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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 music urban legends featured so far.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Cher’s first single was a novelty song about Ringo Starr.

Young Cherilyn Sarkisian dropped out of high school when she was 16, and eventually found work a few years later working along side an older man who would be an important part of her life for years, Sonny Bono. Bono worked with music producer Phil Spector, and soon, Cherilyn was getting work as a back-up singer on a few Spector recordings (Spector was big on overlapping sounds in his music, so Cherilyn never actually sang with the original artists, she would just sing and it would be edited on to the rest of the track).

Eventually, in 1964, Cherilyn was given a shot at her own single. Spector, though, had a rule about his artists – their names all had to be very easy to remember and they had to sound very “American,” like Darlene Love or Ronnie Bennett/Spector.

Cherilyn Sarkisian was not going to work, so under the name Bonnie Jo Mason, Cherilyn got her first shot…

and it was with a song about the Beatles’ Ringo Starr!!!
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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 music urban legends featured so far.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: “Hang On Sloopy” is the Official Rock Song of the State of Ohio.

Forty-eight of the fifty states in the United States of America have official state songs (only New Jersey and Virginia are without state songs – Virginia decided to change their state song over a decade ago because their old state song “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” was considered to be too offensive. Fifteen years later they still can’t agree on a new state song. “Shenandoah” came really close in 2006). A lot of these songs are some of the most famous songs ever recorded, like “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Yankee Doodle.”

But only ONE state has an official ROCK song, and that state is the great state of Ohio, home of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame!

That makes some sense, but what’s interesting is WHAT song they chose…

“Hang on Sloopy” by The McCoys?!?

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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 music urban legends featured so far.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Pat Boone recorded Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” but changed the song to the grammatically correct “Isn’t That a Shame.”

One of the more embarrassing facets of popular music history was the period in time when songs written and/or first performed by black artists were then re-recorded by white singers for the “white audience.”

As the white audience was obviously much larger, artists would typically lose out on a good deal of sales (and therefore, royalties) from this practice.

One such example happened when Fats Domino’s hit “Ain’t That a Shame” was released in 1955.

The song was popular on the “black charts,” but soon, a young performer (still in college) by the name of Pat Boone was asked to record the song.

As the legend goes, Boone, who was majoring in English at Columbia University at the time, changed the song to “Isn’t That a Shame.”
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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: Marty McFly originally time-traveled in a refrigerator in Back to the Future.

One of the most iconic vehicles in the history of film is the modified 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 used by Doctor Emmett Brown and Marty McFly to travel back in time in the massive hit 1985 film, Back to the Future, which was written by Bob Gale, directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.

However, amazingly enough, when the movie was originally written, there was no DeLorean involved. In fact, it took a few drafts of the screenplay before the DeLorean became the means of time travel. Originally, the method Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly traveled back in time was quite different and his trip back to the future took place in something that would become very familiar (perhaps infamously so) to fans of Steven Spielberg’s work – a refrigerator at the center of an atomic blast! Read on to see how things went down…
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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: Ron Howard was hired for Happy Days based on his performance in American Graffiti.

People often get caught up in how chronology appears like on the surface.

You can’t even count how many times whatever project comes out first automatically gets the credit for being “first,” and that if something comes out later, it is always perceived as being inspired by the first project, no matter if that is the case or not.

A notable example of this is Ron Howard’s performance in American Graffiti.

The movie, which was set in the very beginning of the 1960s (early enough to effectively be a “50s” movie), came out in 1973 and was a smash hit.

The next year, Howard was the lead in Happy Days, an ABC sitcom set in the 1950s.

So naturally, people assumed that Howard got the Happy Days role (and heck, that the entire reason for Happy Days EXISTING) was because of the success of American Graffiti.

That is, of course, not the case.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about pulp fiction and whether they are true or false.

PULP FICTION URBAN LEGEND: The writer who created the character (and pen name) Hank Janson was prosecuted by the British government, who did not check to make sure that he was the Hank Janson that they wanted!

Stephen Frances was a writer who began his own small publishing company at the tail end of World War II. At one point in 1946, a distributor was looking for a novel and Frances had none ready to go, so he bluffed his way through it, claiming he’d have one the next week. He then proceeded to write the first Hank Janson novel, When Dames Get Tough…

The book was a success. Hank Janson was an American character, and Frances created the pen name of Hank Janson to use with the story, as well, so the books were sold to the British public as a sordid, true-to-America crime story.

Frances, though, was not involved in the writing of the novels after the first few. He sold off his rights to the character and the name.

Soon, Hank Janson books were selling in the millions.

And they were getting randier and randier…

And that became a problem in the 1950s, when the British government began to be more and more involved in cracking down on “obscene” material.

In 1954, perhaps driven by the sensational murder of a police officer by a teenager following an attempted break-in (which was, itself, followed by the execution of the mentally challenged accomplice of the murderer, for being considered to have “jointly” committed the homicide – a charge the dead man was years later posthumously pardoned for), there was even a bigger drive to get rid of “obscene” pulp fiction, which, just like comic books in the United States, were being blamed as contributors to delinquency.

And a major target was Hank Janson, by then a multi-million book-selling franchise.

Janson’s publisher and distributor were both criminally prosecuted under the obscenity laws for seven recent Hank Janson novels. They also issued a warrant for the arrest of the writer of Hank Janson, Hank Janson himself, Stephen Frances!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about pulp fiction and whether they are true or false.

PULP FICTION URBAN LEGEND: John D. MacDonald became a professional writer without knowing it.

John D. MacDonald, like many popular pulp writers, was also extremely underrated.

MacDonald’s most famous single work is most likely The Executioners…

which was later remade into the film classic, Cape Fear…

But he’s also well known for his series of novels starring the character, Travis McGee, beginning with Deep Blue Good-by…

What’s amazing, though, is that his long and storied career really began when he became a professional writer…without his knowledge!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about pulp fiction and whether they are true or false.

PULP FICTION URBAN LEGEND: Captain Future was created by Edmond Hamilton.

Let’s be clear, the great (and eternally underrated) Edmond Hamilton was clearly the driving force behind Captain Future, a very well-regarded pulp hero of the 1940s, who starred in his own pulp magazine (titled Captain Future) for 17 issues over four years. That series was so well-regarded that it was later reprinted in the popular Startling Stories pulp magazine, leading to a short return of new Captain Future stories as part of Startling Stories for a few years in the early 1950s.

When these stories were collected a few years back, Hamilton is the only name mentioned…

and unless you want to argue that his wife, Leigh, had some influence upon Hamilton’s writing, this is a fair assessment, as Captain Future was basically Hamilton’s character and Hamilton alone.

However (there’s almost always a “however,” isn’t there?), Hamilton did not create the character.
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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: When Phylicia Rashād was cast as Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, the intent was for her to be a female version of Ricky Ricardo.

Phylicia Rashād played Clair Huxtable, the wife of Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable, on the smash hit TV sitcom The Cosby Show (the series was so popular that during its heyday, its Nielsen rating was over 30, meaning that 30% of the TVs in the United States were watching it every week, the last TV show to ever do so over a full season. To compare, the most-watched TV show this past season had a 12.3 Nielsen rating).

Rashād was so successful on the show that Cosby even cast her as his wife on his follow-up series, Cosby, which also lasted for four seasons. Rashād’s background before The Cosby Show is pretty fascinating. Her mother, Anita Ayers, was a poet and an author (she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize) and her father, Dr. Andrew “Tex” Allen was an orthodontist. Ayers was African-American while Allen was a Native American (a full-blooded Cherokee). The family moved to Houston where they had three children, Phylicia and her younger sister Debbie and her older brother Arthur Jr. (also known as “Tex”). The Allens divorced in 1954 when their youngest, Debbie, was just four years old. Ayers made waves in the Houston society pages two years later when she fired two warning shots from a pistol at Allen after he barged into her home while she was entertaining a male guest. Years later, when Debbie (who later went on to become a famous dancer and choreographer) began to study ballet, Ayers actually moved her family to Mexico when racism prevented Debbie from finding a position at a ballet school in Texas. Ayers and her two daughters (I am unsure about her son) lived in Mexico for two years before a position finally opened up in Houston, and as a result both Phylicia and Debbie speak fluent Spanish. Rashād’s fluency in Spanish was actually a major part of her being cast on The Cosby Show. You see, originally, Bill Cosby envisioned Clair Huxtable as a female version of Ricky Ricardo! Read on to see what he meant…
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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: Victor Fleming had an…interesting method for getting Judy Garland to keep from laughing during the filming of a scene for the Wizard of Oz.

Victor Fleming was actually the FOURTH director on the Wizard of Oz (following Norman Taurog, Richard Thorpe and George Cukor), but if you had to pick one person as “the” director of the film, I suppose you’d have to go with Fleming.

In any event, there’s a famous (infamous?) story about Fleming and Judy Garland from the film that I’ve seen a few times over the years and I’ve always been a bit suspicious of it.

Here’s the story:
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