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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: Carrie Fisher worked as a script doctor on over a dozen Hollywood films.

Besides making them cultural icons and movie stars, George Lucas also helped the stars of the original Star Wars in other ways.

First off, he famously gave Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher a quarter of a percent of his cut of the Star Wars profits, which made each of the actors millions (Lucas also gave Steven Spielberg a cut of the film, as well, as part of a bet that we covered in an old Movie Legends Revealed). Secondly, he allowed them to develop their characters as the film series went on. Harrison Ford was the first one to really get a say in his character of Han Solo (including almost convincing Lucas to kill Han off), but one thing most of the actors agreed on was that they had a problem with George Lucas’ dialogue for their characters. Alec Guinness once wrote about the film, “New rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper — and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable.” A few years back, Carrie Fisher spoke about Lucas’ approach to their dialogue:

Harrison Ford was rewriting his stuff in all the Star Wars movies and it became annoying because it impacted my stuff. It is easier as an actor to go into rewriting because you know what would fit into your mouth dialogue wise. We would tell George Lucas, “You can type this shit but you can’t say it.”

By the third film, I was rewriting a little bit of my dialogue.

Lucas allowing Fisher to work on her own dialogue eventually served her well, as she later became one of the top script doctors in Hollywood, known for her great dialogue! Read on to see how it all happened and what eventually drove her out of the script doctoring business.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to amusement parks and whether they are true or false.

AMUSEMENT PARK URBAN LEGEND: Disney gives free tickets for life to any baby born in a Disney theme park.

Disney’s “Golden Pass” program (originally “Gold Pass”) is a fun little program that Disney has that allows access for free to nearly all Disney theme parks to its recipients (the only exception are the Japanese Disney parks, which are not owned by Disney). The recipients range from foreign dignitaries to “Disney Legends” like Sterling “Winnie the Pooh” Holloway and Adriana “Snow White” Caselotti. It also includes “normal” people like Dave MacPherson, the first paying customer at Disneyland back in 1956 and also, more recently, the two billionth Disney theme park customer, Emmalee Mason.

Here’s one once owned by TV producer Jack Wrather (who financed the first Disneyland hotel back in the day when Walt Disney’s credit line ran dry during the construction of Disneyland)…

Legend is that they ALSO give Golden Passes to babies that are born in Disney theme parks. Is that true?
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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: “How I Met Your Mother” was going to reveal the secret of “The Pineapple Incident” in the final season but cut it from the show.

Few shows were quite as dedicated to getting every little detail right than Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the showrunners of “How I Met Your Mother.”

The show, about a man (Ted Mosby, played by Josh Radnor) telling his children the (rather long) story of how he met their mother through a series of flashbacks to his 20s and 30s, was famously meticulous with the plot points revealed over the show’s run, as the whole thing was headed towards a specific point in time. As the show kept going and going and going, however, things had to be stretched. I wrote a while back about how the show initially had “back-up” mothers in case the show was canceled early. By season 3, however, they not only knew who the mother would be, but they had actually already filmed the ending of the series, which they would just sit on for a number of years until the show ended in 2014 after nine seasons. However, having a reputation for being so detail-oriented can have a downside – what happens when you introduce a mystery but then never solve it? That was something that weighed on Bays and Thomas’ mind with “The Pineapple Incident,” a mystery from Season 1 that they nearly DID solve in one of the last episodes of the series but it never quite happened. Read on to find out what went down!
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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: “Toy Story” was nearly canceled because the original script was considered too dark.

In an old Movie Legends Revealed a couple of years ago, I discussed how Pixar accidentally deleted 90% of their work done on “Toy Story 2” nine months into the project. The studio managed to recover from that near disaster, but what is interesting is that there almost came a time when there would not have even been a “Toy Story 2,” because the original “Toy Story” came within two weeks of being canceled by Walt Disney Studios!

Read on to discover why!
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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: Angry about the cancellation of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the producer of the show let an intern direct the last episode – and the intern went on to become a prolific TV director!

A common piece of trivia (I’ve seen it a bunch of places, but I presume it originated at the Internet Movie Database) about the late 1970s/early 1980s TV series, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

is the following:

The studio decided to cancel the series before the last episode was shot. The producer was evidently incensed that this happened, without his prior knowledge, and began to clear out his office immediately upon hearing the news. To exact a measure of revenge, however, he assigned an intern, Guy Magar, to direct the final episode. Magar had just happened to pop into the director’s office to see if he needed anything just after the producer got the call about the cancellation. The studio had no idea that Magar had never before directed a TV show (or anything beyond a student film). Magar went on to direct episodes of “Sliders” (1995), “La Femme Nikita” (1997) and other shows.

Is it 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 film Snakes on a Plane had new scenes filmed after the film was otherwise completed to incorporate, among other things, a line from an internet spoof of the film.

As we have pointed out a few times over the years in Movie Legends Revealed, filmmakers are willing to re-edit their films well after they are otherwise completed, often to give their films whole new endings, like “Major League” changing the identity of the film’s villain or “Pretty in Pink” changing who the protagonist ends up with at the end of the film. In the case of both of those films, though, the changes were based on the reactions to the film from test audiences who saw the final film. This what made the changes made to the 2006 action/horror/comedy “Snakes on a Plane” so striking – they were made based on reactions from fans before any audiences saw the movie!

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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: “South Park” was originally going to be an “X-Files”-style show.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone came to the attention of Comedy Central due to their famous “Spirit of Christmas” video shorts from 1992 and 1995, starring the characters who would later become famous in “South Park” (Stan, Kenny and Cartman). However, after they got a deal to create an ongoing television series, Parker and Stone were faced with a difficult task – how do you turn a short video into a full television series? They essentially had to create a TV series from scratch. As a result, their earliest “South Park” episodes had a lot of uncertainty in them, as their approach to the series often changed as they developed the idea. It was very much like the problems that Matt Groening and the producers of “The Simpsons” had in adapting their short “Simpsons” video segments on “The Tracey Ullman Show” into a full series. In the case of “The Simpsons,” this caused Groening and crew to come up with all sorts of weird ideas for the series that never came to fruition, most famously (as featured in this old TV Legends Revealed), having Homer Simpson turn out to secretly be Krusty the Clown. In the case of Parker and Stone and “South Park,” the most notable change was that originally the series was going to be a lot like “The X-Files!”

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

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: The lyrics to “Possession” were taken from actual stalkers’ letters.

A few years back, I did a legend about whether The Police’s hit “Every Breath You Take” was based on actual letters that Sting had received from stalkers. You can check that one out to learn whether it is true or not, but in any event, the legend inspired longtime commenter ParanoidObsessive to write in about how he heard the story “about how Sarah McLachlan wrote “Possession” based on actual stalker letters.”

Is that 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: Flash Gordon was nearly in A Christmas Story.

A Christmas Story, has had an interesting trajectory since it was released in 1983. Written and directed by Bob Clark (based on radio personality/writer Jean Shepard’s stories about his childhood growing up during the 1930s), the film was a modest success upon its initial release but over time developed into first a cult classic and now one of the most mainstream Christmas movies around, with TBS airing a 24-hour marathon of the film every year on Christmas Eve and Christmas.

The film is about a young boy named Ralphie who spends the weeks leading up to Christmas trying to come up with a way to convince his parents to get him a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle for Christmas. Everywhere he turns, he is deterred from desiring the gun through the warning, “you’ll shoot your eye out”. While the driving plot of the film is Ralphie’s quest for the air rifle, the rest of the film is filled with snippets of what life was like during the Great Depression, including Ralphie’s other interests, like the Little Orphan Annie radio show (I did a legend a while back about the truth behind the secret decoder used in the film). Interestingly enough, originally the film was set to reference another one of Ralphie’s interests, the comic strip hero Flash Gordon! Yes, there was nearly a Flash Gordon/Ralphie team-up!
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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: The Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special would have been a lot different if the screenwriter had had access to the original Rudolph picture book.

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the popular animated special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which is the longest running Christmas special in television history (just a year ahead of 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas).

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer made his debut as a Montgomery Ward picture book giveaway written by Robert May. As I’ve featured in a past legend, Montgomery Ward remarkably just gave May the copyright to the book. That proved to be particularly significant when May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, adapted the story into a song that became one of the most popular Christmas songs of all-time upon its release in 1949. In 1964, Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass (at the time their company was called Videocraft International – they soon became known as their more familiar name, Rankin/Bass Productions) turned the story into an animated TV special that remains a hit program to this day. They enlisted screenwriter Romeo Muller to write the story for the special (and Johnny Marks contributed a bunch of new songs). The special introduced a pile of brand new characters, including Sam the Snowman, Yukon Cornelius, Hermey the Elf (who wants to be a dentis), the Abominable Snowmonster, Clarice (Rudolph’s reindeer love interest) and, of course, the Island of Misfit Toys (who proved so popular that the special had to be re-written a year later to change the ending because viewers were outraged that the Misfit Toys didn’t find new homes at the end of the original special). All of these new characters have led to a popular legend out there about how Muller wrote the show. From Mental Floss (among many other places, who all seem to be repeating the same story, so it is anyone’s guess who shared the story first):

Muller, the screenwriter for the TV special, stated in an interview that the reason his script deviated so much from the original story is that he was unable to find a copy of May’s book at the time. Several of the characters, including Hermey the wannabe dentist, were named after Muller’s real-life friends.

Is that true? Is that why Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is so different from the original book?
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