Talk:The Honking

Regarding the Title reference: Is there any real reason for thinking this is alluding to The Shining? If anything, it seems to me more likely to be a reference to The Haunting, being closer phonetically. --Mukor 23:55, 7 July 2008 (CEST)
 * I'm gonna have to agree with you there. - Quolnok 12:40, 8 July 2008 (CEST)

Changed it. If anybody comes up with a good argument for it being The Shining, post it here --Mukor 21:15, 8 July 2008 (CEST)

Did someone notice that the window of the apartment in robot arms apts. is located at another side of the building than it is usually located?
 * I didn't, but it's probably because I wasn't paying that much attention. You can list it as a goof in "The Honking", or, even better, in a later appearance of the appartment. Fan Futurama 22:42, 26 September 2010 (CEST)

Satan's motor
This isn't really a goof:
 * Despite running on an electric motor, Project Satan still makes the sound of an internal combustion engine when it drives.

Electric cars being silent up to 20-25mph makes them a serious danger to pedestrians. Not serious enough that anyone would seriously call the electric motor the most evil propulsion system ever built, but more than serious enough that car companies and governments take it seriously. The obvious solution to this problem is to just play a tape of engine noises through a loudspeaker. Which may sound silly, but some electric car experimenters in the 1960s-80s actually did it. And some people were seriously pushing it as a regulatory requirement in the late 90s. And it's not miles away from the solution they eventually came up with—playing a synthesized warning sound like a sweeping sine wave through a loudspeaker. (According to research by Nissan and Toyota, that's actually easier to notice and respond to, while being subtler and less annoying, and it directly encodes information about the car's actual speed and acceleration rather than its engine speed. Although the fact that it sounds cooler and more science-fictiony probably doesn't hurt.)

You might ask why Project Satan would play engine noises as a safety measure, which isn't very evil. But it doesn't really use them as a safety measure, so much as a threat. And that fits in perfectly with everything else about the project—remember, Project Satan wasn't intended to be evil; the engineers were surprised by the fact that combining the most evil parts of the most evil cars somehow resulted in something evil.

All that being said, this seems like way too much to explain on-page, so I'm not sure what to do, so I'm leaving the "goof" as-is. --172.68.133.23 06:45, 30 July 2017 (CEST)