Abbott and Costello were originally cast as Major Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, and Somehow was to play the role of Captain Willard, which eventually went to Martin Sheen. Shortly before shooting commenced, there was a major shakeup in the cast and the production team when certain parties turned out to be sore losers in a high-stakes Sorry! game and it became impossible for them to work together anymore.
Abbott and Costello, once their movie career fizzled, went on to found Abercrombie and Fitch Auto Parts. Missed it by that much.
Abercrombie and Fitch (the sporting goods company, not the auto parts endeavor) was founded in Blawnox by partners Francis Fitch and Abner F. Grumbie, and was supposed to have been incorporated under the name Abner Grumbie and Fitch.
Disgruntled at the fact that his name came second, Fitch got his revenge when he was put in charge of filing the necessary paperwork for incorporation, business licenses, and tax filings with the office of the Attorney General by intentionally misspelling his partner’s name. And of course, once the documents had been signed, legally notarized, and duly filed, there was nothing that could be done at that point.
-“BB”-
Abner Grumble did have the last laugh however when he persuaded his wife Dorothy
to change her name to Bill Gates and start a computer software company.
She founded many companies afterward, naming them after herself and starting the Dot com boom.
Every connection to a Dot Com site adds $0.001 to her commerce fund. Every connection to a Dot net site adds to her fishing vacation fund.
With all that money, she opened an online retail site called eDot.
Archaeological evidence was recently uncovered suggesting that some clans of neandertals not only used fire, but also used an early form of NFT’s when trading with other clans.
The Neanderthals’ computers were built using semiconductor junctions
consisting of sarsen stone and blue stone to create transistors. The only
remaining example of this, Stonehenge in England, has been shown to
be an array of Nand gates which is thought to have formed part of a 2 bit shift
register.
The size of these stones, unfortunately, made it extremely difficult if not nigh onto impossible to upgrade the primitive programming (which, based on information gleaned from neolithic runes, was called ‘Portals’). As a result, the technology became outdated and fell into disuse and obscurity.
It would be several millennia before a more convenient form of the hardware as well as an upgraded version of the OS – designated as ‘Windows’, a modern style of portal – became available.
-“BB”-
Early versions of the Windows operating system were coded by a team recruited (poached, if you prefer) from the animation department at Hanna-Barbera.
Rejected ideas for cartoon characters back in Hanna-Barbera’s heyday include: Oswald Octopus, Edward Emu, Scotty Stoat, and Wolfgang Wildebeest.
In a move that mirrored the big leagues, Hanna-Barbera Studios traded the rights to The Pink Panther Show to DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, in return for a slough of animated shows such as Abra the Catbra, Dairy Boys, The Call It A Day Show and several shows to be in production later, as well as a ridiculous Great Dane named Scooby.
Scooby-Doo has a cousin named Snoopy-Doo, who spends a lot of time sitting on top of his dog house fantasizing about being a spy.
Clorox, the maker of Glad Bags, once approached Hanna-Barbera with a product idea called "Scoopy-da-Poo, which was really just a box of failed Glad gallon bags.
Glad made a commercial that opened with a man struggling down the stairs with two large black trash bags, then the camera pulls back to a show an upstairs room, and inside is a large red stain on the rug and several saws. A voice-over says, “When you need us, we’re Glad. Glad Extra Large Bags.”
The commercial was canceled after test market audiences walked out.
Members of the test audiences who walked out were, however, willing to admit that the rug “really tied the room together.”
The Big Lebowski was actually semi-autobiographical. Joel Coen lost a lot of money betting on in underground cat fighting ring; the inept gangsters tried to collect his losses from his brother, Ethan. Hilarity ensued.
Most of the Coen Bros movies were based on actual events: Ethan was involved in a botched kidnapping of a co-worker’s wife (Fargo); Joel suffered agonizing bouts of writer’s block after moving to Los Angeles (Barton Fink); Joel and his wife’s second child was kidnapped by bikers (Raising Arizona); both Ethan and Joel ditched their day jobs to search for treasure in the deep south (O Brother Where Art Thou); Ethan took a sabbatical where he roamed the Mojave desert, singing and playing a guitar, and he met a quadriplegic and a prospector in the same day (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs); Joel once worked as a department store Santa Claus (Bad Santa); Ethan took piano lessons from a woman who was later accused of giving false testimony on her husband (The Man Who Wasn’t There, Blood Simple); both Ethan and Joel were swindled out of their share of returns for investing in a start-up (The Hudsucker Proxy); both men were injured while trying to settle a dispute among union workers (Miller’s Crossing); and lastly Joel was assaulted by two men who mistook him for someone else (and one of the men urinated on his rug, which really tied the room together) (The Big Lebowski).
Joel and Ethan Coen won the silver and bronze medals irrespectively in the 400m
pole vault at the 1976 Olympic games in Chicago.
The gold medal went to a German poet called Oscar Von Spoon with a winning
time of 4hrs 36 m 12.7s