"Lightning in a bottle" moments in media.

[Sheikah_Witch]

So I'm rewatching the Lord of the Rings trilogy now, and many refer to it as a 'lightning in a bottle' moment where stars aligned and the production team just knocked it out of the park and created something truly special - nobody had ever seen anything like it when it came out, and it's unlikely that we're gonna see anything like it ever again, and the Hobbit films doesn't come even near enough. I've seen the term applied to several games as well, classics like Metroid Prime and Super Mario 64 being examples of production teams capturing a special kind of magic, often under unprecedented and risky circumstances, and on their very first try.

Are there any examples in media you can think of that you think was 'lightning in a bottle'?

 

[VikzeLink]

I mean, I'm not sure I can be objective about this... Some people I think would also only apply that term if said thing was very successfull, like Friends, but I'd like to think it can be anything that is great in a certain way. But then it'd just be me stating some of my favorite shows, but I suppose that is the lightning for me.

Scrubs and That 70s Show are my two favorites, and I'd like to say that they are just that. Another show I like is Brooklyn 99, and I think that fits the description as well. Also early Big Bang Theory, when it was about laughing with the nerds, not at the nerds.

So I'm rewatching the Lord of the Rings trilogy now, and many refer to it as a 'lightning in a bottle' moment where stars aligned and the production team just knocked it out of the park and created something truly special

Definetly, those too, my favorite movies!

 

[Spirit]

I feel like 'lightning in a bottle' as a term really undermines the skills, talents and hard work hundreds and sometimes thousands (if we're talking LOTR) of people put into their projects.

I think lightning in a bottle should be more geared towards the impact the product had on the media it was a part of.

But to answer the question, I think the Death of Superman comic in the 90s is a good example.

The project was born out of the small creative team at the time being forced to change more than a year's worth of planned stories. So irritated were they at having to throw away so much work that they decided to kill Superman.

The way they did it was very smart and very clever and the cultural impact was astounding with lines out of the doors of comic shops. There were news reports and public outcry.

Of course, superheroes are incapable of staying dead, but at the end of the run, following the 'death issue', DC actually stopped publication of all four Superman comics for a number of months.

When they began publishing the four comics again, they maintained continuity and kept Superman dead for a while longer and told more intimate stories of lesser superheroes trying to fill the void that Superman had left.

To this day some of these stories are regarded as some of the best that DC has ever published and it remains as a stand out event in the comic book medium long before the MCU boom.

All of this was one of those rare moments where everything came together and went smoothly during production, so much so that people took note and it left it significant cultural impact, as these 'lightning in a bottle' moments tend to do.

 

[TheGreatCthulhu]

I'll give some musical examples.

On Iron Maiden's recording of the song "The Number of the Beast" producer Martin Birch had Bruce Dickinson singing the intro verse so many times that Dickinson was losing his mind.

Birch kept having him do the intro so much that Bruce was throwing chairs across the studio, but Birch insisted that they keep redoing the intro until it was perfect.

Then Birch said, "Alright Bruce, I think we got it. Can you do the scream before the second verse?"

Bruce responded with, "Gladly."

And that scream you hear on that song was something that was powered by pure frustration of having to constantly redo a part, and to this day, Bruce hasn't been able to replicate it.



In fact the whole album The Number of the Beast could be considered a lightning in a bottle moment, as we won't quite ever get something of that caliber past or present.

Another one was Metallica's first three albums. Considering that Lars is out of practice as a drummer, we're unlikely to ever get something on the level of Kill 'Em All, Ride the Lightning, or Master of Puppets. One of the biggest reasons for that is that Cliff Burton is no longer with us (RIP).