Goofs

When Columbo arrives at a back office with monitors, he's being tracked by a videocamera. He arrives and sees himself live on the monitor, filmed from behind. What he sees doesn't match with his actual position, judging by a hand resting against a wall.

When Kepple leaves Columbo in the grocery, he walks along the back of the store, passing by a lady in red heading in the opposite direction. When Keppel reaches the far corner of the store, the lady in red is there ahead of him, shopping.

When Columbo meets Kepple in the back room of the grocery store, he is carrying four of Kepple's books. When they are talking in the store, Columbo has only three books.

When Dr. Kepple goes to start playback on the tape recorder off the side of the theater stage, the recorder is already on "play" and he presses "stop" instead.

Although the plot turns on the effectiveness of subliminal cuts in films and Kepple mentions that the Consumer Trade Commission had banned such cuts, the use of such subliminal advertising has never been proved to be effective, and no such ban was made.

It is stated that one single frame of a film cannot be consciously noticed when the movie is played at full speed, and so supposedly the projected film of the racing cars contained a single "still" image of a hamburger that had been spliced into it in order to send a subliminal "eat hamburgers" message to the movie's audience. But it's certainly NOT the case that the human eye is unable to sense an individual frame out of 24 frames shown in a second --- as middle-aged adults today, we have all seen 16mm educational films from grade school where the single "picture start" frame was flashed on the screen, and we could read it easily. So obviously, the racing-cars footage shown in this episode actually did NOT contain the hamburger image; it was merely shown in the subsequently-displayed frame-by-frame sequence, but not in the original full-speed-projection clip.

When Keppel hits his last shot so close to the green, there already is a foursome putting on the green.

When they are first going through the slides Columbo put in the film, the one of him looking at the lamp is backwards. It shows him on the right and the lamp on the left. During the final look at the slide, it is shown correctly.

However a slide can be looked at both ways. It is probable that Dr Kepple looked at it one way, then realized that his office's curtains and furniture were reversed and flipped the slide over.

When Mr. Norris leaves the screening room to get a drink of water, he is shot. Norris's colleagues later find him on the ground dead, and his colleagues can be heard asking if Norris is OK and could he be suffering from a heart attack. Considering Norris was shot through the heart, as stated by the coroner later on, it would have been obvious that Norris was murdered, given the facts that there would be copious amounts of blood on the floor and his clothing would be soaked in blood. Not a goof: When he is shot in the heart, his heart would stop pumping. The only blood is what oozed out, and his dark suit and tie would have concealed it.

When they are standing in the supermarket near the pumpkins, there is a sign saying "watermelons" stuck into the stand. As the entire scene plays out, it can be seen there is not a single melon in sight, only pumpkins.

Dr. Keppel uses a tape player to replace him narrating the film. However, the tape player is not plugged into the sound system nor is it near the microphone so it would have been obvious that something was different the minute Keppel walked away from the microphone.

As Dr. Kepple is outside Mrs. Norris's home, waiting for her to leave, the reflection of the boom mic can be seen in Kepple's driver's side window just before he drives towards Mrs. Norris's home.

When Columbo is riding in the golf cart with Dr. Kepple, there are no golf clubs on the cart and Dr. Kepple uses the same club for three consecutive shots, including one near the green - something no good golfer would do.

When Columbo first arrives on the scene, another detective informs him there are only two possible entry points for the murderer: the front door or the service entrance in the rear. Two scenes later, a different detective is talking to Dr. Kepple and tells him that this is a big building, there are dozens of ways for the killer to have gotten in.

When Dr. Kepple offers Vic some beluga caviar, he pronounces the type as "be-lu-jah" instead of "be-lu-ga".

The search in the suspect's office was without a warrant, thus illegal. Anything arising from the search would be inadmissible in court. A common error in Colombo movies, gathering evidence without a search warrant. Columbo stated to the photographer, who points out there is no warrant, he is not searching, he is looking.

That's wrong. Searching or looking is a difference without distinction. The 4th Amendment is clear about that. The only accepted exemption is the "plain sight" rule., when something is lying out in the open on a desk or on the floor. What's more, they would have to have permission to be there.

Columbo calls the barrel a 'calibration converter', when he should have said 'caliber converter'.