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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: Masi Oka appeared on the cover of Time Magazine as a kid!

Heroes was a television series about a group of superpowered people and seeing what they all do with their powers (become heroes, villains, etc.).

Actor Masi Oka played Hiro Nakamura, an idealistic Japanese office worker who discovers he has superpowers. As the series has gone on, Hiro has grown as a person and as a hero.

He is currently co-starring on Hawaii Five-O…

Oka had been appearing in various TV series for years before getting his big break on Heroes (he also worked in the digital effects field up to AND including his tenure on Heroes).

But amusingly enough, Oka had an earlier brush with fame when he was 12 years old.
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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: Bill Cosby tried to purchase the rights to the Amos and Andy TV series to keep it off the air.

A very popular urban legend is that entertainer Bill Cosby bought the rights to the Little Rascals so that they would no longer be aired, because Cosby found the show offensive due to its jokes involving the African-American character, Buckwheat.

That story is false (here’s Snopes on the subject).

However, a similar story has also popped up involving the TV series Amos and Andy (here’s someone asking about it on answers.com and here is an article from a few years back saying “A rumor, which might be nothing more than an Urban Legend, claims that it is entertainer Bill Cosby who bought the rights to the television sitcom and is responsible for keeping it off the air.”), and in this case, there actually is a little more to it than the Little Rascals story, which seems to have just been made up from whole cloth.

So what’s the truth?
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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: Concern over toy sales kept Han Solo from being killed off in Return of the Jedi.

One of the biggest decisions that filmmakers have to make when dealing with franchises is how to handle killing off characters. Do you kill off one of your main characters? And if so, which one? This debate was a major one for George Lucas when he began working on the final film of the original Star Wars trilogy of films and as it turns out, at least one character might have survived due to, of all things, the Star Wars line of toys. Read on to learn what went down in the great “Should Han Solo die in Return of the Jedi?” debate of 1982.

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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to pro wrestling and pro wrestlers and whether they are true or not.

PRO WRESTLING URBAN LEGEND: The Iron Sheik won a Gold Medal for Wrestling at the 1968 Olympics.

In March of 2008, the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) inducted wrestler The Iron Sheik into its Hall of Fame.

They sent out a press release to honor the wrestler. It said, in part:

Khosrow Vaziri better known as The Iron Sheik has terrorized his opponents while entertaining generations of Pro Wrestling fan’s for close to four decades. Although The Iron Sheik turned Pro in 1972 he has been competing on the grappling scene since the mid 1960s and was a member of his native Iran’s Olympic Wrestling Team during the 1968 Mexico Olympics. In 1971, he won the AAU Greco Roman Gold Metal. Vaziri was also once a bodyguard for the family of the Shah of Iran.

The bit I wish to spotlight is:

was a member of his native Iran’s Olympic Wrestling Team during the 1968 Mexico Olympics.

Is that true?
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to pro wrestling and wrestlers and whether they are true or not.

PRO WRESTLING URBAN LEGEND: An interesting confluence of events (including an untimely hug) led to Stone Cold Steve Austin becoming a major wrestling star.

Obviously, if you track any wrestler (or heck, any celebrity period), there is a “path” that led to them becoming famous, and usually there will be turning points along the way where you can stop and say “Wow, what if ____ had not happened, would ____ still be such a star?” For instance, what would Michael J. Fox’s career be like if Eric Stoltz had stayed on as the lead of Back to the Future? Heck, what would Fox’s career be like if Matthew Broderick had not turned down the role of Alex Keaton on Family Ties (The “P” was Fox’s idea)?

However, rarely do you have such a peculiar confluence of events as those that came together to make Steve Austin one of the most famous professional wrestlers in the world.
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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: Frank Capra had a Machiavellian way to get Claudette Colbert to show her legs in It Happened One Night.

It Happened One Night was a great success when it was released in 1934, becoming a box office smash.

Not only that, but it was the first film (and only film for nearly four decades – and still only one of three films) to sweep the “major” categories, Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress, at the Academy Awards.

However, at the time of the filming, the movie was not thought to be much of a big deal by the particulars of the film.

The lead actor, Clark Gable, had a lot of problems with the film’s script.

And Gable was the HAPPY one on set!

Lead actress Claudette Colbert was not the first choice for the picture (nor was Gable, actually), and when offered the part, she initially refused. She had worked on an unsuccessful picture with Capra a number of years earlier, and she wanted nothing more to do with the director.

She finally was coerced into doing the film when her salary was doubled and she was promised that she would be finished in four weeks, so as to not conflict with a planned vacation she had coming up.

Still, once on set, she was not particularly happy, and Capra resorted to all sorts of tricks to keep her interested, including enlisting Gable to play a few little pranks on her to make her feel more at home, and supposedly, it worked, as Colbert later recalled having fun filming the picture, although she still told friends that it was the worst picture she had ever been in (she was more graceful when she won her Oscar, though, stating that her Oscar was all due to Capra).

She would still have a few outbursts during the film, primarily some objections over overly salacious (in her view, at least) aspects of the script.

One such objection was for the now-famous scene where the two characters are hitchhiking.

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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: Was Denise Crosby fired from Star Trek: The Next Generation
because she posed nude in Playboy?

While posing nude in Playboy has launched the careers of a number of actresses, like Jenny McCarthy, Carmen Electra and Pamela Anderson (although a strange turn of events had already made Anderson popular in Canada, as I featured in an old Football Legends Revealed), it can also cause problems when actresses try out for “family” programming. In the May 1988 issue of Playboy (which would have been released around March 1988), they had a nude pictorial spread of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Denise Crosby, who played Lietenant Tasha Yar on the program, then in its first season (the spread was advertised as “Denise Crosby: Out of Uniform”). Yar’s character was killed off in an April 1988 episode. Reader Drew G. wrote in to ask:

One legend I heard, many years ago, that I have always wondered about, and maybe this was covered already and I missed it, was that Denise Crosby’s Lt. Yar character was killed off in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation because she had appeared nude in a Playboy magazine. While I thought it unlikely that Gene Roddenbery would have done this it wouldn’t be unprecedented.

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: The assistant in Frankenstein was named Igor.

An interesting situation that pops up frequently is the case of almost intellectual consolidation. Take a bunch of similar movies and whoever is the most memorable from that group will be what people remember.

That is most likely the situation when you see people refer to Doctor Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant, Igor.

In 1931’s Frankenstein, Doctor Henry Frankenstein does NOT have an assistant named Igor.

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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: “Danger Zone” was originally going to be a Toto song!

The popular hit “Danger Zone” had an interesting journey on its way to becoming a hit song for Kenny Loggins!

The songwriting team of Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock wrote the song (the same fellows who wrote “Take My Breath Away”) for the film Top Gun, and they initially offered the song to popular 1980s rocker Bryan Adams.

Adams (who hails from Canada) turned down the song, and went so far as to disallowe the use of another one of his songs for Top Gun, due to the content of Top Gun, which he felt was basically a big piece of propaganda for the United States military.

The popular pop group Toto were in negotiations at the time to have another song on the soundtrack of the film, so they were lined up to be the next to take a crack at “Danger Zone.” However, the agreement to use their “Only You” for the film fell through, and the failure of that song lead to Toto abruptly pulling out of performing this song.

So now the producers had a song ready to go, but no singer!
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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: “Unchained Melody” was actually the melody to the film Unchained!

We as a music-listening audience are so used to song titles that don’t seem to make any sense (“Rainy Day Women #12 and #35,” as a for instance) that a song like “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers has been accepted pretty easily, despite the fact that there is no mention of the word “unchained,” or heck, “chains” even, anywhere in the song.

As it turns out, that is because the song actually came out years before the Righteous Brothers got a hold of it, when it was the title track of the 1955 prison film, Unchained!!