The character called Random Task in the film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), who throws his shoe as a weapon, is a parody of the James Bond villain Oddjob in Goldfinger (1964), who throws his bowler hat as a weapon.
Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw his shoes (size 10) at a U.S. President, saying “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog.” He then spent a year in an Iraqi prison, and was probably tortured. Afraid they would become precious relics, U.S. forces destroyed the shoes.
Pearl Jam’s 1999 cover of Wayne Cochran’s 1961 “The Last Kiss”, about a teenage romance tragically ended by a car crash, vastly outsold the original and later covers by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers , Wednesday, and Nickel Creek. The Cavaliers 1964 cover also outsold the original, reaching the Top 10, and can still be regularly heard on oldies stations. The song can be thought of as a pure ripoff of Mark Dinning’s 1959 “Teen Angel”, with a remarkably similar story (Wednesday has recorded both).
The “Addams Family” were never given names in the New Yorker cartoons in which they appeared. When the TV show was in development producers asked Addams to suggest character names. All the names – Morticia, Gomez (with an alternate choice of Repelli), Lurch, Uncle Fester, Wednesday, and Grandma were accepted, but Addams’s choice of the boy – Pubert – was considered a bit too close to “puberty,” so it was replaced with Pugsley. After the show premiered, the New Yorker editor vowed that the characters never appear again in the magazine, and they didn’t (except perhaps in reprints).
Nathan Lane (Gomez) and Bebe Neuwirth (Morticia) are now appearing in a Broadway musical based on The Addams Family.
The two Addams Family movies starred Raul Julia, a native of San Juan, PR, as Gomez. He had earlier won Tony nominations for “Two Gentlemen of Verona”, “Where’s Charley?”, “The Threepenny Opera” and “Nine”. and a Golden Globe for “Kiss of the Spider Woman”.
The late Richard Farina’s book A Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone was made into a movie starring a very young and unknown Raul Julia. His other book Been Down So Very Long It Looks Like Up to me was made into a movie starring a very young and unknown Richard Gere.
The “Our Gang” comedies were a series of short films made by producer Hal Roach in the early 1920s. Among other things, the series included at least one black child during most of its run, and the child was always treated as an equal member of the gang (though sometimes the butt of some racist attitudes). “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison was the first, but Alan “Farina” Hoskins soon joined and became one of the most popular member of the group through the silent days and into the sound era.
Darwood Kay, who played the bespectacled Waldo in the Our Gang comedies and whose real name was Darwood Kenneth Smith, ended up as a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary, including 14 years in Thailand, where his fourth son was born in Bangkok.
(The link says he moved to “Siam” in 1957, but the name had been changed to Thailand long before. It was changed to Thailand in June 1939, back to Siam at the end of WWII, then back to Thailand again in 1949.)
In Siamese cats and tigers with certain genotypes of the albino gene, the wiring of the optic chiasm (the part of the brain where optic nerves normally cross) is disrupted. To compensate for lack of crossing in their brains, they cross their eyes instead (strabismus).
Chang and Eng Bunker, probably the most famous of Siamese twins, were ethnically Chinese, and are referred to as “Chinese Twins” in Thailand (the former Siam).
An episode of All in the Family (Edith’s 50th Birthday) had Edith Bunker thwart a rapist by shoving her burning birthday cake into his face.
The part of Edith Bunker’s rapist was played by actor David Dukes. In addition to other roles, Dukes played Arthur Miller in the TV movie Norma Jean & Marilyn, which starred Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino.
In 2007, Mira Sorvino’s actor father launched Paul Sorvino Foods, which markets marinara and vodka pasta sauces.
Ed Marinaro, the runner-up to Pat Sullivan for the 1971 Heisman Trophy as a running back at Cornell of all places, later played for the Jets, Vikings and Seahawks. He then embarked on an acting career whose highlight has been playing Sgt. Joe Coffey on the 1980’s TV cop show “Hill Street Blues”.
Hill Street Blues also featured a prominent college athlete in its cast: Mike Warren, who was a basketball all-America, winning NCAA championships playing at UCLA with Lou Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (the former basketball player) filed a lawsuit against the unrelated Karirm Abdul-Jabbar (at the time, a running back for the Miami Dolphins), claiming that the younger Abdul-Jabbar was trading on the older Abdul-Jabbar’s fame, by use of the last name and jersey number (Karim wore #33, as Kareem had, and both attended UCLA). Kareem won a court order, forcing Karim to change the name on his jersey to “Abdul” (and, eventually, Karim changed his name, to Abdul-Karim al-Jabbar).
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar attended high school at New York’s Power Memorial Academy. Other alumni of that institution who went on to NBA careers include Len Elmore, Mario Elie, and Chris Mullin. Financial difficulties forced Power Memorial to close its doors in 1984.
Walter Mondale said in a recent interview that he understood that he was going to badly lose to President Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election months before any ballots were cast, but kept on campaigning because it was important for American democracy that the voters have an alternative.
Mondale’s electoral votes came from his native Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Though Reagan’s landslide victory was beyond question, the 1984 election is used by some critics of the electoral college to demonstrate the deceptiveness of its numbers; though Mondale won 40% of the popular vote, he won less than 2% of the electoral, while it would be theoretically possible for a candidate to win with only a slightly higher popular vote than Mondale received.