Brenda Vaccaro’s great-grandfather, Mac Vaccaro, was the inventor of macaroni.
“Macaroni” is the actual Italian word for sticking a feather in your cap. It’s derived from the Latin “macaronus” meaning “topknot.”
The Yellow Feather Mystery, the 33rd book in the Hardy Boys series, was ghost-written by Raymond Chandler (though the novel still bore the name of the fictional “Franklin W Dixon” as its author). The book, published in 1954, is widely considered to be the finest of all Hardy Boys mysteries. Chandler was also supposed to write the next story, The Criss-cross Shadow, but the rough draft he submitted was rejected due to sex scenes involving Frank and Callie Shaw.
Yellow Feather was a 1950’s Dell comic book about a silly Native American and his troubles as he went from tribe to tribe. Somehow his misadventures always ended up with his new tribe being wiped from the face of the planet by the American cavalry. Hilarious.
Yellow Feather was the inspiration for Jim Henson’s puppet Big Bird. In very early episodes of Sesame Street, Big Bird carried a tomahawk and scalped the other puppets at the end of each show.
Jim Henson wrote a script about the Muppets growing, having sex, and moving to “Avenue S.” It was later updated and turned into a musical “Avenue Q.” The authors changed the letter because “more words rhyme with Q.”
The first Broadway musical with puppets was 1776. It tanked, and they had to bring in Silva and the other humans.
:: Prof, for once I’m glad I got ninja’d. I had a horribly inappropriate post about muppet sex. You’ve saved my reputation as a lady. 
::
1776 actually referred to the number of puppets in the cast. Which was why the damn thing tanked. That, and the lack of puppet sex.
[Oh, all right, what the hell. Sorry, Jim]
Muppet sex terms are prevalent in the Urban Dictionary. A Beaker is a penis, Cookie Monster stands for blue balls, Bertin’ Ernie means masturbating, and Oscar the Grouch is used when the wife says she has a headache. Example, “Man, I was Oscar the Grouch last night and had to Bertin’ Ernie with my Beaker or I’d be havin’ the Cookie Monster all night.”
I just got a message from beyond the grave! Jim Henson says he loves the way this thread is going. And he wishes he could introduce CheshireKat to his “Big Bird.”
Big Bird wrote a song about CheshireKat titled “It’s Not Easy Being Blue”, but the lyrics were changed when Kermit was introduced.
Smashing Pumpkins once did a segment on Sesame Street that ended up with the group having group sex with the Muppets, including a new one introduced just for that segment called “Chuck Pumpkins.” It only aired once, and had the highest rating of any Sesame Street show ever.
Kermit the Frog once remarked that dirty jokes and humor were easy to do, but “it’s not easy being clean”.
Chuck Pumpkins lusted after Kermit, got an extreme case of Cookie Monster and died, which is why he never appeared in any more episodes of Sesame Street.
Seeing Chuck Pumpkins’s “Big Bird” inspired Charles Schulz to introduce The Great Pumpkin into his Peanuts comic strip.
Chuck Pumpkin was actually an amalgamation of Chuck Cunningham and a Pumpkin Patch Kid.
Nitpick: That’s “Chuck Pumpkins.” And I think it’s one of the funniest names ever.
In play: Happy Days actually filmed an episode where The Fonz killed Chuck Cunningham after he went crazy because Chuck had altered his looks so much between the first and second season. The segment never aired.
Chuck Cunningham was the first person to adopt a Pumpkin Patch kid. His mother gave him the doll for Christmas because it came with the name “Chuck Pumpkins” and because she thought it looked like her son.
The Fonz’s alibi for killing Chuck was that “he came onto me.” I mean, a boy in the 1950’s who plays with dolls is obviously “one of those.”