So asks -and investigates!- Laura Bradley for Slate magazine:

Why Do TV Characters All Own The Same Weird Old Blanket?  A Slate Investigation

I think this is one of those humorous little side things that people with a sharp eye notice about TV shows or movies: There are sometimes props reused or, conversely, set decorators follow certain patterns, which is what appears to be happening with this particular blanket.

A while back there was a humorous story regarding a newspaper that seemed to find its way into many a show/movie:

LOL: The Recurring Prop Newspaper

And while the rug in question doesn’t seem to be the same one used over and over again, it is a curious thing that this particular design/style has been reused.

But I got the biggest kick from one of the comments by Jay Lawson presented below the Slate article.  In it she states:

There’s a granny square afghan that shows up all over Dark Shadows, from 1966 onward.  I started calling it ‘the ubiquitous afghan’ because that darn thing showed up in everybody’s house: the Old House, the Evans house … all through time and space, that thing showed up everywhere.

Given the cheap budget of the Dark Shadows TV show, I suspect Ms. Lawson was seeing the exact same afghan being repurposed from scene to scene.

It reminded me, in a weird way, of one of the funniest realizations I had when watching something.  In this case it was the 1942 Spy Smasher cliffhanger serial.  Considered by many to be among the best cliffhanger serials ever made, Spy Smasher was based on a Fawcett Comic book (that publishing company was the home of the original Shazam! Captain Marvel, who himself was featured in what is considered by many to be the best movie serial ever produced) and ran for 12 episodes (roughly 212 minutes in total).

When I watched it, I did so via VHS tape (it was a number of years ago!) and I had the whole thing available to me versus the way it was originally aired all those years ago chapter by chapter.  As I watched the serial, I started to pay attention to the various locations used to film on.  It soon became clear to me that many of them were reused and, after a while, I formed a general idea of where certain buildings were in relation to others.

Which lead to this: In one of the later episodes of the serial, we see a group of the bad guys hurriedly emerge from a building (one I was quite familiar with by that point), get into their car, and drive off at high speed.  After a cut, the bad guys and their vehicle comes to a screeching stop at their destination, which was another building.  By this point, I knew that their destination building lay directly across the street from the building they had just emerged from the scene before!

They didn’t need to drive to their new location, all they had to do was cross the street! 😉

Man, I have to get my hands on that serial again.  Oh, wait…

Amusing stuff!