Free The Extraordinary Book of Useless Information by Don Voorhees Page A

1931 movie
Viking
, a ship explosion killed the producer and about twenty-six members of the crew while they were filming an iceberg off of Labrador.
    The 1964 movie
The Fall of the Roman Empire
had the biggest outdoor movie set ever built. Its reconstruction of the Roman Forum measured 1,312 feet by 754 feet.
    In the movie
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
, 532 cars were destroyed. They were flood-damaged autos donated by an insurance company.
    TO BOLDLY GO . . .
    Initially, NBC executives wanted to ditch the Spock character from
Star Trek
because they thought he looked satanic.
    James Doohan, who played Scottie on
Star Trek
, lost his right middle finger during World War II.
    Lieutenant Uhura’s name means “freedom” in Swahili.
    Star Trek: The Next Generation
character Geordi La Forge was named for an avid
Star Trek
fan, George La Forge, who died of muscular dystrophy in 1975.
    Captain Kirk’s USS
Enterprise
NCC-1701 is 953.7 feet long.
    It would take the starship
Enterprise
400,000 years to cross the galaxy on impulse drive.
    The
Enterprise
holds a crew of 430.
    Klingons like to eat food that is still alive.
    A Vulcan’s heart beats several hundred times a minute, and Vulcans don’t have an appendix.
    BONDAGE
    The only James Bond movie theme song to hit number one on the
Billboard
Hot 100 chart was “A View to a Kill,” by Duran Duran. “Live and Let Die,” by Paul McCartney and Wings, and “Nobody Does it Better,” by Carly Simon, made it to number two. “For Your Eyes Only,” by Sheena Easton, hit number five, and “Die Another Day,” by Madonna, and “Skyfall,” by Adele, both peaked at number eight.
    â€œOH TAY!”
    Alfalfa of
Our Gang
film shorts (later known as
The Little Rascals
, when they moved to television) fame was actor Carl Switzer.
    Switzer was shot to death by an acquaintance in a dispute over money in 1959.
    George McFarland, who played Spanky, got his nickname from a newspaper reporter who called the three-year-old actor a “spanky child,” a term at the time referring to a bright toddler.
    McFarland, who was in the series from 1932 to 1942, popularized the expression “okeydokey.”
    William “Billie” Thomas Jr. played Buckwheat in the series from 1934 to 1944. Originally, Buckwheat was a girl, but later she slowly morphed into a boy.
    Thomas suffered from a speech impediment and is best known for the expression “O-tay!”
    Thomas’s family were offended by Eddie Murphy’s spoof of the Buckwheat character on
Saturday Night Live
in the 1980s.
    In 1990, the ABC newsmagazine TV show
20/20
did an interview with an Arizona grocery bagger that they thought was Thomas. Unfortunately, Thomas had died ten years earlier. ABC apologized and the program’s producer was forced to resign.
    Contrary to popular myth, Bill Cosby never bought up the rights to
Our Gang
to keep the show’s racial stereotypes off TV.
    A pit bull, with a black ring around its left eye, played Petey. The ring was applied by makeup artist Max Factor.
    Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple both auditioned for
Our Gang
.
    OFF TO A GOOD START
    In 2010,
TV Guide
published a list of the top ten television credits sequences. They were, in order,
The Simpsons
,
Get Smart
,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
,
Hawaii Five-O
(the original),
True Blood
,
The Big Bang Theory
,
Dexter
,
The Brady Bunch
,
Mad Men
, and
The Sopranos
.
    BEWARE THE BLOB
    In 1950, four Philadelphia policemen saw a six-foot, round, light-emitting, gelatinous mass land on the ground and begin to climb up a telephone pole. This incident became the basis for the 1958 cult classic
The Blob
, which was filmed in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
    The Blob
was Steve McQueen’s first starring role.
    The movie’s title song—“The Blob”—hit number thirty-three on the
Billboard
Hot 100 list.
    BLINDED BY THE LIGHT
    CNN news personality Anderson Cooper