"I Won't Spoil The Ending" - January 15, 2021

[MatthewB]

Phew! My last "once over" worked! On shore!
Nice one...

[mikeh]

I do not care for the accommodations on this ship, nor do I enjoy Isaac's company. But on this ship I, a film lover, find myself, confused and rueful and wondering who's flirting with my cabana boy on the shore.

[Joe Ross]

[Joe Ross]

[mikeh]

I do not care for the accommodations on this ship, nor do I enjoy Isaac's company. But on this ship I, a film lover, find myself, confused and rueful and wondering who's flirting with my cabana boy on the shore.

A friendly nudge got me to shore, with two minutes to spare! Goodbye Isaac, hello cabana boy!

[mikeh]

BTW, did anyone else see BATHEMAGGOT and think BABE MAGNET and get lost going down that road?

[EVJ]

I did indeed!

[Plymouthrock]

The swim of shame. Back to boat for me. Did anyone else submit Bambi? I thought answer would end in “I” then the iambic pentameter thing. Female deer in there too etc etc.but it never completely gelled. Love the solution. Good work to all you code crackers

[Tony S]

I quickly realized that this meta would take extensive research to complete so I cast the puzzle aside and moved on to more pleasurable pursuits for my weekend. When I saw the answer I have no regrets.

[DrTom]

I thought everyone might be amused by the email I just received re: a meeting at the historic house where I volunteer:

"Thursday at 2:00 for our budget meeting. Wendy, we will get you home by 4:00."

http://www.primitivehall.org/index.html

I have 4 pm doctor appointment Thursday.
Sure my pulse and blood pressure will be high because of FOMO!

Any readings taken at that point would automatically be invalid in my case!

Wendy, in the barn at Primitive Hall do they have Primitive Oates?

[DrTom]

Well I tried to see if I could mess it up some how and come up with a typically odd answer but I couldn't, the mechanism was just too tight. However, I did learn a valuable lesson, do not just haphazardly Google movies on the Internet...for instance there is a movie called "Coming To" that I managed to find and though I did not watch it I now want to buy a scarf.....

[Geezer Weezer]

BTW, did anyone else see BATHEMAGGOT and think BABE MAGNET and get lost going down that road?

I never got far enough to go down a wrong road.

[escapeartist]

This was a very clever mechanism that I didn't see right away but eventually got.

Initially I was thinking it would be a 5 letter animated movie (eg shrek, bambi)

"Coming to" was the first thing that set me down the rabbit hole that showed me the answer. (great movie by the way, watched it again this year)

But I couldn't think of a popular animated movie called "A B _ G S"

I shook my fist at Gaffney after realizing he couldn't spoil the ending.

[escapeartist]

BTW, did anyone else see BATHEMAGGOT and think BABE MAGNET and get lost going down that road?

I thought maybe the first part of the answer belonged at the end and it was " MAGGOT BATH" with a leftover "E"

I can't think of a movie where that's a thing that people want to watch...

[Thurman8er]

Was never gonna get it. Sigh.

[BrianMac]

I was stumped by HE GOT GAME for a while. I wanted it to be THE something. So I tried backsolving, but I was thinking BOURNE IDENTITY (despite Matt's warning to be careful on that one). With that misstep, I had the letters A B I _ S...aha! The letters would anagram to SIMBA and the answer would be the Lion King. Only when I went back and heeded the warning about BOURNE did I see the mistake and HE GOT GAME jumped right out at me. Really liked it!

[Colin]

For me, my weekend was spent down two holes:
1) Roman numerals based on the film dates... lots of “I”s and lots of ways to play with spoiling them
2) Reverse engineering 5-letter animated film names. Only RANGO and MIRAI fitted my hypothesis of taking a letter from each long clue in sequence, but I couldn’t align them with the meta.
Very nice puzzle MG - well done solvers!

[Meg]

I missed one of the themes and came up with ABUS. or A BUS. Sounded like Albus. It’s always good to check your work, which I did soon after.

[LadyBird]

My first--and lenghthiest--rabbit hole started when I discovered that a Disney show called Johnny and the Sprites had a song called Welcome to Grotto's Grove.. Followed by Googling animated movies for the various years.

Then I tried things with "I". That Bourne in Melbourne kept bugging me and then I realized the mechanism.

[HunterX]

So this is one of those where I think I’m on shore, but with a nagging doubt that it might be the wrong shore. I’m going to submit tonight before the deadline, and in the meantime plan to keep looking for the tiki hut to make sure I’m in the right place.

I find it rare to have that nagging doubt you refer to, though I have been there. (e.g. With MMMM puzzles.) With Matt Gaffney and Mike Shenk, it's usually a 100%-er. The pieces just fall into place so beautifully. This one (no spoiler) uses a mechanism that I (IMHO) consider very "Matt Gaffneyesque."

The part that I consider "Matt Gaffneyesque" is that you apply a mechanism at the end that you already used to get there. So after finding the first two words of the 3-word movie titles, you then fill in the 3rd word of the title. This then gets you to the first two words of another 3-word title, and you have to fill in the 3rd word. When Matt uses this, it reminds me of one of my favorites, "Where's the Rest?" where you pluralized words and found the homonym that ended in 'ze', which gave you 'dough' to which you did the same thing to get 'doze'.