If you’ve ever wished you could time travel, drive through Wisconsin (the catch is, you can’t time travel to any place exciting…). My wife is a big city west coast type, so I took her to ‘the Dells’. We walked into Paul Bunyan’s and my jaw dropped “Oh! I was here… fifty years ago! And my parents wouldn’t let me buy a beaded ‘injun’ belt!”
So I spent ten bucks on my very own… ‘never too late to have a happy childhood’.
By the way, the place had not changed one iota since '59. They served huge breakfasts on tin plates at long picnic tables… family style (basket of donuts for the table, huge tin platters of bacon, eggs and hashbrowns passed around…all you could eat.
There’s far more fictional characters from Wisconsin/Minnesota than Missouri. The Wikipedia listing for fictional characters from Missouri has about 6 people, a GI Joe character among them.
The rich main bad guy in the animated TV series Danny Phantom lives in Madison and went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also is a giant Packers fan in the show.
True… friends and I once made a list of inherently funny words. We included place names (Peoria, Kalamazoo), but since we were in Wisconsin at the time, we must have been too close to the subject.
Come to think of it, we were in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin… that’s two smirky names together.
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Oh, there’s an entire series of comic books set in Madison, WI, starring a psychotic super-hero… The Badger.
Mike Baron and Jeff Butler made him truly delusional and dangerous (read the synopsis at that link above, it’s hilarious). And since Madison was psychotic, dangerous and hilarious at the time (mid-80s), it all worked.
Fort Snelling was built under the direction of Col Josiah Snelling, USA, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers in the 1820s. This is now part of the Twin Cities, but at the time it was “unorganized (Indian) territory.” For some reason, the cornerstone of the Commandant’s house refers to it as the “Ouisconsin Territory.”
Back in the '80s, a girlfriend and I wanted to film a parody of In Search Of (titled In Quest Of) dedicated to “The Cult of Paul Bunyan.” The disclaimer at the beginning went “This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture. Where there was no evidence, it was fabricated.”
We would have shown (among other things) how he was depicted in Ancient Greek art, fighting the Titans, and how the heads on Easter Island were modeled after him… We even hoped to film a scene inside the restaurant on the weekend, when all of the cult members are gathered around the tables feasting. The scene would have ended with all of the cultists standing and chanting “Paul Bunyan, Paul Bunyan, Paul Bunyan, Paul Bunyan! Oh, what a great guy he was!” (Like in this clip.)
My girlfriend even looked a bit like the whacko woman in this episode. I wanted to wrap her in a shawl and have her stare spookily into the camera while she ranted on about Paul Bunyan. Sadly, we stopped seeing each other before we could pitch the idea to Leonard Nimoy.
If Wanker County is supposed to be in Wisconsin, why does everyone there talk like a hillbilly? I spent the summer of 1991 traveling around the state and never heard that accent.
Josh Lyman: “How could you not like Donna? She’s from Wisconsin!”
Not exactly. She’s from a border town in Minnesota that, after a “border clarification,” was determined to be in Canada. (Wisconsin shares no land border with Canada.) She did, however, attend the University of Wisconsin.
That could be a thread of its own. We’re surrounded by Poorly-Named Towns. I mean, how lazy do you have to be to start a city, and just shrug and say “Ehh… I like Berlin. I’ll just call this dirt road full of goats… New Berlin.”
… But we’ll mispronounce it "New BURR’–lin.
Wisconsin is full of these: a town is named Rio, so it’s pronounced RYE’–oh. And of course Moscow is MOSS’–kOh (long Oh)… and they did the same thing in Idaho.
The last three seasons of Laverne & Shirley were set in Los Angeles, so (for that period, at least) Laverne, Shirley, Lenny, Squiggy, Carmine, Frank, and Edna should all count.
Home Alone is a Christmas movie and, I’m not sure it’s explicitly stated, but I strongly suspect John Candy’s character, Gus Polinski, is from Wisconsin.
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