The Olden Age of Cinema (MIT Mystery Hunt 2020)

The Olden Age of Cinema
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020
Yesterdayland
Author(s)Todd Etter and Summer Herrick
AnswerClick to revealDRIVE IN MOVIE
Statistics
No. solves71
No. total guesses149
Links
PuzzleLink
SolutionLink

The Olden Age of Cinema is a puzzle from the Yesterdayland round of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt.

Puzzle Elements[edit | edit source]

Flavortext - The theater at YesterdayLand offers the finest in entertainment for those in their later years!

Image-Heavy Presentation - The puzzle features 24 pictures of faces.

Text-Heavy Presentation - The puzzle also features 12 paragraphs, apparently the synopses to various movies.

 

Identification (Film) - The faces are actually those of modern actors digitally modified to look older. The paragraphs between them are synopses of actual films, but the description has also been modified by adding an additional word to the title to "age" it. Both can be identified, though the actors may prove troublesome for people without film knowledge, as the images are not recognized by reverse image search engines.

Pairs and Groups - From there, it is simply a matter of matching each movie to one actor in said movie on each side.

Reordering - The first actors provide the ordering (since the synopses are in alphabetical order and the second set of actors are ordered by their corresponding index)...

Indexing - ...while the second actor has an index that is applied to the additional word. This yields the answer.