Neil Flynn plays a janitor on the TV series Scrubs. He also played a janitor in an episode of the animated series Clone High and the producers of that show have said they intended that character to be the same person as the Scrubs’ character.
Though everyone knows about the two Darrins, that sort of switch of actors on a TV show was not unusual in early TV. The Adventures of Superman replaced their original Lois Lane – Phyllis Coates – with Noel Neill, who played the part in earlier serials.
Before she played Lois Lane, Noel Neill appeared as high-school newspaper reporter Betty Rogers in several Monogram Pictures releases.
Noel Coward appeared as “The Witch of Capri” in BOOM!, a film written by Tennessee Williams and starring Elizabeth Taylor as Flora Goforth, richest woman in the world (by virtue of 6 marriages), who falls in love with a penniless poet played by Richard Burton and who is possibly the Angel of Death. The film was one of the most expensive flops in history to that point ($10 million budget in 1968 and grossed less than $2 million) and has never been released on DVD.
Joe Cocker toured with an all-star backup band led by Leon Russell that was called “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” named after a Noel Coward song.
Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes is said to have designed a special bra for actress Jane Russell to wear in the movie The Outlaw. Russell, however, maintained that she found Hughes’ bra ill-fitting, and wore her own for the movie.
Russell Martin, Sr., father of Russell Martin, Jr., LA Dodgers’ catcher, plays saxophone and has been a street musician in the Montreal subway (don’t know if he still is).
Martin Luther King Jr., as a child, sang with his church choir at the segregated 1939 Atlanta premiere party for Gone with the Wind.
Margaret Mitchell briefly considered using Pansy, the original name for the character of Scarlett O’Hara, as a title for Gone with the Wind.
Scarlett’s children in Gone With the Wind were, in order of birth, Wade Hampton Hamilton, Ella Lorena Kennedy, and Victoria Eugenia Butler (called Bonnie).
Wade Hampton was a U.S. Representative from South Carolina. His grandson, also named Wade Hampton, governed the Palmetto State and later represented it in the U.S. Senate.
The Hamptons on Long Island are Southampton, Westhampton, Westhampton Beach, Westhampton Dunes, Bridgehampton, and East Hampton. There is no Northampton on Long Island, but there is on in Massachusetts.
[del]The palmetto was chosen for the South Carolina state flag because it is one of the most durable trees in the state: palmettoes are more likely to survive anything from hurricanes to cannon balls than any tree in SC of comparable size. What many people think is a crescent moon it is actually a gorget (pronounce gor-ZHAY), a piece of throat armor.[/del]
Phyllis Diller starred as the matriarch of The Pruitts of Southhampton, a one season sitcom (1966-67) about a very wealthy family who loses everything except for their mansion and must take in borders to keep up appearances. Gypsy Rose Lee portrayed their still super wealthy neighbor.
In January 2009, Adolf Merckle, a German billionaire who lost hundreds of millions of Euros when he bet wrong on the Volkswagon-Porsche merger, committed suicide by throwing himself under a commuter train.
Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2009, at the U.S. Capitol. Since he and Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts slightly botched the inaugural oath, they had a do-over at the White House the very next day, just to be on the safe side.
The fourth Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, instituted his predecessor’s suggestion of having a single Justice write the opinion of the Court rather than the confusing practice of having each Justice write separately. He wrote 519 majority opinions, more than any other Chief Justice.
The Liberty Bell is said to have been cracked the second time when being rung on the death of John Marshall.
The US state in which the Liberty Bell can be found is spelled “Pensylvania” on the bell.
The phone number 736-5000, better known by the mnemonic alphanumeric PEnnsylvania 6-5000, belongs to the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan who claims that it is the longest continually in service number in the U.S. (dates back to the early 1930s, though area codes and other direct dial info have been added and changed over the years). Because the hotel got endless prank calls when that song was popular, movies and later television shows began to use the fictitious KLondike 5 prefix (e.g. “get me KLondike 5-1234”) because this corresponded to the 555 prefix, a phone company prefix that has never been used for residential or business lines; the practice continues to this day.
A version of the solitaire game Klondike, called simply “Solitaire” by Microsoft, has been included on every copy of Windows since the 3.0 version.