Four clues have a misprint, and the rest have a redundant word. A jumble of the corrections to the misprints form a word that is thematically associated with eight unclued entries, and the initial letters of the redundant words spell five more thematic associations. The entries in the first and last columns are also relevant.
I must say, I found this remarkably easy. I solved about half the across clues on the first pass, then all bar three of the down clues. This allowed me to discover the theme, and fill in all the unclued entries. On the second pass through the clues, I finished off the across answers, and the remaining down ones. It was all over very quickly.
The theme is ‘blue‘ films (hence the puzzle’s title), which “could be described as” PORNOGRAPHIC but “they’ve been appreciated by a wide range of” PICTURE-GOERS. The films that provide the unclued entries are
Blue PETER, The (1955)
Blue LAMP, The (1950)
Blue THUNDER (1983)
Blue VELVET (1986)
Blue HAWAII (1961)
Blue MAX, The (1966)
Blue SKIES (1946)
Blue ANGEL, The – Der blaue Engel (1930)
and those from the initial letters of redundant words are
Blue COLLAR (1978)
Blue STEEL (1989)
Blue LAGOON, The (1980)
Blue DAHLIA, The (1946)
Blue LIGHT, The – Das blaue Licht (1932)
All links are to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
(Use Ctrl-click, Shift-click or Shift-Ctrl-click to the launch the target of a link in a new tab or window – they do slightly different things depending on your browser. See comments 2-4.)
Quite a lot of thematic material, but not that much of a challenge. Good for beginners since many of the definitions are verbatim from Chambers, plus lots of anagrams – so that’s OK.
I agree, a pretty straightforward one, though I spent some time up a blind alley. I found HAWAII unclued and thought that 1D would be CARTographic, but the P of PETER and the blue reference came out quickly to put me on the right track. A nice theme well followed through.
Hi H___ G____,
I too found this pretty easy, a nice break after 1215, but I failed to spot that they were all movie titles. 🙁
I think you have a little problem in your blog regarding the IMDB links. When I clicked on The Blue Max, the IMDB opened in a new window but when I closed that window, it then re-opened in several tabs in my original window. If you want the page to open in a new window/tab then instead of coding TARGET=”IMDB”, you should specify TARGET=”_blank”. So:
<a href=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060177″ target=”_blank”>1966</a></strong
Worked fine for me, opening in a new tab.
Thanks for the tip, Ken (and for Hihoba’s report on the problem). Greetings from A Small Town in Germany, with a slightly dodgy internet connection.
My idea was that if you clicked on successive movie links then they wouldn’t each come up in a separate new “_blank”, but that a later one would replace earlier ones in “IMDb”. When I test drove the blog this worked fine, and I didn’t encounter the nuisance that Ken suffered. However, I tried it again about half an hour ago and reproduced Ken’s problem (some of the time) … so I changed all the occurences of “IMDb” to “_blank” and retested – same thing: sporadic recurrence of the problem.
What to do? Not use target= and educate users to Ctrl-click the link if they want it to open in a new tab or window? (Maybe the former; the latter’s a bit of a challenge.) Any suggestions?
I enjoyed this one and, indeed, found it decidedly more accessible than the previous week’s puzzle. That said, it was nothing like the walk in the park for me that HolyGhost describes having had.
I particularly appreciated the cheeky humour linking blue with pornography and films, although I can’t say that I was familiar with all the films, not all of which are so very well known. As always, I prefer all entries to be clued in one way or another, rather than needing to be filled in (guessed?) on the strength of general knowledge.
Incidentally, I haven’t understand the use of “in parts” in 19.
RatkojaRiku:
If you look in Chambers under dern^1, you are referred to durn, where dialect is indicated – that is what “in parts” in 19d signifies.