Fun Facts and Trivia Part Five: Episodes 13-15

This is a fun one!

The birthday episode uses a date for Yorick’s birthday from a contest we ran, won by Melanie Miller-Savoury. Turns out she is also a craftsperson who has made some skull art, so two of her creations make an appearance at the surprise birthday party:

This entire episode is a tip-of-the-hat musically to “Rabbit of Seville”, a 1950 Warner Bros./Looney Toon cartoon starring Bugs and Elmer. It uses music from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” (as does our episode) and just spirals out of control. It’s probably one of the best cartoons ever made...if very violent by today’s standards. You know what, though? I grew up on these and even at a tender age I knew what was real and what wasn’t. To this day I haven’t gone after anyone with a cannon or an anvil (much as I may have wanted to). Watch that cartoon and I defy you to get the lyrics “Come into my shop, Let me cut your mop” out of your head.

Mr. Freddy, the pompous automaton who runs the haberdashery, is based on a portrait of Friedrich von Knauss, an 18^th-century watchmaker and inventor of automatons! He became Royal Court Mechanician in Darmstadt and designed and built some truly amazing mechanical wonders.

The Gaming Episodes:

The whole concept of the path of our lives being somewhat beyond our control (i.e., “the gods playing dice with our destiny”, Einstein notwithstanding) is a pretty universal one; even the ancient Aztecs wrote poetry about it. Figures Yorick would get to the bottom of it, even though he thinks there might be an Editor-in-Chief involved as well.

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Ever try to say isthmus fast?...or is it just me.

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When she first sees the Tentacle, one of the Rats lets out a scream that is identified as not being a “Wilhelm Scream”. Named after a character (Private Wilhelm) in a 50s western, the original scream was probably recorded by none other than Sheb Wooley (he who wrote and recorded “Purple People Eater” and probably best known to my generation as Pete Nolan on “Rawhide”). The scream became one of the most-used sound effects (in over 300 films!) and eventually took on the status of an in-joke in more recent films like some of the Indiana Jones sequels and Star Wars films.

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“Roll Them Bones” is slang for playing dice.

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The two games rejected by the Misty Never Beings in favour of playing “Meddlesome” are “Surly Holmes, Insulting Detective” and “Flowchart Frontiers: Rule the Old West with Algorithms”. Trust me – there are weirder actual tabletop games out there.

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You know how you always come up with the perfect comeback long after the moment has passed? If only we could live in a video editor like the Anachronauts and have these ready to go ahead of time; we would be lauded for our sparkling wit instead of just standing there with our mouths hanging open, trying to think of something...anything... to say.

And then there’s the whole Duck/Rabbit paradigm shift. All this really boils down to is seeing the same information in entirely different ways, causing a shift in one’s perception of things. Do you see a Duck or a Rabbit in the diagram? Then again, is it Duck Season or Rabbit Season? Ask Bugs.