real for about the first third. It's only after the first list — Barbie, Damini, Sita,... Azhar, It — that it descends into obvious parody. Quote:
"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.
Yes. I would expect the writer to at least check the top 10 movies.
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.
I think it's just a guy that dug around in some data for fun and wanted to show it to people.
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.
Have you stopped scrolling once you realized that? The article acknowledges that, and even has a special category of movies named after characters with just a single title drop.
That said, Barbie is a funny case indeed, as it's named after about half of its characters :P
Yes, but it would've been much more interesting to read about title drops where this is not the case. The top titledrops listed that are not names of a character are all names of something else, like locations or objects.
I agree, I think this analysis can benefit from some data sanitisation.
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.
This seems like something that could be handled easily with a second-pass on the data using an LLM. And the author has made the dataset available... [0]
Indeed, and this contaminates all other analyses as well. Sure, shorter titles are dropped more frequently – but that sounds like it could be just because character names tend to make for short titles.
What a fun read! I should point out though that the movie Saina definitely needs a "name" icon next to it, as it's a biopic of badminton player Saina Nehwal.
I would've liked 2d charts or at least stacked bar charts for the correlation ones to see if the correlations are different for ones with only one drop or many drops
Just dropping in to say thank you! Fun read, fun idea, well executed.
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.
Deathstalker 2 is probably my favorite instance of a sequel number being incorporated into the title drop. Not only is it one of the first lines of the movie, the timing is impeccable.
Robocop 2 is a critique of sequels - everything must be bigger and better, designed by committee, with every idea (directive) shoved into the box until it becomes unworkable.
> 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 (feel free to hover over the visualizations to explore the matches)!
An unacknowledged partial title drop for that movie is that "Lord of the Ring" (with no s at the end) is uttered.
While you're right about Sauron being the Lord of the Rings, he didn't make all of 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.
Sauron is twice called the Lord of the Rings in book two.
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.)
I don't have my Fellowship at hand now, but doesn't Frodo joke near the beginning he's "the lord of the rings" and Gandalf scolds him by telling him something like "there's only one lord of the rings"?
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!"
Sauron is referred to as the Lord of the Ring and the Lord of the Rings (second being much more common) multiple times.
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.
They even included one in the article. At least I sincerely doubt that "The Scarlet Bond That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime" [sic] was dialogue. Given the context I'm fairly sure it's just the title showing up on screen, but subtitled because it's in Japanese.
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.
> 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."
I was utterly disturbed by a story sent into the Kermode and Mayo radio show many years ago. The listener explained that their family went to the theatre, sat down in their seats to watch the film, and then upon the first utterance of the title of the film they would clap, stand up, and walk out.
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.
Happy to see Damini movie in that list. It's an excellent Bollywood movie from the 90s. I know the list is not indicative of the quality of the movie. But still happy to see this obscure Indian movie. Worth a watch. Highly rated on IMDB too.
Maybe I was (un)lucky, but the only film I've checked was "Inception". It's spoken at 19:24, but the explorer states the title is not dropped at all. I had to actually look it up, as I've doubted my memory for a second.
Wild, that was the first title I tried as well.
It is such a specific word, hence why I tried it first.
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.
While the 1995 Japanese anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion revolves around human-shaped weapons called "Evangelions", the "Neon Genesis" part of the title is neither part of the original Japanese name, nor its direct translation. The Japanese name is 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン / Shin-seiki evangerion, "Evangelion of a new era/century". The series has other non-direct translations too, and apparently this style was approved of the original creators, but it was always a bit of a mystery whether the gap in the interpretation was intentional or not.
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.
Neon is relating to "new" via neo- prefix, with -n added on because the Western idea in the 90s of Japanese aesthetic was futuristic neon.
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.
BTW neon the gas was called so because it was a new discovery (in a well-searched area, the composition of air). The name basically means "a new something", neuter gender, could be "lo nuevo" in Spanish or "das neue" in German.
Since "evangelion" and "genesis" clearly are taken from Greek, so was apparently "neon".
They're both ancient Greek, but different grammatical genders: neon (νέον) is neuter, while γένεσις is feminine. Better might have been "nea genesis" if those two words were to be interpreted together. But, "evangelion" (εὐαγγέλιον) is also Greek and neuter, meaning the gospel, good news, or a reward owed a messenger for his good news. I always figured the "new" of "neon" belonged with the "evangelion," and "genesis" was just kind of hanging around for no particular reason.
Oh, I 100% agree that the translator intended the "gap", and the original creators approved of it. However, what was not clear, was whether the director Anno Hideaki had in mind the primary(?) meaning of genesis, as in creation of the world, when he was sketching the original plot of the TV series and the translation title wasn't ostensibly decided upon yet.
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.
I remember about 12-15 years ago, as a weekend project, I reached out to the creator of OpenSubtitles dot org and asked him for a dump of all the subtitles, which he promptly and happily provided. I then indexed them all in elasticsearch (it was a pretty nascent tech at the time), and created a movie quote finder, with timestamps. E.g. you could search for "i love you" and it would tell you all the movies and timestamps that phrase would be uttered. My lazy ass didn't go beyond a localhost version, but I still remember fondly of having gotten that working, it felt like magic at the time.
174 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadPlease 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"
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.
[0] https://www.titledrops.net/
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.
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
> 00:23:19 it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you, Robocop 2
https://youtu.be/BkPxZLWeTBg
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.
But then opensubtitles couldn't be used to analyse that.
Aliens (1986)
(Aliens hissing)
https://www.titledrops.net/explorer?movies=tt0090605&title=
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.
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."
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.
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.