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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: Jonathan Rollins on L.A. Law was based, at least in part, on a young Barack Obama.

In 1987, the hit television series L.A. Law introduced a brand new character, a brilliant, young and charismatic African-American lawyer named Jonathan Rollins, played by Blair Underwood. The character was created by the show’s co-creator, Stephen Bochco.

The character would become a major part of the series, staying on the show for the rest of the series’ run (all the way to the finale in 1994) and the character would become more and more of a central figure as the show went on (as other stars, like Jimmy Smits and Harry Hamlin, left the series).

An interesting facet of Rollins’ back story on the show was that he was the first African-America President of the Harvard Law Review.

This has led people, looking back, to wonder if the character was based, even in part, on former United States President Barack Obama, who was the ACTUAL first African-American President of the Harvard Law Review.

After all, Obama’s history-making success at Harvard was big news at the time, with the “New York Times” even doing an article on the topic, “First Black Elected to Head Harvard’s Law Review.”

So it is certainly feasible that Bochko would hear about it. And it would be pretty cool if true, right? So IS it 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: ABBA turned down a billion dollar concert tour.

Longtime reader Jumborg Ace wrote in to ask, “Is it true that a few (maybe a lot of) years ago that ABBA was offered 1 BILLION
dollars to do 1 concert AND they turned it down? I though I heard that but maybe it was just a radio joke.”

Well, the answer to your very specific question is no. They were never offered that much money for one single show.

However, the full answer is closer to true than you would expect!
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about novels and novelists and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the novel urban legends featured so far.

NOVEL URBAN LEGEND: Moby-Dick was printed in England without the Epilogue.

As I noted in a legend years ago (about how the “piracy” in Pirates of Penzance was a reference to COPYRIGHT piracy), in the 19th Century, copyright piracy was rampant. Something would be printed in England and then people would rush it over to the United States, which did not recognize British copyrights, and then print up copies here and be legally allowed to do so.

So while people continued to always publish in England first, what authors began to do was to publish essentially simultaneously in both England and the United States, to gain copyrights in both places at the same time.

That is what happened with Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby-Dick, about an ill-fated whaling crew hunting down a great white whale. However, in the process, there was a major chunk of the book actually left out of its initial printing!

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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.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: A scene featuring Slimer at the end of “Ghostbusters II” was cut from the film.

An interesting phenomenon in the world of popular culture is when people’s collective memory convinces a bunch of people that they saw something that they did not actually see. We’ve addressed this a few times over the years, like whether there was an end scene cut from U.S. prints of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, whether “Star Wars” was originally titled “Episode IV” in the opening scroll and whether “Back to the Future” originally ended with “To Be Continued…” People will swear that they saw something in a film that they never actually saw. However, sometimes films really do cut scenes from the original print of a film (a famous example is “The Program” cutting a sequence because people died trying to re-enact it), so it can be difficult to figure out whether people actually saw a scene that was cut from the film or not.

One of these possibly mythical scenes is the longstanding rumor regarding Slimer at the end of “Ghostbusters II.”

Slimer, the green glob of a ghost, appeared at the end of the original Ghostbusters, flying towards the audience.

As the story goes, the original ending of “Ghostbusters II” had Slimer repeating his flying towards the audience trick, only this time flying out of the restored Statue of Liberty (the Ghostbusters borrow the Statue of Liberty to defeat the bad guy in the film). However, Bill Murray was adamant about not doing another “Ghostbusters” sequel, and the theory was that ending the second film like the first one would suggest that they were going to make a third one. That’s the rumor. When I mentioned this on Comics Should Be Goo a while back, multiple people wrote in to say that yes, they saw that scene when they saw “Ghostbusters II” in theaters back in 1989.

But DID they?
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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 Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” was almost accidentally erased.

For whatever reason, few rock songs have had as many legends about it than the Rolling Stones’ classic song, “Wild Horses.”

In the past, I’ve discussed whether Mick Jagger really wrote it about Marianne Faithful.

In the past, I’ve discussed whether Gram Parsons secretly wrote the song for the Stones.

Now, however, we’re taking a look a surprising thing that happened that nearly caused us to lose one of the great rock songs of all-time!
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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 see all the Movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: One of the characters in “Love Actually” was meant to be an angel the whole movie.

Just the other day, we did a Movie Legends Revealed about how an entire romance was cut from the film, Love Actually, due to the film being too long. When we posted that article, reader Marc H. wrote in about another fascinating aspect of the original film that was cut, although this did not get past the original script (unlike the romance between the school headmistress and her lover that was definitely filmed and cut from the final movie).

As it turned out, one of the characters in the film originally was intended to be an angel the whole time. Can you guess who?

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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: “Frosty the Snowman” was not originally a Christmas story.

One of the most famous Christmas animated TV specials is “Frosty the Snowman,” which debuted in 1969. It was by Rankin/Bass Productions, the same company that produced the classic Christmas animated special, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which debuted five years earlier. Narrated by Jimmy Durante, the special involves a magic hat that transforms a snowman, Frosty, into a living being. The magician who owned the hat wants it back now that he knows it contained actual magic, so the kids had to get together and find a way to bring Frosty to the North Pole to keep him from melting. However, once there, Frosty sacrifices himself to warm up the little girl, Karen, who took him to the North Pole. He melts, but Santa Claus explains that Frosty is made out of special Christmas snow and thus can never truly melt. Frosty then comes back to life and everyone has a Merry Christmas.

Again, as noted, the special is a Christmas classic and the soundtrack is beloved, as well, including not just the title track, but a great version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” However, did you know that originally, “Frosty the Snowman” wasn’t about Christmas, at all?
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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 see all the Movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: There was a lesbian romance cut out of “Love Actually”.

Today, we take a look at a legend from a modern Christmas classic, 2003’s “Love Actually”.

The film (written and directed by Richard Curtis) follows a disparate (but, as it slowly turns out, all somewhat interconnected) group of British people who are dealing with all sorts of dramas involving love around the Christmas season – familial love, unrequited love, illicit love, platonic love, it’s all covered in the film. One area, though, that the film did not get into was same sex love. However, originally that was not the case! Read on to learn about the lesbian romance that was cut out of “Love Actually”!
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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 see all the Movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” nearly never existed because it was too depressing.

It comes as little surprise to any moviegoer out there that the soundtrack to a film musical plays a major role in how the story of the film is presented. We’ve discussed in the past how the song “Let it Go” literally changed the whole focus of Disney’s hit film, Frozen, turning Elsa from a villain to a hero. Similarly, though, if you don’t want to change the story of your film, then you will have problems if the songs you are given don’t fit the story of the film. This was the key conflict that very nearly led to the classic Christmas song, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” never being released.

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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 LEGEND: Tom and Jerry were named after a cartoon featuring human characters named Tom and Jerry that Tom and Jerry co-creator, Joe Barbera, had worked on earlier.

Created for MGM in 1940 (well, technically 1941, as you’ll see later on in this story), the Tom and Jerry characters were William Hanna and Joe Barbera’s first huge hit working together, as they worked on the cartoons (which aired as film shorts) for nearly 20 years, picking up a pile of Academy Awards for their work. MGM eventually decided that it was cheaper to just re-air old cartoons than make new ones, so they shut down their entire cartoon division.

Luckily, Hanna and Barbera then teamed up to form a cartoon studio that made cartoons for television and, well, I think you know how well THAT turned out.

In any event, my friend Chris N. wrote to me to ask if Tom and Jerry were inspired by an old 1930s cartoon duo, a human team who were ALSO called Tom and Jerry!

Created by Amadee J. Van Beuren’s New York studio, Joe Barbera even WORKED for Van Beueren it the early 1930s (after the original Tom and Jerry cartoons had debuted, though)! So, is there a connection?

Oddly enough, it doesn’t appear to be one, no.

Tom and Jerry is credited as being introduced in 1940, but in reality, the 1940 story that introduced the characters, “Puss Gets the Boot,” technically starred two OTHER characters, Jasper and Jinx, who had slightly different designs…

MGM originally did not like Hanna and Barbera’s idea of doing another cat and mouse cartoon right after “Puss Gets the Boot” (which was nominated for an Academy Award), but they eventually let the pair go with their idea to do more stories featuring the characters. However, now that they were going to be a regular thing, Hanna and Barbera wanted to both tweak their design and come up with a new name for the pair. So they had a contest with the animators at MGM to name the pair.

Animator Jack Carr won the contest. He suggested “Tom and Jerry,” Tom and Jerry were characters in an old Pierre Egan play, but by the 20th Century, they had become much more familiar as both the name of a drink (a Christmastime drink involving eggnog, rum and brandy – also devised by Egan) and as the slang term people used to describe British and German soldiers (Tom and Jerry, respectively) during World War I. So the phrase was a common one, and when you add in the double meaning of “tomcat,” it just made sense. Hanna and Barbera weren’t thrilled with naming their characters after a phrase then most popular as being a drink name, but they went with it, and obviously the cartoon ended up taking over the name (by the way, when the original Tom and Jerry cartoon aired on TV years later, they obviously had to change their names, so they went with Dick and Harry).

So there does not appear to be any connection to the original Tom and Jerry cartoon, so I’m going with the legend as…

STATUS: False

Thanks to Chris for the question!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com.