3 minutes before the end of the Manchurian Candidate, as the main character approaches an island somewhere in the Persian Gulf, a helicopter is visible on the beach.
Dubbed in as background sound is an NS defect detector! The recording is supposed to represent military air traffic control or some other type of communications, but it’s clearly not! The recording goes something like: “NS defect detector, milepost ??, no defects.”
I did a double take. My first reaction was to look around the theater for some railfan nut with a scanner turned up loud, but then I realized, I am hundreds of miles from the nearest NS rail line. So it must be in the soundtrack somehow.
Listen for it… and confirm that I am not nuts like the characters in the movie.
The defect detector is usually the Hot Box Detector (HBD) that scans each journal for any over heating. After the train passes over the “talker” model, it will transmit what it has found: no defects, or, it will send an alarm tone and transmit which bearing(s) and on which side of the train it has scanned the “defects”. These systems help to prevent derailments.
Or, it could be a High/Wide load detector set up in the same fashion.
You are not losing it[:D] The DVD of this is coming out on Tuesday and, working at Blockbuster like I do, I can get stuff before it comes out. I just picked up the movie last night to check on this for everyone here in the forum. In the last scene of the movie there is a bunch of garbled radio communications, but loud and clear there was “NS Detector…Milepost 79.81…No Defects”. I couldn’t understand any of the other lines, but I have a feeling that none of them were legitimate military communications.[;)]
As an aside, the movie is alright, but the original ‘62 version with Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury is a great movie![8D]