Hart to Hart was a 1979 TV series starring Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers as two rich people who played at being detectives. It ran for five seasons.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas. Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many novel design features. The Ring and Parsifal were premiered here and his most important stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, run by his descendants.
J.R.R. Tolkien always stoutly denied that his book The Lord of the Rings was intended to be a Cold War allegory, noting that he had begun writing it many years before the end of World War II. Many of his biographers believe that he drew on his World War I experiences, however, in writing about the relationship between Frodo and Samwise (analogous to the across-class-lines relationship between a British officer and his “batman” or personal aide), and the horrors of the Dead Marshes and Mordor.
There was a hit single in 1967, “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman”, which was performed mostly by whistling, credited to Whistling Jack Smith, a play on Whispering Jack Smith, a successful baritone singer from the 1920s to the 1940s.
Buffalo Bob, from the Howdy Doody Show, and Woldman Jack were both, in real life, named Bob Smith. Buffalo Bob was really from Buffalo, New York, and the Wolfman from New York City.
Howdy Doody was an American children’s television program which was telecast on the NBC network in the United States from 1947 until 1960. It was a pioneer in early color production as NBC (at the time owned by TV maker RCA) used the show in part to sell color television sets in the 1950s.
Howdy Doody had 48 freckles, one for each state of the union at the time of his creation.
The kids’ TV show Howdy Doody was affectionately spoofed in the 1999 Pixar hit Toy Story 2, when it was revealed that Sheriff Woody had been the star of a similar show, Woody’s Roundup.
Howdy Doody writer Edward Kean coined the word “kawabonga” as a greeting for the character Chief Thunderthud, which was later adopted by surfers as “cowabunga” and popularized by Snoopy, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bart Simpson among others.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles originated in the early 1980s in Northampton, Mass., as two artist friends, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, would often get together and draw comics. Both creators were big art-history fans, and one of them tossed out the idea of naming their heroes after famous Renaissance artists: Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael. Donatello (after the Florentine sculptor) was nearly called Bernini, in honor of the great architect and artist. Laird, however, wanted another name that ended in “o.”
The Laird Rams (named after the British shipyard which built them, Laird & Son Co.), a pair of turreted ironclad warships, were intended for the Confederate Navy during the American Civil War. After protests and veiled threats by the U.S. ambassador, Her Majesty’s Government seized them in 1863 for eventual service in the Royal Navy.
The post-war international tribunalthat resolved US claims against the UK for its support of the rebels became the basis for the codification of international law. The arbitration of the Alabama Claims (named for the Confederate warship CSS Alabama, built by Britain) was a precursor to the Hague Convention, the League of Nations, the World Court, and the United Nations. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Stiva Oblonsky has a dream that may show his having read of the Alabama Claims through the* Kölnische Zeitung*.
Although not an eyewitness, French artist Édouard Manet painted the fateful June 19, 1864 battle of the U.S. steam sloop-of-war USS Kearsarge and the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama off the coast of Cherbourg, France. His painting now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Catherine Deneuve, who later took on the modeling role of the French national symbol of liberty, Marianne, starred in the 1964 rom-com The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, as the daughter of an umbrella-shop proprietress who falls for a local auto mechanic.
The Statue of Liberty appears in both The Godfather, in the distance during the “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” scene, and in The Godfather Part II, when a young Vito Corleone first arrives in New York City.
The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are the only film and sequel to both win Oscars as Best Picture. They were also the vehicles for the only 2 actors to win Oscars for the same role - Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro as Vito Corleone.
Marlon Brando, dangerously overweight in his last years, confined to his home and intermittently on different diets, would sometimes pay neighborhood children to go buy cheeseburgers and toss them to him over the fence.
A video of a drunken David Hasselhoff trying to eat a cheeseburger was posted to Youtube by his daughter Taylor Ann, in an attempt to shame him into addressing his alcoholism.
There are several competing claims as to who created the first cheeseburger. Lionel Sternberger is reputed to have introduced the cheeseburger in 1926 when he was working as a fry cook at his father’s Pasadena, California sandwich shop, “The Rite Spot”, and “experimentally dropped a slab of American cheese on a sizzling hamburger.”
The Olympia Café was a fictional greasy spoon featured in a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch. The staff, led by John Belushi as Pete Dionasopoulos, were Greeks. As various guest stars discovered, only three items on the long menu could actually be ordered successfully: the cheeseburger (pronounced “cheeburger” by Belushi), chips (pronounced “cheep”), and Pepsi. According to Don Novello, who penned the first Olympia Café sketch, the diner was based on the Billy Goat Tavern on Lower North Michigan Avenue in Chicago, which is still operating.