In Print or Other Media
One of the first print uses of the terms was in the April 1971 issue of National Lampoon. An article entitled "Spoilers," by Doug Kenney, lists spoilers for famous films and movies.
The Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert wrote an article entitled "Critics have no right to play spoiler" which contained spoilers and spoilers warnings. Ebert wrote:
- The characters in movies do not always do what we would do. Sometimes they make choices that offend us. That is their right. It is our right to disagree with them. It is not our right, however, to destroy for others the experience of being as surprised by those choices as we were. A few years ago, I began to notice "spoiler warnings" on Web-based movie reviews -- a shorthand way of informing the reader that a key plot point was about to be revealed. Having heard from more than a few readers accusing me of telling too much of the story, I began using such warnings in my reviews.
Ebert used two spoiler warnings in the article, saying "If you have not yet seen Million Dollar Baby and know nothing about the plot, read no further" and later said, "Now yet another spoiler warning, because I am going to become more explicit." Ebert discussed six films in the article and mentioned how many critics handled The Crying Game and also noted a detail about the film The Year of Living Dangerously. Ebert also mentioned two films alongside Million Dollar Baby.
Ebert additionally criticized two commentators, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved (the latter of whom "for a long time been a political commentator, not a movie critic"), for deliberately revealing the ending of the movie due to a moral disagreement with the lead character's life decision. "hould no movie be allowed to consider ?" Ebert asked. "The separation of church and state in America was wisely designed to prevent religions from dictating the personal choices of those who do not share the same beliefs."
In an interview about his Dark Tower series (appearing in issue #4 of the 2007 Marvel Comic adaptation The Gunslinger Born), Stephen King was asked if there are spoilers in the first few novels that would ruin someone's experience of the comic. "There are no spoilers!", King replied, "You might as well say 'I'm never gonna watch Wizard of Oz again because I know how it comes out'".
The 2008 Doctor Who two-part story Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead introduced the concept of "spoilers" within the story's time travel narrative, with the enigmatic character River Song using the term to refer to her foreknowledge of future events. This use continued through her subsequent appearances in The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone and The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon. The term is often used whilst River Song is consulting a diary charting her encounters with The Doctor as due to the vagaries of time travel they keep meeting in the wrong order. The executive producer of Doctor Who Steven Moffat expressed disappointment with fans who reveal spoilers after a pirate copy of The Impossible Astronaut was made available online prior to the episode's first television broadcast.
Comedian Daniel Tosh frequently gives spoilers on recently released films on his show, Tosh.0. His segment, "Spoiler Alert", is an impromptu take on the plot of each film.
Read more about this topic: Spoiler (media)
Famous quotes containing the words print and/or media:
“Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man,—he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here,—a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)