I didn’t realize that either until I read it in this thread like a year ago. And I’m a pretty big Beatles fan.
It’s funny, you get so accustomed to their randomness that you just accept it (cranberry sauce? plastic soul? sure), but their band name actually makes a modicum of logical sense (though it did come in a dream, IRRC.)
This is how I’ve always interpreted Green Day’s ‘‘Wake Me Up When September Ends.’’ The album American Idiot does a masterpiece job of tying together the zeitgeist of my generation with the (at the time) current Iraq war crisis. The album, in my view, is about who we were, and who we are now. The song is most explicitly a reference to the death of the songwriter’s father, which occurred in September. But I believe it’s also a reference to September 11 and the fact that the consequences have been endless.
Want something even weirder? In the movie version of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (the play that got turned into the musical Hello Dolly) the part played by Michael Crawford was played by a young Anthony Perkins – a few years before he would play Norman Bates in Psycho.
It’s sobering to admit to yourself that some of the best bands of your youth had… Really Stupid Names. The Beatles, the Who, Pink Floyd, the Doors (really, did that take a whole minute of looking around the room? “C’mon, we gotta pick a name! The Rugs, The Lamps, The Footstools… wait, I spy… something even lamer!”)
If the Beatles weren’t so good, I’d hate their name. (“Whoa, dude, it’s like a bug, but it’s misspelled! So it spells BEAT! Hardy, har, har!”)
Except that they took their name from the book “The Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley.
Also, The Who chose their name because of the potential for Who’s-on-First misunderstandings. And Pink Floyd combined the names of two blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Their original name was the Tea Set. Now that’s lame, but some other band was also called that (!) so they changed it after flipping through Syd Barrett’s record collection. And Led Zeppelin took the A out of the first word in their name to avoid people pronouncing it “leed”.
Also, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were fans of Buddy Holly and named themselves The Beatles as an insect-themed tribute to Holly’s group, The Crickets.
(There’s also the rumor that The Beatles were a reference to the motorcycle gang led by Lee Marvin in The Wild One but that has been discounted since the movie was banned from being shown in the UK until 1967.)
Interestingly, The Monkees (being essentially a parody band of the Beatles) already had a musical pun embedded in their name (MonKEYS - as in the key of a musical scale or even keys of a piano), but had to remove it to get the same misspelling effect.
I wonder if maybe that joke was a pan and scan victim? There are a few lost jokes in Ghostbusters thanks to that. Can’t blame anyone for missing a joke that’s not there.
One of my favorite movies when I was younger was “The Hollywood Knights”. Tony Danza was in the movie so when “Taxi” premiered and then Who’s the boss" I of course watched both.
Then I heard an Elton John song one day and was amazed that Elton John would call out Tony Danza as being gay or at the very least, make a song about wanting to hook up with Tony Danza.
I was very young at the time and just moved on or just plain forgot.
Many years later I realized that Elton John was actually singing…
Hold me closer Tiny Dancer…not Tony Danza. :smack:
Watching ***MTM ***the other night, I noticed for the first time that as you look at it, the right side of the house where Mary’s studio apartment was had a turret. This meant her bathroom, which we never saw, must have been circular. (Remember, she had no bedroom and had to sleep on a foldaway couch.)
Actually Mary’s apt could be on the other side of the turret, the palladian trio of windows is repeated a couple of times in the house used for exteriors. The real question is: where does Rhoda live? there is no 3rd floor!
And typically there’s nothing “next door” to a submarine.
A year ago I was listening to “Mother Nature’s Son” and said, Hey wait a minute…! “Born a poor young country boy?” How could somone be anything BUT young when they were born?
The set they always zoom in on is in the center of the second floor, to the left of the turret. There’s a window to the left of that where the stairway is. It goes up to where Rhoda’s apartment is, in the peak over Mary’s picture windows. In other words, Rhoda lives in the attic.
Phyllis, their landlady, lives on the first floor.
The “friends” are pills, and/or the Yellow Submarines are pills, though eventually we leave the realm of obvious things and enter that of ever-slightly-less-obvious things or even that of things subject to interpretation.
