CULTURE SHOCK! At the movies!

[cimorene]

Last night wax and I saw Music and Lyrics (a Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore romcom about a former pop star) instead of 300 because our immersion in Panic! At The Disco has put us in the mood for fluffy things.

Okay, so, I had a CULTURE SHOCK moment twice when a joke consisted of Hugh Grant picking out the Jeopardy theme on the piano while he waits for Drew to come up with something, and - you know, it wasn't the greatest joke in the history of ever, but it was well-timed and quite good in context, and I laughed out loud and was the only one in the theatre laughing. I was like, "Wow, am I that lame all of a sudden? - Oh wait," because they don't know Jeopardy in Finland. How were the translators going to handle that (if they could)?

Also, a couple of months ago I had to explain "Trix are for kids" to wax. It's not like I'm not used to cultural differences, obviously, but you can demonstrably never become completely used to it. Socialisation wouldn't be very effective without its ability to convince us of our culture's naturalness and inevitability.

Comments

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

I feel very, very culturally stupid right now. I'm in the US, I was born and raised here, and I have no idea what the Jeopardy theme is or what "Trix is for kids" means.

Thank god for Google. "Trix is for kids" is apparently something to do with an ad for a cereal. (And a rabbit. Huh.) And now I'm off to see if there's a Jeopardy theme download somewhere.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, well, maybe that's age-related? There are fairly widespread references to that slogan, because Trix has been using it since the 80s and are still using it - wax actually recognised the references, without having known what they were referring to.

As for the Jeopardy theme, there might be no excuse - but I hate gameshows myself, so I might not recognise it either, had I grown up in a different family (as it is, I was - fairly successful at avoiding television for many years). They play the themesong on the show while waiting for the contestants to answer the questions, so the reference in the movie was not a new joke. I've known people to hum it to indicate impatience before.