Why I'm usually against 'flintlock' entries for movies.....

[MoviePropMaster2008]

Usually when a movie (like Pirates of the Caribbean) or other period pieces have firearms, eventually some member will create the page and then the weapons used in the film are simply listed as 'Flintlock musket' or "flintlock pistol". Well Whoopty F***king Doo! Any idiot can see that. IMFDB becomes the place for 'stating the obvious' and in my opinion, loses some of its' credibility as being a unique and scholarly firearms resource, when it's pages are lame like that.

Rather than stating the obvious, a movie-page maker should seriously research the screencaps of the film and try to determine the style or make of the weapons. Even educated guesses as to the country of origin, or even researching who provided the weapons would be preferable to a lame gun entry.

That would be akin to a member listing every film with a bolt action rifle, and simply listing them as 'bolt action rifle' without bothering to find out WHAT rifle it was.

Sure, the matchlock and flintlock weapons (even into the percussion cap guns) had a lot a customized runs. Only into the 1800s did we see any sort of real mass production, despite official European armories creating thousands of guns by hand for the previous centuries. But taking the time to research and observe, especially in the screencaps, makes the page much more worthwhile than declaring something that any casual viewer could have figured out on their own.

I tend to DELETE movie pages that just like 'generic weapon archetypes' since they offer no new insight other than what the general public already knows.

So help IMFDB out here. Try doing some research and tell the public something that they don't already know.

Fair warning. Lame pages are on the chopping block on IMFDB. That doesn't mean we don't want them, but only if someone bothers to do the research and hard work to make the page worthy of being looked at.