Tag: fun facts

prokopetz:

Honestly, a lot of my favourite elements of popular media have come about directly from writers being passive-aggressive.

Let me give you a classic example: Happy Days. For a lot of folks reading this post, it’s probably before your time, but you’re likely to at least be familiar with Fonzie, a supporting character played by Henry Winkler who ended up being so popular that he’s literally the only thing anybody remembers about the show.

Now, if you recognize the name, you might also know that one of Fonzie’s more notable quirks is that he tends to take his motorcycle with him everywhere – even indoors, including many places where there’s no obvious way for him to have gotten it there. What you might not know, however, is why the writers came up with this running gag in the first place.

Y’see, Fonzie was originally conceived as the “bad influence” character – the cool, dangerous bad boy. As part of that characterisation, the writers wanted to have him wear a leather jacket. (Because it was the 1970s, and that counted as edgy back then.) The network censors, however, objected, claiming that allowing him to wear the jacket would encourage juvenile delinquency and gang violence. (Again, it was the 70s.)

Eventually, the writers worked out a deal whereby they’d be allowed to have Fonzie wear the jacket – but only if he was riding or otherwise physically near his motorcycle, since a leather jacket is a common article of safety equipment when operating a non-enclosed vehicle, and we can’t let impressionable kids see somebody riding a motorcycle without proper safety equipment, can we?

Then they just wrote the motorcycle into every scene, regardless of whether it made sense or not, thereby allowing Fonzie to wear the jacket all the time.

Useless Prussia Fact #50

takingaspadetoasouffle:

ladyaudleyssecrettumlbr:

useless-prussiafacts:

In his exile in the Netherlands, William II cut down trees almost everyday – mostly to show his supporters back in Germany how strong he was and that he was ready to return to the throne. Perhaps he was frustrated too.

When reporters started to sneak onto the property to take pictures of the exiled Kaiser, William II started complaining – one of his servants told him, that it was his own fault. After all he had cut down all the trees that could have sheltered him from curious eyes.

@takingaspadetoasouffle how did Wilhelm take to being given this sort of reality check by the staff when in exile? Did it happen often?

@ladyaudleyssecrettumlbr As far as I know, it didn’t happen very often. I’ve read about this incident in the memoirs of a member of the household (Sigurd von Islemann I think), but he only said “well it’s your own fault” in the memoirs, not actually to wilhelm’s face. I do hope someone did in real life, though.

Exile was a strange “mini court” with a lot of the same etiquette (Wilhelm was addressed as “royal highness” instead of “imperial majesty”, and his second wife was also elevated in rank…but only in Doorn.) Most of the people would go by the old rules (particularly because a lot of visitors were people who’d known wilhelm before his exile), and not actually tell him unpleasant truths. HOWEVER, he did receive endless letters from all over the world telling him how awful he was; he had to put up with the “are we going to try him for war crimes?” debacle; he would have been aware of the ‘khaki election’ in Britain where David Lloyd George won with “Hang The Kaiser!” as one of his main slogans; and eventually he’d have realised that the monarchy wasn’t coming back in his lifetime. With all this in mind, I think he’d have been reasonably ok with people who weren’t his staff telling him things bluntly, but I think the old rules of the hohenzollern court would have remained for the staff. I have a feeling that von Islemann could get away with it sometimes (he was part of the entourage during the war, and followed wilhelm into exile), but I’m not sure how often he actually did it. I know that the exile entourage bitched about wilhelm in their memoirs, just like the pre-exile lot did too, so that may well have been a way to let off steam when all one wanted to do was shove the kaiser in a moat.