In the movie Hard Boiled (辣手神探/Lashou Shentan/Hot-handed God of Cops), there’s a big warehouse fight scene that just keeps going and going.  It’s a pivotal moment or two, so that’s fair.  Early in that scene, when Johnny Wong’s crew are attacking rival mobster Uncle Hui’s property, one of the defenders calls up the boss to let him know what’s going down.

In my head the line was something like “Uncle Hui, Uncle Hui.  At the armory.  There’s a raid going on.”  “Armory” was said more like “ermory.”  Side note, I’m talking about the dub, because I love the early english dub of that movie.  Anyway, the actual line?  Completely different.  I can’t easily find a version to double check at the moment, but going from memory is where I went wrong in the first place, so not sharing it.

Why did such an inconsequential line take real estate in my brain?  The dub voices were so funny to me I couldn’t help repeating lines, sticking on them.  The obvious ones to hit over and over again would be your “Give a guy a gun and he’s superman, give him two and he’s god!” and, oh, practically everything Johnny Wong says.  Maybe I was more likely to get those ones right, so the lesser lines suffered memetic drift in my head.

Again with the dubbed voices, there’s a kung fu movie where Jacky Chan steals a guy’s food.  I always remembered the line as “Hey, goddammit!  Who stole my piece of chicken?”  The actual line was more like, “My piece of chicken, who stole it?”  I get confronted with this, the limitations of memory, far more often than I’d prefer.  I call it “Uncle Hui-ing” in honor of that moment from Hard Boiled.

The original George Romero version of Day of the Dead has a kinda hilarious but heartfelt performance by the late Anthony Dileo Jr, as a guy who is losing his mind under the influence of a zombie apocalypse.  I remembered a number of those lines perfectly, but at least one was a bit off.  Uncle Hui’d!  And perfectly fitting the theme of this post, as I look at the videos I was watching just last fucking night, I can’t remember which line I had wrong or how the wrong version went.  fml.

Off topique, but that dude died from covid early this year.  Keep vaxing, and if you wanna like i do, keep masking.  Don’t take chances with your lives.

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