Whereas just about every school in North America is on winter break right now, and whereas you might want to see a movie over the break, and whereas Will Ferrell’s new movie, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, has hit theaters, and whereas IMDB.com hasn’t reported yet about at least one “goof” in the film, and whereas we are constantly on the lookout for good careers for scientists, we just have to point out one thing.
Don’t get me wrong: The film is everything it was marketed to be, which is one goof after another. Well, maybe some of the marketing was better, such as Will Ferrell’s Dodge Durango commercial. It would be pretty difficult for anything in the movie to top that for pure silliness.
No, what we have in the movie is an actual mistake. It’s not funny, but it’s just inaccurate. After Ron Burgundy trips and falls while ice skating, he’s blind. The doctor, with CT films in hand, tells him both optic nerves have been detached from his corneas. The optic nerves—a few fibers of them, anyway—attach to cells in the retina, not the cornea.
I have reproduced above a graphic from Gray’s Anatomy. Of course, in the movie, the condition itself is a great gag and very funny. But, the joke would have been of higher quality if it had been accurate about something that had nothing to do with the joke. That’s all I wanted to say, and this will be my only official opinion about the movie.
The optic nerve is the nerve that gives us vision, carrying nervous signals from the retina to the brain. To learn more about the optic nerve, we recommend these resources:
- What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain, one of the best research articles ever written
- Gray’s Anatomy, available here, from which the figure was reproduced
- A discussion of all cranial nerves on Wikipedia
- Ebook chapter about the cranial nerves, Gray’s Anatomy for Students