The best joke in the 2009 Watchmen movie is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to a weird urban legend about what Neil Armstrong said during the moon landing. This moment happens in Zack Snyder's famous opening credits montage, running down the changes between the Watchmen world and the real world, all set to “The Times They Are A-Changin’” by Bob Dylan. It packs a lot of information into a short amount of time and is generally considered one of the best opening credits sequences of all time.
While many of the scenes shown in the opening credits set up the comic book side of the world, like masked vigilantes and Dr. Manhattan, there are some moments that are a lot more grounded in the real world. There’s Andy Warhol, the woman protesting Vietnam and the National Guard with a flower, and a recreation of the V-J Day kiss, just with two women instead, to name a few of them. And then there’s the weird moment on the moon.
In the opening credits of Watchmen, Neil Armstrong is shown on the moon, saying “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky”, referencing an urban legend from the 1990s. These aren’t meant to be his first words instead of his famous “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind” line, instead said before getting back in the lander. But just who is Mr. Gorsky, and why is that joke here?
With the caveat that there’s no evidence from NASA transcripts or Neil Armstrong himself that this is true (via Snopes), here’s the urban legend. As a kid, Neil Armstrong was playing baseball with his brother and had to retrieve the ball from the neighbor’s yard. While in Mr. Gorsky’s backyard, he supposedly heard Mr. Gorsky’s wife yell at him “You’ll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!” The details changed from telling to telling, but the most common version of the legend ended up landing on Mr. Gorsky as the neighbor’s name, leading to the line in Watchmen.
While it’s a funny line for anyone who knows the urban legend, this line isn't more than just a joke. Like the other details that are just a bit off about the world of Watchmen, this sets up something that’s like the real world, but a little bit skewed, such as Andy Warhol being obsessed with Nite Owl, or Silhouette being one of the women recreating the V-J Day kiss. The Vietnam protest is right out of the real world until the soldiers open fire on the crowd. The Neil Armstrong landing is right out of reality until he says a line out of a nearly two-decades-old (at the time) urban legend. The changes go deeper than just the superhero bits of the story.
That gives the Mr. Gorsky line a reason to exist in the Watchmen movie. It’s the funniest joke in the movie by far and actually serves a storytelling purpose beyond just making people familiar with the urban legend laugh. The only downside is that it passes by so quickly that many people never even notice it’s there, getting to laugh at this world’s seemingly more relatable version of Neil Armstrong and his odd sense of humor.
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