Ah, what a culture! Who needs memes when we have TV shows whose darkest secrets emit wisdom like uranium sending out radiation?
(Whaat?)
Oh well:
by Brian Wilson
Urban legends and pop culture have always had an incredibly healthy relationship. Whether it’s the story about Walt Disney’s body being frozen for when scientists learn how to cheat death or the Munchkin actor who supposedly committed suicide in the background of a scene in The Wizard Of Oz, society can’t get enough of these mysterious anecdotes.
But never are they more fascinating than the ones that spawn from television. When you think about it, television is the perfect place for the creation of urban legends. For a start, a massive amount of material is constantly being recorded, with much of it remaining on the cutting room floor, or simply never being aired.
Then there’s the fact that unlike film, so much television from the last few decades has been lost or become inaccessible to the general public, meaning that this rare and unknown footage is a prime breeding ground for rumour and enigma.
From a talk show and its guests that potentially halted crime in America to the flashing of a sitcom star’s testicles, here are eight insane urban legends about TV shows.
These days watching the host of a talk show being flirtatious and suggestive with female guests is fairly normal, and not particularly surprising. What is surprising, however, is how little this has supposedly changed in the last fifty years, specifically when you look at one instance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
For decades now the story has persisted that actress Zsa Zsa Gabor (who is famous for the likes of 1952’s Moulin Rouge, The Naked Gun 2 and The Hollywood Squares) showed up for an interview with Johnny Carson with a cat on her lap. She then asked Carson if he would like to “pet her pussy”, to which Carson is said to have replied “I’d love to, but you’ll to remove that damn cat.”…