Everything has a beginning, and in many things they are quite easy to understand. You can look at the first film of a certain director or actor, the first book of a writer, the first appearance of a favorite fictional character. Usually it is very cut and dry. However, every now and then something becomes popular and then you discover that it is much older than you first imagined, and the origin can be quite unexpected.
10. Nazi soup was mentioned before Seinfeld V "Sleepless in Seattle"
Seinfeld was known for having a lot of really quirky and interesting supporting characters that stood out as much, if not more, than the main cast. Some of them only appeared in one or two episodes, but are still mentioned to this day, years after the show went off the air. Perhaps the most famous of all these characters was the Soup Nazi.
In the show, the Soup Nazi runs a soup restaurant with an intolerant iron fist. Customers who refuse to abide by the rules are banished for life, hence the humorous name he gave it. But the character was based on a real person named Ali Yagenah .
Yagena ran a famous soup restaurant in Manhattan and was known for his short temper. The man's real-life nickname was Soup Man. A terrorist. As a character, he was actually mentioned two years before Seinfeld in the film by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan "Sleepless in Seattle " Although it's brief, Ryan's character talks about wanting to write a story about a guy in New York who makes the best soup but is also the meanest man in America. The film's screenwriter is Nora Ephron, a New Yorker, and Yagenach had been written about in the New Yorker a few years earlier.
9. The first F-word was used in text as early as the 1300s.
The F-word is one of the most enduring words in the English language, and is still considered taboo by many today, despite being over 700 years old. Few words have such longevity that most of "polite" society must refer to them by their first letter.
The first written mention of the word f comes from 1310 , when it was deciphered as part of a court case. The previous earliest mention was much later, in 1475. It's also at 100% not what you'd expect. There was a guy named Roger F-bytenavele, who, and this is just a guess, could have been a guy who was really bad at sex, or just someone known as a jerk who got a creative nickname so famous they said it in legal documents. Either way, it's amazing.
He is mentioned in the document 7 times under this name. The case had no connection with his name and appeared to relate mainly to his failure to appear in an earlier case, although the nature of this is not mentioned.
8. Botanist was first used by Dr. Seuss
The word "nerd" is so common these days that businesses use it to advertise things like computer services. It really gained prominence in everyday usage in the 1970s and probably peaked in the '80s with movies like "Revenge of the Nerds" By that time, the meaning of the word "unattractive" and socially awkward" was quite widely understood.
Nerd didn't develop in schoolyards with bullies, but it came from one of the world's most famous authors. Dr. Seuss first coined the word. back in 1950 , at least as far as its use in print is concerned. There it appeared in his work "If I Ran the Zoo" and in context it is simply a meaningless word with no relation to its current meaning.
It was mentioned that in Newsweek article from 1951 There are also references to teenagers calling each other nerds, and that the term came to replace the words "blob" or "square" as an insult, so it's likely that Suess didn't pull the word out of the airwaves, but he was the first to put it on paper.
7. The Romans used Yin-Yang symbolism before China
The Yin-Yang symbol is closely associated with East Asian culture. You can find it all over the Western world as a sort of pseudo-spiritual symbol used in jewelry and art, usually representing balance and harmony. The idea of what the symbol represents dates back to China thousands of years ago, but the iconography does not. In fact, it first appeared in Rome around 700 years before in China.
This symbol was used in some examples of Roman shields , but has nothing to do with the meaning of yin-yang or Taoism in general, as none of this was known to the Romans at the time. Instead, it was a coincidence, or, less likely, someone saw a design on Roman shields and thought it represented the idea well, and adapted it to their own needs. If this symbol had any deeper meaning for the Romans, it has since been lost to history.
6. Harry Potter was a character in a fantasy story many years before J.K. Rowling's books.
Harry Potter is one of the biggest entertainment franchises in history, and the films, including the Fantastic Beasts spin-offs, to date collected more 9 billion dollars . They brought more books 7.7 billion dollars .
If you were to describe the story in very general and vague terms, you could say that it's a fantasy series about someone named Harry Potter who lives in a world with trolls and goblins and the like. And based on that limited description, you're also describing the movie "Troll" 1986, which significantly predates the more popular franchise. Filmmaker John Buechler later claimed, that he invented Harry Potter , that the stories had a lot in common and that J.K. Rowling had tricked him. He even planned to release a remake/sequel called "Troll: The Rise of Harry Potter Jr." , which was never realized after Büchler's death.
Rowling and the studio, The team behind the famous Potter films disagreed that they stole anything, and if you've seen both, you'll find it hard to believe that Boy Wizard was inspired by an 80s B-movie, but the fact remains that it was indeed a story about a wizarding world and a boy named Harry Potter, many years before the more famous version.
5. Donald Duck's sister was created in the 30s
Disney has a plethora of famous characters that span the decades, but some of the original and most iconic characters include Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck. Donald had his own corner of the Disney-verse featuring three nephews named Huey, Dewey, and Louie, implying that Donald had a sister somewhere.
In 2017, the cartoon "DuckTales" , which featured Donald's three nephews and uncle Scrooge McDuck, got a reboot, and they finally decided to give the boysmother . She is featured in a painting in one episode and is referred to as a mom, and then in 2019, the character Della Duck debuts, who voiced by Paget Brewster .
But the boys had a mother long before that; Disney just never did anything with her. The first mention of their mother, then named Dumbella, was in 1937. She later appeared in a Dutch comic strip in which the triplets are named Quick, Quek, and Kwak, but she hasn't been seen in any other cartoons until recently.
4. The ring of invisibility was first used by Plato.
Perhaps the most important plot device in Tolkien's books "The Lord of the Rings" is the One Ring itself , which is also possibly its own character, despite not being a living being. It has an active influence on events and without it the plot cannot move forward. It is an important element and is very much borrowed from Plato. This was done on purpose.
Tolkien must have been familiar with Plato's "Republic " And " "The Ring of Gyges" In Plato's tale, a shepherd receives a magic ring that makes him invisible. Using this ring, he kills the king and takes over the kingdom. Plato believed that invisibility and anonymity were important keys to corruption, and the difference between a just and an unjust person was only one's ability to be invisible and anonymous. Take what you will from that sentence as it applies to the Internet.
Parallels With "The Lord of the Rings" are obvious. The One Ring corrupts all who come into contact with it. Only simple, innocent hobbits can resist its influence long enough to reach Mount Doom, and even then Frodo is lost at the critical moment.
3. The NY Times first mentioned Hitler back in 1922.
The history of World War II has been covered widely and from countless angles. Many people have wanted to know afterwards and still want to know how it could have happened. Or more precisely, how Hitler could have happened.
Stories of Nazi atrocities and the deaths of millions of Jews have been in the headlines in 1942. The war itself had begun only three years earlier, and Hitler had become Reich Chancellor in 1933.
Part of the problem was that the world knew about him before it turned into a world war. The New York Times first wrote about Hitler in 1922 At that time, he had only been in the German political world since 1919 and had become the leader of the Nazi Party in 1921. Outside Germany, he was still relatively unknown.
The Times article noted that Hitler was a good orator and also made many anti-Semitic speeches, which the author dismissed, stating that "well-informed sources have supported the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not as sincere or violent as it sounded, and that he simply used anti-Semitic propaganda as bait to entice a mass following."
2. Palpatine was declared Emperor before the original film was released. "Star wars" .
The big reveal in the original trilogy "Star Wars" — the identity of Darth Vader. The identity of the Emperor is never considered at all, he is simply the Emperor. But at that time, he also never had a name. Nobody called him Palpatine. in the original trilogy, and actor Ian McDiarmid actually had some serious makeup to make him look creepy.
Fast forward to the prequel trilogy of the 1990s, and Chancellor Palpatine is a fully-fledged character, played again by a much older Ian McDiarmid. He's initially portrayed as good, and gradually suspicions fall on him, until finally there's a scene in which Yoda and Mace Windu discuss the Sith master/apprentice relationship, and the movie just goes and shows you Palpatine.
Some fans would have known beforehand that Palpatine was the Emperor, simply because they noticed the actors or even recognized the voice. But for many, it was a surprise. However, the actual reveal happened long before the prequel trilogy and, oddly enough, before the original trilogy. Palpatine's first appearance and the revelation that he was the Emperor occurred months before the original Star Wars film was released in Alan Dean Foster's novel Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker.
1. "God helps those who help themselves" appeared before the Bible.
There are many proverbs, sayings, and aphorisms that are quoted all the time to impart wisdom, or at least some cliched version of it. The popular saying “God helps those who help themselves” has been around for centuries and basically means that you have your own power and agency to do things in your life.
Some people believe the saying is taken from the Bible, perhaps even quoting Jesus. According to one pastor, a survey of American Christians found that 68% of which believe that the proverb has biblical origins. In truth, the proverb is actually much older.
You can trace the phrase "God helps those who help themselves" back to Aesop's Fables , where you can find it in a story called "Hercules and the Carter." There it is sometimes translated as "Heaven helps those who help themselves" and was written around 550 BC, long before Jesus could have uttered any such words.
Оставить Комментарий