Being a media junkie is fairly useless except in very, very specific circumstances. Fortunately, with the help of an obscure subreddit, I've finally figured out a way to make obsessing over media a tiny bit helpful. I'm talking about /r/tipofmytongue, the subreddit for people who need help identifying a piece of media they heard or watched.
If you're around any media-related forum for long enough, you'll inevitably run into this kind of request. What was this song that I heard yesterday that reminds me of another song? Does anyone have any idea what this movie or TV show I saw two scenes from when I was six might have been? Who is this actor I'm thinking of, who was always in action movies in the '90s? I have a couple of these lingering media mysteries myself, and it's always satisfying to finally solve them. Most recently, I figured out a song I couldn't seem to google the lyrics to was a cover of "Prisencolinensinainciusol," a famous Italian song that sounded like it was in English, but all the words were actually nonsense.
/r/tipofmytogue is dedicated to solving these little mysteries. Users submit as many details as they can about what they remember about a book or song or movie or music video or discontinued soda, and the subreddit's resident sleuths try their best to identify it from there. I stop by every few weeks or so to see if there are any lingering unsolved submissions I can help puzzle out. I'm especially good with obscure cartoons from the 1990s and early 2000s, though there's not much demand for that these days. Sometimes I recognize what's being described immediately. Sometimes a little Googling turns up the right answer. Sometimes, figuring things out takes more effort. I once found an old cartoon movie by first identifying a trailer that was included on the same video, finding the American distributor, and then pulling up a list of every cartoon they'd released on home media, in order to point the submitter toward the right one.
Since the subreddit started keeping track of how many queries were solved by particular participants, I also started keeping track of which titles I'd solved. My official total is 64 solved queries, including movies, TV shows, miniseries, shorts, books, and an old website that helped you make your own digital snowflakes. Though most of my solved queries are about cartoons and animation, I've found the titles of all sorts of random media. The oldest was a children's book from 1929, The Funny Thing. The most recent was an indie thriller from 2020 that has three different titles. I've also gotten a couple of my own mysteries solved, including one about an anime series, "Akko's Secret," that I watched dubbed into Chinese in the 80s.
If I can offer any advice about solving these media mysteries, it's that memory is incredibly unreliable. It's fascinating how many times I figured out the right answer by completely ignoring details that the poster included. A scene they're sure was from an anime? Turned out to be an episode of the live-action series "Red Dwarf." A recent courtroom drama? Actually a twenty year-old John Travolta movie. Memories of multiple movies or shows mashed together is common, and nobody ever seems to remember television channels right. I'm seriously impressed whenever an offered description turns out to be completely accurate.
I'm also struck by how much media there is that we don't tend to think about as media - commercials, news reports, industrial and educational videos, television station idents, tie-in computer games, website content, PSAs - all of them capable of getting lodged in our brains for years on end. It doesn't matter how good or bad a movie or show is to be memorable, and no matter how obscure something is, chances are somebody out there saw it and was affected by it. More and more requests are being posted for online content, which is even more ephemeral, and the only way to confirm that something exists can be other people's memories of it.
Most of the posted requests never get solved, but many of them do. Sometimes I like reading posts that other users have worked out, marveling over how some of the vaguest, weirdest hints can lead to the right titles. I like seeing the connections, however tenuous, between anonymous people trying to solve these strange little mysteries together. But as much fun as some of the more convoluted mysteries are, I've found the most satisfying ones for me to solve are always the ones where there was really no other way to have found the right answer besides having remembered the media in question.
It's nice to know that sometimes being a media junkie has its uses.
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