1.
When creator Loren Bouchard first developed Bob's Burgers, the Belcher family was originally conceived as cannibals who unknowingly served human meat in their restaurant. Early pitch materials and the show's original presentation included the idea that the family obtained meat from a crematorium next door, making the series much darker than the version that eventually reached television.
The premise was inspired in part by the dark humor of Bouchard's earlier animated work and the need for edgier ideas when working with Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, but executives felt the cannibalism angle was too extreme for a network sitcom and suggested they just be a regular family. Although the idea was dropped before the series premiered in 2011, traces of it remain in the pilot episode, including health inspectors accusing Bob of serving human flesh and placing a "Human Flesh" sign on the restaurant.
2.
This sounds wild today, but when it was announced that Heath Ledger was cast as the Joker in 2006, the reaction online was overwhelmingly negative, with many fans believing he was completely wrong for the role. At the time, Ledger was best known for romantic dramas like Brokeback Mountain and teen movies such as 10 Things I Hate About You, and a lot of people just thought of him as a pretty boy heartthrob, making him, on paper, seem like an unlikely choice to play Batman's most famous villain.
Message boards, fan sites, and websites mocked the casting, with some fans even signing online petitions demanding that the studio recast the role. Many people compared him unfavorably to previous Jokers, particularly Jack Nicholson, and assumed he lacked the intensity needed for the character. Of course, after the release of The Dark Knight, Ledger's performance was widely hailed as iconic and one of the greatest comic book movie performances ever, and eventually earned him a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
3.
Worcestershire sauce was invented by accident. In the early 1800s, chemists John Wheeley Lea and William Perrins in Worcester, England, were asked to recreate a fermented sauce that a British official had tasted while serving in India. Their first attempt was considered a failure because the mixture smelled and tasted overwhelmingly strong, so the barrels were reportedly set aside and forgotten in a cellar.
Months or even years later, the sauce had aged and fermented, transforming into a much richer and more balanced flavor. Realizing they had accidentally created something unique, the pair began selling it commercially as Worcestershire sauce in 1837. The sauce was an immediate hit as they were able to market it through British ocean liners for passengers to try with their meal, as well as in ads, where they created a fake origin story that the creation was the favorite recipe of a nobleman.
4.
There was a sequel series to The Brady Bunch that is all but forgotten today. In 1990, The Bradys premiered, and instead of the lighthearted family comedy that made the original famous, the new series adopted an hour-long dramedy format and focused on more adult storylines involving the grown Brady children.
The show tackled surprisingly serious subjects, including Marcia being an alcoholic stay-at-home mom whose husband couldn't keep a job, Bobby, a race car driver, becoming paralyzed from the waist down after an accident, and Peter being in an abusive relationship. Reportedly, there was even a script for an episode where Mike would have died in a fiery helicopter crash (Robert Reed wanted off the show after disagreements with the producers). With the exception of Maureen McCormick, who didn't reprise her role as Marcia, all of the original cast returned. This made the tonal shift especially jarring for viewers who expected the cheerful, family-friendly atmosphere of the earlier series, and the show was canceled after six episodes.
5.
There was an episode of The Twilight Zone that only aired once. "The Encounter" is one of the most controversial episodes of the series, and originally aired in 1964 during the show's fifth season. The story stars George Takei as a Japanese American man who visits the attic of a World War II veteran, where the two men become trapped and are forced to confront painful memories and prejudice connected to the war. The episode deals directly with racism, anti-Japanese sentiment, and the lingering trauma of World War II, topics that were super sensitive less than two decades after the conflict ended.
After its initial broadcast, CBS removed the episode from reruns and syndication, and it was largely unavailable on television for more than 50 years because of concerns about its racial themes and its historical inaccuracies, as Takei's character confesses that his father had been a traitor that helped the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. During that time, many fans of the series didn't even realize the episode existed, since all other pulled installments had eventually been released on home video or returned to syndication, while "The Encounter" remained largely unavailable for decades. The episode finally aired again in 2016, as part of Syfy's New Year's Day Twilight Zone marathon, and eventually became available through streaming.
6.
The term "Gilded Age" was coined by legendary writer Mark Twain, who co-wrote the 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today with Charles Dudley Warner. Today, people often use the phrase to describe the period of rapid industrial growth, enormous fortunes, and social change in the United States during the late 19th century. However, Twain did not intend the term as a compliment.
The word "gilded" refers to something covered in a thin layer of gold, suggesting that the era appeared prosperous and glamorous on the surface while hiding political corruption, economic inequality, and social problems underneath. Twain's novel satirized the greed, speculation, and influence of wealthy elites that characterized the period after the Civil War. Although historians later adopted "Gilded Age" as the official name for the era
7.
"Scream" was not meant to be a duet between Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson. It was supposed to be what would eventually become her own single, "Runaway." According to her longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, they were asked to work on Michael's HIStory album. The duo created five tracks for potential duets — including "Scream" and "Runaway" — for it, and they first presented the songs to Janet for her feedback before presenting them to Michael.
Jam and Lewis thought "Runaway" would be the song the two would duet on. However, upon hearing them, Janet said that Michael would like "Scream" and hoped he didn't pick "Runaway." Well, he did like "Scream," and she got to keep "Runaway" for herself. The breezy track would become the lead single from her greatest hits album, Design of a Decade: 1986–1996.
8.
In 2004, Starbucks entered the music business by opening Hear Music coffeehouses that combined a café with a music store. The concept grew out of the company's long-standing interest in curated in-store music and its belief that customers would want to discover artists while having coffee. One of the stores' most unusual features was a touchscreen kiosk that allowed customers to create personalized mix CDs by selecting songs from a digital catalog and burning them onto a disc for 99 cents per track.
The launch arrived at a time when digital music was rapidly transforming the industry, and physical album sales were declining. Starbucks later expanded its music efforts through exclusive album sales and artist partnerships, but the Hear Music stores struggled to find a large audience. But the idea was a little too late — by 2004, a lot of people either burned their own CDs at home and/or listened to music on an iPod. By 2006, Starbucks had removed the kiosks from most of its Hear Music locations.
9.
In 1985, Warren Beatty bought the film and TV rights to Dick Tracy from Tribune Media Services, hoping to turn it into a film since he loved the comic strip as a kid. Eventually, in 1990, he starred and directed the movie. While the movie was a success, it didn't reach the same level as Batman's the year before, and it only received so-so reviews, so Disney decided not to green-light a sequel.
Beatty did make repeated attempts to produce a sequel. However, he then became entangled in a bitter, years-long series of lawsuits with Tribune Media over profits and creative control. Because of a "use-it-or-lose-it" loophole in the contract with Tribune, Beatty has periodically appeared as Dick Tracy on television to help demonstrate that the property remains active. In 2008, he appeared in a TCM TV special that aired only once, in which he remained in character as the detective while being interviewed by film critic Leonard Maltin. He repeated the unusual strategy in 2023 with another special, Tracy Zooms In, once again appearing as Dick Tracy and interviewed by Maltin and Ben Mankiewicz.
10.
And lastly, Marlon Brando's performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather is considered legendary and has gone down in cinematic history as such. But he almost didn't get the part of Vito because at the time, he was considered a temperamental, washed-up actor whom the studio refused to hire. And for his part, Brando initially wasn't interested and didn't really want to work.
In fact, it was truly a series of events that got Brando cast in the role. The film's director, Francis Ford Coppola, was dead set on casting either Brando or Laurence Olivier as Vito. When he was told no to casting Brando by Paramount's then-president, Stanley Jaffe, Coppola faked a stress-induced epilepsy in Jaffe's office. After that stunt, Jaffe reconsidered and told him he would consider Brando for the role on three conditions, one of which was that he would need to screen-test for it.
Meanwhile, Mario Puzo, who wrote The Godfather novel, read a story that comedian–sitcom star–producer Danny Thomas was interested in buying a majority share in Paramount with the sole purpose of casting himself as Vito. That caused an alarmed Puzo to write a letter to Brando — whom he had envisioned in the role — and plead with him to consider the role of Vito. Brando's personal secretary, Alice Marchak, knew that he needed to work because he was deeply in debt, so she bought a subscription to the Hollywood Reporter to keep tabs on potential roles for him. However, he caught her reading it one day and got mad that she would bring "movie magazines into [his] house." So she left his house and let him cool off for a few days, during which time she read that Paramount was looking to cast the role of Vito in The Godfather. When she came back to Brando's house, she found Puzo's letter in the mail.
Eventually, he agreed to it, but Coppola knew he would need to screen-test him in order to cast him (something that would be an insult to an actor of Brando's stature). So he devised a plan in which he didn't tell Brando it was a screen test, but instead told him that he wanted to come over to his house to try some things for the camera, experiment a bit, and try some improvisation. And that worked. When Coppola finally did the not-a-screen-test-at-all at Brando's house, he saw the 47-year-old actor transform into Vito in front of his eyes as he smeared black shoe polish on his blonde hair to give it a darker and greased-back look, gave himself a shoe polish mustache, and put wads of tissue in his cheeks to give himself an appearance of a bulldog. The rest, of course, is movie history.
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