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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: Gwyneth Paltrow had an interesting approach to a radio contest revolving around her.

In 2003, actress Gwyneth Paltrow was in New Zealand filming a movie about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (originally titled Ted and Sylvia, it eventually was released as just Sylvia).

While driving to the film set one day, the star was listening to the radio. A local radio station was running a sort of “Star Stalker” game. They would give away $100 for a photograph of Paltrow, $1,000 for a pair of knickers stolen from her hotel room or $5,000 if they could get Paltrow to actually come to the phone and speak live on-air.

Well, Paltrow figured, why not play along?
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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.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: An interesting confluence of events had to occur on the road to “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)” winning an Academy Award for Best Original Song (including a title change).

Alfred Hitchcock had a problem when it came to the casting of his latest film, The Man Who Knew Too Much.

He wanted the film to star Jimmy Stewart, but Stewart’s agent told Hitchcock that Stewart would only do the film if Hitchcock agreed to take another of their clientsr, Doris Day, as the female lead (presumably to help promote Day as a dramatic actress to go with her fame as a singer and comedic actress).

Not only that, but part of the MCA deal insisted that if Day were to appear in the film and sang a song, Hitchcock would to hire her songwriters, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, as well. And upon hearing that Day was possibly going to be in the film, Paramount Pictures insisted that yes, if she was going to be in the film, she would have to sing a song.

The character in the film WAS a singer, so Hitchcock was not all together displeased at this offer (while he was not at first pleased with the idea of hiring Day, he later was very complimentary of her acting skills), but first, he wanted to hear what kind of song Livingston and Evans were going to write. If they could nail the specific type of tune that he wanted, he would be okay with the whole deal. He specifically wanted them to write a song that sounded foreign and could be sung to a little boy.

Livingston and Evan were already very notable songwriters, at the time. I mean, the guys wrote “Silver Bells,” for crying out loud!

And they had already won two Academy Awards for Best Song, including “Mona Lisa,” which was a major hit for Nat King Cole in 1950.

So forcing them to practically audition was not an experience they had had for quite some time.

However, the duo were up to the task.
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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.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: The BBC forced a change to the song “The Cover of Rolling Stone” for it to be played in England.

As I mentioned in a recent Poetry Urban Legends Revealed, Shel Silverstein was a songwriter as well as a poet and cartoonist.

Probably his most famous song was “A Boy Named Sue,” which Johnny Cash performed to great acclaim.

His next famous song was “The Cover of Rolling Stone,” a 1973 song about the thrill of a band and/or artist appearing on the cover of the popular magazine, which was performed by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (which, as you can see below, ended up with the band actually getting on the cover of the magazine)…

The song hit #6 on the Billboard charts.

A problem occurred, however, when the song crossed the pond and tried to become a hit in England.
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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.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Tom Lehrer quit writing protest songs because Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.

One fairly common way for a legend to begin is from people misunderstanding a joke. For instance, awhile back, I did a bit on how a joke by Alice Cooper during an interview led to a legend that he played Eddie Haskell on Leave it to Beaver.

A similar situation has led to the legend that Tom Lehrer quit doing protest songs because Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, soon after becoming Secretary of State during the Nixon administration (Kissinger won the award for his role in the Paris Peace Talks for the Vietnam War).

So 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: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was originally going to be a horror film.

It’s interesting to see how much movies sometimes change from their conception to the ultimate film that is released. Notably, Snakes on a Plane was dramatically re-edited after a famous parody trailer was released (you would be shocked to learn how much of the film was changed by the parody). Some movies, though, are changed so much that they cease to be the original movie and become something completely different.

This was what happened with Steven Spielberg’s classic 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which began life, amazingly enough, as a horror film! Read on to see what happened.
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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: Muttley and Dick Dastardly were removed whole cloth from one show and added to another.

While Wacky Races was not a big hit, Hanna-Barbera were fans of the Penelope Pitstop character and the Dick Dastardly and Muttley characters, so as soon as the show ended, they developed a new show for the three characters in 1969.

It was to be called the Perils of Penelope Pitstop, and Dick and Muttley were to serve as the bodyguards for Penelope’s brother, who would always be trying to save Penelope from various perilous situations.

Before the show began production, though, it was determined that Dick and Muttley were too good of a pair of characters to “waste” as supporting characters in another series.
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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: Mumbly was created as a stand-in for Muttley in the Laff-A-lympics.

In a similar vein to the Wacky Races, in the late 1970s, Hanna-Barbera released another short-lived television series called Laff-A-Lympics.

In it, three teams of Hanna-Barbera characters competed against each other in a series of Olympic-style events from all over the world.

There were the Yogi Yahooeys (consisting of talking animal characters), the Scooby Doobies (consisting mostly of cartoon shows that starred human characters) and the Really Rottens (consisting of the bad guys from cartoons)…

The Really Rottens were led by Mumbly, a dog with a distinctive laugh/snicker and his co-hort the Dread Baron.

Here they are with their team…

and by themselves…

So, quite naturally, it was thought that the two characters were meant to be stand-ins for Dick Dastardly and Muttley…

And that almost certainly IS true.

The reason is most likely the fact that, as mentioned in the previous legend, Hanna-Barbera did not own the two characters outright, so they substituted look-alike characters.

However, people think that Mumbly and the Dread Baron are just re-named Muttley and Dick Dastardly, and that is not so, at least not in the case of Mumbly (Dread Baron was created just for the Laff-a-lympics).

Mumbly might have BECOME a stand-in for Muttley, but that was not how it always was!
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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: Wacky Races was originally going to be a game show.

As mentioned in a previous installment of TV Urban Legends Revealed, Hanna-Barbera had a short-lived animated series in the late 1960s called Wacky Races, which featured a group of colorful personalities all racing against each other.

The main villain on the show was Dick Dastardly and his sidekick, Muttley (who had a distinctive laugh/snicker)…

An interesting aspect about Wacky Race is to look at the producers behind the program.

If you look at Hanna-Barbera’s TV series, you will not find very many joint productions. They basically handled their properties on their own.

On the same token, Heatter-Quigley Productions (a company formed by TV writers Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley) also tended to handle their properties on their own.

Not only that, but their programs were entirely different genres.

Hanna-Barbera did cartoons, while Heatter-Quigley produced game shows.

Their most famous game show was Hollywood Squares…

So why, then, did Hanna-Barbera and Heatter-Quigley co-produce Wacky Races?
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to poetry and poets and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of all poetry legends featured so far.

POETRY URBAN LEGEND: Poet Wallace Stevens converted to Catholicism before he died.

The idea of someone converting to another religion is a pretty commonplace situation.

And someone converting while on their death bed is even MORE conventional.

And yet, in the case of award-winning poet Wallace Stevens, his conversion was treated quite unconventionally…

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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 staff of The Simpsons got a measure of revenge on Justin Timberlake after he took issue with the dialogue that they wrote for him for a guest appearance.

Since leaving his popular boy band ‘N Sync in 2002, Justin Timberlake’s success has exceeded pretty much everyone’s expectations. First he became a world famous solo recording artist, releasing four hit albums (the first three of which have each gone multi-Plantium, meaning that they sold at least two million copies apiece, and the latest album is already nearing 500,000 copies sold since its release at the end of September 2013) along with eight top ten singles on the Billboard charts and three number one singles (including the quadruple-platinum selling 2006 smash hit “SexyBack”).

As if that was not enough, he then became a bit of a movie star, releasing a number of films (including a strong performance in the 2010 hit film The Social Network as Sean Parker, one of the founders of Napster).

And as if that was not enough, he has also become an acclaimed comedic actor on television, winning two Emmy Awards for his performances hosting Saturday Night Live in 2009 and 2011. Timberlake is the youngest host to host the comedy show five times.

One of the best aspects of Timberlake’s performances on Saturday Night Live, and likely what endears himself to so many people, is how willing he is to make a fool of himself on national television, both on Saturday Night Live and on guest appearances of his friend Jimmy Fallon’s show, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. It is always fun to see a major celebrity not take himself so seriously. However, while that is where Timberlake is today, that was not necessarily always the case. In 2001, a 19 year old Timberlake ran afoul a bit of the writers of The Simpsons when guest starring on the animated program and their “revenge” on him is pretty hilarious. Read on to see what they did!
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