Category Archives: Entertainment

Network Origins: NBC

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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From Oswald the Rabbit to Mickey Mouse

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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Behind the Hits: Soundtrack Cuts

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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How They Cobbled Together The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers From Footage of a Completely Different Japanese TV Show

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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Forgotten History: The First Movie and the Scientific Question It Sought to Answer

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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What’s a MacGuffin in Films and Why is It Called That?

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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Making Science Cool Since 1974

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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Shaking Polaroids

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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That Time Mozart Pirated a Forbidden Piece of Music from the Catholic Church from Memory

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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What Exactly Does Landing on Free Parking Do in a Game of Monopoly? (And Other Ways You’ve Been Playing Monopoly Wrong That Make It Take Longer)

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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