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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: Outkast was sued by Rosa Parks for a song named after her.

Outkast is one of the most successful hip hop groups of all time, managing to balance commercial success with critical acclaim, as well, including winning the Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year in 2004 for their novel release Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (where the two members of the group, Andre 3000 and Big Boi, each did a solo album and then released them together as a group double album).

Their 1998 hit album Aquemi featured a song called “Rosa Parks”…

The song was the biggest hit off of the album.

Rosa Parks, of course, is the civil rights icon who made history by being arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger in 1955. Her actions sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and was a major event in the pursuit of equal rights for African-Americans in the United States.

The intent of the song is to demonstrate how, like Parks changed the world of civil rights, Outkast was changing the world of hip hop. The only part of the song that actually refers to Parks is the chorus, which goes “Ah ha, hush that fuss / Everybody move to the back of the bus / Do you want to bump and slump with us / We the type of people make the club get crunk.”

It is certainly a bit iffy to draw comparisons between being influential hip hop artists and being a civil rights icon, but in any event, the guys clearly intended the song as an homage (if a bizarre one) to Parks.

However, she apparently saw it otherwise.
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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 Cagney from the first season of Cagney and Lacey was replaced because CBS executives felt that the show seemed like it was about a pair of lesbians.

Cagney and Lacey, about two female police detectives who worked as partners, was one of the most acclaimed television dramas of the 1980s, winning the Emmy Award for Best Drama Series twice and winning Best Lead Actress Emmy Awards a remarkable six times in the show’s seven seasons. Producer Barney Rosenzweig used the series to address a number of social issues over the course of the show’s run.

It was definitely a show with a conscience (Rosenzweig has such a conscience he even kept actor Sidney Klute in the opening credits after Klute passed away, as a tribute to the actor). However, it was mainly a show about the interactions between two female friends working together as cops. That interaction, however, proved to be a tricky one for CBS, as the show was actually briefly canceled after one season for a rather gross reason – the idea that the show seemed to be about two lesbians.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to board games and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of all board game urban legends so far.

BOARD GAME URBAN LEGEND: Candyland had to sue to get the rights to candyland.com away from a porn company.

Candyland, currently produced by Hasbro, is one of the most popular board games currently being produced.

A simple and colorful game, it is notable for being one of the first board games that young children can play.

So that made it all the more sketchy when a company called Internet Entertainment Group launched a softcore porn website in 1996 called candyland.com.
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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: Laverne Cox is the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy Award.

The 2014 Emmy Awards was lauded as one of the most LGBTQ-inclusive Emmy Awards ever. Openly gay actors like Jim Parsons, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Kate McKinnon and Sarah Paulson were all nominated (with Parsons winning Best Lead Actor in a Comedy). In addition, a number of shows and TV films with notable gay characters like A Normal Heart, Orange is the New Black and Modern Family were all prominently recognized in the nominations (and victories, like Modern Family winning its fifth straight Best Comedy Emmy). The most notable nomination, though, was undoubtedly Laverne Cox from Orange is the New Black. The transgender actress was nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (the Guest Acting Awards were given out a week before the actual Emmy Awards ceremony – Cox lost to her fellow Orange is the New Black actress, Uzo Aduba).

It was a historical nomination. However, speaking of history, it appears that a number of media outlets might have missed the boat a bit. Time magazine stated, “Laverne Cox has become the first transgender person nominated for an Emmy award.” Extra noted, “Orange Is the New Black” star Laverne Cox made history on Thursday as the first transgender Emmy nominee.” Even when Laverne Cox was on Late Night with Seth Meyers (Meyers hosted the Emmys), Meyers described her as “the first openly transgender person nominated ever to get nominated for an Emmy Award.” 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: Robin Williams ad-libbed so much of Aladdin that the movie was rejected for a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Tragically, Robin Williams passed away last year at the age of 63. With the sudden passing of such a comedy icon, the internet was filled to the brim with tributes to Williams. Along with these tributes came a number of, for lack of a better term, “lists of interesting facts about Robin Williams.” This is not surprising, of course, as numbered lists have become very popular on the internet. However, I noticed something a bit distressing about these lists – they seem to use a lot of the same “facts” and these facts did not seem to be fact checked at all, instead seemingly going under the theory of “Well, if Site X and Y are reporting it, I guess we can, too.” That’s pretty standard behavior for small independent websites, but I’m talking about this behavior from the Huffington Post and CBS News. Honestly, it looks like writers just pulled things from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)’s Trivia page and just ran them as facts. The issue, of course, is that these “facts” are user-submitted and are often unsourced, leaving the truth behind them up in the air. One fact I saw repeated a number of times on these lists in the weeks following Williams’ death is that Robin Williams ad-libbed so much of his dialogue as the Genie in Aladdin (a role which ended up causing him a lot of aggravation, as we covered in an old Movie Legends Revealed) that the film was ineligible for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Is that true?
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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: American Idol’s parent company and/or Simon Cowell owns the publishing rights to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

Leonard Cohen’s song, “Hallelujah,” off of his 1984 album, Various Positions, was not exactly a hit right away.

Artist John Cale recorded the song in 1991 for a Leonard Cohen cover album. It was Cale’s version that inspired singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley to cover the song for his 1994 album, Grace.

Buckley’s version was well-received, critically, but it was not exactly an instant hit. In fact, at the time of Buckley’s death, the song was not nearly as popular as it soon would become as it began to be covered by other artists (most notably by singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright) and used in a number of films and television shows.

One television show, in particular, who used the show frequently, was American Idol.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to architecture and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the architecture urban legends featured so far.

ARCHITECTURE URBAN LEGEND: Frank Lloyd Wright used massive amount of college student urine to treat the copper in his buildings at Florida Southern College.

It seems positively strange, but the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture in one place is on the campus of the small private Methodist college, Florida Southern College, in Lakeland, Florida (Oak Hill Park in Illinois still has the largest collection of houses designed by Wright, but as you might imagine, a college campus has all of the buildings together, something that would not really be possible anywhere else).

The collection of buildings is called “The Child of the Sun” and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Here are a few of the pieces…

The story of HOW the buildings were built is pretty remarkable.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to architecture and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the architecture urban legends featured so far.

ARCHITECTURE URBAN LEGEND: A California woman had a house constructed entirely out of a recycled Boeing 747 airplane!

Francine Rehwald was a 65-year-old retiree who was living in Malibu Hills, California when she came to David Hertz for ideas for her retirement house in 2005. She wanted something that was “environmentally friendly” while also having a real feminine design. Something with “curves,” as Rehwald described it.

Hertz came up with a brilliant idea – build the house out of a recycled Boeing 747 airplane!!
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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: Miami Vice originated as a two-word brainstorming memo – “MTV Cops.”

Few network executives have ever experienced the sort of hot streak that Brandon Tartikoff went on when he took over as the chief programmer at NBC in 1981 when he was just 32 years old. He soon launched a series of critical and commercial successes that took NBC from a last-place network to the dominant network for the rest of the decade in both ratings and in awards. The number of shows that developed under his leadership is astonishing – award-winning dramas like Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere and L.A. Law and hit comedies like Family Ties, Cheers and The Cosby Show. Tartikoff was very involved in the creation of a number of these shows, like convincing Bill Cosby to create a sitcom based on Cosby’s stand-up about his family or persuading Norman Lear not to walk away from Tartikoff’s idea for a spin-off of Diff’rent Strokes (one of the only hits NBC had when Tartikoff took over) called The Facts of Life (Tartikoff also made some mistakes, of course, like when he fought to have Michael J. Fox replaced on the pilot for Family Ties). Tartioff and Warren Littlefield (the top NBC programming executive under Tartikoff) were both known for coming up with high concept ideas that they then got TV producers to turn into TV series. Just last year in TV Legends Revealed, we took a look at how Littlefield took the joke idea of “Miami Nice” and turned it into The Golden Girls. Similarly, a longstanding television legend is that the hit cop drama Miami Vice began as a brainstorming memo by Tartikoff where he simply wrote two words – “MTV Cops” and the rest is supposedly history.

Is that how it really happened, though?
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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: Before saying goodbye for the last time before Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, Waylon Jennings told Holly that he hoped his plane crashes.

Reader Ed R. asked me recently:

I read online today that before Buddy Holly’s fateful plane crash, Holly told Waylon Jennings that he hoped his “ol’ bus freezes up,” to which Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.”

Do you know if there’s any truth to that legend?

Let’s find out!
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