19 Random Pop Culture Facts That I Find Unbelievably Interesting And Mind-Blowing

1.Most people over 30 likely associate The Smurfs with the classic '80s cartoon. However, that wasn't The Smurfs' first adaptation into animation. In 1961, they were adapted into a cartoon series in Belgium that ran from (1961–67), though it appears it was more of a series of specials than a full-fledged TV series as there were only nine episodes.

2.Mike Myers originally recorded all his dialogue for Shrek in his normal accent, but after seeing a rough cut of the movie, he asked DreamWorks CEO and the film's producer, Jeffrey Katzenberg, if he could re-record his lines with a Scottish accent.

Katzenberg agreed after hearing him do an alternative take. The re-record and reanimation cost the studio an extra $4 million dollars.

3.Throughout the '90s and '00s, there were lots of direct-to-video sequels/prequels to both new and classic Disney movies. However, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was one of the few exceptions. But in 2005, a direct-to-video, computer-animated prequel film to Snow White was put into production. The prequel was titled The Seven Dwarfs and was led by director Mike Disa and screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos — who both knew the reputation of Disney animated sequel films being unoriginal and not great, and wanted to make something very different. According to Mike, he said it would be "Disney’s answer to The Lord of the Rings." However, in 2006, when John Lasseter became the Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, he canceled the movie, along with all other direct-to-video movies still in development.

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The plot of the movie was actually interesting. It followed Grumpy and Dopey on a quest into the Old Forest to the city of Dwarfenholme; along the way, they would meet the other Dwarfs and befriend a young girl named Narcissa. Also, during the journey, the Dwarfs are being hunted by an evil wizard who wants to use them to get the Olden Dwarf’s ancient magical power. But Narcissa is actually the wizard's daughter and works with him to trick the Dwarfs. The film would have ended with Narcissa double-crossing her father by stealing the Olden Dwarf's magic and placing him in the mirror before turning on the Dwarfs.

4.There are actually two versions of the 1931 classic film Dracula. One is in English and stars Bela Lugosi, while the other is in Spanish and stars Carlos Villarías. Both movies were filmed simultaneously in essentially two shifts; the English movie was filmed during the day, while the Spanish version was shot at night — filming the same exact scenes that the English film had shot that day. Below is a side-by-side of a scene from both versions.

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5.If you haven't seen the original Dracula, then it might be easy to assume that the movie takes place in the 1890s, but it actually takes place in then modern-day 1931 London.

6.It's a well-known fact that Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is an unauthorized retelling of Dracula. However, the 1922 film introduced one element that has become standard in vampire media: that sunlight kills vampires. At the end of the movie, Count Orlok becomes the first vampire to die from exposure to sunlight (prior to that, sunlight was more of an annoyance).

7.If you aren't listening to the lyrics closely, then you may miss that OutKast's "Hey Ya!" is actually a sad song. According to André 3000 — who wrote the majority of it — the song was about modern-day relationships and how "a lot of people stay together for tradition," choosing to be unhappy rather than alone.

Even OutKast's official Twitter account tweeted back in 2021, about how "Hey Ya!" is actually a sad song:

OutKast/SME / Via Twitter: @Outkast

8.In a 1976 episode of Sesame Street, Margaret Hamilton reprised her role as the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz (around 37 years after she first played her). In the episode, the Wicked Witch loses her broom while flying over Sesame Street, and she then interacts with several characters throughout the episode as she tries to get it back. However, kids found the episode scary, and the show got lots of complaint letters from angry parents, leading to the episode being pulled and never rerun.

9.The Grinch doesn't have a color in the 1957 Dr. Seuss book, as the illustrations are in black and white — with red being the only other color used. This was changed to green for the classic 1966 animated TV special. Reportedly, the green color was inspired by the green rental car that animator Chuck Jones drove at the time.

10.This promotional photo of Jack Nicholson in the "Here's Johnny!" moment in The Shining was what got him cast as the Joker. In 1980, Michael Uslan, who would go on to executive produce all the Batman films, picked up a copy of the New York Post, and when he opened up the movie section, he saw this photo of Nicholson, which was advertising that The Shining was opening that weekend. Uslan, who had bought the film rights for Batman the year prior, immediately thought that Nicholson was the only one who could play the Joker. When he got home, he tore the photo from the paper and drew the Joker's face over it using Wite-Out and markers. The drawing, indeed, looks a lot like the Joker from the film.

According to Uslan, "The day Jack Nicholson was hired was the best day of my career to that point."

11.The Friends writers hadn't planned to have Ross and Rachel get back together in the series finale. The original idea was to have a more ambiguous ending for them, where it would have been implied that there was a possibility that they could get back together in the future. However, the creators and writers of the show realized that having such an open-ended ending to their relationship would be unsatisfying to fans who had invested a lot into them as a couple over the years.

12.As a kid, Ana Gasteyer grew up in Washington D.C., and she was friends with President Jimmy Carter's daughter, Amy. She said that as a kid, she would sleep over at the White House and go to Camp David. Ana was at Camp David in 1978, during the Camp David Accords, and even played the violin for then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

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13.Batman Begins is the first movie to successfully reboot a franchise. At the time the last Batman film, Batman & Robin, had been released eight years prior — in 1997 — and the reviews and audience reactions to it were so bad that Warner Bros. put a stop to future movies.

As Forbes points out in their article, back in 2005, the idea of a reboot was so new that some people assumed that the movie was actually a prequel to the original 1989 Batman film.

14.In 2020, George Clooney revealed that towards the end of Paul Newman's life, the two wanted to star in a project together. The project was The Notebook, and Clooney would have played Young Noah and Newman Old Noah. According to Clooney, the two met and said, "This is it. It’s going to be great." He then went home and watched a bunch of old Newman movies — which made him realize he couldn't do the movie because "He’s one of the handsomest guys you’ve ever seen." When he met up with Newman again, he told him, "I can’t play with you. I don’t look anything like you. This is insane."

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They, of course, ended up passing on the movie, which then went to Ryan Gosling and James Garner in the roles.

15.There was almost an Arrested Development and The O.C. crossover episode (yes, you read that right). Both shows aired on Fox and took place in Orange County, California, so Mitch Hurwitz (who created Arrested Development) and Josh Schwartz (who created The O.C.) spoke about doing an episode of Arrested Development in which the cast members of The O.C. would appear as their characters on the show. The idea was eventually dropped for being too meta.

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16.Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is heavily inspired by two shows: 1959's The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and 1968's The Archie Show. Fred Silverman, who was then head of daytime programming at CBS, wanted to mimic the success of The Archie Show, so he asked Hanna-Barbera and its animators for a Saturday morning cartoon with a comparable dynamic. Initially, he got a near copy of The Archie Show, with a show called Mysteries Five, which was about five teens in a band called the Mysteries Five who solved mysteries along with their sheepdog named Too Much. Silverman didn't like this idea and asked them to retool the show, so this time, Hanna-Barbera also drew inspiration from the other show he mentioned, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

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The animators changed the dog to a Great Dane, removed the band aspect, and scaled back the characters to just four. They modeled the four main human characters after the The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis core cast — Fred resembling Dobie, Velma based on Zelda, Daphne on Thalia, and Shaggy being nearly identical to Dobie's beatnik friend Maynard.

17.Contrary to what everybody remembers, Britney Spears is not wearing a nude/sheer body suit with rhinestones on it in her "Toxic" music video, it's actually her body with the stones directly glued onto her skin.

Britney revealed this during a 2016 interview with UK talk show host Jonathan Ross.

18.The Pink Panther was a cartoon character that was created for the opening credits of the 1963 film The Pink Panther. In fact, the character is named after the large pink diamond that the jewel thief is trying to steal in the film. In early screenings of the movie, audiences reportedly loved the animated opening sequence so much that they had to stop the projectors to allow for the audience's applause to subside. Seeing the popularity of the character, United Artists, the studio that produced the movie, decided to spin him off and ordered 154 animated shorts to be made.

19.And lastly, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was a comedian and actor before being elected president, was the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian dubs of Paddington and Paddington 2.

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