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The Plate Archive59 charts

Movies, Plotted: Film Charts and Graphs From the Archive

Films are already structured. Charting one is mostly a matter of admitting how few moves it has.

Films are the easiest thing in this archive to chart, and the charts here are correspondingly uneven. A film has acts, rules, running gags and a body count. Any of those is a dataset. The good charts in this collection notice that the structure is the joke; the weaker ones just name a film and attach a graph.

Charts of a single line

The most durable ones take one piece of dialogue and treat it as a specification. Air Speed Velocity of Various Objects According to Monty Python charts a joke about measurement using measurement. Offers Made by Don Corleone reduces a career of negotiation to a pie with one slice. World Events According to Vizzini plots a character whose entire function is being confidently wrong. Popular Phrases in the movie 300 counts a script that mostly repeats itself.

Each of these depends on a line the reader can already recite, which is the same constraint that made the song charts work. Where the dialogue is fixed, the chart has something to be accurate about.

Charts of the machinery

The larger group here plots genre rather than film, and it is where the collection is strongest. What helicopters do in action movies has a small number of categories and no exceptions. Cities Attacked in Movies is a frequency table nobody has to be persuaded of. What You’ll Find in Sewer According to Hollywood and Things that happen in Underground Parking Garages in the movies both work because the location has a script of its own. Chances of a Sequel Being as Good as the Original needs one falling line.

Endings to the Oregon Trail is the outlier that proves the rule, a game rather than a film, with a famously short list of ways to die, plotted exactly.

The actor as a process

A handful treat a performer as a repeatable operation. Allocation Of Will Smith’s Time, Circa 1991 is a working-hours chart. The Denzel Washington Venn Diagram sorts a filmography into overlapping sets, which is a genuinely useful thing to do with a filmography and is linked from two sites, it. According to Jack Nicholson and Mr. T concerning Fools both plot a persona as if it were policy.

Wile E. Coyote’s ACME Account Statement is the best of them and not about an actor at all: a purchase ledger for a character defined entirely by failed purchases. Laws Broken by Wile E. Coyote runs the same audit from the other side.

The 2010 tail

The last dozen entries are a different animal. Wait wait wait 300 isnt a documentary, The Correct Answer Is Always Dynamite, Hope Christopher Lloyd Pays It Will, these are captions in the site’s late voice, where a reaction came first and the chart was fitted to it afterwards. Several arrived with the image already lost, so what survives is a title that reads like the end of an argument.

Reasons people hate Twilight, published separately as a plate, sits at the hinge: January 2009, drawn about a film franchise that had made itself into a public dispute, and cited by people who wanted the dispute settled with a diagram.

Charts here
59
Images recovered
25
Published as plates
1
Referring domains
70
First posted
Mar 2008
Last posted
Aug 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    This is

  2. A2

    If you’re a 24 Character, you’re probably

    · image not recovered

  3. A3

    Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Harman’s Understanding of the Population of Texas

  4. A4

    Who Ya Gonna Call?

    · image not recovered

  5. A5

    Tonight We Dine

    · image not recovered

  6. A6

    Soylent Green

    · Drawn by Hilary G

  7. A7

    The Black Knight

    · Drawn by Nathan D · image not recovered

  8. A8

    The Jeff Goldblum Ratio

    · Drawn by Mike K · image not recovered

  9. A9

    No, Mr. Bond…

    · Drawn by Eric S

  10. A10

    People Who Love Ferris

    · Drawn by Matt M · image not recovered

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Bill And Ted’s Adventure Quality

    · Drawn by Wesley B · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  13. B2

    Allocation Of Will Smith’s Time, Circa 1991

    · Drawn by Peter Schamp · image not recovered

  14. B3

    Mr. T concerning Fools

    · Drawn by Jon R

  15. B4

    THE CGI EFFECT UNCANNY VALLEY

    · Drawn by CIRC

  16. B5

    Elements of a Michael Bay film

    · Drawn by Pete · image not recovered

  17. B6

    World Events According to Vizzini

    · Drawn by JenBoi

  18. B7

    Offers Made by Don Corleone

    · Drawn by Joseph O’Connell · 2 domains still link here

  19. B8

    Probability of Princess Whereabouts

    · Drawn by Brian McCulloh

  20. B9

    Wile E. Coyote’s ACME Account Statement

    · Drawn by Ian McGonnigal

  21. B10

    ACME PRODUCTS

    · Drawn by Lawrence M · image not recovered

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    Endings to the Oregon Trail

    · Drawn by Adam Yohrling · 2 domains still link here

  24. C2

    Air Speed Velocity of Various Objects According to Monty Python

    · Drawn by Robbo · 2 domains still link here

  25. C3

    ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ Synopsis

    · Drawn by Joe W · image not recovered

  26. C4

    Ingredients in Soylent Green

    · Drawn by Karen S · 2 domains still link here

  27. C5

    Things Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Been Trying to Get to

    · Drawn by K. Baker · image not recovered

  28. C6

    Who is Legend

    · Drawn by 7CHP · image not recovered

  29. C8

    Tom Cruise likelihood

    · Drawn by Kat Cake · image not recovered

  30. C9

    Movie twists

    · Drawn by Frank Clay · image not recovered

  31. C10

    Reasons people hate Twilight

    · Drawn by Elagia · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  32. Side D
  33. D1

    People who complain about the new movie adaptation of a book/comic/video game

    · Drawn by JonM

  34. D2

    Things that happen in Underground Parking Garages in the movies

    · Drawn by oliver.wolf · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  35. D3

    Chances of a Sequel Being as Good as the Original

    · Drawn by operationsealion · image not recovered

  36. D4

    Structural Analysis of Hummed Batman-Theme

    · image not recovered

  37. D5

    What Happens In Vegas

    · Drawn by XvXrockstarkittehXvX · image not recovered

  38. D6

    Cities Attacked in Movies

    · Drawn by Andizzle35 · image not recovered

  39. D7

    The Sixties

    · Drawn by Contraltissimo · image not recovered

  40. D8

    Laws Broken by Wile E. Coyote

    · Drawn by EvWill · image not recovered

  41. D9

    My reaction to deaths in movies

    · Drawn by Loltater

  42. D10

    Things New Moon Consists of

    · image not recovered

  43. Side E
  44. E2

    Movie popcorn

    · image not recovered

  45. E3

    The Denzel Washington Venn Diagram

    · 2 domains still link here

  46. E4

    What You’ll Find in Sewer According to Hollywood

    · Drawn by G-Rex · image not recovered

  47. E5

    Famous Movie Quotes

    · Drawn by The American Film Institute / Flowing Data

  48. E6

    Shakespeare in a Minute

    · Drawn by llamadude98 · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  49. E7

    Monty Python Paradox

    · Drawn by holymasterchief · image not recovered

  50. E8

    Films Teenage Males Have Nightmares About

    · Drawn by moytefriendly

  51. E9

    According to Jack Nicholson

    · Drawn by Speak1967

  52. E10

    What Little Kids Learn from Cinderella

    · Drawn by rubybooksuraski · image not recovered

  53. Side F
  54. F1

    What helicopters do in action movies

    · Drawn by DOOF

  55. F2

    Necrophilia or Bestiality?

    · Drawn by broerej123

  56. F3

    Bonus Post: The Most Elusive Of Them All

    · image not recovered

  57. F4

    Things you can do lotr

    · image not recovered

  58. F5

    From inspector gadget

    · image not recovered

  59. F6

    But What About The Werewolf?

    · Drawn by Teens Humor · 2 domains still link here

  60. F7

    Hope Christopher Lloyd Pays It Will

    · Drawn by WindowlessVan · image not recovered

  61. F8

    The Correct Answer Is Always Dynamite

    · image not recovered

  62. F9

    Wait wait wait 300 isnt a documentary

    · image not recovered

Queries answered

What kind of film charts are in this collection?

Fifty-nine, in three rough kinds: charts of a single scene or line, charts of a genre’s recurring machinery, and charts that measure an actor’s career as if it were a process. They run from March 2008 to August 2010.

Which film turns up most often?

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, closely followed by the Star Wars films, though the science fiction charts are collected separately. Films with quotable rules attract charts, because a rule can be plotted and a plot cannot.

Is there a chart about airspeed velocity of a swallow?

Yes. Air Speed Velocity of Various Objects According to Monty Python, from September 2008, plots the film’s own joke as a comparative bar chart, which is the only correct response to a joke about units.

Why are genre charts more common than charts about single films?

Because a genre repeats and a film does not. What helicopters do in action movies works on every reader; a chart about one helicopter would work on almost none. The archive’s best film charts are all about machinery rather than plot.

Why do some entries have no image?

The original images were hosted on a service that no longer serves them. Where no copy survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address rather than a stand-in.