FAQ

What is Pop Mystic?

Pop Mystic is an index of spoken utterances in movies and television shows. These utterances are the words that would appear if you watched a movie with subtitles, or watched television with closed captioning turned on.

How do I use Pop Mystic?

Pop Mystic enables researchers to locate specific words or phrases within the lines of dialog of thousands of movies and television shows. Type a word or phrase in the search box and hit return to get instance where that word or phrase has been uttered, or dial it in a little more by specifying the genre, release year, title, director, etc. that you want to confine the search to.

How do I include information from Pop Mystic in my research?

Once Pop Mystic has located the target utterance, a researcher knows in which movie or show the phrase appears, and at what point in its run-time it occurs. It’s important to remember that in order to use a quote from a movie or tv show in an academically rigorous way, the primary source must be consulted. In the same way one doesn’t cite Wikipedia as a source in one’s bibliography, one shouldn’t cite Pop Mystic. If you are using a quote in a school paper or professional research, you must view that segment of the movie or show in its original form in order to know what the words actually represent, what’s happening on-screen, etc.

How do I download the whole script to a movie or show?

Pop Mystic doesn’t provide full scripts, only the snippet view of the target utterance and the few lines before and after it in order to give context.

Where does this data come from?

Pop Mystic’s data is crowd-sourced and collected from all over the globe.

Where did Pop Mystic’s subtitle data come from?

The majority of Pop Mystic’s subtitle data was sourced from OpenSubtitles.org, a community-built subtitle database.

Where do the movie and television posters come from?

Poster images are provided by The Movie Database (TMDB). This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

Is this data reliable?

Generally the quality of the data is excellent, but it isn’t perfect. You may come across misspelled words for example. Take common misspellings into account when writing your search terms. Try searching for “their going to take there hats off” and other misspelled variations if you don’t get the result you want when spelling the words in the target phrase correctly.

Can I search movies that are in languages other than English?

At the moment the Pop Mystic database contains utterances only from the English language transcripts of movies and television shows. This means that though the original language of a movie might be Korean, the only data in the Pop Mystic database for that movie is from its English translation. In the not-to-distant future we hope to augment our database with other language data.