Welcome to the four hundred and nineteenth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. This week, did Marvel nearly put out a Spider-Man graphic novel in the 1980s where he romances a married mob wife? Plus, did Brian K. Vaughan offer a challenge involving a racy joke in a Batman comic? Finally, be sure to check out old Steve Ditko Spider-Man characters updated for the 1980s!

Click here for an archive of the previous four hundred and eighteen.

Click here to read this week’s legends.

Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to fashion and whether they are true or false.

FASHION URBAN LEGEND: Hugo Boss produced uniforms for the Nazis.

Hugo Ferdinand Boss started his first clothing business in the early 1920s, when Boss was in his early 40s.

By 1930, Boss was forced to declare bankruptcy.

In 1931, Boss joined the National Socialist party.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to fashion and whether they are true or false.

FASHION URBAN LEGEND: Coco Chanel had two legendary retorts to a marriage proposal by the Duke of Winchester and to a query by Poiret.

If you went looking for the best example of the “cult of personality,” you could do a lot worse than picking Coco Chanel.

An icon of style – the Chanel that Chanel No. 5 is named after, Chanel was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century.

Part of her imposing position on the world stage is that stories tended to be written about Chanel, whether they were true or not.

This was something that Chanel herself fostered, as she was known to come up with some good ones on her own (like dropping ten years from her age or inventing a childhood spent with spinster aunts in a story that sounded like out of Cinderella).

Today, let’s look at two of the more notable quotes attributed to Chanel!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.

TV URBAN LEGEND: Did the BBC buy the trademark to blue police boxes from the Metropolitan Police?

When the first episode of Doctor Who was written in 1963, one of the biggest points of debate was over what Doctor Who’s time machine would look like. Eventually, they determined that it would look like a police box. Police boxes were little blue concrete rooms that were, in effect, miniature police stations. First created in the United States, they began appearing in the United Kingdom by the turn of the 20th Century. The most iconic blue version of the London police box was introduced in 1929. The police box contained telephones in them that would connect directly with British police stations. This way, police officers would be able to contact their stations whenever they would need to and in addition, through a light at the top of the box, they could be notified when they needed to go to the police box themselves when the station was trying to contact them. In addition, the public could also use the phones to notify the police of crimes (the boxes also carried first aid kits). By the 1950s, London was covered with police boxs, nearly 700 of them dotted the streets. Therefore, if you wanted your time machine to fit in in London in 1963, disguising it as a police box would be a great idea. The police box is revealed in the series to actually be a TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), which is exponentially bigger once you enter than what it appears like on the outside. It is simply camouflaged as a police box so as to be able to blend in. However, in the first episode, the camouflaging technology malfunctions, leaving the TARDIS stuck in the form a police box. There was some debate over possibly having the TARDIS disguise itself as different objects as the series went along, but for whatever reason (almost assuredly reasons of cost, but I don’t know that for a 100% certainty) they decided to stick with it just being a police box. Legend has it that the very first Doctor Who TARDIS was a re-used prop from the popular British police television drama Dixon of Dock Green (which was, in turn, based on the 1950 British police film, The Blue Lamp), where Jack Warner played Police Constable George Dixon for decades. This is not true (wow, two legends debunked for the price of one! Lucky readers!). Production designer Peter Brachacki built the police box used in the first episode of Doctor Who (which was then used for the first thirteen seasons of the show).

Anyhow, another legend about the TARDIS is about who owns the trademark to the TARDIS. A common bit of Doctor Who trivia is the following (I got it from this Doctor Who site, but I’ve seen it in plenty of places):

The BBC actually owns the copyright to the design of the Police Box used as the design for the TARDIS. It was bought from the Metropolitan Police.

Besides using the term “copyright” when they mean “trademark” (a common mistake and not one worth making a fuss about), the first part of the trivia is correct. However, how the BBC got the trademark is a lot more complicated than that! Read on to learn how they got it!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to fashion and whether they are true or false.

FASHION URBAN LEGEND: Kenneth Cole came up with a rather…enterprising way of getting his product to the masses at Market Week when he began his company.

Kenneth Cole was not yet 30 years old when he formed his company in 1982. Cole had spent a long time (and basically all of his money) in Europe designing and producing shoes and now he had a ton of shoes, a company name, Kenneth Cole Incorporated, and that’s about it.

He had no money for a storefront and no real in road at getting his new shoe company out to the people.

However, upon returning to New York in 1982, he knew that he was going to try to make his splash at Market Week. He just wasn’t sure how. Read on to see the outrageous idea he came up with!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about movies and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Howard Hughes filmed an entirely different ending to Scarface (withOUT actor Paul Muni) to help appease censors.

Howard Hughes’ 1932 smash hit, Scarface, continued in Hughes’ string of screen hits that he produced that pushed the boundaries of censorship in the various states of the U.S. (this was all before the film industry decided to censor itself – back then, each state had their own censorship laws for films).

In the ending of the film (a fictionalized account of the life of Al Capone), Antonio “Tony” Camonte (played by Paul Muni), escapes police custody and is tracked down. He refuses to surrender and is instead gunned down in a blaze of gunfire.

Director Howard Hawks directs the conclusion of the film brilliantly, if violently.

Here, Tony is struck by police bullets…

See as he gets knocked around by the gunfire…

Here are the police firing on him…

Finally, his dead body lies on the ground…

And Hawks beautifully pulls up and we see a sign on a billboard, almost mocking Tony’s death…

And that is how the film ends, with a close-up of the billboard…

It’s a wonderful ending by Hawks.

The problem was, it was deemed far too violent (not to mention that it seemed to show Tony’s defiance of the police in a bit too positive of a light – almost like he was heroic to take on the police).

Hughes decided that his desire for a hit film outweighed any artistic problems he had with the censorship of the film, and since he could certainly afford the costs of doing so (being, you know, really rich and all), he re-shot a brand-new, censor-geared ending of the film, without Hawks’ presence (or permission).
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Welcome to the four hundred and eighteenth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. This week, did Marvel get Samuel L. Jackson to be Nick Fury BEFORE they used him as the basis for Ultimate Nick Fury? Plus, how did a typo (that was later edited out) give a clue to a future Spider-Man storyline? And speaking of Spider-Man and edits, how did Marvel “fix” a classic Spider-Man story in a reprint?

Click here for an archive of the previous four hundred and seventeen.

Click here to read this week’s legends.

Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about movies and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Ray Bolger occasionally set himself on fire while on set during the filming of the Wizard of Oz.

Ray Bolger was already a Broadway song and dance star by the time he took the role of the Scarecrow in 1939′s The Wizard of Oz, but let’s be honest, we know (and he knew) that he will forever be known as the Scarecrow – which is certainly a fine legacy for any actor.

The extensive costuming for the film took up a whole lot of Bolger’s time, and it had other side effects, as well, most notably the effect it had upon his smoking habit.

As you can see, the Scarecrow’s costume is filled with dry straw like an actual Scarecrow…

Well, naturally, all the adult actors on the film smoked cigarettes (who didn’t back then?), and that caused a problem with Bolger’s costume.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about movies and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: The sequel to Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension was re-worked into the screenplay for Big Trouble in Little China.

Reader Devin wrote in suggesting a legend that was, well, just like the one I posted – was the sequel to Adventures of Buckaroo Banzia Across the Eighth Dimension re-worked into the screenplay for Big Trouble in Little China?

Big Trouble in Little China began in 1982 as a Fantasy/Western screenplay, with the Jack Burton character a cowboy and the whole thing set at the turn of the 20th Century in San Francisco. At this time, it was written by the film’s original screenwriters, Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein.

The studios liked the basic idea of the screenplay (doing an adventure film mixing Western heroics with Eastern mysticism), but disliked everything else, particularly the whole “set in the past” aspect of the script.

So after purchasing the script, the insisted the screenwriters update the story to modern times. When they balked at the changes, the studio had them removed.

In stepped W. D. Richter, writer and director of Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, a very cool, off-kilter science fiction adventure film from 1984.

Sadly, while the film has achieved the level of “cult classic” in the years since its release, at the time, it was not a particularly profitable movie.

It did so poorly that the sequel to the film that was promised during the end credits (see below) never materialized…

So since the sequel never showed up, people presumed that Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League was just re-worked into Big Trouble in Little China.

True?
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about movies and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: The negative reaction to the death of Optimus Prime in the Transformers movie saved Duke from dying in the G.I. Joe movie.

A recurring rumor in the months leading up to the release of G.I. Joe: Retaliation this past March suggested that the stated reason for the film being delayed in May of 2012 from the original release date of June 29, 2012 to the actual release date of March 28, 2013 was not just because of their stated reason, which was to convert the film into an additional 3-D version of the film (which was not originally filmed in 3-D) but also to change the original plot of the film so that Channing Tatum’s character of Duke did not die, as he was rumored to have been killed in the first version of the movie.

The fact that they did, in fact, shoot new scenes for the film with Tatum seemed to bear out the rumor that after they saw Tatum’s star status explode in early 2012 (with the hit films The Vow and 21 Jump Street coming out before they scrapped the 2012 release of G.I. Joe: Retaliation and the hit film Magic Mike following later in June 2012, as well) that they figured that they better change the film so that Tatum’s character, Duke, survives the film for possible use in future G.I. Joe movies. The film is new enough that I won’t spoil whether that actually happened, but it is fascinating to note that if they did do that, it would be the second time that Duke’s character had been saved from death after a G.I. Joe movie had been made! Read on to see how it happened last time and how the 1986 animated Transformers movie actually caused the reversal!
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