McGuffins

As a fan of film, and being originally from Southern California (and having had a few brushes with almost fame) I am a movie and TV trivia nut.  I just can’t help it.  I can tell you the simple stuff like Buddy Epson(Green Acres fame) was originally cast as the Tin Woodsman in the Judy Gardner Wizard of Oz , but he was allergic to the aluminum based makeup and they had to recast.  I can tell you some of the more escoteric stuff like Armeggeddon is so factually incorrect that it has been used as a managers training video at NASA with a requirement that they pick out those things that are scientifically incorrect with it (I believe at last count, there were something in the neighborhood of 256 inaccuracies). 

I just eat up this information.  Typically I will watch a movie, then go scouring in the internet for trivia or production information.  When I first heard of TVTropes.org  it was actually from reading another webcomic.  I didn’t check it out for some time and finally about six months ago (right around the time I was suffering Tweetics burnout) I found it and was instantly intrigued.  It is a wiki, but without the formality of that other wiki.  It is self referential, it is fun and through it I discovered this term referred to as “Lampshading” and I just started to think about that and what that would mean if consciously used as a Mac Guffin (Sometimes spelled McGuffin-a term coined by Hitchcock ), what would it mean for a story?  I suppose what you might have here is Meta-Fiction, who knows.  But it has been a hoot to play with.

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