About research

I have heard the question “How did you know there would be a turtle in X?” a lot, especially about less well-known positions. The answer to this question is quite wide, so I decided to write it down in one place – maybe someone looking for specific movies/series/books/comics will find here something useful.

First of all, an important thing – every time I write about searching, in the case of English-speaking places (and therefore the dominant places in my search) I mean checking keywords such as Turtle, Tortoise, Terrapin, Testudo. Sometimes, rarely, it is also worth checking the versions with s at the end, in the vast majority of cases typing Turtle will find and show also Turtles, but sometimes there are places with more specific search engines.

Some of the sources I use are obvious, although not everyone may know some of their capabilities – the IMDB service is rather famous. You can get a lot of interesting things out of it:
– The most obvious one is, of course, to search for movies that have a turtle in the title.
– More interesting results are given by the advanced search (Advanced Title Search) where you can search for the word you are interested in in the summary/plot summary.
– Another, giving even more interesting (where “interesting” should be understood as less obvious results, i.e. those in which the turtle appears only for a moment and when looking for a general description of the plot or title, there is no option for that movie to pop up on the radar) is the option to search by keywords.
– The last one that is very noteworthy, although quite specific (and sometimes unreliable, ie I did not always notice the existence of references that someone adding info to IMDB noticed) is the “Connections” section on the pages of individual films. Entering one in Gamera from 1965, we learn, i.a., that in the movie “Connect 5” we should be able to see the poster with Gamera, in the movie “The Darkness” this movie is turned on on the TV, etc. things. Of course, this only works as a source of movies/tv series with Ninja Turtles or Gamera, which are popular anthropomorphic turtles.

Obviously, IMDB is dedicated to movies and series (with an admixture of games). In terms of books, I mainly use goodreads.com and books.google.com (although I do not use them much, I have enough books on the shelves for yeeeers). In comic terms (apart from the wikipedia sites mentioned below) I use places such as comics.org, comicvine.gamespot.com or gocomics.com.

I deeply appreciate a variety of specialized Wikia-type sites. Those devoted to one series as well as wider ones, whether it is about the Pokemon brand, Star Wars, or about everything by Disney, Warner Brothers, and so on. Their level is different, on some you can learn that, for example, in the series X there is sometimes Y turtle, others are very precise and list exactly in which episodes Y turtle appeared.

I also learned a lot from Wikipedia – but it’s not a source that I would particularly recommend for normal searches. I used them because I was going through ALL the pages that popped up after entering Turtle in the search engine, if you only want movies, or books or comics, you would have to spend too much time sifting out what we are looking for from hundreds of other results.

Another place where you can find a lot of interesting stuff are websites that collect “scripts” – such as scripts.com or springfieldspringfield.co.uk (currently inactive). I wrote the scripts in quotation marks, because although yes, there are often some real scripts, more often you can find there simply a record of dialogues from the film, i.e. simply subtitles thrown in as a script. The scenarios themselves are not always a good source – the scriptwriter may write that the characters run past the turtle-shaped sandbox, but the scenographer may go the easy way, considering that this element does not affect the plot of the film and use an ordinary sandbox (it is an real example taken from script/movie Point Break from 1991).

As mentioned above, the subtitles are also a useful element. Convenient search engines can be found on sites such as quodb.com or subzin.com – both sites probably use the same database, the differences are in displaying the results (I personally prefer the first one). When he wants to watch selected episodes of a series, I also try to download subtitles to all episodes and search them for turtle mentions – after all, the fact that in the series Elementary there is a named turtle Clyde and in the encyclopedia devoted to this series there is a list of episodes in which he is, it does not mean that there are no other episodes with some turtle references.

There is also a broadly understood “probability”. If you choose a movie completely randomly, of course, the chance for a turtle element is tiny. However, if you choose a movie that takes place in Hawaii, or that tells about surfers or divers, the chance of a turtle element is much higher. Similarly in the case of nature films – a random film is small chance. A movie about forest animals, a small chance to spot a turtle. A movie about the oceans or about a coral reef? A huge chance.

Of course, there is also a social aspect – friends and their tips about turtles in what they have seen/read – the more diversed in tastes, the better, of course.

Author: XYuriTT

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