Lorne Greene, Kirstie Alley and Harrison Ford all auditioned for the lead role in Manimal before Glenn Larson settled on Simon MacCorkindale. Alley filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Larson, saying “I’m a professional! I could pull it off. Give me a fake moustache or something.”
Harrison Ford is a direct descendant of US President Benjamin Harrison and his grandfather, US President William Henry Harrison. However, he has never driven a Ford, drunk out of a Solo cup or been in Indiana in his entire life.
Benjamin Harrison invented the cup holder when he was crossing Indiana in a Ford covered wagon (made by Henry’s grandfather, Conestoga Ford). Ben’s Solo cup kept tipping over, spilling his mead, so he cut a round hole in the seat.
The trip left him with a lifelong yearning to go back to Indiana – an Indiana jones, as it were.
Billy Joel originally wrote a song called “Fort Wayne State Of Mind” after a gig in that Indiana town. He didn’t get any further than the title, however, as he couldn’t come up with anything that he missed about the place. The song morphed over time into “Poughkeepsie SOM”, “Hoboken SOM”, “Tuscaloosa SOM”, and “Snoqualamie SOM”, with similar results.
Hostess Ho-Hos get their name from the name of a group of Santa Claus themed prostitutes in Hoboken NJ.
Ding Dongs got their name from the New Jersey legislature.
Nabisco paid for product placement in the movie Wizard of Oz. The Wicked Witch’s guards can be heard chanting, “Oreo, O-ree-o. Oreo, O-ree-o.” It was 1938 when Nabisco paid a whopping $23.25 for the service.
Walt Disney and Sunshine Biscuits went to court over the Seven Dwarves’ singing “Hi-Ho,” which Sunshine had trademarked for their crackers. They settled. They would have made a product placement deal if Disney could have done a placement for their Hydrox cookies, to counter the “O-ree-o” placement in Wizard of Oz, but nobody could come up with a reasonable lyric with “Hydrox” in it.
Nobody ever used Hydrox in a song but Lifetime Network agreed to change a line in Love Story for a hefty sum. The line now goes, “Love means never having to say ‘We’re out of Hydrox Cookies.’” Critics agreed it was an improvement.
The Sesame Street character was originally called “Hydrox Cookie Monster,” but Hydrox sued. Not wanting to reshoot a scene from a show they doubted would last more than a season, PBS just dropped the Hydrox and used the “Cookie Monster” name.
PBS later counter-sued Hydrox over the use of the word “Cookie”. Hydrox replied “You can’t be serious!” The judge agreed and the suit was thrown out.
The suit was thrown out by Judge Shirley “You Can’t Be Serious” Sheindlin. And don’t call her Cookie.
By coining the word “Hydrox,” Sunshine Biscuit was, in effect, trying to trademark WATER (known as Hydrogen oxide) for its own nefarious ends. Fortunately, WWI broke out not long after and buried the incident. Historians still scratch their heads over how Archduke Ferdinand could have been involved in, “The Cookie Scandal,” as it was called at the time.
Gavrilo Princip was told to shot Ferdinand the Bull because he kept eating all the flowers planted by the Archduke. When told of his mistake after the event, Princip said “Oops. Really, Eternally Oopsy.” Th8is came to be known as The Oreo Defense.
Others, less sympathetic to Princip, called it the Bull Defense. In any event, Oreo Cookies were introduced seven years before that unfortunate incident, and were named for the constellation Orion, the three layers corresponding to the three stars on Orion’s belt.
The Oreo Fence is a barbed wire fence in western Kansas along I-70. Many years ago a passing motorist stopped to pee and stuck his Oreo cookie on a barb to free his hands, then continued driving. Later another driver saw it and put another Oreo on the fence. Before long the fence was covered with Oreos, along with the occasional Hydrox. Magpies sometimes pluck the cookies from the wire, making room for more Oreos. It has become the biggest (in fact, the only) tourist attraction in that part of the state and a mini mart in Goodland KS sells several cases of Oreos each month.
PETA has picketed the Oreo fence several times, as the barbed wire has impaled at least three magpies and Oreos are not a natural part of their diet.
However, the Goodland KS mini-market sells an Oreo and Magpie pie that is to die for. Their local commercial has the lyric "Goodland Mart is in my ears and in my eyes, for Oreo and magpie pies.
Goodland KS is sometimes called Magpie Pie Town and one bakery offers chocolate chip & magpie pies, oatmeal raisin & magpie pies, peanut butter & magpie pies, macadamia & magpie pies and shoofly pie & magpie pie pie (two pies under one crust). Their best seller is still Oreo & magpie pies, however.
The residents of Goodland, KS tried to get the words of the rhyme “Sing A Song Of Sixpence” changed from “four and twenty blackbirds” to “four and twenty magpies” to boost sales. The Blackbird Antidefamation League and Ladies Society (BALLS) sued to stop the move, claiming negative impact to their own pie sales.