Rob here. I incorrectly said Shakespeare used "gaffer vicar". It was actually William Stevenson who used it. I got the wrong Elizabethan Willy S. Sorry!

When my 81 year old Mum was very seriously ill, and things looked bad, my niece asked her if she had a bucket list? She replied: "No. But I've got a f**k it list".

A "gaff" is a stick with a hook at the end used to capture wayward ropes in the olde days of sailing.  After a bunch of theatres burned down, someone decided it would be a good idea to float candles in water in front of the stage.  Since so many sailors were employed to build and operate the rigging in theatres, it made sense to use a gaff to push the candles out into the "moat" and to retrieve them.  This is how the lighting guy became the "gaffer".  Incidentally the gaff is also the "hook" used to snatch terrible performers offstage.

speaking of corpsing, nice story from our dad who was a stage actor in the 50s: some period play where the leading woman and man hated each other, so they kept trying to prank each other on stage - anyway one time the man arranged to have the candlestick phone on stage ring as the woman walked past it during a performance - she paused for the briefest of moments, picked up the phone and said "hello?" and then turned to him and said "it's for you"

I have often thought it to be ironic that a blockbuster is both a term for a huge bomb and a very successful movie, whereas a movie which fails at the boxoffice is a bomb, and one which is a dismal failure is often referred to as a huge bomb.

I always associated Barnstorming and a barnstormer with a pilot, and I presumed it was because of the daring stunts they did like flying through a barn at a ridiculously low altitude. I also associated it with a certain bombascity and swagger of the one doing the barnstorming. I didn't know it first was associated with actors.

My understanding was that spaghetti western was more to do with where they were made, not who was directing them.

During my time, extras in crowd scenes were given the phrases "watermelon, cantaloupe," and "peas and carrots" to say. If the director wanted the crowd to sound surly, a smattering of extras were given the phrase "natter gromish" to use.

Re: Star Trek and redshirts … in-universe (in the Original Series, at least), Star Fleet personnel wear a tunic color that denotes their general area of work or expertise; blue is a scientific or medical field, gold is a command-track color, and red for security and technical fields like starship engineering. As a result of that, most of the characters who were in a position to die off in an episode tended to come from fields with red-shirted personnel, especially security. Thus, since they tended to be in harm's way more often than blue- or gold-shirts, it became a trope.

Rob mentioned "check the gate" at the end - that refers to the "gate" in the camera through which the film passes behind the lens, which needed to be checked for hairs or other contaminants that might become trapped in it and ruin the film.

"Cartoon" came from the Italian word "Cartone", where Middle-age and Renaissance Artist like Michealangelo would first draw the picture in heavy thick paper before transferring the drawings into walls and ceilings to make a Fresco art, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Early, Newspaper and Magazines comics and illustration are drawn and inked in large cardboard paper, before being photographed and resized to be made in print plates.

That's why we call thick board paper a "Carton" like a Carton of milk. And the word Cardboard..

I can still just remember (I am 70) my mum using a dolly tub and mangle to do the washing. She was in raptures when our first twin-tub arrived.

OK, I'm going to show my age...in the EARLY 1950s there was a song (1949) "Music! Music! Music!" by Theresa Brewer that was also known as "Put another nickel in the nickelodeon" so in this case the nickelodeon was referring to a jukebox. I was waiting for a discussion of "soap opera".

24:31 Something similar happened on the BBC, during the filming of a classic Doctor Who serial called ‘The Brain of Morbius.’ The writer Terrance Dicks wasn’t happy with the changes made by script editor Robert Holmes, and so insisted that the on screen authorship credit went to the made up writer, Robin Bland.

42:51 that always bugged me because that was the detail people best remembered about the film, but even in that movie, "inception" referred to giving someone an idea by planting it in a dream, not to the recursive layers of dreams-within-dreams

I remember when The Bucket List came out and everyone involved in doing promotion was at pains to explain what the term 'bucket list' meant. I guess they were more successful than they ever could have hoped, since it's not only embedded, it's a Mandela Memory!

I used to lecture on the topic of comic strip history, and the origin of "cartoon" is a favorite story of mine.

It comes from the Italian word "cartone," meaning cardboard. ("Carton" has the same root.) Before painting a wall mural, artists used to do a preliminary charcoal sketch on a large sheet of cardboard, then transfer the sketch to the wall by a method called "pouncing" (which is a whole 'nother story).

After a great fire destroyed the Palace of Westminster in 1834, a new building was planned. Parliament wanted to line the halls of the new building with paintings of inspiring scenes from British history. They asked artists to submit cartoons of their ideas, and a public exhibition of these drawings was held.

The satirical magazine, Punch, reacted by publishing a series of "Mr. Punch's Cartoons" depicting embarrassing scenes from British history -- like how Parliament spent money on an art exhibition instead of helping the sick and hungry.

The common folk, not being artists, were unfamiliar with the word "cartoon," and assumed it meant "funny drawings with captions." Punch, along with other humor magazines (called "comic weeklies," or "comics" for short), printed more and more "cartoons." And so, the name "comics" gradually came to mean "publications containing mostly cartoon drawings."

14:10 - Tom Hanks "corpsed" a scene in Saving Private Ryan. When Captain Miller went to the typist pool to find Private Upham, Captain Miller tells Upham to gather his things. As Upham picks up his typewriter, Captain Miller tells him he won't need that. But as Jeremy Davies (playing Upham) drops his helmet, you can clearly hear Tom Hanks (and not Captain Miller!) telling him, "Oh, you'll need that, though!" CORPSED!

20:20 one of my favorites is the “script supervisor “ who has to make sure everything matches from a previous cut…like if someone is smoking…the cigarette can’t mysteriously grow longer or something

The reason why redshirts on Star Trek were usually the first to die is they were part of the operations crew, specifically/usually security. When Kirk beamed down to a location he would usually take a security detachment with him and those security officers usually found the dangerous things, because that was their job 😂

Also, typically the other crew on the away missions were also main characters and the show wasn’t going to kill main characters off, so the writers usually just offed the security officers instead.