When life imitates art, one must ask
how the artists knew what they knew and when they knew it. Did they
just make a lucky but inspired guess, or were they diligent enough to research the topic and talk to a specialist and then make a
considered and informed extrapolation of what is known into the
unknown? (1) Movies about the future and the distant past know in
advance that they must make predictions where certain knowledge is
missing, but even in these cases the filmmakers shrug off an
obligation to make solidly grounded predictions and lapse into the
cheap or predictable.
I would say that cheap and predictable
is Hollywood's metier.
However it occurred, in the case we
have here the filmmakers have unexpectedly triumphed when they
probably just thought they were creating an inexpensive but exciting
moment in a film that has a certain reputation for being unusually
entertaining. I am referring here to the "rodents of unusual
size" in the esteemed movie The Princess Bride (1987).
To refresh your memory, the kidnapped
princess and the Dread Pirate Roberts, revealed to be her former
servant and lover, Wesley, try to escape their pursuers in the Fire
Swamp, known to be inhabited by horrible ROUS, which are "rodents
of unusual size". Of course they are attacked by ROUSes
(ROUSi?) in the swamp and a terrible battle ensues before they are
able to defeat the ROUSes and escape the swamp. The ROUSes are not
a shining moment in the history of visual effects, being somewhat
cheesy and, well, ratty in appearance.
Although filmgoers of today demand the
highest quality in visual effects, the best that technology can
imagine for their quota of zombies, giant robots, and superheroines,
it wasn't always so. Back in the day, long ago, movies were often
about telling a story and made economic use of the resources
available. The effects only had to be good enough to move the story
forward. In some cases, one could even accuse the filmmakers of
being tongue-in-cheek cheesy. The gopher in Caddyshack (1980)
comes to mind.
So we might dismiss the ROUSes as being
merely enlarged and fictional examples of an imaginary
rodentia, until
science made the following amazing discovery. Apparently, in ancient
italy, rodents of unusual size, giant hedgehogs, roamed the countryside, eating and
otherwise annoying the other flora and fauna of its time. Although
this is probably just a lucky guess on the part of the filmmakers, I
think you will agree that it is an amazing resemblance.
It may be a hedgehog but it certainly looks like a rodent to me
Since one of the theme's here at Global
Wahrman is to analyze the process by which one can successfully predict the future, we plan to use this example in our case studies of
successful, if inadvertent, predictions.
Read more about the Ancient Rodent
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1. In this case, I think we can rule
out the use of Atlantean Crystal Wisdom. There is no evidence to
suggest that any of the filmmakers were aware of and using the
Esoteric Knowledge.
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