4.2: Triple Feature (Solution)

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Author: Brian Tivol

The basic gist of this puzzle is that if you concatenate two movies
and remove the first and last word, then you can sometimes get another
movie as a result.  It was ridiculous fun to come up with the titles,
and teams seemed to enjoy solving the puzzle.

Figuring out which movies fit the bill isn't all that tough, once you
know what to do.  The descriptions were mainly intended to let solvers
know that they're on the right track when they found a triple feature.
Some words (FREAKY) and some descriptions (a tale of a frozen pilot)
really only point to one movie no matter how hard you try to make
things tough.

One bit of trickiness, though, involves overuse of GIRL.  One could
easily, accidentally get ANIMAL HOUSE PARTY GIRL INTERRUPTED MELODY
and be left with a solitary TANK GIRL.  The name of this puzzle is
"Triple Feature", though, and getting chains of the appropriate length
shouldn't be too difficult.

When all of the triple features are assembled, there is one word left
over: RISING.  That is the answer to this puzzle.

The movies were:

ANIMAL (HOUSE / PARTY) GIRL
  a good comedy with an old SNL member
  a vehicle for a rap group
  a tale of a socialite

BATMAN (FOREVER / YOUNG) GUNS
  an adaptation of an old comic book
  a tale of a frozen pilot
  a recent western

CATHERINE (THE GREAT / ESCAPE) VELOCITY
  a historical drama
  a WWII action film
  a space horror film

FREAKY (FRIDAY / THE THIRTEENTH) WARRIOR
  a Disney movie
  a classic slasher
  a Viking slasher

HOLLYWOOD (BLUE / VELVET) GOLDMINE
  a documentary about porn
  a bizarre mystery film
  a tale of a rock star

REGARDING (HENRY / V) ELEMENT
  a tale of an amnesiac
  a Shakespearean play
  a space opera

ROCK'N'ROLL (HIGH SCHOOL / HIGH) NOON
  a vehicle for a punk band
  a bad comedy with a new SNL member
  a classic western

TANK (GIRL / INTERRUPTED) MELODY
  an adaptation of a newer comic book
  a movie in theaters now
  a tale of an opera singer




I was happy to come up with a movie puzzle that the IMDB doesn't
immediately crack-- this is why brief descriptions were given instead
of actors or years.  Searching for movies with the word GIRL, for
example, doesn't get you very far.  Even when words had only a
half-dozen titles, it was still an unwieldy mess to try to search
every possible branch.  Most teams with a movie buff solved the puzzle
faster than those who just ran to the IMDB and began searching.

I chose to go with CATHERINE THE GREAT ESCAPE VELOCITY over DR. NO
ESCAPE VELOCITY to cut down on the number of pointless science fiction
movies.  Not enough people seemed to know the first movie in HEAD
OFFICE SPACE JAM.  There were others, but I felt compelled to use
movies that people should have heard of without resorting to the IMDB
or looking through the straight-to-video soft-core section of a rental
store.

I'd written the puzzle without an answer in mind, hoping to get some
nice misleading word like MYSTERY or AMERICAN as an answer.  As I sat
waiting for a word, I'd included SKIN DEEP RISING SUN as one of the
original chains.  Lo and behold, RISING (which also appears in
_Mercury Rising_ and _Scorpio Rising_) was available as an answer.  I
thought that would confuse things quite a bit.

Shortly after the puzzle was completed, I went to see a movie and
couldn't stop trying to make chains out of the trailers I saw.  _Snow
Day_, I thought, should have been good for something.  Then I spotted
_Girl, Interrupted_, and got one immediately.  I wrote it into the
puzzle, and then I noticed that LSC was actually showing this movie on
the Thursday before the hunt!  What could be better?  Well, I later
noticed that the movie was opening nationwide on the first day of the
hunt.  Its clue kept changing, but I like what I settled on.  (We
received some phone calls asking if _Girl, Interrupted_ was really "a
movie in theaters now", and I ashamedly realized I hadn't checked to
see if any Boston theaters were showing it.  Since I was logged in, I
looked at a website for showtimes, and across the room, another MIPB
member started looking it up in the newspaper.  We both were hit with
gigantic ads reading "_Girl, Interrupted_, in theaters everywhere
January 14th."  Seemed like an easy enough question to answer.)