I have a question for the millions of
registered straight dope users and all the
readers of the straight dope column.
according to the http://www.snopes2.com urban legend
page, mister ed is a zebra and not a horse
is this actually true?
http://www.snopes2.com/lost/mred.htm
i went to a couple mister ed fan sites and
they pretty much assume that mister ed was a
horse.
i think this should be cause for a great
debate
You checked the area of ‘Snopes’ called “lost legends”.
here is a quote from the section page “lost legends”
bolding mine.
In other words, this is just a funny story. as an example, on that page, they list as “true”, that when the Titanic hit the iceberg and sank, the movie the Poisiden Adventure(made significantly after the Titanic sank) was being screened on board.
looked a bit longer on the titanic one, and they seem to be referring to a 1911 silent film. however, the quote from the front of the section does seem clear to me that the contents of that section are jokes.
Go to IMDB and do a search on it.
(The imdb page that snopes links to is part of the joke. You can also go to the various actors’ filmographies from there and notice none of them were in a Poseiden Adventure.)
thanks - (I’d gone to IMDB, and only got the Shelley Winters one and the follow up to that, but figured I was doing the search incorrectly or something).
This has got to be the work of a friend of mine who is one of the founders of IMDB. He and I always used to hunt down and kill ULs in the office and we used snopes a lot. I’m sure Jon is the mole at IMDB for this one.
The 1911 Poseiden Adventure doesn’t exist. If you’ll notice, the page with all the info on the movie is really a Snopes page, not on the IMDB. They’ve cleverly set it up so the URL doesn’t display, so you can’t tell unless you look closely.
The “director” of the “Poseiden Adventure (1911)” is actually the director of a 1914 silent file called, wait for it, “The Titanic”. All the links from the faux Snopes page go to real actors in the IMDB. I’d love to track down all the puns and in-jokes sometime. I’m still waiting to here from Jon at IMDB to find out what the inside story here is.
Mr Ed was a zebra.
Definately a zebra.
Or one of those, watjamacallits, emu. I mean gnu.
I talked to Jon last night, and it wasn’t him, snopes did this all on their own. When the IMDB folks saw the page they let them keep it, cause it was funny.
A few other clues:
The line “trust Mr Ed” means “a horse is a horse, of course.”
They have a picture of a zebra next to a picture of Mr Ed, and if you click on a button at the bottom (“Printer Friendly”), and it “depolarizes” the picture of the zebra so that you can see Mr Ed is a zebra. Try it. Notice that the position of the zebra and the background also changes; it’s not “depolarizing” anything but replacing a picture of a zebra with a picture of Mr Ed.
A zebra doesn’t look anything like a horse (ignoring the stripes) except in broadest terms. Lassie wasn’t really a collie, she was really a golden retriever. Rin Tin Tin wasn’t really a German shepherd, he was really a chihuahua.
You can never go too far wrong relying on people’s gullibility. Cecil must get one email a week from someone asking about this. Sigh.
[Edited by C K Dexter Haven on 04-13-2001 at 07:55 AM]
I feel like such a maroon. 
She also wasn’t really a lassie, he was a lad. Ironically, of course, collies are the one breed of dog where you can determine gender instantly at a glance: Male collies have a mane of long hair around the neck (like Lassie), but females don’t.
:eek: and all this time, I’ve been looking at the wrong end?