I Apocalypse Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

August 29, 2008 5:09 PM

I Apocalypse Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry
A cheesy little page I made to mimic a game that my friends and I like to play where we combine two movie titles for (hopefully) comic results.

Sometimes it produces a title for a movie I'd love to actually see get made, for example "You've Gothika Mail!". Sometimes it produces funny gibberish. Sometimes it produces unfunny gibberish. Refresh the page or click the link to generate a new title.

posted by woj (18 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by cog_nate on September 2, 2008: I Apocalypse Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

My favorite so far: Song of the South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
posted by hellojed at 7:26 PM on August 29, 2008

I love these things:
Rules of The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
Daddy Day Care of the Dead (!!!)
posted by xorry at 9:04 PM on August 29, 2008

My favorite so far: Chariots in the Line of Fire.

I like it, but some of the titles had "The The" in them. I guess that's the "unfunny gibberish" part.
posted by Locative at 10:47 PM on August 29, 2008 [1 favorite]

Someone should tell Shyamalan: "Stop Making The Sixth Sense".
posted by Memo at 10:57 PM on August 29, 2008 [1 favorite]

8 Million 100 Ways To Murder Your Wife to Die - Everybody knows 8,000,000, but we have 8,000,100!
Father of the Bride of the Bride Part 2. - "Help my daughter's getting gay married!"
posted by Lemurrhea at 11:16 PM on August 29, 2008

I couldn't not add this one:

Phenomena + Phenomenon = Phenomenonomena

Do doo, doo do do. Phenomenonomena!
posted by Lemurrhea at 11:20 PM on August 29, 2008 [2 favorites]

Under The Cherry Moon 2000
posted by cog_nate at 9:34 AM on August 30, 2008

Cute app. Work on the text formatting some.
posted by netbros at 10:28 AM on August 31, 2008

Down to Earth + Doin' Time on Planet Earth = Down to Doin' Time on Planet Earth

Porn-tastic.
posted by HaloMan at 4:54 PM on August 31, 2008

Some of the unfunny gibberish is so unfunny as to be funny again:

Star Wars: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith I - The Phantom Menace

Other less gibberishly funny titles:
Over the Top Gun - I can smell the testosterone already.
Kindergarten Beverly Hills Cop II - The "II" is essential.
The Last Dragon of the Mohicans - Technically, this one started "The The", but I took artistic license.
Freddy Kramer vs. Kramer Jason
The Mummy Superman Returns

Fantastic! I love it.
posted by ErWenn at 9:58 PM on August 31, 2008

I promise I won't post any more, but I just can't help it one last time:

"Everest + Ever After = Ever Afterest"
posted by ErWenn at 10:00 PM on August 31, 2008

I had the experience that it was much more fun to read funny results other people had found than to actually use the tool myself. This could be addressed by implementing some kind of collaborative filtering mechanism, like Hotornot I guess. Offer users the ability to vote on the quality of a movie title and display the higher-rated titles preferentially. Tweak the algorithm so this doesn't eliminate variety.
posted by grobstein at 2:21 PM on September 2, 2008

grobstein...

I totally agree. If I had a ton of free time to work on this, I would definitely add a feature like that. I also wanted to have it fetch the plot summary from IMDB and try to generate a new combined plot. I actually got a prototype of that feature working, but it hardly ever made any sense due to the different writing styles in the summaries, etc.

I'm sure there's a lot of improvements I could make, but for a simple little program it worked well enough to make me laugh occasionally, and I didn't really feel like it was that big of a deal to refresh the page until I hit something funny.
posted by woj at 5:13 PM on September 2, 2008

Very amusing. I'd still sink some time into striking the 2nd "The" in any combined instance.

The First Wives Club + The Breakfast Club =
The First Wives The Breakfast Club

...kills the funny in The First Wives Breakfast Club. Which is actually quite funny and seen daily at a Starbucks near me.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:51 PM on September 4, 2008

DarlingBri...

Yes, but what about something like this:

The Sum Of All Fears + Jingle All the Way =
The Sum Of Jingle All the Way Fears

Automatically stripping the second instance of "the" won't always work. We understand what would make the sentence sound correct, but getting a program to do that correctly is not a simple matter (at least for someone like me).
posted by woj at 7:33 PM on September 4, 2008

There are certainly some complex issues involved in making each one sound clean, but I think there are a few easy wins. Simply removing words that appear twice in a row would be very easy and would clean up a lot of results. Also, disqualifying pairs of alternate titles for the same movie and pairs of movies in the same sequel sequence would also be a (relatively) easy win.
posted by ErWenn at 6:15 PM on September 5, 2008

ErWenn...
I agree fully on the duplicated words. I actually had that in my code at one point and when I made a change at some point stopped scrubbing the duplicated words. I've remedied that, and it should be a bit cleaner now.

Alternate titles for the same movie are simply a problem in the file where I store all the movie names. I scrub them out as I find them, but there are upwards of 1500 titles in the file, and I'm sure there are some I've missed. Please do let me know if you spot any though!

As for the sequels, again, I don't think is as simple as it might seem. How can my program tell the difference between a sequel and a movie that simply shares common words (which is the crux of this whole thing). Take some examples:

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets + Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

The Dark Knight + The Dark Crystal

Each of those share two words. How would one determine that one is two related movies, and the other is two movies that are unrelated but with similar titles?

Thanks for the suggestions, BTW.
posted by woj at 8:38 PM on September 5, 2008

You might try eliminating movies that start with the same 2+ words (ignoring "the") where at least one of them has an Arabic or Roman numeral in it. Won't catch everything, but it might clean out some of the more egregious examples. It might also catch a small number of non-sequels, but I don't think it'd be that many.
posted by ErWenn at 9:26 PM on September 5, 2008