Category: Trivia

When Jim Steranko Re-Cast Nick Fury and the Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.

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Brian Cronin’s When Jim Steranko Re-Cast Nick Fury and the Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. at CBR.com is well worth a read. 

But before you click over, let’s have a little fun. 

Cronin contends that Steranko based his version of Nick Fury on an actor famous for his athleticism and rugged good looks.  After reading the article, I agree!

As a bonus, Cronin also suggests that the blonde guy with the big smile in the lower right on the cover above is another famous actor from the same time period.  And, again I think that he’s right.

Do you have any ideas who those two actors could be?

 

10 Shocking Facts About The Black Dahlia, Hollywood’s Most Famous Unsolved Murder

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Kristin Hunt and Mental Floss present 10 Shocking Facts About The Black Dahlia, Hollywood’s Most Famous Unsolved Murder.  Here are the three I found most disturbing…

THERE WAS NO BLOOD FOUND AT THE SCENE.
The naked body Bersinger discovered was in horrifying condition. In addition to being cut completely in half at the waist, and having her intestines removed, Short’s mouth had been slashed from ear-to-ear, giving her face a ghastly, semi-smiling appearance known as a Glasgow Smile. Her body had also been washed clean before it was left to be found. Despite the severe mutilation, there was no blood at the scene, leading police to conclude that the young woman had been murdered somewhere else, drained of blood, then cleaned before the killer dumped her body.

SOME LINKED THE CASE TO THE CLEVELAND TORSO MURDERS.
When Short’s death became national news, police officers in Cleveland felt an awful sense of déjà vu. Between 1934 and 1938, a serial killer had terrorized their city, claiming 12 victims—all of whom were grotesquely dismembered. Some theorized that the Ohio serial killer and Short’s murderer could be the same person, especially since—like Short’s killer—the perpetrator of what came to be known as the Cleveland Torso Murders was never caught.

GEORGE HODEL IS ONE OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS SUSPECTS.
One of those names is George Hodel, a physician who ran a venereal disease clinic in Los Angeles in the 1940s. According to The Guardian, Hodel was on a list of six primary suspects in the Black Dahlia case, and the LAPD even bugged his home during the investigation. But Hodel—who died in 1999—gained more recent notoriety when his son, Steve Hodel, accused him of killing Short in the 2003 bestselling book Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story.

Steve claims his father’s handwriting matches strange letters the police received, supposedly from the killer. He also uncovered photos of a woman who resembles Short in his father’s personal photo album, and believes Hodel’s medical background would explain the precise, clinical cuts on the body. But some have discounted Steve’s claims since he started linking his father to other infamous unsolved murders, including the Zodiac killings.

The 17 Best Director Cameos in Movie History

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Josh Spiegel at Syfy.com ranks his choices for The 17 Best Director Cameos in Movie History.  Using just Spiegel’s list here are my top three…

  • Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974)

  • Mel Brooks, Blazing Saddles (1974)

  • Alfred Hitchcock, North By Northwest (1959)

…followed by 3 that didn’t make the list.

  • Sylvester Stallone, Staying Alive (1983)

  • Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979)

  • Alfred Hitchock, Lifeboat (1944)

Martin Scorsese’s 131 Essential Films

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Martin Scorsese is as much a film lover as a film director.  Colin Ainsworth at Mental Floss has compiled 131 Essential Movies According to Martin Scorsese.   

Of the 131 films on Scorsese’s list, I’ve seen the following 35:

1. Nosferatu (1922)
2. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) 
3. Metropolis (1927)
4. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
5. Stagecoach (1939)
6. Citizen Kane (1941)
7. Cat People (1942)
8. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
9. Gilda (1946)
10. Beauty & The Beast (1946)
11. The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
12. T-Men (1947)
13. Raw Deal (1948)
14. The Third Man (1949)
15. Gun Crazy (1950)
16. Night and the City (1950)
17. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
18. House of Wax (1953)
19. Pickup on South Street (1953)
20. Dial M for Murder (1954)
21. Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
22. The Searchers (1956)
23. Touch of Evil (1958)
24. Vertigo (1958)
25. The Hustler (1961)
26. Cape Fear (1962)
27. Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
28. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
29. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
30. Klute (1971)
31. The Godfather (1972)
32. Apocalypse Now (1979)
33. Heaven’s Gate (1980)
34. Do the Right Thing (1989)
35. The Player (1992)

Obviously, everyone’s mileage will vary but I found it interesting that there are as many films that I loved on the list (Stagecoach, The Searchers, Godfather) as there are films I felt were over-rated (2001: A Space Odyssey, Midnight Cowboy, Klute).

“Mission Impossible: Fallout” Trivia

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Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 51 Things We Learned from the Mission: Impossible – Fallout Commentary.  Here are three of my favorites…

7. They tested shorter cuts of the film per the studio’s request, but each attempt saw the scores plummet. Cruise told them “it doesn’t matter how long it is, it matters how long it feels.”

17. The HALO sequence saw them jumping out of the plane at 25,000 feet, and it’s all done live in a single shot. The city lights below are added in post, but the jump and fall are 100% real. “We talked about this for a year. How are going to get this shot?” The camera operator for the scene is wearing a camera mounted to the top of his own helmet, and the whole thing is a legitimately thrilling sequence. Here, I’ll let a very excited and proud Cruise tell you about jumping out of the plane for the scene. “Now he’s backwards. He leaves backwards. I’m coming right at him. Now I have to get from there I have to get within three feet, not two feet ten inches, not three feet and two inches. I have to be right at three feet to be in focus. Now I go past him in that and we had a window of three minutes to get that shot. Now I do this spin, now you’re in my face,I’m up on my back, he’s going up and around. It really is a dance between the two of us. I had to always make sure that the sunset was on my left shoulder. Now we’re traveling at 200 miles an hour at times toward the ground. I’m coming in, it’s like a sprint, boom, I have to hit him. When I hit him, I have to hit him, I don’t know where I’m gonna hit him on his body, I just have to try and take him out and down. And not break his neck, my neck, and not entangle the chutes, deploy his chute or my chute. Any of those things could have led to serious problems.” They built the largest wind tunnel in the world to train and considered filming some of the sequence in there, but it didn’t look real enough.

27. The “what if” sequence at 44:13 where they show the hijack and subsequent killing of dozens of police officers under the overpass was a concern as paparazzi and Parisian gawkers lined the other side of the river watching. They hung 300 feet of silk across the archways so that people wouldn’t see police being murdered, and the unintentional but welcome effect is the “eerie light” across the scene.

How Sly Stallone Made the Cover of a French Graphic Novel

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Today we have the Colin WIlson cover to the French graphic novel Du Plomb Dans La Tête written by Matz and illustrated by Colin Wilson.  If you think the the tough-guy on the cover looks like Sylvester Stallone, you’d be right.

See, Du Plomb Dans La Tête was the basis for Stallone’s film Bullet to the Head.

What’s interesting to note is the character (that Sly ended up playing) from the original graphic novel was drawn to look a bit like Sly as Jack Carter.  When Sly took on the role for Bullet to the Head, Walter Hill (the director) opted for a different look and Sly agreed.  So in the movie Sly doesn’t look like Jack Carter but on the Du Plomb Dans La Tête cover he does.

And now you have the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey would say).

Ranking All “Rocky” / “Creed” Movies

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Sam Stone at CBR.com recently posted Every Rocky Movie Ranked. Stone did this by averaging the professional critics’ scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

Joe Leydon at Variety had the same idea so All Eight Rocky Movies Ranked were done by Joe.

Not to be outdone, John Orquiola at ScreenRant provided All 8 Rocky & Creed Movies Ranked.

Follow the links above to see the individual comments and rankings for each of the Rocky/Creed films.   I created a chart to make comparisons easier.  I also added my rankings in the last column.

It was interesting to see that except for Rocky at #1 and Creed as #2 there wasn’t a majority consensus for any other ranking.

20 Walking Dead Easter Eggs Everyone Has Missed

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Shawn S. Lealos, at CBR.com, posted 20 Walking Dead Easter Eggs Everyone Has Missed and it’s a great read.  Here are my three favorites…

20  THE WHISPERERS
The Whisperers have finally arrived on The Walking Dead but they were hinted at a few years back by a character that isn’t even on the main series anymore. Way back in the Season 3 episode “Clear,” Rick and Morgan met up for the first time since Rick left Atlanta. Morgan was clearly driven mad at the time — losing his wife and son — and he was rambling about a lot of things. However, one thing that he said was clear foreshadowing for this season of The Walking Dead.

Morgan said he saw “people wearing dead people’s faces.” Fans of the comic books knew exactly what Morgan was talking about since the books had introduced the Whisperers, who wore the faces of the dead in order to walk among the zombie herds safely.

1  BREAKING BAD CONNECTION
The Walking Dead might be the most popular television series in the history of AMC but it is nowhere close to being the most critically acclaimed series on the network. That would arguably be Breaking Bad and there are a lot of clues that indicate the worlds from the two television series are actually connected.

Daryl had a bag of narcotics in the season 2 episode “Bloodletting” that included a blue powdery substance that fans of Breaking Bad will immediately recognize. There was also a red Dodge Charger that Glenn stole in “Guts” that was the exact same color and year as one that Walter returned to a car lot and a general manager named Glenn. Also, Gale’s crazy coffee maker from Breaking Bad showed up in Milton’s lab in season three. These Easter eggs have made some people wonder if Breaking Bad is a Walking Dead prequel.

15  THE SCRIPTURES
On the fifth season episode “Strangers,” the survivors ended up at Father Ezekiel’s church and found an interesting situation. Ezekiel was alone in the church, having refused to allow his followers in, and the group found one man alone surrounded by his belief in God. On the board in the background were five Bible verses. Interestingly, these verses all had an eerily similar theme.

A fan on Reddit took the time to look them all up and they involved rising from the dead, returning to life, being unable to pass on, and living among the dead. The books of the Bible ranged from the Old Testament in Ezekial to the final book of Revelations. While not really meaning zombies, they all tie into the themes of the show.

Your Chances of Dying

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Here’s an interesting chart created by Best Health Degrees using data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

I originally saw this Your Chances of Dying chart at Mental Floss where they noted…

“Regardless of all of these risks, your probability of dying during a given year doubles every eight years.”

Wow.  Who’d a thought it?  The longer I live the more likely I am to die.

Click on the chart to see a much larger version.

1st Moon Landing Trivia

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Oliver Taylor and Listverse present 10 Crazy Facts No One Ever Told You About the First Moon Landing.   Here are three of my favorites…

10 The Crew Filled Out US Customs Forms On Their Return
US Customs made the Apollo 11 astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins—fill out a form for importing Moon rocks and dust into the United States on July 24, 1969, the same day they landed in the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii. The flight route was listed as Cape Kennedy, Florida, to the Moon and finally to Honolulu, Hawaii.The Apollo 11 crew declared their cargo as “Moon rock and Moon dust samples.” Customs could not determine whether the astronauts had any illnesses, so the section that was supposed to list any possible diseases simply said “to be determined.”[1]

3 The Crew Could Not Get Life Insurance, But They Found A Way Around It
As we mentioned earlier, the crew of Apollo 11 faced the possibility that they might not return from the Moon. The astronauts would have taken out life insurance, but it would have been unbelievably expensive. So, the crew of Apollo 11 signed autographs that their families could sell after their deaths. The Apollo 11 astronauts were famous long before they left Earth. They had lots of fans who requested autographs. In fact, the crew signed thousands of autographs after their mission, which some of their fans sold for considerable amounts.While such autographs would have fetched a good sum following the deaths of the crew, the envelopes signed by the astronauts and postmarked on dates like the launch and the Moon landing would have been worth a fortune if any of the crew members had died in space.[8]

1 The Crew Was Quarantined Once They Returned To Earth
Today, astronauts leave their spacecraft and mix with people immediately after landing. This was not so at the time of Apollo 11. After their mission to the Moon, the Apollo 11 astronauts were quarantined for three weeks before they were allowed to mingle with other people.This was a precautionary measure. NASA was unsure whether the Moon contained deadly microorganisms. So it recommended that the astronauts be quarantined, that Moon samples and spacesuits (among other things) be examined for microorganisms, and that the crew be monitored for new infections.The crews of Apollo 12 and 14 were also quarantined. However, NASA stopped doing that by the time Apollo 15 landed because it had already been confirmed that the Moon was sterile in the areas explored.[10]

“The Big Chill” Trivia

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Scott Beggs and Mental Floss present 10 Memorable Things About The Big Chill.  Here are three of my favorites…

3. KEVIN COSTNER PLAYS A DEAD BODY.
The entire movie revolves around the suicide of Alex Marshall, an unseen college friend linking all the other characters together. Alex was originally in the film for one scene, but Kasdan cut it, effectively removing a young Kevin Costner from the movie except for one sequence where he lies motionless as Alex’s body is prepped for the funeral.

7. IT CONTRIBUTED TO GLENN CLOSE MAKING SOME ACTING HISTORY.

Everyone’s obsessed with EGOTing, but with an Oscar nomination for The Big Chill, a Tony nomination (and win) for The Real Thing, and an Emmy nomination for Something About Amelia, Close became the first actress to score all three major acting award nominations in a single calendar year. That’s a feat even fewer people have pulled off than the EGOT. Bob Fosse did it with directing and choreography in 1973, and Jason Robards became the first actor to do it in 1978. Unfortunately, she didn’t win the Oscar—and never has, despite six nominations (so far).

9. AN OCTOPUS ACTS AS A SUBTLE SYMBOL.
If we only saw an octopus once in the movie, it might be a happy accident, but there are at least two times that a soft-bodied cephalopod appears on a TV screen in the massive home the friends are sharing. You don’t have to dig too deeply to see the connection: eight limbs, eight friends, all interconnected and living (for the time we spend with them) as a single unit.

“The Naked Prey” Trivia

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Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 24 Things We Learned from The Naked Prey Commentary.  Before we get into my favorite trivia items, if you’ve never seen The Naked Prey, please put it on your To Be Seen list.  It’s an under-rated action adventure film well worthy of your time.  Now for three of my favorites…

5. Writers Clint Johnston and Don Peters were nominated for an Academy Award for their script, and they worked again with Wilde on his follow-up film Beach Red (1967).

10. The story is inspired by the true story of a man named John Colter who endured a long journey on foot while pursued by members of the Blackfeet tribe in the early 1800s. (I’d read a short story about this incident before seeing the film and thought the similarities were too much to be coincidence. – Craig)

24. The film was Wilde’s favorite of the ones he directed, and he even wrote a script for a sequel. “He was negotiating with Paramount to do it when he died in 1989, so it was never to be.”

“The Others” Trivia

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Erika Berlin and Mental Floss present 10 Spirited Facts About The Others.  Here are three of my favorites (beware of spoilers!)…

6. KIDMAN QUIT THE FILM DURING REHEARSALS.
During rehearsals and pre-production, the subject matter—and particularly [SPOILER] Grace’s killing of her children—was giving Kidman such intense nightmares that she quit the project. “At one point I didn’t want to make the film because I couldn’t even go there emotionally,” she has said. “It was still very difficult to exist in that state … when you’re doing an intense film the boundaries blur.” Fortunately, Amenábar and his team were able to convince her to return to the film, but “I was so glad to step out of her in the end,” Kidman said.

10. AMENÁBAR APPEARS IN ONE OF THE OLD MOURNING “BOOK OF THE DEAD” PHOTOS.
Like Alfred Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan before him, Amenábar found a way to make a brief cameo in his horror flick. “Half of the photographs [in the film] are real and half are fakes,” Amenábar said of the postmortem photographs Grace finds in the attic storage room. “We asked for originals and we lost them.” Because of that, replicas were made, and the director appears in one of them.

4. IT MADE HISTORY AT THE GOYA AWARDS.
The Others earned a total of eight Goya Awards, including Best Film. It’s the first film to earn Spain’s highest film honor in which not one word of Spanish is spoken.

“The Matrix Revolutions” Trivia

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Sean Hutchinson and Mental Floss present 15 Mind-Blowing Facts About The Matrix Revolutions.  Here are three of my favorites…

4. THE FILM WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT A LOT OF MOVIE MAGIC.
In addition to cutting-edge CGI technology, the production included the use of some impressive miniatures, such as the dock door of Zion, which was a 1/10th-scale model. Still, the scale of the door was astonishing as this “miniature” was 30 feet high and 40 feet wide.

8. R&B SINGER AALIYAH WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO PLAY ZEE.
In another tragic turn of events, the character Zee was recast after Aaliyah, who shot small portions of the role for the second movie, died in a plane crash in 2001. Nona Gaye, daughter of singer Marvin Gaye, ultimately played Zee.

9. CAPTAIN MIFUNE’S NAME IS A NOD TO TOSHIRO MIFUNE.
Toshiro Mifune’s samurai movies (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, etc.) were major inspirations for the Wachowskis while making the Matrix trilogy, so to honor him, the character Mifune was created.