Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2013 September 20

= September 20 =

Gaslight
"Gaslight" the film (Angel Street) came out in 1944. What other films have been made on the gaslighting theme? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.25.4.14 (talk) 11:42, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Fanny by Gaslight. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  12:59, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Gaslight (1940 film). Seriously though, TVTropes lists a bunch. Clarityfiend (talk) 15:31, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Perhaps we should mention the theme, for anyone unfamiliar with it. The idea was to drive somebody insane, by playing many tricks on them.  The reason in the original was to have them committed and inherit their estate, but I'm not sure if that is an essential part of the theme.  Also, the goal of driving them insane might not be essential, either, as "gaslighting" somebody just to annoy them might also qualify.  The OP should clarify exactly what portions of the theme they are looking for.


 * SPOILER WARNING: BTW, for those curious about the name, it was a gas lighting fixture that clued the would-be victim in to the fact the there weren't ghosts in the house, but a person, since the gas pressure would drop and the lights dim when that person snuck into the house and turned on their own gas light. I never quite got that bit, though, as I saw no reason why a ghost might not turn on a gas light. StuRat (talk) 02:03, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

OP I was mainly interested in the theme of manipulation so as to damage the person psychologically and discredit them socially. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.25.4.14 (talk) 09:24, 21 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I seem to recall at least one film or TV show where a man tried to make his wife crazy and convince everyone she was. Not sure of the name, though. StuRat (talk) 10:07, 21 September 2013 (UTC)


 * TVtropes lists quite a few examples. - Ka renjc (talk) 17:41, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Recognize a classical piece of music
What's the name of the melody played in the background of this PowerPoint presentation? Thanks, 84.109.248.221 (talk) 12:35, 20 September 2013 (UTC) Note: I tried to ask this question before but the file was corrupt. The problem is now fixed.


 * It's nothing I recognise, but I'd say it's not from the "classical" repertoire as such, but rather a piece of contemporary ambient music. It must have a composer and a name, but search me.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  12:58, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * According to Shazam, it is Le Petit Fille De La Mer, from the album L'Apocapypse des Animaux by Vangelis. --NorwegianBluetalk 22:32, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Name of a song
I've heard this song several times, it is sang by a woman... it says something like In the arms of an angel... it appears in the movie City of Angels (film). Also, the movie credits If God Will Send His Angels as appearing in the movie, but I couldn't hear it at all. Anyone knows which part of the movie the song appears in??  Miss Bono  [hello, hello!]  13:03, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Angel (Sarah McLachlan song) ☯ Bonkers The Clown  \(^_^)/  Nonsensical Babble  ☯ 13:08, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Cool! I heard it alson in some of the first episodes of the 1st season of Alias (TV series) And something on the U2 song appearing in the movie?   Miss Bono  [hello, hello!]  13:19, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears at the start or the end, I guess. ☯ Bonkers The Clown  \(^_^)/  Nonsensical Babble  ☯ 13:22, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Are you sure?  Miss Bono  [hello, hello!]  13:46, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I think Bonkers The Clown   is right. That song is used a lot in TV shows, commercials and ads for charities.  Liz  Read! Talk! 23:10, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Liz, I guess I only have listened to it a lot in my iPod :D. I love that song!  Miss Bono  [hello, hello!]  13:17, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Christian hymns and songs that are also popular secular music?
Besides Amazing Grace and Jesus Loves Me This I Know and various holiday songs, what other Christian hymns and songs that are also popular secular music? Does anybody know popular children's Christian songs that are also used and favored in the secular world? If not, then are there songs that are not necessarily Christian but still have that traditional hymnodic tune? 164.107.147.118 (talk) 14:10, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Lord of the Dance is pretty well-liked generally. --Viennese Waltz 14:16, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * For the first, more direct question, there are some overtly Christian popular rock songs, for example "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum (his original composition) and "Jesus Is Just Alright", an earlier Gospel song which has been covered by many rock acts, notably The Doobie Brothers. For songs that are based off of Christian music, but are not directly Christian, much of early Soul music used well-known melodies and song structures from gospel music.  Early creators of soul music came from a Gospel tradition, such as Sam Cooke and Solomon Burke, and borrowed heavily from African-American church music.  Even today, secular groups like Robert Randolph and the Family Band still borrow from Christian traditions.  -- Jayron  32  14:33, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Do you know any music that is not Rock and Roll, Rap, Blues, Jazz, Hip-Hop, or Metal? 164.107.103.94 (talk) 16:51, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * See below for some ideas from others. "Daddy Sang Bass", a popular country song for Johnny Cash is based on a Christian Hymn.  -- Jayron  32  16:55, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Several songs from the musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell have become popular in their own right, such as I Don't Know How to Love Him, Day by Day and Superstar. Rojomoke (talk) 14:43, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Simple children's Sunday school songs, sometimes with slightly altered words sometiems show up in secular preschools like This little light of mine, If you happy and you know it (perhaps), spirituals like Swing low, sweet chariot, Dem Bones (with versions by The Wiggles, The Chipmunks, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot and Mike Wazowski), Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. Traditional music songs like Keep On the Sunny Side, Will the circle be unbroken. We also have Category:Works based on Simple Gifts. Most of these


 * (The remainder of the previous edit seems to have been lost somehow).
 * When I went to an English school in a Commonwealth country some 45 years ago, we had singing classes where (at least) two hymns were sung in singing classes along with secular songs such as The Maid of Amsterdam (A-roving), The Keeper (did a-hunting go), The Mermaid (One Friday morn'...) and The Minstrel Boy. The hymns were We Plough the Fields and Scatter and Onward, Christian Soldiers. --NorwegianBluetalk 22:22, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" is a popular English rugby anthem, and "Abide with Me" is sung at some English soccer matches. --Nicknack009 (talk) 10:25, 21 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Some hymns have been chart hits in the UK. "All Things Bright and Beautiful" was a hit for Joe Brown and the Bruvvers in 1963. Cat Stevens took "Morning has Broken" to the charts in 1972 (with keyboard help from Rick Wakeman). Also in the early 60s, the Joy Strings were a Salvation Army band who made the Hit Parade with "It's an Open Secret". Some tunes have been hijacked for use with Christian words, such as The Carnival is Over, which has been re-used for What A Friend We Have in Jesus. --TammyMoet (talk) 15:57, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2 - Meridian's written language
In the game Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2, there is various posters, graffiti & street signs in the city of Meridian which is written in a language that is either called Meridian's written language or Meridian Script. Does anyone know where I can get this as a font ? 194.74.238.6 (talk) 15:27, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

CHARLIE CHAN AT THE WAX MUSEUM
Is this movie in the PUBLIC DOMAIN? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zrdavis (talk • contribs) 16:56, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * It can be tough to say for sure without hiring a lawyer to do a lot of research, but, Archive.org seems to think that it's public domain. APL (talk) 19:17, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

identify this actress?
Can anyone recognize the actress in the picture at the top of this Slate article? At first I thought maybe it was Sarah Drew, but she was never on Seinfeld (and would have been younger at the time anyway). —Steve Summit (talk) 20:55, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * It's Jami Gertz from the episode "The Stall". Dismas |(talk) 21:20, 20 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks! —Steve Summit (talk) 01:30, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Pure Audio Blu-ray disc
I've heard about these Pure Audio Blu-ray discs coming out soon. Will you have to have a video monitor hooked up to the player to play them, or can you play them without a video monitor? Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 22:50, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Nothing stops you from playing a normal Blu-Ray disc without a monitor, so I don't see why an audio disc should be different (barring any strange software/firmware interlock that detects the presence of an AV connection). Zunaid 23:46, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * With the BDs I have, so many times you have to select things from the menu to start them. For audio only, I'd rather be able to put them in and play.  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 00:24, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
 * There is no reason that this should be required. Blu-Ray is not a video format: it's a storage medium.  If people want to make audio-only Blu-rays, there is nothing stopping them from being made.  See DVD-Audio for the previous attempt at high fidelity audio.  Blu-ray is just the next attempt. Mingmingla (talk) 03:18, 21 September 2013 (UTC)


 * With my SACDs, I just put them in and play, just like a CD. With my DVD-audio, I have to look at the menu on a monitor to get it started.  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 04:04, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Are you sure your Bluray player even supports DVD-audio? Our article says many DVD-audio discs actually present a backwards compatible DVD-video stream. If your player doesn't even understand the DVD-audio part, it's no wonder it required navigation. If it does understand DVD-audio but still requires it, I wonder if it's because they just tacked the DVD-audio portion onto their DVD-video play back function. Either way, I don't see any specific reason why this would be required (unless perhaps the backward compatibility function thing is acting as a hiderance here and they present the menu so you can select between playing back the DVD-audio and the DVD-video which is generally just a lower fidelity copy), so there's no way you can know how Bluray players will handle it, unless it's actually required by the standard they handle it in a certain way (and the current licencing model suggest to me if the designers want to force something, they can do so succesfully). Nil Einne (talk) 17:21, 21 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't have any of these discs - I just found out about them yesterday. I have a BD player hooked to my TV.  I have a SACD/DVD-audio player on my stereo.  The website I found says that any BD player can play them.  It says that you can use it just like a CD with the remote control - no TV necessary.  It has different formats (5.1, stereo, etc) that you can select with the colored buttons on the remote control and then you can play the disc normally (i.e. like a CD w/o a TV.)  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 02:57, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Well, I just found this, which says "the easy and straight-forward handling of a CD – on every Blu-ray player". Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 04:07, 21 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I'd never heard of these before and I'm wondering what the market would actually be. Nearly every BD player I've seen could play mp3s of whatever quality was desired and you can fit several hundred on even a standard DVDR (let alone BD disc), yet as I clicked through some of the pages on the link above, it seems like they're releasing only a single album's worth of music per BD disc, so what's the advantage over, say, a CD or high quality mp3? Indeed, some of the albums are dual discs, with both a CD and BD copy included. To me, it sounds like selling poster-sized fortune cookie fortunes. What exactly are you getting that you're not getting from the CD? Matt Deres (talk) 02:02, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Did you look at the site Bubba linked to? "High resolution sound (up to 192 kHz/24Bit) in surround and stereo". Whether you can hear the extra data is a stunningly dull topic which I'm not going in to, but for those who want to have it, that's the selling point. HenryFlower 02:51, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * If you encode losslessly without any attempt at compression (basically a PCM format), then 8 channels of surround sound gives about an hour and a half of audio on a single-layer blu-ray disc. Calculation on Wolfram Alpha K ati e R  (talk) 12:09, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It looks like they can have stereo, 5.1, 7.1, and 9.1. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 04:19, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

deaths in movie adaptations of TV
Inspired by my recent re-watching of The Transformers: The Movie, which I must admit traumatized me when I watched it as a little kid (imagine if they made a Pokemon movie nowadays where nearly all of Ash's Pokemon literally died onscreen because they could get away with showing that stuff in the cinema) - I think that this was quite a common reaction at the time too. Those robots were heroes to lots of young boys... :)

Can anyone think of any other move adaptations of a popular TV series where a significant proportion of the characters from the series are unexpectedly killed off in the first act of the movie? --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 23:33, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This sounds like a job for TV Tropes! Here's their page on the movie. It looks like the most relevant trope documented there is Anyone Can Die. You can browse the Live-Action TV and Western Animation subpages for that trope, but neither I nor Wikipedia can be held responsible for the hours of your life you may lose in the process. --BDD (talk) 07:27, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Serenity (film) had some unexpected deaths of series characters, not (all) in the first act though. Staecker (talk) 11:26, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
 * TV Tropes is a great site, Kurt Shaped Box. It is easy to spend hours browsing through the entries. Here is their page on Transformers: The Movie. It notes that the film was a little traumatic for young viewers. Liz  Read! Talk! 20:15, 22 September 2013 (UTC)