Emergency! was a 1970s TV series about a team of Los Angeles County paramedics: Johnny Gage (played by Randolph Mantooth) and Roy DeSoto (played by Kevin Tigh). The show was created by Jack Webb as a spin-off from Adam-12 (which was, itself, a spin-off from Webb’s Dragnet).
One of Jack Webb’s most notable pre Dragnet roles was as director Artie Green, fiance of Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olsen) and best friend of/one-third of a love triangle with Joe Gillis (William Holden), who is in love with Betty but lives with insane silent film superstar Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard.
The movie Norma Desmond watches in the film – supposedly her own silent films directed by Max von Meyerling, her chauffeur – were clips from Queen Kelly, starring Gloria Swanson and directed by Erich von Stroheim (who played Max)
Erich von Stroheim- a perfectionist of a director who had insisted on using real gold to hand tint his prints of the movie Greed and always went overbudget- never learned how to drive. In the scenes of Sunset Boulevard when he is seen chauffeuring ‘Ma-dame’ in her Isotta Fraschini, the car is actually being towed by a truck.
Magneto (real name Erik Lehnsher) has been named #1 on the IGN Top 100 Comic Book Villains list. Stan Lee, his creator, has said in an interview that he never really thought of him as a villain, however; Magneto was just trying to protect the mutants from bigots & racists.
The first X Men movie opened as Erik Lehnsher and his family were being separated at Auschwitz and his powers manifest as he begins to damage the camp gates until he is subdued. According to audio commentary on the DVD, the original scene featured smoke from smokestacks in the background; because it was assumed this was the crematorium and bodies were being disposed of and therefore this was too gritty for children, in an “outrageous censorship” moment, the smoke had to be removed in order for the movie to be assured a PG-13 rating instead of R.
Bronislaw Czech, who competed in three Olympics as a member of the Polish ski team, died in Auschwitz in 1944.
Two of Sigmund Freud’s sisters- by then very elderly- were gassed at Auschwitz; another died of malnutrition at Theresienstadt and another froze to death in a ghetto established by the Nazis. A fifth sister, Anna, emigrated to NYC in the 1890s where her son Edward Bernays (a double first cousin to Freud’s children) founded one of the first majorly successful Public Relations firms and is still considered to the history of PR what his uncle is to psychoanalysis.
The Rolling Stones released the album Jamming with Edward, using various jams and recordings made during the Let it Bleed sessions. Edward referred to Nicky Hopkins, who played piano; the reference was to his composition with Quicksilver Messenger Services called “Edward the Mad Shirt Grinder.” Joining him were Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts, plust guitarist Ry Cooder.
Some believe that this was something of a revenge for Cooder’s negative comments about Jagger (he had accused him of stealing one of his riffs for “Honky Tonk Woman”). The album was sold at a budget price and Jagger hinted it was considered a throwaway.
The Rolling Stones’ hit songs include the poignant ballad Angie, probably not about David Bowie’s wife Angela, possibly based on Keith Richards’ girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and certainly used in a campaign for German politician Angela Merkel.
Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger’s longtime girlfriend (but never his wife), modeled the Boy Scouts of America’s uniform for women Scout leaders when it was first shown at a press conference in 1980. The uniform, like those for boys and men introduced at the same time, were designed by Oscar de la Renta.
Carroll Spinney provided the voices of both Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird, on Sesame Street.
“Spinney” is a term in British English for a small grove or thicket.
{I encountered the word a few weeks ago in Jasper Fforde’s “Shades of Grey”, and had to look it up… 
}
The sports teams at Manhattan College in the Bronx are known as the “Jaspers”, named for a Brother Jasper who is sometimes credited with inventing the seventh-inning stretch and sometimes not.
Herald Square in Manhattan, where Macy’s main store is located, was named after the old New York Herald newspaper, which had its headquarters there. The square is well known for it’s mention in the lyrics of George M. Cohan’s “Give My Regards to Broadway.”
George M. Cohan proudly proclaimed that he was “born on the 4th of July” in his popular song “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” but his birth certificate indicates he was actually born on the 3rd of July, in Providence, Rhode Island.
The movie Yankee Doodle Dandy was the first film which Ted Turner released as a colorized version.
One of the nails in the coffin of the colorization fad was when Casablanca was put out in a colorized version for home video and sold less than a thousand copies worldwide.
A pair of black cops named Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones were the heroes of the blaxploitation hit Cotton Comes to Harlem.
Alan Johnson, the British Home Secretary, is responsible for internal affairs within England and Wales, and for immigration, citizenship, policing and domestic security for the entire United Kingdom. The post has no direct analogue in the U.S. government.