Daniel Brizuela 2/2/12
Iconic Movie Scenes.
Since the creation of film in the late 1800s, and the idea of the film-making process at the start of the 1900s, films have had many memorable things about them that so many people love to watch in their favorite movies. There are the memorable characters, like James Bond or The Tramp, memorable quotes, like anything that Clint Eastwood says, and even memorable endings, like The Dark Knight and Casablanca. But, one very important thing that so many great films have is their very memorable scenes where something great is shown that it’s eventually copied and parodied in other films.
Some of these memorable film scenes include most of the Rocky films’ training sequences, especially the first film. In 1976s Rocky, the film that made Sylvester Stallone famous, boxer Rocky Balboa trains by running all over Philadelphia. He then runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Arts, now known as the “Rocky Steps”, which he does again in some of the sequels. What makes this film so memorable is that it was one of the first films to use the Steadicam as a way to not make the camera jump up and down as it’s following Rocky.
Another memorable scene in film is from one of the classics of the 1930s that has been copied, parodied, and remade so many times: the climbing of the Empire State Building near the end of the original King Kong. The 1933 RKO production, which was produced and directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and starring Fay Wray in her most famous role ever and the original scream queen, was considered revolutionary at the time thanks to the stop motion special effects by Willis O’Brien, who made the first stop motion animation with 1925s The Lost World. The very memorable scene is when Kong finds and captures Wray’s character after he escapes from a Manhattan theater and climbs the Empire State Building while holding her in one hand. At the top, Kong is eventually killed after being shot down by fighter planes, with the directors in cameos as one of the pilots and shooter, and eventually falls down.
A third and final memorable movie scene is from the classic 1985 science fiction time travel comedy Back to the Future. The Steven Spielberg produced and Robert Zemeckis written and directed hit has so many great scenes, that’s the same for its two sequels in 1989 and 1990. However, the scene that’s the most memorable in the original film is at the start when Marty McFly, played by Canadian actor and Family Ties star Michael J. Fox who replaced Eric Stoltz a few weeks into production, first sees the modified DeLorean that his friend Dr. Emmet “Doc” Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, built. It has Marty holding onto a film camera and filming Doc using a remote control to drive the DeLorean with his dog inside to 88 miles per hour right towards them. Just before it hits them, the DeLorean is surrounded by a flash of colored lights and disappears, leaving nothing but a fire trail in front of and behind Marty and Brown and the license plate spinning on the ground. Marty, being shocked by what just happened, freaks out that Brown’s dog was just vaporized but he explains that the DeLorean was a time machine set for one minute ahead. Before it returns, the one thing that Marty is more confused about is that Doc built a time machine out of a DeLorean. When it comes back, the exterior is filled with smoke and ice cold, but everything inside intact and a clock being exactly one minute behind.
Besides those few films, there have been others that are as famous and parodied as Back to the Future or Rocky. These include the gun barrel sequences at the start of the James Bond films, the snow globe breaking at the start of Citizen Kane, or even Harold Lloyd hanging on a giant clock in 1923s Safety Last.
