"Rising Stars" April 26, 2024

[PQ63]

It would have been clever to have ROCKY as the answer and somehow fit Stallone into the meta. But it was a fun challenge nevertheless.

[Relic]

It seems like there is at least one really creative clue in these contest puzzles. Mike is the clue King. My favorite clue in this puzzle was
60A OTIS clued as "Maker of cars never seen on the road." I love these creative clues!

[mitchel674]

It's funny how some answers just hit you over the head. REGNAL seemed like such an odd word until I saw LANGE staring at me backwards. Solved quickly thereafter.

[Zobo3737]

I wasted a lot of time thinking the 5 singers (Ani, Daryl, Patsy, Lena, Fiona) in the grid were the STARS.

[femullen]

Cripes, what a Google-fest! Had to google the movies and google the stars that played the theme-answer parts. That's as much as I did right. A very kind Muggle-nudger then helpfully suggested that I consider what the puzzle title implied, and you will see very clearly that I did. "Rising star" obviously has to do with when those stars were first "rising" in their careers. So, google the years of their first appearance in a film, subtract that year from the year given in each theme clue--hey, the years are given for a reason, right?--then what letter of the alphabet does that numerical difference give? Well, Bruce Dern, who's been in movies for 60 years, blew that rabbit hole into a crater. How about the logarithm of the difference? A lot of other arithmetic ensued, all fruitlessly, except that I got extra practice with Laplace transforms and was just starting on Lambert W-functions when time ran out.

I should give up meta-puzzling, but I've grown very fond of Isaac.

[KayW]

Haha. I solved this one the hard way. I didn't see anything obvious in the across theme entries. Using the puzzle title I started playing S to N word-search in the grid. I immediately noticed DEPP-U and LETO-H and eventually got to ROUGH. I thought to myself "this isn't nearly as elegant as Mike usually is - the theme entries aren't symmetrical". Sometime later another muggle mentioned the movies/roles, which I somehow managed to stay completely oblivious to

Nebraska was the only movie I had seen, and while I vaguely recalled that Bruce DERN was in it I had no recollection of his character's name. Plus I had associated DERN with Laura.

[ron]

I came up with the actors but couldn't do much with them at first. Then rising stars dawned on me in terms of the grid, but the first thing I saw was LYRA in DARYL (which is a constellation and not a star but still...) So started looking for upside down names of actual stars. Didn't see any though. Then after that detour I caught on and solved.

[otlaolap]

One trivial rabbit hole, one minor rabbit hole, and one DUH! reminder to do the basics. Saw the movies, thought about actors, kept thinking about Jay Silverheels. This went nowhere. Went away, and then came back and noticed as possible real data the years attached to the movies, so whet back and looked up the movies by years and got the actors. That ended the trivial rabit hole. With the correct set of actors got much of nowhere, until it occurred to me to go get the birth names of the actors. Looked them up: got stuff like "DEPP" born "DEPP" and "ELBA" born "ELBA". This led nowhere again, and was the minor rabbit hole. Went away, and then came back and rememberd DUH! to look at the title. Rising Stars. We've had several puzzles recently with literal directions in the title, so looked at the grid and the answer immediately appeared. [edit:] Unlike the mug, which has not.

[HunterX]

Filling in the grid with the kids, I made the comment, "I remember watching the old black & white TV show version of the Lone Ranger. Why would he use the 2013 version for the clue?" And my son said, "Well, Johnny Depp's version of Tonto is iconic!" That's when I realized it was the actors' names that were going to be used in the metanism.

Much as I love movies, I hadn't seen any of these. Most of the films I've seen are a bit on the... um... older side.

[Nlobb]

I think I probably wore out Mr G looking up movies and characters and actors. Never heard of most of them! Clever puzzle as always…

[Annabelle]

Ooops! I am on the wrong island. Darn those rabbits and their holes!

[FatJack]

I had circled the theme answers and listed the 5 actors and somehow failed to see their names in the down clues. Sigh

[woozy]

Well, the title made me think you probably had to read down clues up to get the names of stars but that was a little on the technical side and obscure side I wasn't sure. (Star names tend to be long and technical sounding and mostly one would know the constellation names but not the stars. The only names I could think of off the top of my head were VEGA, ARCTURUS, and BETELGEUSE) The movie character clues seemed seemed unnecessarily specific to a particular edition of a move (the 2013 Lone Ranger movie rather than any other) and they all referred to characters, so it seemed the actor playing them would be important. When I filled in the UPPED clue everything was obvious. Just had to finish the grind and google the two movies I never heard of.

[BarbaraK]

Ooops! I am on the wrong island. Darn those rabbits and their holes!

Care to share the details of that rabbit hole? Always fun to read about, plus you never know when this week's rabbit hole turns into another week's metanism

[kurtalert]

Hah, I actually never realized that the actors were tied to the characters. I just searched upward and found 5 last names that I recognized as actors, and that worked well enough. Connecting them to the characters would have been a nice confirmation!

[JRS51]

When I began working on this one I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the title referred to stars in the sky. Even after completing the grid, I ignored the fact that the theme answers referred to movies and movie stars. I searched the down answers for the names of stars or constellations, upward, downward, even diagonally or in patterns. Did you know you can take RIGS and ELS and form RIGEL, with two extra letters? But I didn’t find much else.
Finally I remembered to go back through the clues, realized we are dealing with movie stars and it was a quick solve from there.

[Flying_Burrito]

I did spend a little time looking for stars in the diagonals of the grid (for rising stars) but Regnal and Lange then popped up pretty quickly

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

I was happy to not have to Google any of the movies since I was able to recall the names of four of the five stars, and then find Lange in the odd REGNAL and realize that she must be the fifth. What I didn't know until I Googled was that Patsy Cline herself died in a plane crash in 1963 so she couldn't have appeared in "Sweet Dreams" in 1985. That one seemed like a pattern breaker at first with a real person alongside four fictional characters.

Using "The Suicide Squad" to clue THEJOKER was also a big red arrow since the character has been played by so many people in so many more significant movies.

[flepper]

My first thought for 27D clue of "coarse" was rough, but it didn't work--there.

[John77]

Nearly miraculous that I got this as I don't watch many movies and haven't seen any of those used in the clues.

I'd like to thank everybody who made my success possible: Duck, Duck, and Go.