TIL Thread: Today I learned...

[Mr. Big]

TIL about, well, this:



It's amazing

[Octavia]

TIL about LANSA Flight 508 and its sole survivor, Juliane Koepcke. The plane broke apart in mid-air and while strapped into her row of seats, she fell 2 miles into the dense Amazon rainforest below. While nursing severe injuries, for 10 days she navigated her way through the jungle until she found help. There's a documentary about her tale of survival by Werner Herzog, who amazingly was scheduled to be on the very same plane's next flight:

[Adiwan]

Disney Research does very amazing work.

[Mr. Big]

Today I learned that Bobby Bonilla is probably the only person who doesn't hate Bernie Madoff

[Pocket]

You know the famous voice clip of Wario saying "D'oh! I missed!"? TIL he's actually speaking German, and saying "So ein mist!" meaning "Aw crap!" Wario was originally intended to be German, and I guess Nintendo changed their minds at some point later on.

[Pocket]

TIL pure ray-tracing was not actually used in CGI films until Monsters University in 2013. That explains a few things, like how there are shots in the original Toy Story where a character is harshly lit from the side but his nose doesn't cast a shadow on the rest of his face.

[Mr. Big]

TIL that a 1990s Peanuts special "It's Spring Training, Charlie Brown" was supposed to air on CBS in 1992, but they cancelled the premiere for reasons they never explained (although presumably it's because the ratings for the specials were dropping by the time the 1990s hit). It finally made it premiere in 1996 as a direct-to-video release, and made its television debut in 1998 on Nickelodeon, when they had the rights to the Peanuts specials.

CBS would only air one more Peanuts special after this, "It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown", before cancelling all further specials on the network. How fitting that the last special CBS aired was the 2nd Christmas special. The next special, "You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown", aired on NBC in 1994 as a tie-in with that year's Super Bowl. The last set of specials produced by Bill Melendez were either direct-to-video or aired on ABC.

[diribigal]

Before it was a weapon, a "bazooka" was a musical instrument?!

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

yup

[Octavia]

There's also an instrument called a bouzouki

[Madeline]

TIL that Angry Birds not only still exists, it apparently just got an update

It was like looking at the bill for the state fair and seeing that half of it is bands you heard on the radio in high school and then forgot about for 20 years

[Pocket]

It's weird to think Angry Birds was once considered the epitome of shitty mobile games, back when we thought the worst a game studio could do was be extremely popular despite being just kind of an OK way to kill time on the subway, and milk an IP to death.

I mean, maybe the franchise has moved on to being the kind of pay-to-win lootbox-fests that people like these days, by this point. I wouldn't know.

[Perpetual Motion]

The actual weird part is that Angry Birds somehow manages to have one of the least-bad movie adaptations of any video game. Movie's still shit and actually promotes some really fucking vile xenophobia if you stop to think about it for any amount of time, but when most video game movies are from Uwe Boll or Resident Evil-style schlock it manages to stick out.

[Adiwan]

Never forget Double Dragon, the first of its kind.

[Fizzbuzz]

The actual weird part is that Angry Birds somehow manages to have one of the least-bad movie adaptations of any video game.

Someone post the clip of the eagle peeing for 42 seconds, thanks in advance.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

sadly all i can find on youtube are longer than 42 seconds

[Mr. Big]

And they made a sequel to that movie.

And it was directed by the guy who voiced Gideon in "Gravity Falls" (and created "Flapjack")

[Frosthawk]

It was like looking at the bill for the state fair and seeing that half of it is bands you heard on the radio in high school and then forgot about for 20 years

Hell, these days that's pretty much all rock festivals. Two years ago I went to a festival where among others I saw Bush, Primus, Living Colour, Stone Temple Pilots and Chevelle.

[Octavia]

Hell, these days that's pretty much all rock festivals. Two years ago I went to a festival where among others I saw Bush, Primus, Living Colour, Stone Temple Pilots and Chevelle.

There was one here a few years ago with Fastball, Vertical Horizon, Gin Blossoms, Sugar Ray, and Smash Mouth.

I saw Stone Temple Pilots in the early 2000s, about a decade after their heyday, but they still played all their old stuff and they were AMAZING. Scott

[Pocket]

TIL the Takeshi of Takeshi's Challenge fame is the same as Takeshi's Castle. And that the original pitch for Takeshi's Challenge was to be a video game adapation of the show before he decided to take it in the radically different direction that he did.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

i like that the game is as absurdly challenging as takeshi's castle

[Perpetual Motion]

Thankfully we eventually got Fall Guys, which is the video game adaptation of Takeshi's Castle we all deserve.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

fall guys seems nice

[Pocket]

That's what inspired me to look it up. I was like "Wait, that name sounds familiar."

[Pocket]

TIL the attempt at reviving the XFL got shut down back in March due to the pandemic and went bankrupt. So that's twice now that it's failed spectacularly.

[Perpetual Motion]

Didn't The Rock buy it off of Vince?

[Mr. Big]

TIL about...this:



So rats are basically Tex Avery characters IRL

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

hah

[Octavia]

[Perpetual Motion]

Rats are amazing, but the ones I would want as a pet are not exactly available in pet stores. The normal Fancy breed rats you get only live for 2-3 years, but I'm really enamored with the Gambian Pouched Rat, which can live for 7-10 years in captivity. Unfortunately, they're banned from being imported to the US after being the likely vector for a small outbreak of Monkeypox in Florida in 2003.

These rats are actually trained to detect landmines in Africa, since their noses are keen enough to sniff them out, and they're light enough to never trigger one, which I find incredibly cool.

[Pocket]

Y'all remember the "Going to the Store" viral video?



TIL the composer of the piece used in that video, "The Little Ships", was Jean-Jacques Perrey, who has also written some other things you might know. "Brazilian Flower" went somewhat viral when it was used in the YTMND-esque Rainbow Bunchie webpage (and also appeared in an episode of PONIES the Anthology, although I forget what the context was), and "Mary France" became the basis for the original end sequence of Nintendo's Doki Doki Panic, the game that would later become Super Mario Bros. 2 in the US.



And by an interesting coincidence, all three songs were from the same album.

But it gets even more interesting. You know "Popcorn", maybe the most famous early synth song of all time? The composer of that song (although not the most famous version), Gershon Kingsley, teamed up with Perrey for a while under the name Perrey and Kingsley. Some of their material appeared on Sesame Street back in the day (naturally!), but their most famous piece was "Baroque Hoedown", which became the main theme from the Disneyland Electrical Parade.



Dude's had quite the career, and I didn't even get into the stuff I wasn't already personally familiar with, like apparently his stuff has appeared in South Park, Spongebob Squarepants... and judging by the material I've listened to so far, we might also have to credit him as the true inventor of penis music.

[Mr. Big]

Oh gosh. Jean-Jacques Perrey's music was used at a stock music for so long.

"The Mighty B!" used a song he did, "Boys and Girls", as a closing credits song.



It gets weirder. That exact same music was used as a theme song for an anime. Specifically, "Polon the Star Child", an infamously bad anime that's often put in the same category as "Chargeman Ken!". The show used Perrey's library of stock music for its soundtrack.

Here's one of the few episodes that has English subtitles:

[Fizzbuzz]

On SA, back when the Gas Chamber had music that automatically played in the background (before my time, well over a decade and a half ago), a song of his once served that purpose.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

your posts are now funky

[SlateSlabrock]

"Brazilian Flower" went somewhat viral when it was used in the YTMND-esque Rainbow Bunchie webpage (and also appeared in an episode of PONIES the Anthology, although I forget what the context was)

[Pocket]

Thanks.

Now just what in the blueberry fuck was that parodying?

[Pocket]

I just stumbled across this apparently real, and apparently official, poster released by the movie ratings people back in the '90s to explain what the different ratings mean. The details are funny enough on their own, but now I realize what was being referenced in that one Freakazoid bit:

[Mr. Big]

NC-17 is so rarely used in mainstream movies you always forget that rating exists.

[Octavia]

NC-17 is so rarely used in mainstream movies you always forget that rating exists.

Because it's pretty much a death sentence for a film. A lot of theaters won't even show NC-17 movies and lots of distribution companies won't create home media options for them.

I recommend watching "This Film is Not Yet Rated", a documentary that shows how biased the MPAA rating system is. The people who rate the films are kept a guarded secret, as are the people in the appeals board for films who receive a rating they don't want. Films with gay sex scenes are FAR more likely to get an NC-17 than straight ones, even ones that are far more tame by comparison.

[Mechanical Ape]

"Showgirls" was the trial balloon for whether a studio could make a commercially successful NC-17 film, and, well ...