mcguffin

• “In CS, the mcguffin is writ large from the very beginning, and the whole film suffers as a result, and don't even get me started on the crappy overreliance on CGI.”

  The goofiest scene in all the Star Wars movies

• “Going Postal's mcguffin is the "clacks," a system of mechanical semaphore towers that have been strung across the continent in a kind of primitive telegraph/Internet.”

  Boing Boing

• “He's after the mcguffin, which is something I won't tell you about, since Rhoades keeps it a secret for a while.”

  Archive 2007-11-11

• “Being a baseball card collector myself, I have to love a book in which the mcguffin is a one-of-a-kind card signed by Joe Dimaggio, Billy Wilder, and Marilyn Monroe.”

  Archive 2006-03-26

• “The other IJ films had a "mcguffin", a mystical plot thread, but generally it was underplayed.”

  The goofiest scene in all the Star Wars movies

• “An Electro-Magnetic-Pulse attack was a staple sci-fi notion of the Eighties which formed the "mcguffin" of that highly entertaining action comedy "Escape from LA".”

  On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with...

• “Is it better to just not show the "mcguffin" (a Hitchcock term for a thing that everyone is after - a jewel, a prize, a valuable artifact, whatever - that thing itself doesn't matter but it serves a structural role as an excuse for chases and mayhem and plot convolutions)?”

  Hiding the ball?

• “I decided to have the hero blown up in an exploding nuclear reactor in the middle of the novel rather than the end, to muck-about with the hero-in-peril elements as far as possible, replace mcguffin pseudo-science with genuine science-fiction and so on.”

  Best of 2009

• “I would have liked to have seen a western style three-way standoff: Indy vs KGB vs SS resolved in a unique way (Nazi and reds shooting each other up while indy slinks away with the mcguffin).”

  I saw “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” last nigh on Netflix DVD… « PurpleSlog – Awesomeness & Modesty Meets Sexy

• “The mcguffin in The Chopin Manuscript is -- you guessed it -- what seems to be a previously unknown original score by Chopin.”

  Archive 2010-03-07

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