Tom Hardy, the British actor who came to prominence playing characters averse to shaving and bathing, had a holiday surprise for fans on New Year’s Eve. He was featured on the BBC’s CBeebies anthology series, where actors are tasked with reading bedtime stories to young viewers.

Hardy’s selection was You Must Bring a Hat by Simon Philip and Kate Hindley (who provided the illustrations), a whimsical tale in which a boy invited to a party tries to adhere to the dress code by taking along a monkey sporting a cap. Hardy uses several different voices during his segment; the dog dozing in his lap is reported to be the actor’s own.

The spot is likely to be the most family-friendly appearance by the actor in the foreseeable future. He can next be seen in Taboo, the BBC One and FX period drama about an anti-establishment provocateur that Hardy has described as being “part Hannibal Lecter.” You can catch all of Hardy’s reading engagement below.

In an effort to give the U.S.’s growing elderly population a boost, a California-based smart clothing company called Superflex is working on a new robotic exoskeleton designed to increase mobility.

According to The Verge, the lightweight wearable is meant to be worn under clothing and features a number of computer-controlled sensors which track the wearer’s posture and movement, which are all readable via a companion mobile app. Data is then sent to the suit’s motors, which can offer assistance sitting up, standing upright, and raising one’s arms.

Research company SRI International initially developed the technology for the military as a way to help soldiers avoid injury while carrying heavy loads in the field. Recognizing the suit’s commercial potential, they formed Superflex, a new company focused on making the technology accessible to aging consumers. (As The Verge points out, the population of Americans over 65 years old is expected to almost double in the next 30 years.) Although designed with seniors in mind, the exoskeleton could also be used by athletes, construction workers, and people with physical disabilities.

“Our origins are in robotics, our future is as an apparel company,” Superflex co-founder and CEO Rich Mahoney said in a statement. “Our powered clothing will give people the ability to move more freely, to gain strength and confidence, to be more injury-free in the workplace, to achieve higher levels of wellness and social engagement, and to stay in the home longer.”

Still in the early stages of development, the Superflex smart suit should be ready to ship to consumers in 2018.

[h/t The Verge]

It may not have been a huge box office success, but Tim Burton’s Ed Wood did win two Academy Awards and a chorus of rave reviews following its release in 1994. Pretty impressive for a biopic about a man who has largely been labeled “the worst director of all time.” Throw on an angora sweater and let’s take a look.

1. IT’S THE BRAINCHILD OF FORMER COLLEGE ROOMMATES.

In 1981, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski—both freshmen at the USC School of Cinema-Television—met each other in a cafeteria line, hit it off immediately, and arranged to become roommates. During their senior year, the duo began joining forces on an assortment of screenwriting projects, kicking off a partnership that continues to this day. Together, they have co-written Problem Child (1990), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Man on the Moon (1999), and Big Eyes (2014). On the small screen, they also developed the hit FX series American Crime Story, which recently completed its first season with The People v. O. J. Simpson.

Before graduating from USC in 1985, Alexander and Karaszewski briefly considered making a documentary on history’s most enigmatic director, Edward D. Wood, Jr. Although this project went unrealized, they eventually returned to the subject. In 1992, author Rudolph Grey published Ed Wood: Nightmare of Ecstasy (The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr.), a thoroughly researched oral biography of Wood and his work. The book inspired Alexander and Karaszewski to pen a 10-page story treatment for a new biopic about the eccentric, cross-dressing auteur.

2. THE ORIGINAL PLAN WAS TO BRING ON TIM BURTON AS A PRODUCER.

Karaszewski said that, at the onset, he and Alexander “envisioned Ed Wood as more of an indie style picture.” Obviously, it would need a director, so the scribes presented their treatment to their former USC classmate Michael Lehmann, who’s best known for directing the low-budget cult comedy Heathers (1988). Lehmann loved the concept and agreed to sit in the director’s chair. Then the scriptwriters contacted Tim Burton.

“We weren’t even asking Tim to work on Ed Wood, just to put his name to it,” Alexander recalled. “We said, ‘Would you mind coming on as a producer or a presenter, just to help us raise our financing?’ This was so we could say ‘Tim Burton Presents [Ed Wood].’” Having grown up with Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), Burton was a lifelong Ed Wood fan. Excited by the treatment, he told Alexander and Karaszewski that he’d like to direct the film.

Not only did the material seem tailor-made for Burton’s unique style but, as Karaszewski pointed out, everyone involved knew that, “The film would have a much better chance of being made if Tim agreed to direct.” Even Lehmann was excited about the possibility and agreed to “step aside” should Burton choose to assume directing duty. (Lehmann later became one of Ed Wood’s producers.)

There was just one problem: Tri-Star had already asked Burton to helm Mary Reilly, an upcoming drama about Dr. Jekyll’s housekeeper. In order to secure his services, Alexander and Karaszewski knew they’d need to give him a full-length script—and fast!

“Tim had six weeks to decide whether he was going to make Mary Reilly or not,” Karaszewski explained, “… so Scott and I locked ourselves in a room and quickly did a first draft, which ended up too long at about 140 pages. We got it to Tim on a Friday and then we got a call [that] Sunday saying Tim had dropped out of the other movie and was going our movie. Tim had no notes at all, and his intention was to simply shoot our first draft, which is exactly what he did. We were very lucky. Not much got changed.”

3. COLUMBIA PICTURES DROPPED THE FILM AFTER BURTON INSISTED ON SHOOTING IT IN BLACK AND WHITE.

One month before production began, Ed Wood hit a snag. Burton was fortunate enough to hire his first choice for the role of Bela Lugosi, actor Martin Landau, and makeup artist Rick Baker made Landau look uncannily similar to the Hungarian movie star. Nevertheless, after watching the first color tests, something felt a bit off. That’s when everyone realized that they’d only ever seen black-and-white photographs of Lugosi. Immediately, Burton decided that Ed Wood couldn’t be filmed in color.

The movie was being developed by Columbia Pictures, whose higher-ups disagreed with Burton’s decision to shoot in black and white. “They were saying, ‘Look, we can’t get our cable money, we can’t get our foreign video money, we won’t be able to exploit the movie in a lot of markets if it’s in black-and-white,” Alexander recalled. Still, Burton held firm. Realizing he wouldn’t budge, Columbia abandoned the picture. Fortunately, Disney was there to pick it up—and allowed Burton to follow his creative instincts.

4. MARTIN LANDAU PREPARED FOR HIS ROLE BY STUDYING HUNGARIAN LANGUAGE TAPES.

In order to imitate Lugosi’s voice and mannerisms, Landau watched some 35 Lugosi movies and purchased Hungarian language tapes. With the latter, he would “literally practice the language and see where the tongue would go.” Doing his homework really paid off, as the performance earned Landau an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1995. When Hungarian-born director Peter Medak saw Ed Wood, he called Landau to praise him; Medak said that Landau’s accent sounded spot-on because, “You are not an actor trying to do a Hungarian accent, you’re a character trying not to do [one].”

5. BURTON HAS LIKENED THE ON-SCREEN BOND BETWEEN WOOD AND LUGOSI TO HIS OWN RELATIONSHIP WITH VINCENT PRICE.

Following the release of his 1953 mega-hit House of Wax, Vincent Price became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. And Tim Burton, who grew up watching and rewatching the actor’s acclaimed Edgar Allan Poe films, was one of Price’s biggest fans.

“There was an energy he had; it was evident in everything.” Burton said. “I liked believing Vincent Price, I believed him.” In 1982, Burton gave Price’s career a boost by casting him as the narrator of Vincent, a short film. The two became friends and worked together again on Edward Scissorhands (1990), as well as a Price-centered documentary called Conversations With Vincent.

When Burton read Alexander and Karaszewski’s script for Ed Wood, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. “There was an aspect of Wood’s relationship with Bela Lugosi that I liked,” Burton said. “He befriended him at the end of his life, and … I connected with it on the level that I did with Vincent Price, in terms of how I felt about him. Meeting Vincent had an incredible impact on me, the same impact Ed must have felt meeting and working with his idol.”

6. JOHNNY DEPP’S ED WOOD VOICE WAS A COMBINATION OF RONALD REAGAN, CASEY KASEM, AND THE TIN MAN FROM THE WIZARD OF OZ.

In interviews, Johnny Depp has said that to capture the voice of Wood, he tried to merge Ronald Reagan’s “blind optimism” with the “vocal attack” of Casey Kasem, the long-serving disc jockey who voiced Shaggy on the original Scooby-Doo cartoon series. Further inspiration was drawn from Jack Haley’s performance as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

7. BUNNY’S ROLE WAS EXPANDED AFTER BILL MURRAY SIGNED ON.

Actor and drag queen John Campbell “Bunny” Breckinridge was a major player in Plan 9 From Outer Space. Despite this, the original Ed Wood script gave the character very little dialogue. But when Bill Murray signed on to play the part, Alexander and Karaszewski decided to beef up the role. “When Bill got cast, it didn’t make sense to just have him standing in the background!” Karaszewski said.

8. THE REAL ED WOOD PROBABLY DIDN’T KIDNAP AN OCTOPUS.

The movie shows Wood stealing a motorized giant octopus from Paramount so that he can shoot the climactic scene for Bride of the Monster (1955). However, the jury’s still out on whether this actually happened or not. Many years after the fact, Wood himself boasted that he illegally lifted the prop and Dolores Fuller later said as much in a conversation with film historian Tom Weaver. Yet Alex Gordon, the movie’s screenwriter, claimed it was rented.

9. PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE’S LEADING MAN IS IN IT.

Although he appeared in more than 30 movies and worked with visionaries like Steven Spielberg and John Ford, Gregory Walcott is chiefly remembered for playing the main character in Plan 9 From Outer Space. “It’s enough to drive a puritan to drink!” Walcott vented in 1998. Regardless, when Tim Burton’s Ed Wood came around, he made a quick cameo as a prospective investor in one scene. The film marked Walcott’s final film appearance; the actor passed away in 2015.

10. DEPP DEVELOPED A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH ANGORA SWEATERS.

“I learned too much about women’s clothing,” Depp said of Ed Wood, while promoting the movie in an MTV interview. “The first thing I learned is that angora feels amazing on someone else, [but] not on you.” Alas, the fuzzy material does have an annoying habit of shedding profusely; Depp joked that in certain scenes, he may have “inhaled more angora than oxygen.”

11. IT WAS THE FIRST BURTON-DIRECTED MOVIE THAT DANNY ELFMAN DIDN’T SCORE.

Burton and Danny Elfman first collaborated on Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), which marked Burton’s feature directorial debut and Elfman’s first major movie score. It was a match made in heaven. Following Pee-wee, Elfman provided the music for Burton’s next four pictures: Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Batman Returns (1992). But due to a temporary falling out between the two artists, Elfman did not lend his talents to Ed Wood, which was scored by Howard Shore instead. The dynamic duo would later bury the hatchet after filming began on Mars Attacks! (1996).

12. BELA LUGOSI JR. ISN’T A FAN.

Although Ed Wood was showered with positive reviews after its release, the picture didn’t win everybody over. Bela Lugosi Jr., for one, was outraged by the film’s “distorted” portrayal of his late father’s drug rehabilitation process. “The truth, in this case, is actually more dramatic than fiction, but it doesn’t star Ed Wood,” the younger Lugosi told the Los Angeles Times. “My dad, who had a medically induced addiction to morphine, turned himself in—with no Mr. Wood accompanying him, contrary to what the film shows—to Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk.”

Furthermore, Lugosi Jr. says that his father never would have made “certain references to Vampira’s anatomy or … scatological remarks regarding Boris Karloff.” (In fact, Lugosi Sr. greatly respected Karloff, and vice versa.)

13. DOLORES FULLER DIDN’T LIKE SARAH JESSICA PARKER’S PORTRAYAL OF HER.

Overall, Wood’s longtime girlfriend enjoyed the movie. Before her death in 2011, Fuller called Landau’s performance “magnificent” and said that Depp did a “beautiful” job in the lead role. “Eddy wasn’t always that up, he had his heartbreaks too,” Fuller allowed, “… but oh what a great actor [Depp] is and I just loved the portrayal.” But she didn’t feel that the film treated her fairly.

“That was the only thing I didn’t like about the movie,” Fuller said. “Sarah Jessica Parker smoked all the time and I would never smoke. And she didn’t contact me. Here she’s playing my life and she didn’t bother to do any research.” Also, she pointed out that her relationship with Wood was a lot warmer than the movie might have you believe. “They portrayed me as an actress out to get all I can get, but I contributed.” Indeed, she did: Among many other things, Fuller (willingly) provided Wood with a number of costumes that were used in his films. She’d also help her then-boyfriend entertain Bela Lugosi during the Dracula star’s regular visits to their home.

14. PEOPLE WERE MISTAKING GEORGE STEELE FOR TOR JOHNSON LONG BEFORE ED WOOD CAME OUT.

A professional wrestler himself, George Steele looks like Tor Johnson—who appeared in several of Wood’s movies—reincarnated. Noting their physical similarities, Burton asked Steele to submit an audition tape and cast him as Johnson shortly thereafter. In Steele’s autobiography, he reveals that he “knew nothing about” Wood before Burton contacted him. “While I had never seen Plan 9 From Outer Space,” Steele wrote, “people had told me that they’d seen me in this monster movie. I had no clue at the time what they were talking about. Later on, I learned it was an Ed Wood movie featuring Tor Johnson. Apparently, Tim Burton was not the only one who saw some resemblance between me and ol’ Tor.”

“Secure the shadow, ere the substance fades.” That very early photographers’ slogan—introduced not long after Louis Daguerre announced his daguerreotype process in 1839—may seem ominous, but it reflects the reality of Victorian life. In an age before antibiotics, when infant mortality soared and the Civil War raged, death was a constant presence in the United States. And one prominent part of the process of memorializing the dead was taking a postmortem photo.

Postmortem photography evolved out of posthumous portraiture, a mode of painting in which wealthy Europeans (and eventually Americans) memorialized dead family members by depicting them alongside a slew of symbols, colors, and gestures associated with death. While the people—usually children—in these images might look reasonably healthy, the presence of a dead bird, a cut cord, drooping flowers, or a three-fingered grip (a reference to the holy trinity) often signaled that the subject was deceased. These types of images, popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries, served as cherished reminders of loved ones long gone.

By the 1840s, however, the production of memorial images started moving from the artist’s studio to the photography studio—and democratized in the process. No longer were the wealthy the only ones who could afford images of loved ones, in life or death. Photography studios spread throughout the country in the 1850s, and postmortem photography reached its height a few decades later. And whereas paintings might have cost large sums, and daguerreotypes were often luxuries, the ambrotypes and tintypes that followed sometimes went for just a few cents.

For the Victorians, the postmortem photo was just one aspect of an elaborate mourning ritual that often involved covering the house and body in as much black crepe as one could afford, as well as more intimate acts like washing the corpse, watching over it, and accompanying it to the gravesite. Early photos were sometimes referred to as “mirrors with memories,” and the Victorians saw photographing the dead as one way of preserving the memory of a family member. Photos of the dead were kept as keepsakes, displayed in homes, sent to friends and relatives, worn inside lockets, or even carried as pocket mirrors.

Photographing the dead, however, was a tricky business, and required careful manipulation of the body, props, and equipment, either at the photographer’s studio or at the home of the deceased. Though the majority of postmortem images depict the dead laid out in a bed or coffin, dead children were not infrequently placed in a mother’s lap to keep them upright (echoing the Victorian fashion for “hidden mother” portraits, in which a parent or assistant was draped in fabric as a backdrop with varying degrees of success). Adults were also most frequently shown in coffins, but occasionally photographed in chairs, sometimes holding a book or other props. After the photo session, photographers manipulated the negative, too—to make the dead person’s stare look less blank, or sometimes to paint pupils over closed eyelids.

Some sense of the difficulties of postmortem photography can be gleaned from remarks by leading daguerrotype photographer Albert Southworth printed in an 1873 edition of the Philadelphia Photographer: “If a person has died, and the friends are afraid that there will be a liquid ejected from the mouth, you can carefully turn them over just as though they were under the operation of an emetic. You can do that in less than a single minute, and every single thing will pass out, and you can wipe out the mouth and wash off the face, and handle them just as well as if they were well persons.”

Today, a lot of myths about postmortem photos circulate on the internet and among the general public. One of the biggest falsehoods, says Mike Zohn, co-owner of New York’s Obscura Oddities and Antiques and a long-time postmortem photography collector and dealer, is that the world’s photo albums are filled with lively looking photos of dead people.

The Victorians “had no issue showing dead people as being dead,” Zohn tells mental_floss. “They did not try to make them look alive, that is a modern myth.” He cautions that Pinterest and other websites are full of images of living people who have been labeled as dead, sometimes with elaborate (but incorrect) explanations of the types of tools that have been used to keep them propped up. “The Victorians also did not use strings, wires, armatures, or anything else to pose the dead,” Zohn adds. “They weren’t meat puppets that were strung up and treated like meat. They were respectful and treated the dead with dignity.”

Part of the problem, writes noted postmortem photography collector and scholar Stanley Burns in Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography, American & European Traditions, is that the dead of the 19th century often looked better than the dead of today. We tend to prolong life with measures that weren’t available for the Victorians, but the epidemics of the 19th century killed quickly. “Except for children who died from dehydration or from viruses that left conspicuous skin rashes, or adults who succumbed to cancer or extreme old age,” Burns writes, “the dead would often appear to be quite healthy.”

Zohn particularly cautions against the idea that Victorians used posing stands to create upright post-mortems. “The posing stand is similar in design and strength to a modern day microphone stand,” he says. “There is no way it could possibly hold up the weight of a dead body. If you see a photo with a person and a stand behind them, it’s a guarantee that the person is alive.”

Jack Mord, who runs the postmortem-focused Thanatos Archive, agrees about the posing stands. “People see the base of these stands in photos and assume it’s there to stand a dead person up … but that was never, ever the case,” Mord says. “Basically, if you see the base of a posing stand in a photo, that’s an immediate sign that the person in the photo was alive, not dead.”

Both Zohn and Mord also point out that many people have a misperception about how expensive photography was during the 19th century. Zohn says, “You could easily get a tintype taken for less than five cents—in some cases as low as one or two cents. It was well within the reach of almost all but the very poor, yet some falsely believe it was so expensive that they could only afford to have one image taken and it would have been a post mortem.” While that might have been true when the photography was first introduced—and it’s true that postmortems might have been the only photo ever made of an infant—it wasn’t a general rule.

Some books on postmortem photography mention checking the hands for signs the subject is dead, noting that swelling or discoloration can be a sign of death. But Zohn says it’s easy to misread this clue: “I’ve seen many images of clearly dead people with light-colored hands as well as clearly live people with dark hands. It’s usually caused by lighting and exposure, but could also be something such as suntanned hands that will appear darker.” A better clue, Zohn says, is the symbolism—flowers, folded hands, closed eyes. An adult lying stretched out on a bed with his or her shoes off can be a sign of a postmortem, since shoes can be hard to put on a corpse. And of course, if someone’s lying in a coffin, there’s a good chance they’re dead.

Postmortem photography more or less ended as a common practice by the 1930s in the United States, as social mores shifted away from prolonged public mourning, death became medicalized, and infant mortality rates improved. But “postmortems never truly ever ended,” Zohn says. Today, several companies specialize in taking photos of stillborn infants or newborns, and the practice of postmortem photography continues as a regular event in other parts of the world.

Today, most Americans have decided that our final image is the one we least want remembered. It’s easy for us to shut death out of our minds, and we don’t necessarily want reminders in our homes. But for the Victorians, death wasn’t weird—it was ordinary and ever-present. Burns writes that postmortems “were taken with the same lack of self-consciousness with which today’s photographer might document a party or a prom.”

All photos via the Thanatos Archive, used with permission. Identifying information provided where known.