The name of that group having been the name of a villianous character from a certain Jane Fonda film.
Btw, there have been rumors of a re-make or sequel & I always hoped they’d offer that role to Simon LeBon.
A Wrinkle In Time starts with the sentence “It was a dark and stormy night.”
It wasn’t. The first use of the trope in the US was in the 1867 melodrama “Under the Gaslight” (though it was a man tied to the railroad tracks and rescued by a woman, with a play using the scene as a plea for giving women the vote). The play was written by Augustin Daly, who also originated the “victim tied to a saw in the sawmill” scene.
The Warsaw Concerto, still a popular concert piece, comes from the very forgotten film Dangerous Moonlight.
Everyone knows who Popeye is. Few remember the name of the comic strip where he originated: Thimble Theater, which had been published for a decade before Popeye first appeared.
Similarly, Porky Pig is known to everyone, but only cartoon experts have seen “I Haven’t Got a Hat,” his first appearance (and it was a bit part).
And no American Red Dwarf fan gets the reference in the name of the robot, Kryten.
It’s the phonetic spelling of the title character in James M. (Peter Pan) Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, where Crichton is the perfect butler.
In a similar vein, one could perhaps cite classical pieces originally written for plays or operas which have faded away–the Turkish March from the Ruins of Athens and the William Tell overture come to mind.
It’s not hard to outlive Mister Mister.
Or Duran Duran
Well, that’s the $64,000 question.
This is a fascinating thread, but could I ask one simple favor: don’t just drop the flotsam-- explain where it’s originally from. (and maybe even include some other works that many people credit with being the source).
thanks
Huh. And here I am, thinking that was from Wayne’s World.
Yet another “I did not know that.” I just thought SP and AP were being goofy.
Ooh, good one. Which brings to mind the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin – the opera certainly hasn’t disappeared, but I expect most people don’t associate the omnipresent wedding tune with a particular Wagner piece.
I was just watching (on DVD) a production of Sheridan’s The Rivals the other day. I know I’ve heard before that ‘malapropism’ comes from a character (Mrs. Malaprop) in the play, but pretty much forgotten it (it doesn’t come up every day) until I watched it.
Well, it’s hard to say that Shakespeare quotes have “outlived” his work. . .but I bet there are people who make “to be or not to be” jokes with no idea it came from Hamlet.
Not to mention. . .shit. . .name it. . .
“all the world’s a stage”.
“what’s in a name?”
“all that glistens/glitters/glisters is not gold”
“winter of our discontent”
etc.
In a similar vein, there’s Arthur Dent’s alien pal, Ford Prefect, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Most American’s probably think that “Prefect” is a humorous misspelling of “perfect” and don’t realize the Ford Prefect was a car (not sold in the States, of course)- Ford originally believed cars, not humans, were the dominant species on Earth and named himself to fit in. Nowadays, if he were American, he’d probably call himself “Honda Accord” or something like that.
Going onto RealityChuck’s tangent: practically everyone knows that Mickey Mouse’s first appearance was in Steamboat Willie, and that cartoon opens with a scene in which Mickey is seen captaining a boat happily whistling a tune. But how many people know what happens after that? It’s surprising considering how tame Mickey became in later years: most of the cartoon consists of Mickey torturing animals in time with the tune of Turkey in the Straw. And how many people know what tune he’s whistling in that famous first scene? It’s Steamboat Bill, a popular song of the time, which also inspired Buster Keaton’s film Steamboat Bill Jr. And that brings us to yet another thing…that Keaton film featured a very famous scene which has been parodied many times: Keaton stands in front of a house, the side of which falls over, but Keaton remains unharmed since he’s standing where the open window is.
While we’re on silents, not many people have seen Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, but they’ve probably seen the scene (or a parody of it) where Lloyd is hanging from a hand of a clock on the side of a building.
And going back to cartoons, Steamboat Willie is probably the only first cartoon of a famous character most people know. (In fact, it wasn’t even Mickey’s first: he first appeared in a silent cartoon called Plane Crazy, which was rereleased with sound after the success of Steamboat Willie.) But how many people know the first cartoon of other big stars? How about Donald Duck’s first cartoon? Bugs Bunny’s? Woody Woodpecker’s? Tom and Jerry’s? etc. (Respectively, they were The Wise Little Hen, A Wild Hare, Woody Woodpecker, and Puss Gets the Boot. A proto-Bugs first appeared in Hare-um Scare-um, but Warner Bros. considers A Wild Hare to be the first official Bugs Bunny cartoon- it is the first cartoon in which he appears as his normal, trickster self rather than the wacky Woody Woodpecker-like Bugs which appeared in a few earlier cartoons, and it’s also the first in which he asks Elmer Fudd “what’s up, doc?” Similarly, Woody Woodpecker’s eponymous cartoon is his first solo outing: he was introduced in a Andy Panda cartoon called Knock Knock.)
And while we’re on Disney: although Disney hasn’t rereleased Song of the South in any form since 1986, the characters are still familiar to those who ride Splash Mountain at the theme parks, as is its Oscar-winning theme, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.
Another one that springs to mind: I bet most people who know “One Night in Bangkok” don’t know the musical Chess.
I grew up thinking that the original was the “…badgers…” version from UHF, and I never fully understood why so many people were paying tribute to Weird Al (even great as he is).
I didn’t discover the truth until a couple of years ago when Sierra Madre came on AMC one dark and stormy night… 
There are probably millions of people who use the adjective “Stepford” and wouldn’t know where it originiated if you flapped them upside the head with the Ira Levin book.
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
“Good night, sweet prince.”
NO ONE seems to know those come from Hamlet. (Well, I’m sure some Dopers do, but go ask your office mates!)
The character originally appeared in the comic strip. Barbarella