Guess the Film Line
A line of film dialogue, and the film it came from. What makes this harder than it sounds is that the lines are quoted exactly, and the popular version of a movie line is very often not the line.
Casablanca contains no Play it again, Sam. Star Wars contains no Luke, I am your father. Snow White's queen says Magic mirror on the wall. Where the real wording differs from the one everybody repeats, the real one is what appears on screen.
Name the film a line of dialogue comes from.
Play Guess the Film LineWhat the exact wording gives away
If a line reads slightly wrong to you, that is a clue rather than a mistake. A remembered quotation gets smoothed over the years — contractions get added, names get inserted, syntax gets tidied. Seeing the unsmoothed version is often enough on its own to place the film, because it means you are looking at a famous line rather than a paraphrase of one.
Diction dates the film. Nobody in 1939 speaks in the rhythm of a 1990s screenplay. Mid-century dialogue is more formal and more complete; modern dialogue is clipped, overlapping and full of sentence fragments. Animation is its own register — direct, declarative and written to be understood by a six-year-old, which covers a substantial part of this deck.
Watch for lines that only make sense as an answer to something. A line beginning with No or But is a reply, which usually means a confrontation scene, which usually means the film is a drama or a thriller rather than a comedy.
The clue ladder
Three clues at a rung each. The decade first, which is the broadest and most useful. Then the setting, written to place you without naming anything — a musical fantasy, just after a tornado — and then the character who says it, which for a famous film is effectively the answer.
Because several films contribute more than one line, the guess list is deduplicated by title: two lines from the same film are both answered by that film. The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, The Princess Bride, The Lion King, Back to the Future and The Fellowship of the Ring each supply two of the 46 lines.
The deck
46 lines spanning 1939 to 2014, weighted towards the films whose dialogue entered general conversation. That skews family and adventure — Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Up, Frozen, Lilo and Stitch, Babe — alongside the expected Star Wars, Jaws, Titanic and Back to the Future.
Nothing here needs a network. The whole deck is bundled with the site, so it plays fine with the wifi off.
Scoring
Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380 and 240. This is one of the faster games in the set, so the speed bonus is worth chasing: 160 points for an instant answer is two thirds of what the last rung pays.