I don't mean books or films about coins here, but rather have you ever been reading a fiction book or watching a film and suddenly what turns up?


Well one notable example i can think of straight off of the top of my noggin, anyone here read Stephen King's It?


The book is set in two decades, the late 1950s and the 1970s. The characters are having to relive a nightmare that happened to them as children in the late 1950s. And one character in a philosophical moment remembers how his father (or grandfather, i forget which) gave him some of the old silver dollars, King's description of the coins leaves you in no doubt that he's talking about Morgans and Peace dollars here. And if i recall correctly the character was carrying one around as a pocketpiece. The coins also ended up as part of the storyline rather than being just a side reminicense. The 1970s adult character remembered he'd had these coins as a child but he can't remember what happened to them. But as the horrors of their childhood that they'd thought they'd dealt with in the 1950s seemed to be resurfacing the memories began to trickle back, memories that should have been long buried and thus slowly the character remembers what happened to the dollars. They had melted them to make bullets.

If you need to know more i suggest you read the book. (It's a good one!)

So have you suddenly found coins turning up in stories or even films (and getting special mention) when you least expected it?

I can remember them in television shows, and in Movies, how many of us stopped the Titanic DVD at the scene where Kate Winslet hands Leonardo de Crapio a Barber Dime just to get the date off of the coin.

She did?

She was paying him for the naughty sketch he made of her in the parlour.

My attention must have been elsewhere...

Traditionally in the past with Japanese movies, very high rank officers or landlords would throw kobans or flash their obans to show their ranks.

The dime in Titanic is a 1912 Philadelphia in AU. The Director has it in a protective holder and carries it as a watch fob. Because of the way Kate Winslet was holding it in the movie the date was not visible.

I often notice coins used in tv and movies. I have frequently seen them used on Gunsmoke (It's the best thing on at 5AM while I'm at work.) Now Gunsmoke is set in the 1870's and usually the coins shown are proper for the period. But there was one episode a while back where they were playing poker betting 20 dollars a hand where they showed a clear image of the table and they were using Saint-Gaudens Double eagles. In 1870's Kansas!

There was the Sacagawea episode of the Simpsons.

Typo made intentionally?

Christian

I call him that all the time!

It was too early in the morn, I had not had my tea and crumpets yet. I couldn't think of how to spell his name so I went literal.

Yummy!
I've been wanting to do this thread for a while!

A couple of film coin appearances I have taken note of...
In Seabiscuit, when Tobey Maguire wins a race on a farm he tells his parents that he won two dollars and he holds up two Peace dollars to prove it.

In the Untouchables when Eliot Ness makes Frank Nitti empty his pockets outside the courtroom, he dumps two mercury dimes and a SLQ. All well circulated and reverse side up.

On last weeks episode of Rome Cleopatra was admiring the profile of Caesar on a coin.
I can't think of how many times I have tried to spot the coinage types and failed while watching Deadwood.

I can remember them in television shows, and in Movies, how many of us stopped the Titanic DVD at the scene where Kate Winslet hands Leonardo de Crapio a Barber Dime just to get the date off of the coin



And I thought she just gave him a couple of thrupenny bits.

Goonies was on television yesterday, and they found one-eyed willy's pirate ship with all sorts of gold coins, though they were supposed to be Spanish, so I couldn't tell exactly what they were!

And didn't Titanic also have the large size notes at the end when the bad guys were trying to bribe their way to a lifeboat? To me those looked like series 1914 FRNs which would have been 2 years too early for them.

Most recently, the film with Matthew MacConaughey (sp?) in which a celebrity salvage crew is in Nigeria and an artifact dealer shows the central character what is supposed to be a "Confederate gold dollar". The coin is the size of a Morgan, supposedly struck in gold as a specimen, one of six struck at a nonexistent Richmond mint.

I had already given the film about twelve raspberries for the high BS level (less than 15 minutes into the sorry thing), and this scene contributed to my decision shortly thereafter to stop wasting time watching it.

Hollywood seems infested with imbeciles who have no knowledge of history, or of anything else besides Marxist social justice dogma.....

Well In goodbye America They used the Old Philippine Coins

What types Of Coins Used I have No idea

Very good movie to Watch

Not a coin, but still worth mentioning. "Coming to America" Eddie Murphy pounds.

My most disappointing coin moment in movies was the silver dollar that Two-Face flips in Batman Forever.
Instead of using an existing silver dollar design they made up their own ugly one.
Well, I should add that compared to everything else in Batman Forever the coin actually looks not too bad!!

To Kill a Mockingbird, 1900 and 1906 IHCs.

That's after they found all those coins with Martin Sheen on them. Which makes me think, the Goonies was filmed in 1985. If they really had been down a wishing well and people had been throwing money down there presumably for several decades, how many of those coins would be silver?

Forget the gold coins on the ship, i'd be scouring through the money in the well for the silver!

Not a film or a book, but i remember Finley Quaye's music video for "Sunday Shining" (a version of Bob Marley's "Sun is Shining"), where a very worn Peace Dollar was used as the main metaphor...

Jose

They showed that 100 pound note in the movie Coming to America, but in a deleted scene they also used Zumunda coins. I have one of those "coins".

The Movie "National Treasure" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368891/) showed many many American banknotes and Coins.

-Bobby

It's kind of funny that this thread started. I just watched Sahara. And a few weeks ago I was watching a show called Wild West Tech, about the old west and they showed a robbery, the "cowboy" had a stack of bills flipping through them it happened real fast but Patrick said, "look at that!" He paused it and they were the brand new 50's. We got a big kick out of that.

The remake of "Dennis the Menace" Dennis was with the theif played by Christopher Lloyd. He was trying to recover Mr. Wilsons collection of american gold coins......HA bet nobody thought of that one!

True, i'd forgotten about that one!

Batman does have that giant Lincoln cent hanging in the Batcave but I don't know if that ever made it to film or tv.

And now...my all time favorite reference to a coins in all of motion pictures comes from Mr. Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol"

"Come back with the man, and I'll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes and I'll give you half-a-crown."

Many gold sovereigns too.

In one (or more) of "Back to the Future" movies, the doc gives the kid some notes. $20s, I think, I don't really remember. There may had been coins invovled in at least one of the scenes.

Not a film or book, but The $100,000 Nickel (11-Dec-1973) episode of Hawaii 5-O that used one of the actual 1913 Liberty nickels.

After rereading the first post I guess this doesn't fall into that catagory since the nickel is mentioned in the title...sorry.

In one of Elvis Presley's many forgetable movies, "Frankie and Johnny", Elvis plays a riverboat singer who is constantly losing his pay at the tables. In one scene, he giving Harry Morgan [Joe Friday's partner, Gannon, or to younger folk, Col. Potter on M*A*S*H] $25 which consists of a woodchopper US note and a blue seal FRBN and I can't remember the other note[s]. OBTW, Elvis' love interest was played by Donna Douglas, "Ellie Mae' of the Beverly Hillbillies.

In "Last Man Standing" with Bruce Willis, there is a scene wherein a large sum of small sized nationals are blown into the air by an explosion. One note is seen clearly by the camera. IIRC, Tom Denly supplied the notes to the producers and, as a part of the deal, Denly's daughter appeared in the film.

<img src="http://home.earthlink.net/~brianrxm/post/tsm_cp1.jpg"><P>
<font size=+1>
"Can you stake a fellow American to a meal?"<br>
Humphrey Bogart to John Huston in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre"<br>
</font>

Oh! I almost forgot!

In UHF, Kevin McCarthy gives someone a penny and it turns out to be a double die 1955-D

The large size notes seen in Titanic were just standard prop money and they don't closely resemble any standard US or English Banknote.

the first willie wonka and the chocolate factory....charley finds a coin on the street ...and dang it !! i cant remember what happened or what kind of coin that was...ill have to rent it again ....

In the recent remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the coin he finds is a silver dollar. The interesting thing is that when he finds it it is a morgan dollar but when he shows it to his family it is a peace dollar. They also show a fictional backnote in the movie as well.

No-one here seen "Pirates of the Caribbean"????

Nope.

during the boxing scene in Pearl Harbor, some guy is coaching cuba gooding jr. telling him he didn't want to go back to the Arizona empty handed. the stack of fives he's waving around look like hawaii imprints, even though the war didn't start yet and the notes weren't imprinted until 1942. its somewhere around 45mins 31 secs if someone wants to check on their dvds.