Mindless Crap Entertainment Trivia

Weekly Droppings

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The following are all of the Weekly Droppings that have appeared on Mindless Crap, dating back to the first one posted on October 1, 2000.

Beavis and Butt-Head series creator Mike Judge named Beavis after Bobby Beavis, a jock in his junior high school. Butt-Head came from Judge's then 13-year-old neighbor who called himself "Iron Butt" because he claimed people could kick him in the butt without it hurting.

The game of dominoes was invented by French monks. It's named for a phrase in the Vesper services: "Dixit Dominus Domineo Meo."

Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones was the college roommate of former Vice President Al Gore (Harvard, call of 1969).

Judy Garland's real name was Frances Gumm.

Wes Craven, director of A Nightmare on Elm Street, named Freddy Krueger after a kid who bullied him in school.

You will see some kind of Superman paraphernalia in every episode of Seinfeld.

The sight of Clark Gable peeling a raw carrot with a penknife, then munching on it in It Happened One Night inspired Warner Brothers animator Bob Clampett to give Bugs Bunny his signature carrot chomp.

Between 1908 and 1913, Hollywood director D.W. Griffith made 450 motion pictures.

Slapstick comedy is named after an actual slapping stick. The stick was used by the comic hero Harlequin to whack the butts of artless stooges. It was made of two pieces of wood joined together to make a slapping sound when it hit.

Cinderella has been made into a movie more times than any other story.

The flashing warning light atop the Capital Records Tower in Hollywood, CA spells out H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in Morse code.

The game of billiards was popularized in France by Louis XIV. The King started playing on the advice of his physicians. The constant stretching exercise the he received while playing, his doctors believed, would relieve him of his digestive problems.

Grace Kelly was the first motion-picture actress to appear on a postage stamp. In April, 1956, she was featured with her husband, Prince Rainier III of Monaco, on a stamp commemorating their wedding.

The oldest piano still in existence was built in Florence, Italy in 1720 by Bartolomeo Cristofori.

The 15-minute-long radio serial Amos 'n' Andy, which went on the air at 7:00 pm every night, was so popular in the 1930s that movies typically started their show times at 7:15 because hardly anyone would show up until after they heard that day's episode.

The musical Oklahoma! was originally titled Away We Go.

Jerry Seinfeld's first sitcom wasn't Seinfeld. He played the governor's speechwriter on three episodes of Benson (he was fired from the job).

Michael Myers, the villain of the Halloween movies, is named after a real person. When Assault on Precinct 13 performed better than expected in England, director John Carpenter decided to thank the English distributor by naming the main character of his next movie after him.

Rin Tin Tin was born to a war-dog mother in a German trench in France during World War I. Deserted when the Germans retreated, the German shepherd puppy was found by an American officer who happened to be a police-dog trainer from California. During Rin Tin Tin's training after the war, the dog's intelligence came to the attention of Warner Brothers, which signed the dog up for what turned out to be a long career as one of the biggest box-office draws of the silent screen era.

In the early days of modern theater, artificial lighting was produced by throwing pollen grains of the club moss - which is highly flammable when placed on a hot surface - onto a hot shovel.

Radio and TV producer John Guedel was the originator of the musical commercial.

Because of Davy Jones's popularity as a member of The Monkees, another young singer in London, also named David Jones, was forced to change his name - to David Bowie.

Producer Paul Maslansky was on the set of The Right Stuff when a bus from the local police academy rolled up. After a bunch of freaks walked off, a sergeant explained that the mayor had forced the department to loosen its acceptance standards. Not too long afterwards, Police Academy hit the theaters.

Cher's real name is Cherilyn Sarkasian La Pier.

To make things easier while mixing the American Graffiti sound track, George Lucas and sound designer Walter Murch labeled all of the film reels R and all of the dialogue tracks D, and then numbered each of them sequentially, starting with 1. When Murch later asked Lucas for Reel 2 Dialogue 2 - or more precisely, R2 D2 - Lucas liked the way it sounded so much that he made a note of the name for another project he was writing.

The computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey as a tongue-in-cheek reference to IBM. The name was derived from the fact that the letters H-A-L precede the letters I-B-M in the alphabet.

Jessica Tandy is the oldest winner of an Academy Award. She won the 1989 Best Actress award for Driving Miss Daisy at the age of 80 years and 9 months. She beat George Burns for that distinction by just a few months.

On average, every person in the United States owns 2.1 radios.

Only one movie has had three Academy Award nominees in the same category. In 1963, Tom Jones earned Best Supporting Actress nominations for Diane Cilento, Dame Edith Evans and Joyce Redman.

The average person in the United States watches 239 minutes of television per day.

Ghandi had the most extras of any movie ever made with about 300,000 people. The German movie Kolberg is second with 187,000.

If the gross for Gone With the Wind were to be adjusted to allow for inflation in the period since its release, it would be regarded as the most successful film ever.

The words �video recording� and �videotape� were first used in the early 1950s. At the time, only television professionals used them.

Before the merger with MGM in 1981, eight of the top ten movies released by United Artists were James Bond films.

Cat was the name of Holly Golightly's pet cat in the film Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote David O. Selznick to ask that her maid, Lizzy McDuffy, be considered for the role of Mammy in Gone With the Wind.

There are songs in all of Shakespeare's plays except The Comedy of Errors.

The first motion picture copyrighted in the United States showed a man in the act of sneezing.

1959's A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a black woman to be produced on Broadway.

Stanley Kubrick approached Lloyd's of London about an insurance policy in case extraterrestrial life was discovered before the release of his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Steve McQueen persuaded his karate teacher, kickboxing champion Chuck Norris, to pursue acting.

In the pilot episode of Seinfeld (then called The Seinfeld Chronicles) , Kessler was the last name of the neighbor who would later become known as Kramer.

The top selling song of all time is Elton John�s tribute to the late Princess Diana. Candle in the Wind 1997 has sold over 35 million copies worldwide.

Despite a population of well over one billion people, there are only an estimated 250 million televisions in use in China.

The final episode of M*A*S*H ranks as the most watched television program of any kind in United States history. An estimated 50,150,000 people tuned in on February 28, 1983. That amounted to 60.2% of all households with a television. Second on the list was the �Who Shot J.R.� episode of Dallas.

Harrison Ford is the only actor whose ten highest grossing movies have each earned at least $200 million.

Tatum O�Neal is the youngest Oscar winner not to receive a Special Award. O�Neal was just 10 years old when she won the Best Supporting Actress award for Paper Moon. Shirley Temple is the youngest person to win an Academy Award when she was given the Special Award for Outstanding Contribution in 1934 at the age of 6.

The Top 10 grossing movies of the 1990s each earned at least $500 million worldwide and brought in a combined total of over $7 billion.

John Wayne�s real name was Marion Michael Morrison.

Cutthroat Island is the biggest movie flop in history, losing an estimated $81 million. It�s almost double the loss of the second-biggest money loser, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen ($48.1 million).

Walt Disney provided the voice of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie.

William Fox, the founder of 20^th Century Fox, was bankrupt a few years after selling his studio, and served a prison sentence in Pennsylvania for bribing a judge.

The most expensive movie memorabilia ever sold at an auction was Clark Gable�s Academy Award for It Happened One Night. It sold for $607,500 on December 15, 1996.

The Academy Award was rumored to have gotten its nickname of Oscar for its resemblance to a film librarian�s Uncle Oscar.

Of the Top 10 grossing movies of the 1980s, seven were either produced or directed by Stephen Spielberg or George Lucas. They also represent the men behind the top three grossing films of the 1970s.

Between 1991 and 1996, India produced the most movies per year on average. The 851 movies per year beat the yearly average of the United States (569) by 282 for the same time frame.

78 rpm albums, used prior to 1948, were only capable of recording for four minutes. It wasn�t until later that year that Columbia Records introduced 33 rpm albums capable of playing 23 minutes per side.

Audrey Hepburn�s real name was Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston.

The Cannes Film Festival was conceived in 1938 by two French journalists while they were traveling by train to the Venice Film Festival.

In April 1964, The Beatles had the top five songs in the United States. This is the only time that the top five songs at any one time were by the same group.

During the filming of Singin' in the Rain, the director had two ladies - Carol Haney and Gwen Verdon - put on tap dancing shows and dance around in bucketsful of water. Apparently, he liked Gene Kelly's dancing, but wasn't able to get the sound he wanted for someone dancing in the rain. The sounds of Gene Kelly's tap dancing in the movie aren't really the sounds he made during the filming of the movie.

Stage bows were originally devised as a way for actors to thank the audience. The audience would or would not acknowledge each of the actors in turn, depending on how much they enjoyed the performance.

In Forrest Gump, Gary Sinise's character (Lt. Dan) tells Tom Hanks' character (Forrest Gump) that the day Forrest works on a shrimp boat is the day he'd be an astronaut. The following year, Sinise and Hanks appeared together as astronauts in Apollo 13.

In 1975, it cost only $180,000 to produce an hour-long TV drama.

The play Chantecler, written by French playwright Edmond Rostand, features a rooster as the major character.

Irving Berlin has never learned to read music or to write it. He hums or sings his songs to a secretary, who takes them down in musical notation.

If the coils of a French horn were straightened out, the instrument would be 22 feet long.

No one knows where Mozart is buried.

The movie Quo Vadis had 30,000 extras.

The oldest continuous comic strip still in existence is The Katzenjammer Kids. It first appeared in newspapers in 1897.

Alfred Hitchcock directed the first talking film ever made in England. It was called Blackmail and was made in 1931.

The model of King Kong used in the original movie was only 18 inches tall.

French composer Erik Satie holds the record for shortest and longest composition in the world. His piano piece Vexations lasts for just under a minute. However, Satie states in the score that it should be played 840 times in succession - a nonstop playing time of 14 hours.

The soundtrack to Oklahoma was the first album to sell one million copies on August 18, 1958.

In 1936, England became the first country in the world to provide regular public broadcasting on television.

The four highest grossing movies of the 1940s were all animated motion pictures by Disney (Bambi, Pinnochio, Fantasia, and Cinderella).

The first drive-in movie theater was built in Camden, NJ in 1932-3. It cost 25 cents per car or $1 for three or more people to watch a movie.

Glenn Miller was the first performer to earn a gold record. He got it for the Chattanooga Choo Choo on February 10, 1942.

Throughout his career, DeWolf Hopper recited Casey at the Bat" over 10,000 times.

Elton John and The Beach Boys are tied for the record for the longest gap between number one hit singles in the United States. Both waited 21 years, 11 months.

L.L. Cool J is the only rap star to have performed at a presidential inaugural concert. He performed at Bill Clinton's gala in 1993.

The U.S. Army has a stealth reconnaissance helicopter named "The Duke" in honor of John Wayne.

The movie As Good As It Gets is called Mr. Cat Poop in China.

The Oprah Winfrey Show started out as a local morning talk show called A.M. Chicago. The name was changed in September 1985 after Winfrey beat Donahue in the Chicago ratings. The show was expanded from a half and to an hour and went nationwide a year later.

The longest movie ever screened was a 1970 British film that lasted 48 hours, 0 minutes. Believe it or not, its name is The Longest and Most Meaningless Movie in the World.