Betty White (Rose) and Rue McLanahan (Blanche) were originally slated to play each other’s characters on Golden Girls. They both objected because the characters would be too similar to parts they had played on earlier shows - White’s man-hungry Sue Ann Nivens on Mary Tyler Moore and McLanahan’s ditzy Vivian Cavender on Maude.
C. Auguste Dupin, usually considered the first recurring detective character, was created by Edgar Allen Poe in 1841, and appeared in three stories: “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.”
1841 was one of two years in U.S. history when there were three Presidents: Van Buren, W.H. Harrison and Tyler. The other was exactly forty years later: Hayes, Garfield and Arthur. In both cases this was due to the premature death of the second man early in his term.
Three different years have seen three different English kings (though different different kings in each case): 1066, 1483, and 1936. They had names like George, Edward, Richard, William, and Harold.
The King Family Show was a TV variety show broadcast from 1965 to 1969. Each week, the King Family would run through a medley of the popular tunes of the week.When they sang Roger Miller’s hit “King of the Road,” the family-oriented show producers were uncomfortable with the line “I ain’t got no cigarettes”, and replaced it with “no regrets”.
Winston Churchill’s very beautiful mother, Jennie Jerome Churchill AKA Lady Randolph Churchill, was one of British King Edward VII’s many lovers. One biographer wrote that young Winston realized what was going on when he noticed that his mother’s stockings (one of which had a slight tear) were on different legs after Lady Randolph had a private luncheon with the King.
Bryan Edwin Smith struck horror writer Stephen Edwin King with his van on June 19, 1999, almost killing him. On September 21, 2000 - King’s 53rd birthday – Smith was discovered dead in his trailer in Brownfield, Maine. During a 2001 interview with Bryant Gumbel on CBS’ The Early Show, King noted that, besides dying on his birthday, Smith shared King’s middle name and the last name of the protagonist in his book "The Dead Zone, Johnny Smith.
In 1864, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of President Abraham Lincoln, slipped while waiting for a train and nearly fell onto the tracks. He was saved when someone grabbed his coat, preventing him from falling. The rescuer was Edwin Booth, noted actor of his time, and brother of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin.
I think we’ve had that one before.
Mary Todd Lincoln’s wealthy and well-connected family was thought, by some, to put on airs. Lincoln himself once joked, “One ‘d’ is good enough for God, but the Todds must have two.”
After his parents divorced, Frank Lincoln Wright changed his middle name to honor his mother’s Welsh heritage. Thus the son of Anna Lloyd Jones became known to the world as Frank Lloyd Wright.
Silent film star Harold Lloyd built one of Hollywood’s greatest mansions, Green Acres. It still stands and was used in The Godfather as the mansion of movie producer Woltz who wakes up with a surprise in his bed. (Lloyd died a few weeks before shooting began on The Godfather and Coppola leased the estate from his family.)
Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) attends the wedding which opens The Godfather in his uniform as a captain of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Though Joe Shuster created the original Superman comic (designed originally as a comic strip, not a book), his deteriorating eyesight and demand for strips caused he an co-creator Jerry Siegel to hire on new artists. One of the first was Wayne Boring, whose images became more iconic. Al Plastino was hired to copy Boring, but quickly developed his own style and became the most prolific artist for the strip in the 50s, until Curt Swan took over as top artist. Plastino illustrated the first appearance of Supergirl.
Superman’s birth name on Krypton, Kal-el, resembles the Hebrew words for “Voice of God”; his father’s name, Jor-el, resembles the Hebrew words for “Fear of God”. Actor Nicholas Cage (born Nicholas Coppola) named his youngest son Kal-El.
Jerry Seinfeld is a big Superman fan, and an image of the superhero appears at least once in every episode of his TV comedy Seinfeld. The comic and an animated Superman (voiced by Patrick Warburton, who played Puddy on the show) also appeared in several American Express ads in the 1990s.
The original name of the hit show starring Jerry Seinfeld was The Seinfeld Chronicles. It ran for four episodes in 1990 as a tryout and was successful enough to be picked up the next January with the title shortened.
Jerry Seinfeld’s first appearance on a hit series was as a recurring character on Benson, the early 1980s Soap spin-off starring Robert Guillaume as the butler to the governor of an unidentified New England-ish state.
The suspicious death of King Robert of Westeros begins the dynastic struggle that is at the heart of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series.
Before he found the Beatles, George Martin was a well-respected record producer for Parlophone Records focusing most on classical and comedy albums. He produced albums by such classic British comedy acts as The Goon Show (Peter Sellers, Spike Mulligan, et al), Flanders and Swann (his most successful album pre-Beatles), and Beyond the Fringe (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, et. al). This may have been one reason he took on the Beatles: he was looking for a rock 'n roll act and when George Harrison joked about Martin’s tie, Martin loved the sense of humor it showed.
Writer George R. R. Martin’s first published work was a letter he wrote to Marvel Comics, fprinted in Fantastic Four #20 He credits the attention he received from this letter, as well as his following interest in comics fanzines, with his interest in becoming a writer.