Repeats and pedantry

Last August, I did a brief synopsis of the Edward G. Robinson film Tampico, and pointed out that it only seemed to be on the Fox Movie Channel schedule once. It's back for another showing, tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM ET. Not only that, but it's going to get shown in February as well.

The Robe is also back on the FMC schedule. It's already shown up earlier in January, but I didn't bother to mention it. It too is airing tomorrow, at 11:45 AM; and will get another airing in February as well.

In betwen the two is the failed biblical epic Sodom and Gomorrah, at 9:00 AM. Right now, that's only listed once on the FMC schedule, but I won't be surprised if it shows up in the spring: I honestly don't know how far in advance FMC schedules its movies.

I also had the chance to have a bit more fun with the Fox Movie Channel at the end of last week when I watched the Civil War drama The Raid (not on DVD, but also coming back to FMC in February). The movie fairly prominently makes mention of events scheduled for "Saturday, October 17, 1864". Now, the very first thing I do when I see something like that is start calculating whether or not they got the day of the week correct. (For the record, I looked it up afterwards and found they didn't; October 17, 1864 was a Monday.) By the same token, whenever they show a calendar I try to figure out what year the calendar is from. There's a calendar montage in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, for example that's repeated despite the parts of the story being years apart, and despite the calendar not being right either time. Worse, one time when I watched A Place in the Sun, I noticed that the Labor Day sequence where Shelley Winters drowns is set against a full moon. So I found myself looking for a full moon calculator on the Internet to see if there was a Labor Day full moon around the time the movie was made! Sad, isn't it?