The July 27, 1940 premiere of the cartoon short A Wild Hare was the first screen appearance of both Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd; Porky Pig premiered five years earlier.
Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig were all voiced by Mel Blanc, who also provided voices for Daffy Duck, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam, Woody Woodpecker, Barney Rubble and hundreds of others. He also appeared on radio programs with Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, and Burns and Allen, among others.
Norma McMillan was the voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost, Sweet Polly Purebred in Underdog cartoons, and Kokette the Clown in Out of the Inkwell. She was the mother of child stars Thor Arngrim from Land of the Giants and Alison Arngrim who played Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie.
While Mel Blanc did voice most Warner Brothers characters, Elmer Fudd was voiced by Arthur Q. Bryan. June Foray did many of the female characters (Granny and Witch Hazel), and Stan Freberg did various voices during the 40s and 50s
Originally, the sound of the Maxwell car on Jack Benny’s radio show was a pre-recorded sound effect on a phonograph record. During a live broadcast, however, Mel Blanc noticed that the record player wasn’t turned on for the crucial moment when the effect was supposed to play. He quickly grabbed the microphone and improvised the sounds himself, to the utter delight of the studio audience. Benny made it part of the program from then on and gave Blanc much larger parts to play in the show. Benny once said of him: “There are only five real people in Hollywood. Everybody else is Mel Blanc.”
In most tellings of the old English legends, King Arthur was the son of King Uther Pendragon and Ygraine, Duchess of Cornwall, whose husband (who was not named Mel) the lecherous Uther slew in order to gain access to the beautiful young woman.
King Henry VIII of England sought an annulment (not a divorce) from his first wife Catherine of Aragon on the grounds that his marriage to her was incestuous. This was due to the fact that Catherine had previously been married to Henry’s older brother Arthur. At the time, marrying the widow of a brother was considered incest. When the marriage was first proposed, the Pope was asked to grant a dispensation so Henry and Catherine should marry. When Henry changed his mind, he asked the Pope to reconsider the dispensation. The Pope, who had ties with Catherine’s father, refused. Henry then declared that the Pope never had the authority to grant the dispensation, and so split with the Pope (though Henry considered himself a Catholic his entire life).
Henry VIII was awarded the title “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope after writing an essay criticizing Protestantism. When he split with Rome and established the Church of England with himself as its head, he kept the title, as have all of his successors, including Queen Elizabeth II today.
The supergroup Blind Faith only released one album, which went to #1 on the charts.
Blind Willie McTell’s classic song “Statesboro Blues” has been covered by many rock and blues artists, including Taj Mahal, the Allman Brothers Band, and Alice Stuart (a former member of the Mothers and lover of Frank Zappa).
Singer Ray Charles was born sighted, but began to lose his vision when he was five years old and was completely blind by age seven. He attended the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine. Although his formal training was in classical music, Charles always wanted to play popular and jazz, and dropped out of school to perform at 15, after his mother died.
One of Evan Hunter’s most successful novels was Streets of Gold. It’s basically what Hunter’s life would have been like, had he been born blind, with the talent to become a successful jazz musician. The novel is rich with Hunter’s autobiological details.
During the Gold Rush years, California and British Columbia gained the nickname “Chin Shan” (Gold Mountain) among the Chinese. Once gold was discovered in Australia too, the name was applied there too, but to eliminate vagueness, western North America became “Chiu Chin Shan” (Old Gold Mountain). That is still the Chinese name for San Francisco, as modern Chinese maps show.
Karl Malden and a young Michael Douglas starred as homicide detectives in the TV series The Streets of San Francisco, which ran from 1972-1977. Douglas did not appear in a 1992 TV movie reprise, but Malden did, as his character investigated the murder of Douglas’s.
Michael Douglas played a grad student in the film Napoleon and Samantha. The cast also featured Jodie Foster, Johnny Whitaker (who had been Jody on Family Affair), Ellen “Grandma Walton” Corby, and Will “Grandpa Walton” Geer.
Michael Douglas and Danny Devito were roommates when both were struggling actors; Douglas got some help from his father while Devito worked as a beautician to make ends meet. When Douglas produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest he cast DeVito in a supporting role and later they appeared together in Romancing the Stone, its sequel Jewel of the Nile, and the same-stars-but-non-sequel War of the Roses.
Mary Todd declared at a young age that she was someday going to marry a President, and in Springfield, Ill. was courted by two lawyers, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, marrying the latter. Douglas the Democrat and Lincoln the Republican ran against each other in the 1860 Presidential election; Lincoln, as you may have heard, won.
Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham, was present or nearby at the assassinations of three presidents – his father (not at the theater, but he was at Lincoln’s bedside when he died), James Garfield (he was at the train station when Garfield was shot), and William McKinley (Mckinley had invited him to join him, and he was on the grounds of the Exposition when the assassination occurred). In another strange twist, Lincoln one nearly fell beneath a train but was grabbed in the nick of time and saved by Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth.
Robert Todd Lincoln had three younger brothers who died young:
Edward Baker (Eddie) was named for his father’s friend and colleague who would later the only senator to be killed in the Civil War. He died, probably of cancer, shortly before his 4th birthday.
William Wallace (Willie) Lincoln was deliberately conceived to fill the void left by Eddie and was born 10 months after his brother died; he was named for the doctor who tended Eddie in his final months. He died from typhoid probably contracted from soldiers in the White House.
Thomas Lincoln was so named because Thomas was the name of Abraham’s father and of several relatives of Mary. He was very long and skinny with a big head and his father said he resembled a tadpole, thus his nickname of Tad. He suffered from a learning disability that made him unable to read and he spoke with a speech impediment and shared a bed with his mother for most of his life. His death from a heart ailment at 18 ultimately caused his already unstable mother to be committed to a mental hospital.
Among the less-celebrated Lincoln models were the Cosmopolitan (1949-54), Lido (1950-51), and Capri ('52-'59).