The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader (For more in this series, see: A Scheme to Sell Radios, the Founding of NBC) CBS trailed NBC through most of its radio years but zoomed ahead—and stayed there—when the TV era began. Here’s the story of the “Eye Network.” ARTHUR’S THEME In the 1920s, talent agency Columbia Concerts Corporation […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader The broadcast TV networks no longer monopolize the airwaves, but they still wield tremendous influence. And the grandfather of them all is NBC. RADIO DAYS For radio producer American Marconi Wireless (AMW), selling radios during World War I was easy. Most radios at the time were two-way and direct, and […]
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On September 4th, 1927, a jolly goofy animated bunny named “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” made his silver screen debut. In the five minute and forty-six second short entitled “Trolley Troubles,” the earnest conductor drives his trolley full of rabbits through (and under) a variety of obstacles – including a stubborn cow, a seemingly insurmountable hill and a panic-inducing brake failure. […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Movie soundtracks have long generated popular songs, from “Stayin’ Alive” to “Whistle While You Work,” to “Goldfinger” and hundreds more. Here are the origins of a few more soundtrack hits. Movie: Titanic Song: “My Heart Will Go On” Story: While making his $200-million movie in the mid-1990s, director James Cameron […]
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The Power Rangers are a cultural juggernaut that have been a staple of kid’s entertainment for over two decades now- an impressive feat considering the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers series was literally cobbled together from snippets from a popular Japanese series called Super Sentai, more specifically the 16th series of Super Sentai, known in Japan as Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger. […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader AS SEEN ON TELEVISION The proliferation of reality TV started in the United States with MTV’s The Real World in 1992, and spread globally with Survivor and Big Brother a few years later. The success of these programs proved that nonscripted shows full of nonactors could deliver huge ratings at […]
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The first films were little more than what we would consider short clips, a boxer throwing a single punch or train arriving at a station– the type of scenes that today you might only see in the form of animated gifs. While popular perception is that movies got their start around the early twentieth century, the real seed that grew […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader The business side of music can be a world of cutthroat legal practices and endless litigation. Here’s the story of one of the biggest music legal battles of all time. SOLO FLIGHT In 1969 George Harrison was on a break from the Beatles and was doing some concerts in Copenhagen, […]
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Shih C. asks: Why are McGuffin’s in films called that? In the last scene of the 1941 film classic, The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade (played by Humphrey Bogart) hands over a murderer (played by Mary Astor) and a black falcon statuette to authorities. When asked what the statuette was exactly, Spade looks off in the distance and rather unsatisfactorily explains, […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader When PBS executives started planning a new science show in the early 1970s, people in the TV business were baffled. A show about…science? Were they crazy? Audiences wanted Happy Days and M*A*S*H*, not educational shows! Luckily for us, they were wrong. IN THE BEGINNING… In 1971 an American television producer […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader It’s a good bet that after you read this article, you’ll start paying more attention to background props in movies. A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE It was Christmas Eve 2009. Gergely Barki, an art historian and researcher with the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, had settled in with his daughter Lola to […]
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Dan L. asks: Why did shaking polaroid pictures help them develop faster? For anyone unfamiliar with the 2003 hip-hop hit, Hey Ya! by OutKast, the line “shake it like a Polaroid picture” is repeated over a dozen times. The accompanying music video released alongside the single saw the line punctuated by a bunch of attractive women shaking recently taken Polaroid photos, […]
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is known for many things, few of which we care to cover on this site because you probably already know all about them. Instead, we prefer to cover things that you likely didn’t know, like that the alphabet song was based on a tune by Mozart, or covering his extremely adult themed works that included a bit […]
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Karla B. asks: Why is there twelve days of Christmas in that song? Does anyone really celebrate Christmas for twelve days? Even the most ardent fans of Christmas will agree – the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” does not make a whole lot of sense. What is a partridge doing in a pear tree? Partridges are ground-nesting birds! So […]
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Richard G. asks: I’ve seen so many different rules for it, but what’s actually supposed to happen when you land on free parking in Monopoly? Few board games have the ability to cause arguments like Monopoly, an unsurprising fact given the object of the game it was based on (see: Who Invented Monopoly?) was to send your opponent to the […]
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Silence is golden and in 2014 a little known American funk band called Vulfpeck took this to its logical extreme by releasing an entirely silent album on the popular music streaming service Spotify. This ultimately resulted in the band earning a not unimpressive sum of just over $20,000 from the album- their highest earning yet on the service- at which […]
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No one can dispute George Lucas’ significant contributions to cinema history, including both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. His company also played a role in advancing special effects, top quality post-production audio and even digital sound systems for movie theaters. But it is nice to know that he didn’t invent everything out of whole cloth; when developing the […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Even if you’ve never heard of Otis Blackwell, you’ve almost certainly heard his music—he was one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century. Here’s the story of the most famous songwriter most people have never heard of. TIGHT CHRISTMAS In the mid 1950s, Otis Blackwell was a struggling […]
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