September 15 was Batman Day, so we thought we’d take a look at some of the more bizarre and head-shaking moments in the long comic and cinematic history of The Caped Crusader, a.k.a. The Dark Knight, a.k.a. The World’s Greatest Detective, a.k.a. (spoiler alert) Bruce Wayne. What a bear! In a 1977 Batman comic book, […]

No, that didn’t really happen. The All-American king of ‘70s cinema and guys with mustaches, Burt Reynolds, passed away this week at the age of 82. He starred in plenty of classic movies, including Deliverance, The Longest Yard, and, of course, Smokey and the Bandit. But as much as Hollywood would have liked him to, […]

Don’t you hate it when you don’t get around to seeing the hot new Hollywood movie for a couple of weeks…and then a friend lets slip how it ends? It’s very aggravating. It’s perplexing then that some movies gave away their endings before they were even released. ROCKY IV Rocky IV is yet another Sylvester […]

The history of TV shows doesn’t start with the 1950s—that’s just when most Americans got their first TV set. Over in England, and in small and experimental broadcasts in the U.S, television was on in the air in the 1930s. Here are some of the first (and oddest) TV shows ever, long before I Love […]

Just over 30 years after its debut on Nickelodeon, Double Dare has returned to TV. It was a dream for a generation of kids to win cash and prizes with the show’s messy “physical challenges” and sloppy “obstacle course.” Here’s a look into the old-school TV phenomenon. Show origins Seeing toy companies make millions of off […]

What non-existent Oscar category do you think should exist? Newly installed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president John Bailey announced that there will be some changes to AMPAS’s biggest event: the Academy Awards, a.k.a. the Oscars. The new ideas seem to be about improving the Oscars broadcast. For one, a few minor technical […]

National Lampoon’s Animal House was released 40 years ago this summer. Here are some things you probably didn’t know about the classic college comedy. Chevy Chase Among the cast of young, relatively unknown actors playing fraternity guys in the movie was Saturday Night Live star John Belushi as Bluto. His SNL castmate Chevy Chase was […]

…and vomit, and other fake and forbidden substances, just like they do in Hollywood. Blood When an actor portrays a character that needs to be shot, their body is rigged with small, exploding capsules called squibs. When they’re set to go off, they spew out little bits of red substance to mimic blood of course. […]

Come on down…and check out these stories about the off-stage lives of famous TV game show hosts. Bob Barker Longtime The Price is Right host Bob Barker is well known for his end-of-show sign-off, asking viewers “to help control the pet population and have your pets spayed or neutered.” Barker was an outspoken animal rights […]

Would these popular or classic TV shows have been popular or classic TV shows if they’d gone with their original title ideas? Maybe not. Not the Cosby Show When Married…with Children hit TV in 1987 as one of the first ever shows on the Fox Network, the family sitcom was radically different than contemporary sticky-sweet […]

These kids today! Things would be a lot better if they had those preachy ABC Afterschool Specials to give them a moral compass. Okay, none of that is true, but here are some of silliest, most over-the-top Afterschool Specials from the ‘70s, ’80, and ‘90s. Fast Forward In this very dark take on It’s a […]

Potential first episodes of TV shows are called “pilots.” Sometimes a TV show will try to launch a spinoff via a “backdoor pilot”—a sample of a new series that airs as an episode of the mother show. Successful backdoor pilots: NCIS from JAG, and Private Practice from Grey’s Anatomy. Unsuccessful ones? These. Tales from Springfield […]

The ‘50s-set movie musical Grease theaters in 1978, and it became a blockbuster and an instant classic. As Rizzo might say, “there are worse things you can do” than read an interesting fact or two…about Grease. Up for Sandy Up for the role of Sandy: Carrie Fisher from Star Wars, rock star Linda Ronstadt, Susan […]

You’re likely aware that a lot of classic Disney movies are based on old, often dark fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm in Germany a couple of centuries back. How much did Disney change those stories? A lot. Cinderella The title character’s wicked stepsisters are even more unhinged in the Grimm version. To try […]

After 27 years and more than 4,000 episodes, The Jerry Springer Show is coming to a close. While Springer conducted himself with the dignity and poise of a talk show predecessor like Phil Donohue, the show usually involved angry people confronting each other about a personal issue, and then fighting each other. Here’s a look […]

Sometimes a film director or other entertainment creative is so unhappy with the way a movie turned out that they don’t even want their names publicly associated with it. For decades, the solution was to attribute the movie to a fictional, pseudonymous director named “Alan Smithee.” Here are some entries from “his” filmography. City in […]