C: Chain Link Titles
(20 July 1997)
(Note: see end of column for credits.)
By mixing the title of one work (movie, TV show, book, song, whatever) with another, you can sometimes come up with some great combos:
- Clan of the Care Bears
- Nightmare on Sesame Street [which reminds me of the Duck's Breath Mystery Theater piece called "Sesame Street Blues"]
- Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof
- Creature from the Blue Lagoon
- The Man with the Golden Pond
But those are sort of cheating. The usual rules of this game as I play it require:
- You must use all the words from each title (though you can leave out the occasional "A," "An," or "The");
- You can't scramble the order of the words in a title, though you can insert words from other titles in the middle;
- The titles must be fairly common (usually enforced by requiring that at least two people present must have heard of every title used).
For instance:
- Sling Blade Runner
Jim Moskowitz
- My Fair Lady and the Tramp
- When Dirty Harry Met Sally
- The Magnificent Seven Ambersons Brides for the Seven Samurai Blues Brothers Karamazov from Another Planet [seven titles... unless you count Seven]
- A Room with a View to a Kill
- Gone With the Wind in the Willows
- Pride of the Damn Connecticut Yankees in King Arthur's Court
- Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Brothers
- Black Beauty and the Beast
- sex, true lies and videotape
- Peggy Sue Got Married to the Mob
- Mya Rorer
- Bringing Up Three Men and a Baby
- Kristen McCowan
- The Quiet Earth Girls Are Easy
- Kristen
- The Lost World According to Garp
- Mya
- Valley of the Guys and Dolls
- Arthur Evans
- The Maltese Falcon and The Snowman
- Regarding Henry V: Portrait of a Serial Killer
- Attack of the Killer Fried Green Tomatoes
- Kristen
- Teacher's Pet Sematary
- Natural Born Free Willy Killers
- Kristen/JEH
- Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures in Babysitting
- The Swiss Addams Family Robinson
- The Princess Bride of Frankenstein
- The Wizard of Speed and Time Bandits
- The Wicker Man in the Iron Mask
- The Lawnmower Man who Fell to Earth
- The NeverEnding West Side Story
- A Star is Born Free Willy Wonka and the Like Waterworld for the Chocolate Factory.
- The Incredible Shrinking Man Of La Mancha
- Bob and Carol And Ted and Alice's Restaurant
- Endless Love Potion #9 to 5 Easy Pieces
- The Lion King, the Witches of Eastwick, and the Wardrobe, in Winter
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Duckling
- The Handmaid's Tale of Two Cities
- Kristen
- Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death of a Salesman
- Arthur
- Scent of a Woman of the Year of Living Dangerously
- Arthur
- Terror of a Tiny Town Like Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More
- Arthur
There are a lot of rules variants. Some people require movie titles only; others allow not only other titles (songs, for instance, or books or TV shows), but common phrases.
- Black and Blue Velvet
- Follow The Yellow Brick Road Warrior
- John Wayne's World
- Soylent Green Acres
- Village People of The Damned
- Gentle Ben-Hur [a bear, a rat, and a chariot race...]
- Down Among the Dead Poets Society Men in Black
- JEH
- Through the Wallflower [a collaboration among the Bobs, Pink Floyd, and Peter Gabriel]
- JEH
Some chains overlap in parts of words (or of numbers) rather than full words:
- Vertigo West, Young Man
- Terminators of Endearment
- 2001 Fine Day
- Kristen
- 1984 Weddings and a Funeral
- Return of the Jedi, Claudius
- Two Years Before the Masters of the Universe
- Take Me Out of Africa to the Rollerball Game
- The Rocky Horror Picture Showboat
- Wargames People Play
- Clan of the Bad News Cave Bears
- Lawnmower Man of La Manchurian Candidate
- Jim
- Man and Superman and Superman and Superman and...
- JEH
And allowing homophones, especially in partial-word overlaps, can provide some delightful mixes:
- Children of Doonesbury
- Brigadune
- The Citizen Kane Mutiny
- My Favorite Year of Living Dangerous Liaisons
- Bhadrika Love
- The Nosferatu Jakes
- Arthur
There are some that only work on paper; if you say them aloud they fall apart. The best such I've seen is
- Surf Nazis Must Die Fledermaus
- Arthur
You can, of course, string lots of titles and phrases together. This chain leaves out a couple of words in favor of not leaving any words from one phrase dangling in the middle of another phrase:
- Mystic Pizza Man and Superman from Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Sky With Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend's Wedding Gift From the Sea of Love is a Many-Splendored Thing From Another World, According to Garp
- Arthur
The way I first heard of the game being played, the idea was to takes turns adding on to a string of linked titles/phrases. This version is a memory game as well, since you have to recite the whole string so far before tacking on the new item you're adding. The first example I heard started out "Once upon a time and tide wait for no man is an island of Dr. Moreau, row, row your boat..."
Bhadrika once mentioned a nifty word game played in ASL: a chain of words, keeping one parameter the same from word to word, where "parameter" is a linguistic attribute of a sign in ASL. I don't know enough ASL to provide examples, but as far as I can tell the game is much the same idea as some of these linked title chains...
Finally, a challenge to readers: form a chain loop, starting and ending with the same title. The ideal chain loop would use all the words in each title, have every title start with the end of the previous one (so all words from a given title are adjacent), use only titles (no phrases), and end up where it started. Anyone care to construct one?
Credits
All of the uncredited items listed here are listed on, or derived from, Shadowcat's page of mangled movie titles, which were created by a bunch of folks from the alt.callahans newsgroup and IRC channel. Among the people credited on that page are: Six, Drwelbymd, Niche, Claudia, Tess, Janeaway, The Prof, Alan Kors, Bunyip, Fellini, The Doctor, Draemr, Maenad, and Faith. I've substantially modified or expanded half a dozen of those items.
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Jed Hartman <logophilia@kith.org>