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Examples
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In CS, the mcguffin is writ large from the very beginning, and the whole film suffers as a result, and don't even get me started on the crappy overreliance on CGI.
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Going Postal's mcguffin is the "clacks," a system of mechanical semaphore towers that have been strung across the continent in a kind of primitive telegraph/Internet.
Boing Boing 2004
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He's after the mcguffin, which is something I won't tell you about, since Rhoades keeps it a secret for a while.
Archive 2007-11-11 Bill Crider 2007
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He's after the mcguffin, which is something I won't tell you about, since Rhoades keeps it a secret for a while.
Safe and Sound -- J. D. Rhoades Bill Crider 2007
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Being a baseball card collector myself, I have to love a book in which the mcguffin is a one-of-a-kind card signed by Joe Dimaggio, Billy Wilder, and Marilyn Monroe.
Archive 2006-03-26 Bill Crider 2006
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The other IJ films had a "mcguffin", a mystical plot thread, but generally it was underplayed.
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An Electro-Magnetic-Pulse attack was a staple sci-fi notion of the Eighties which formed the "mcguffin" of that highly entertaining action comedy "Escape from LA".
On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with... 2009
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Is it better to just not show the "mcguffin" (a Hitchcock term for a thing that everyone is after - a jewel, a prize, a valuable artifact, whatever - that thing itself doesn't matter but it serves a structural role as an excuse for chases and mayhem and plot convolutions)?
Hiding the ball? frankwu 2006
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I decided to have the hero blown up in an exploding nuclear reactor in the middle of the novel rather than the end, to muck-about with the hero-in-peril elements as far as possible, replace mcguffin pseudo-science with genuine science-fiction and so on.
Best of 2009 2010
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I would have liked to have seen a western style three-way standoff: Indy vs KGB vs SS resolved in a unique way (Nazi and reds shooting each other up while indy slinks away with the mcguffin).
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