YMMV / Moving Pictures (Discworld)

• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Ponder Stibbons accidentally knocks over his inkwell and ruins his own exam paper, so ends up taking Victor's special one-question exam instead. It was his lucky inkwell, and guess what? It worked perfectly!
  • Deccan Ribobe's first words in The Boke of the Film say that he'd copied it out because the old book fell apart. If Victor'd gotten hold of the original, this Discworld novel would probably have been a lot shorter, because the position of its title page would have made it obvious that its pictographic text should be read right to left!
• Fridge Horror: It's implied the reason no one fishes in the bay at Holy Wood is because the ancient people there had been transformed into sea creatures that still wander the streets of their drowned city. Where does Borgle get his ingredients?
• Harsher in Hindsight: The talking animals revert at the end, and the cat immediately begins hunting the mouse. Originally this just read like life returning to normal for them, but it's a bit more disquieting if you've read The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents: in that book, Maurice the cat is haunted by having unwittingly eaten a talking rat, he attacks another one when his mind is temporarily suppressed by the Rat King, and the prospect of losing their sentience in the same way terrifies the rats of the Clan.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Hwondaland stock dealer's paddocks contain a variety of savannah animals, including a few marked-down specimens of "bewildebeest". Anyone who's a fan of How to Train Your Dragon 2 will get a very different mental image from the one Pratchett was probably going for, when they read that line.
  • A Troll changes his name to "Rock" because he believes it sounds more appropriate for the movies and becomes a very succesful actor. Decades later, Dwayne Johnson becomes a very successful action star and in the process stops using the moniker "The Rock", which he had used in his previous career as a pro-wrestler. (Although the troll's stage name is most likely a reference to real-life movie star Rock Hudson.)
• Magnificent Bastard: M'Bu is the clever young assistant to an animal herder and proves to have far more ambition and determination than his adult master. When his employer gets an order for a thousand elephants to appear in the moving pictures, M'Bu creates a plan to gather them up in the plains, have the massive herd steamroll through the jungles, and use the elephants to transport the timber into the mountains to make bridges and sleighs. Not caring who the elephants trample on the journey, he successfully guides them three thousand miles to their destination and is implied to sell them to make jumbo sausages following the collapse of the moving picture industry in the meantime.
• Woolseyism: The Swedish translation changes the name of the troll Rock (a reference to Rock Hudson) to "Bergman" (a reference to Ingmar Bergman, but also having the troll-appropriate meaning "mountain-man").

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