Author: Jennifer M Wood

In the summer of 1984, nerds were mainly perceived as guys who wore pocket protectors and had tape on their glasses. But in Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs was inventing the type of nerd culture we’re familiar with today. More than 30 years later, nerds rule the world.

Revenge of the Nerds starred then-unknowns Anthony Edwards (Gilbert Lowe), Robert Carradine (Lewis Skolnick), Curtis Armstrong (Booger), James Cromwell (Lewis’s dad), Larry B. Scott (Lamar), John Goodman (Coach Harris), and Timothy Busfield (Poindexter). In the movie, the jock-filled Alpha Beta fraternity bullies the geeks on the campus of Adams College, so to fight back, they form a frat chapter under black fraternity Lambda Lambda Lambda (Tri-Lambs), and take down the jocks. The movie’s plot and title come from a magazine article published around that time about Silicon Valley innovators—who just happened to be nerds.

The film, which was budgeted at $6 million, only opened on 364 screens (it eventually expanded to 877). Somehow the movie had legs and grossed $40,874,452 at the box office and ranked as the 16th highest-grossing film of 1984. It was successful enough to spawn three sequels, none of which were as popular as the original. Here are 12 geeky facts about the underdog comedy.

1. GREEK OFFICIALS OBJECTED TO THE MOVIE BEING FILMED ON CAMPUS.

The movie filmed at the University of Arizona, and involved the college’s Greek system. The Greek officials didn’t want the movie to be another Animal House, so they threatened to halt production. “We meet with the sororities, and we’re worried we’re about to deal with a bunch of feminists who are pissed because this is a fairly sexist movie,” the film’s director, Jeff Kanew, told the Arizona Daily Star. “I just say to them, ‘Look, I have kids, and I’ll tell you now, I’d let them see this movie. It’s about the triumph of the underdog, not judging a book by its cover. This is a good movie.’” The filmmakers won, and the Greeks allowed them to film there.

2. THE SET WAS ONE BIG PARTY.

Ted McGinley—who played Alpha Beta honcho Stan Gable—told The AV Club: “I was so embarrassed to say Revenge Of The Nerds.” Kanew cast him because he saw him on the cover of a Men of USC calendar, sold at the University of Arizona bookstore. His good looks attracted “hot girls” from the UofA campus to watch the dailies with the cast and crew. “They had beer and pizza and sandwiches,” McGinley said. “I mean, you just don’t do that on movie sets. It was just so much fun, and I thought, ‘It can’t be better than this!’”

3. CURTIS ARMSTRONG KNEW IT’D BE A GOOD MOVIE, EVEN THOUGH HIS CHARACTER WASN’T FLESHED OUT.

Curtis Armstrong filmed Risky Business but then was unemployed for a year before he got Revenge of the Nerds. “You have to realize the character of Booger in the original script was non-existent almost,” Armstrong told Entertainment Weekly. “What was there was just, ‘We’ve got b*sh!’ and ‘Mother’s little d**chebag’—those kinds of lines. I was looking at it and thinking, ‘How do I take this and even begin to make it likeable or accessible?’”

With its strong cast, writers, and director, Armstrong said, “It has to be a good movie. But I wasn’t sure how it was going to be taken as opposed to Risky Business, which was sort of an art-house-type movie. This was very much broader and very much cruder, but it had a message that went beyond sex jokes.”

4. THE SCENES BETWEEN BOOGER AND TAKASHI WERE IMPROVISED.

The actors would bring ideas to the director and vice versa, creating a lot of improvisation in the movie. In one scene, Booger and Takashi (Brian Tochi) engage in a friendly game of cards. But unbeknownst to Takashi, Booger tricks him. “We ran and got our cots, and Brian and I were next to each other,” Armstrong told Entertainment Weekly. “It wasn’t planned that we would be next to each other. It just happened that way.”

The production asked the guys to “come up with something” for them to film. “We had nothing at all!” Armstrong said. “We went to the prop people, and they had a deck of cards. And that’s where that scene [and Booger’s whole bit about taking money from Takashi] came from. And they liked it so much that, every time Takashi and I were in the room together, we would have to come up with something else.”

5. LAMBDA LAMBDA LAMBDA EXISTS IN REAL LIFE.

On January 15, 2006, the University of Connecticut founded the co-ed social fraternity. It’s “unaffiliated with Greek Life” and is “dedicated to the enjoyment and enrichment of pop culture and to the brotherhood of its members. Tri-Lambs does not discriminate based on race, gender, religion, class, ability, gender identity, or sexual orientation.”

6. BOOGER’S BELCH IS ACTUALLY FROM A CAMEL.

In one of the film’s more memorable scenes, Booger and Ogre compete in a belching contest. Booger takes a swig of beer and lets out a robust seven-second belch and wins the contest. But the effects were added in post-production. “I can’t even belch on command,” Armstrong told USA Today. “If you said to me, ‘Can you belch now?’ I couldn’t do it.”

To make up for Armstrong’s dearth of gas, “They wound up finding a recording of a camel having an orgasm,” Armstrong said. “They took this sound and blended it in with a human belch.”

7. ARMSTRONG WROTE A BIO ON BOOGER BUT IT TURNED OUT TO BE ABOUT HIMSELF.

Because his character wasn’t fully developed, Armstrong wrote a one-page bio for Booger. Years later he re-read the bio and realized he and Booger had similarities. “I’d basically retold my life as Booger without even being aware of it,” Armstrong told Entertainment Weekly. “[One detail] was that [Booger] used nose-picking and belching as a defense mechanism because [he’s] insecure. Now, mind you, I did not pick my nose and belch because I was insecure. However, I was insecure growing up. I didn’t have dates or anything like that; I was not good around girls. But I had other ways of defending myself other than being crude and picking my nose. When I look at it now with some distance, I realize all I was doing was writing about myself.”

8. A DALLAS TEST SCREENING ALMOST KILLED THE MOVIE.

The film tested well in Las Vegas—an 85—but when the Fox executives took the movie to Dallas, the number dipped. “You’re gonna send us to Dallas to screen a movie that celebrates nerds and in which the black guys intimidate the white football players?!” director Kanew told the Arizona Daily Star. The movie scored in the 60s, which caused Fox to cut marketing for the film and only release it on 364 screens. “I don’t really understand what happened, but it hung around and grew and grew and grew,” Kanew said.

9. POINDEXTER WAS ORIGINALLY NAMED AFTER A PROP GUY.

When Timothy Busfield auditioned for the movie, his character didn’t have many lines, so he had to read Lamar’s lines. At the time, the character was named Lipschultz, after the prop guy. All that was written for the character description was “a violin-playing Henry Kissinger.”

“There was one line Lipschultz had in the original, but our prop guy was named Lipschultz, and he didn’t like the fact that there was a nerd named Lipschultz, so they changed it to Poindexter,” Busfield said during a San Francisco Sketchfest Nerds reunion. Busfield found Poindexter’s costume at a thrift store and showed up to the audition with his hair parted, and danced to “Beat It.”

10. THE SEQUEL TO REVENGE OF THE NERDS AFFORDED ANTHONY EDWARDS A POOL.

Anthony Edwards told The AV Club that he didn’t want to appear in Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, but acquiesced because the producers talked him into it. He’s hardly in the film, but the money he earned afforded him a simple luxury. “I ended up with a pool in my backyard that I called the Revenge of the Nerds II pool,” Edwards said. “Not that I’m complaining, but they seriously overpaid me for my weeks of work on the film, so I used it to put in a pool.”

11. A REMAKE (THANKFULLY) GOT SHUT DOWN.

After two weeks of filming in the fall of 2006, a Revenge of the Nerds remake stopped production. Emory University in Atlanta pulled out of filming, but according to Variety, the real reason was because a Fox Atomic executive “was not completely satisfied with the dailies.” The cast included Adam Brody and a not-yet-married-to-Channing-Tatum Jenna Dewan.

12. IT PUSHED NERDOM INTO THE MAINSTREAM.

“I’m not going to say Revenge of the Nerds was responsible for everything in nerd culture, but I do think you could make an argument that that attitude began with the last scene in Revenge,” Armstrong told Huffington Post. “The last scene—the scene I probably love above all in that movie—we’re at the pep rally and come out in front of everybody as nerds, and encourage these people of different generations to join them in their nerdness. I get teary thinking about it, and you could certainly make an argument that that was the beginning of embracing nerd culture by everybody.”

Families often use the holidays as an excuse to indulge in repeat viewings of Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Elf. But for a certain section of the population, the yuletide is all about horror. Although it didn’t truly emerge until the mid-1970s, “holiday horror” is a thriving subgenre that often combines comedy to tell stories of demented Saint Nicks and lethal gingerbread men. If you’ve never seen Santa slash someone, here are 15 movies to get you started.

1. THANKSKILLING (2009)

Most holiday horror movies concern Christmas, so ThanksKilling is a bit of an anomaly. Another reason it’s an anomaly? It opens in 1621, with an axe-wielding turkey murdering a topless pilgrim woman. The movie continues on to the present-day, where a group of college friends are terrorized by that same demon bird during Thanksgiving break. It’s pretty schlocky, but if Turkey Day-themed terror is your bag, make sure to check out the sequel: ThanksKilling 3. (No one really knows what happened to ThanksKilling 2.)

2. BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

Fittingly, the same man who brought us A Christmas Story also brought us its twisted cousin. Before Bob Clark co-wrote and directed the 1983 saga of Ralphie Parker, he helmed Black Christmas. It concerns a group of sorority sisters who are systematically picked off by a man who keeps making threatening phone calls to their house. Oh, and it all happens during the holidays. Black Christmas is often considered the godfather of holiday horror, but it was also pretty early on the slasher scene, too. It opened the same year as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and beat Halloween by a full four years.

3. SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984)

This movie isn’t about Santa Claus himself going berserk and slaughtering a bunch of people. But it is about a troubled teen who does just that in a Santa suit. Billy Chapman starts Silent Night, Deadly Night as a happy little kid, only to witness a man dressed as St. Nick murder his parents in cold blood. Years later, after he has grown up and gotten a job at a toy store, he conducts a killing spree in his own red-and-white suit. The PTA and plenty of critics condemned the film for demonizing a kiddie icon, but it turned into a bona fide franchise with four sequels and a 2012 remake.

4. RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE (2010)

This Finnish flick dismantles Santa lore in truly bizarre fashion, and it’s not easy to explain in a quick plot summary. But Rare Exports involves a small community living at the base of Korvatunturi mountain, a major excavation project, a bunch of dead reindeer, and a creepy old naked dude who may or may not be Santa Claus. Thanks to its snowy backdrop, the movie scored some comparisons to The Thing, but the hero here isn’t some Kurt Russell clone with equally feathered hair. It’s a bunch of earnest kids and their skeptical dads, who all want to survive the holidays in one piece.

5. TO ALL A GOODNIGHT (1980)

To All a Goodnight follows a by-now familiar recipe: Add a bunch of young women to one psycho dressed as Santa Claus and you get a healthy dose of murder and this 1980 slasher flick. Only this one takes place at a finishing school. So it’s fancier.

6. KRAMPUS (2015)

Although many Americans are blissfully unaware of him, Krampus has terrorized German-speaking kids for centuries. According to folklore, he’s a yuletide demon who punishes naughty children. (He’s also part-goat.) That’s some solid horror movie material, so naturally Krampus earned his own feature film last year. In the movie, he’s summoned because a large suburban family loses its Christmas cheer. That family has an Austrian grandma who had encounters with Krampus as a kid, so he returns to punish her descendants. He also animates one truly awful Jack-in-the-Box.

7. THE GINGERDEAD MAN (2005)

“Eat me, you punk b*tch!” That’s one of the many corny catchphrases spouted by the Gingerdead Man, an evil cookie possessed by the spirit of a convicted killer (played by Gary Busey). The lesson here, obviously, is to never bake.

8. JACK FROST (1997)

No, this isn’t the Michael Keaton snowman movie. It’s actually a holiday horror movie that beat that family film by a year. In this version, Jack Frost is a serial killer on death row who escapes prison and then, through a freak accident, becomes a snowman. He embarks on a murder spree that’s often played for laughs—for instance, the cops threaten him with hairdryers. But the comedy is pretty questionable in the infamous, and quite controversial, Shannon Elizabeth shower scene.

9. ELVES (1989)

Based on the tagline—“They’re not working for Santa anymore”—you’d assume this is your standard evil elves movie. But Elves weaves Nazis, bathtub electrocutions, and a solitary, super grotesque elf into its utterly absurd plot. Watch at your own risk.

10. SINT (2010)

The Dutch have their own take on Santa, and his name is Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas travels to the Netherlands via steamship each year with his racist sidekick Zwarte Piet. But otherwise, he’s pretty similar to Santa. And if Santa can be evil, so can Sinterklaas. According to the backstory in Sint (or Saint), the townspeople burned their malevolent bishop alive on December 5, 1492. But Sinterklaas returns from the grave on that date whenever there’s a full moon to continue dropping bodies. In keeping with his olden origins, he rides around on a white horse wielding a golden staff … that he can use to murder you.

11. SANTA’S SLAY (2005)

Ever wonder where Santa came from? This horror-comedy claims he comes from the worst possible person: Satan. The devil’s kid lost a bet many years ago and had to pretend to be a jolly gift-giver. But now the terms of the bet are up and he’s out to act like a true demon. That includes killing Fran Drescher and James Caan, obviously.

12. ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE (2015)

Another Santa slasher is on the loose in All Through the House, but the big mystery here is who it is. This villain dons a mask during his/her streak through suburbia—and, as the genre dictates, offs a bunch of promiscuous young couples along the way. The riddle is all tied up in the disappearance of a little girl, who vanished several years earlier.

13. CHRISTMAS EVIL (1980)

Several years before Silent Night, Deadly Night garnered protests for its anti-Kringle stance, Christmas Evil put a radicalized Santa at the center of its story. The movie’s protagonist, Harry Stadling, first starts to get weird thoughts in his head as a kid when he sees “Santa” (really his dad in the costume) groping his mom. Then, he becomes unhealthily obsessed with the holiday season, deludes himself into thinking he’s Santa, and goes on a rampage. The movie is mostly notable for its superfan John Waters, who lent commentary to the DVD and gave Christmas Evil some serious cult cred.

14. SANTA CLAWS (1996)

If you thought this was the holiday version of Pet Sematary, guess again. The culprit here isn’t a demon cat in a Santa hat, but a creepy next-door neighbor. Santa Claws stars B-movie icon Debbie Rochon as Raven Quinn, an actress going through a divorce right in the middle of the holidays. She needs some help caring for her two girls, so she seeks out Wayne, her neighbor who has an obsessive crush on her. He eventually snaps and dresses up as Santa Claus in a ski mask. Mayhem ensues.

15. NEW YEAR’S EVIL (1980)

Because the holidays aren’t over until everyone’s sung “Auld Lang Syne,” we can’t count out New Year’s Eve horror. In New Year’s Evil, lady rocker Blaze is hosting a live NYE show. Everything is going well, until a man calls in promising to kill at midnight. The cops write it off as a prank call, but soon, Blaze’s friends start dropping like flies. Just to tie it all together, the mysterious murderer refers to himself as … “EVIL.”

Good news for Studio Ghibli fans: Just days after Hayao Miyazaki announced that he’s coming out of retirement to make one more film, IndieWire reports that the legendary director’s Academy Award-winning animated classic, Spirited Away, will be making its way back into theaters next month.

In celebration of the film’s 15th anniversary, Fathom Events is teaming up with GKIDS for a two-day tribute to Spirited Away in early December that will see both the English-dubbed (featuring the voices of Daveigh Chase, Michael Chiklis, and John Ratzenberger) and the English-subtitled versions of the film be screened. The feature will be accompanied by Ghiblies: Episode 2, a 25-minute comedic look at Studio Ghibli’s staff that was made in 2002 and has never been released in North America.

Spirited Away will return to more than 400 theaters nationwide on Sunday, December 4 and Monday, December 5. Go to Fathom Events for more information, including a complete list of theaters and showtimes.

[h/t IndieWire]

Mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and, of course, turkey may be the stars of your Turkey Day table, but the earliest Thanksgiving dishes looked—and tasted—slightly different. And sometimes included eel. Here are 15 of them.

1. TURKEY SOBAHEG 

Though turkey played a role in the earliest Thanksgivings, it wasn’t always the star. One popular way to incorporate it into the meal was in a “Sobaheg” (the Wampanoag tribe’s word for stew). Among the dish’s ingredients: a half-pound of beans, white hominy corn, sunflower seed meats, and clam juice. (The experts at Plimoth Plantation even have a recipe.)

2. VENISON ROAST

It’s believed that venison roast, not turkey, was the centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony. In 1621, Edward Winslow recalled the feast he and his fellow Pilgrims shared with the Wampanoags, writing: “… Amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some 90 men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others.”

3. ONION SAUCE

Onion sauce, which was very popular in the 17th century, was an early incarnation of the modern gravy. Used for dipping meats, onion sauce was made from onions and turkey drippings. More contemporary interpretations of it include sugar, vinegar, and breadcrumbs.

4. DRESSED CRAB

The earliest Thanksgiving menus leaned heavily on seafood, like eel, mussels, and dressed crab, a sweet delicacy that’s cooked in its own shell and seasoned with sugar and cinnamon.

5. APPLE PUDDING

Apple pudding is a sweet pudding, made from cream and apples, that is either baked or boiled in a pie-like dumpling crust. The recipe appeared in 1841’s Early American Cookery: The Good Housekeeping by Sarah Josepha Hale, who is considered the “Mother of Thanksgiving.”

6. BOILED BREAD

Texturally, boiled bread is similar to a bagel or pretzel, in that it’s soft and chewy. Taste-wise, it’s a lot different: It’s a mix of cornmeal, flour, dried berries (like cranberries, blueberries, or currants—or a mix of all three), and crushed nuts or seeds. The mixture is then formed into patties, dropped into a pot of boiling water, and considered “done” when it floats to the top.

7. CURD FRITTERS

More like a crepe, a recipe for curd fritters—which calls for five eggs, curds from a soft cheese like ricotta or cottage, wheat or corn flour, salt, oil or butter, and sugar—appeared in The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin, which was published in 1594.

8. NASAUMP

Similar to porridge, Nasaump is made from cornmeal, berries, and crushed nuts or seeds and could be served as either a sweet or savory dish. Puritan Roger Williams described it as “a meale pottage, unparched. From this the English call their Samp, which is Indian corn, beaten and boiled, and eaten hot or cold with milk and butter, which are mercies beyond the Natives plaine water.”

9. BAKED EEL

Believe it or not, eels were a very important food for Native Americans and Pilgrims during the 17th century. They were a great source of protein, and especially popular during the long New England winters, when they were easier to catch. To make baked eel, chop an eel into three sections and season it with salt, pepper, and ginger. Put the pieces with butter and onions into a baking tin and cook for about an hour in a 360-degree oven.

10. STEWED PUMPKIN

One of the earliest recipes from New England, stewed pumpkin was known as a “standing dish” because it was eaten almost every day. In the 1600s, British traveler John Josselyn wrote about the dish in his book, Two Voyages to New England, in which he shared that it caused gas.

11. CHESTNUT FRITTERS

American chestnuts were considered much sweeter than their European counterparts, so Colonial cooks often incorporated chestnuts into desserts and snacks. They were also used in savory dishes like stuffing and fried chestnut fritters, which were served with oysters.

12. HASTY PUDDING

Also known as “Indian Pudding” when it came to Colonial America, Hasty Pudding is a sweetened porridge that was served as an appetizer. It was made from cornmeal or molasses, which were prevalent in the New World, instead of tapioca or oatmeal, which were not.

13. SYLLABUB

Dating back as far as the Middle Ages, syllabub was a very popular dessert in Colonial America. It’s a parfait-like treat made with whipped cream, white sugar, and lemon juice, but can also be made with Amaretto for an added punch.

14. MARLBOROUGH PIE

Before the modern apple pie, there was the Marlborough pie—a staple dessert that dates back to the 17th century. It’s an apple pie made with a rich custard base that was fused with sherry and shredded apples or applesauce instead of apple slices. Marlborough pie was served for the holidays, but fell out of fashion after the Civil War.

15. SKILLET CRANBERRIES

Made with either brandy or rum, skillet cranberries were a simple dish, and one of John Adams’s favorite foods. And yes, it’s as simple as it sounds: cranberries and raw sugar were baked in a skillet for over an hour, then deglazed with alcohol.

Every four years, people talk about the oddness of the Electoral College. And just like in 2000, the last time there was a popular vote/Electoral College mismatch, some citizens have decided to attempt to flip electors from Donald Trump to either Hillary Clinton or a third candidate (if enough electors go to the third candidate, the House would then have to choose from among the top three).

Which leads to the question: can the Electoral College actually change the results of the election? It’s an awkwardly worded question for a very specific reason, and the answer is no. But for the question people think that they’re asking—could the Electoral College reverse the results of the election?—the answer is yes, although it’s profoundly unlikely.

The reason it’s an oddly worded question is that the November election is not a vote for president. The vote is for a set of electors who will then go and vote for the president in December. Therefore, the electors cannot change the results of the election since they’re the ones being elected. In one of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton explained the reasoning for forgoing direct democracy, as well as why they avoided letting politicians just make the decision. Largely, the problem was that neither the public nor the politicians could be trusted. Hamilton wrote:

“The Executive should be independent for his continuance in office on all but the people themselves. He might otherwise be tempted to sacrifice his duty to his complaisance for those whose favor was necessary to the duration of his official consequence. This advantage will also be secured, by making his re-election to depend on a special body of representatives, deputed by the society for the single purpose of making the important choice.”

There were other issues the founding fathers were trying to avoid as well, such as the risk of a smorgasbord of regional candidates. As historian Jack Rakove told Stanford News in 2012, “it would become truly difficult to produce a popular majority with a field of favorite sons.”

More controversially, the founding fathers faced the issue of slavery. Because slaves couldn’t vote, a direct popular vote would weaken the power of the South. Thanks to the three-fifths compromise, however, the slave states had greater power under an electoral system than under a direct voting system, because slaves couldn’t vote but did count for the number of representatives. And more representatives meant more electors (the number of electors equals the state’s number of representatives plus the number of senators). As James Madison said in 1787:

“There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”

But objections to the elector’s powers appeared as soon as races got competitive. In 1796, Pennsylvanian Samuel Miles became the first known faithless elector when, despite being chosen as a Federalist, he voted for opposition candidate Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to the Gazette of the United States, a disgruntled Pennsylvania voter asked, “What, do I choose Samuel Miles to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be President? No! I choose him to act, not to think.”

SO WOULD IT WORK?

As we have written about before, in about half the states plus Washington, D.C., electors are required to vote for their state’s popular vote winner—some states to the point that any attempt to defy this would forfeit the elector’s position. They’re extreme, but in the controversial 1952 Ray v. Blair case, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring pledges from electors to vote for a particular candidate was constitutional. But the question that remains unanswered is whether any punishment for breaking those pledges is constitutional. It’s never mattered, but would quickly become a critical issue if electors defected en masse.

Others say that because Hillary Clinton has already conceded, this strategy wouldn’t work. But there’s no requirement that an elector vote for a viable candidate. In 1976, one of the electors voted for Ronald Reagan, who hadn’t even won his party’s primary. In 1956, another elector voted for a local circuit court judge rather than Adlai Stevenson.

A stronger issue standing in the way is how electors are chosen. Generally, in spring and summer, each state’s political parties nominate a slate of electors from a list of party faithful. Any attempt to get defections would require electors to go against a party that chose them specifically for their loyalty.

The Ray v. Blair decision gave one of the most famous dissents in Supreme Court history, where Justice Jackson wrote, “No one faithful to our history can deny that the plan originally contemplated, what is implicit in its text, that electors would be free agents, to exercise an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the men best qualified for the Nation’s highest offices.” While it would be considered highly irregular and is highly unlikely, the possibility is there. And will remain there until January 6, 2017, when the votes are officially counted before a joint session of Congress.

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

Meet a set of twins, and one might proudly proclaim that he or she is “the older one.” (Later in life, the younger twin may be the one boasting.) But such distinctions won’t be so clear-cut for Samuel and Ronan Peterson, twin brothers born at Massachusetts’s Cape Cod Hospital last weekend. The confusion? Daylight Saving Time.

Cape Cod Health News reported the riddle as follows:

“Samuel was born at 1:39 a.m. on Sunday, November 6, followed 31 minutes later by Ronan, at what would have been 2:10. But at 2 a.m. that morning, Daylight Savings Time ended for the year, making it 1:10 a.m. and leaving Ronan—at least in the official record—older than Samuel.”

While not quite a chicken or the egg dilemma, the situation is hardly common. “It’s the first time I have ever seen this in over 40 years of nursing,” maternity nurse Deb Totten said of the twins’ birth order.

The boys’ father, Seth, had a feeling the time change might cause a conundrum. “I said, they’re either going to be born on two different days, or the time change may come into play,” he said. Call it twintuiton.

 [h/t: Someecards]

If you managed to get your hands on the new Nintendo NES Classic today, consider yourself lucky. Like a scene out of the mid-1980s, the miniature game system—which comes pre-loaded with 30 classic video games—is flying off store shelves before it even touches them. While we can’t promise you’ll find one in your stocking this holiday season, we can share these fun facts about your favorite NES games.

1. THE KONAMI CODE’S ORIGINS ARE IN GRADIUS.

Way back in 1985, Kazuhisa Hashimoto was working on the arcade game Gradius. Because he didn’t want to actually play the whole game during the testing process, he developed a little shortcut that gave him a full set of power-ups, letting him live long enough to easily get to where he needed to without dying. When the game went live in 1986, the code was still there. To get full power-ups, all a player had to do was enter the code up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A.

The trick caught on, and soon, the so-called “Konami Code” could be found in a number of arcade and video games. Most notably, it gave you 30 extra lives in Contra. This super-secret (…or not) code has a special place in the hearts of geeks who have since grown up and used the insider code in websites, in movies, and on TV shows.

2. SUPER C USED A DIFFERENT CODE.

The original Contra was famous for featuring the Konami Code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start) to score a player 30 lives. For whatever reason, Super C, the Contra sequel, instead used the code Right, Left, Down, Up, A, B, Start, which only gave a player 10 lives.

3. BALLOON FIGHT WAS ONE OF SATORU IWATA’S FIRST PROJECTS.

Balloon Fight was one of the first games the late Satoru Iwata worked on as he began his career at Nintendo. He later went on to become Nintendo’s president and CEO, presiding over the launches of the Nintendo DS and Wii.

4. BUBBLE BOBBLE IS GOOD FOR YOUR BRAIN.

Bubble Bobble may seem rudimentary by today’s video game standards, but it proved that video games can be good for the brain. Educators praised the game’s ability to help kids overcome developmental challenges with its focus on problem-solving, strategy, and motor skills.

5. PIZZA INSPIRED PAC-MAN.

It’s not easy to create a game based solely on the concept of eating. But Namco employee Toru Iwatani did just that in 1980 by taking the idea of a pizza with a slice missing, and then having it eat a bunch of dots while being chased by ghosts in a maze. (Iwatani has also said that the shape is a rounded version of the square Japanese character for “mouth.”) The name of the game, Pakkuman, was inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeia, “paku-paku,” which describes the sound of eating, similar to the English word “chomp.” As the game was brought to market, the title morphed into Puck Man.

But when Puck Man made his way to North America there was concern that the arcade cabinets would be vandalized by making the P into an F to spell something entirely different. A compromise was reached and the game became known as Pac-Man instead. Thanks to the American marketing machine, the name Pac-Man was eventually adopted for the game all over the world.

6. AN ORIGINAL COPY OF CASTLEVANIA IS WORTH SOME SERIOUS CASH.

The Dracula-based video game Castlevania is particularly valuable these days. Sealed versions of the game sell for upwards of $900, depending on the condition. Original Nintendo NES editions of Castlevania and Castlevania 2 have sold for more than $950.

7. ICE CLIMBER GAVE BIRTH TO SUPER MARIO BROS.

Ice Climber was the first game that Kazuaki Morita worked on. He would go on to refine the game’s formula for his next title at Nintendo: Super Mario Bros., where the action moved horizontally instead of vertically.

8. THE REAL MARIO WAS A LANDLORD, NOT A PLUMBER.

During the development of Donkey Kong, Jr., a Nintendo employee reportedly pointed out that the character looked a lot like Mario Segale, the Italian landlord of Nintendo’s U.S. office. Thus, Mario was born. The original “Lady” character became “Pauline” at the same time in honor of one team member’s wife, Polly.

9. THE GAME VERSION OF MARIO WAS ORIGINALLY A CARPENTER.

In Mario’s first appearance in Donkey Kong, he was portrayed as a carpenter. But after a colleague remarked that his overalls made him look more like a plumber, legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto changed the character’s occupation. This alteration also led to the game being set underground in the pipe-populated sewers of New York City.

10. THE NEW YORK TIMES THOUGHT MARIO AND LUIGI WERE JANITORS.

When longtime Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi passed away in 2013, The New York Times ran an obituary that quoted one of its own articles from 1988, in which Mario and Luigi were incorrectly described as janitors. On September 27, 2013—25 years after the article in question ran—the paper ran a correction:

“An obituary on Sept. 20 about Hiroshi Yamauchi, the longtime president of Nintendo, included a quotation from a 1988 New York Times article that inaccurately described the Nintendo video game Super Mario Bros. 2. The brothers Mario and Luigi, who appear in this and other Nintendo games, are plumbers, not janitors.”

11. THERE’S AN EXCITEBIKE ARENA IN MARIO KART 8.

In 2014’s Mario Kart 8 for the Wii U, an Excitebike arena became available as downloadable content (DLC), allowing the original game’s 8-bit track to be played in a 3D environment.

12. FINAL FANTASY GOT ITS NAME FROM ITS CREATOR’S DESIRE TO RETIRE.

One of the most popular role-playing game franchises of all time got its name from almost becoming the last project its creator ever worked on. According to Hironobu Sakaguchi, he named the game he’d been working on Final Fantasy because he planned to quit the video-game industry if it didn’t sell well. Despite the small staff of developers he was afforded for the game, it managed to sell—to the tune of 400,000 copies initially and a long list of sequels, spin-offs, and remastered releases in the years to come. Sakaguchi went on to serve for several years as President of Square USA, the company that first took a chance on Final Fantasy.

13. A U.S. COURT RULED THAT DONKEY KONG AND KING KONG ARE TWO DIFFERENT APES.

Filed in 1982, argued in a federal court in May of 1984, and concluded that October, Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. represented Universal’s demand for a piece of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong action. The game had pulled in $180 million in sales from around 60,000 arcade machines by 1982, and the studio alleged copyright infringement due to the titular villain’s resemblance to King Kong.

Attorney John Kirby, Jr., who represented Nintendo (and for whom it’s believed the company’s puffiest character was named, in thanks), pointed out that Universal itself had proved in the case of Universal City Studios, Inc. v. RKO General, Inc. that the plot and characters of King Kong were in the public domain. In the Nintendo case, the court ruled that Universal had acted in bad faith with the suit, had no right to the characters, and that, in any case, the studio had failed to prove that “there was any likelihood that an appreciable number of prudent purchasers [were] likely to be misled or confused as to the source of Donkey Kong” based on the ape’s and the game’s attributes.

14. YES, METROID AND KID ICARUS ARE RELATED.

If you think Metroid and Kid Icarus are similar, there’s a reason for that: They were both developed by the same team, including director Satoru Okada, co-director/artist Yoshio Sakamoto, and composer Hip Tanaka.

15. METROID LOOKED TO ALIEN FOR INSPIRATION.

A fantastic game on its own, 1986’s Metroid became the stuff of legends when it saved its biggest surprise for the final moments. After a player completed the game, a short scene revealed that the space-suited, missile-blasting hero was in fact (*gasp*) a woman! This shocking revelation wasn’t something that had been planned from the start, and was instead the result of a programmer asking, “Hey, wouldn’t that be kind of cool if it turned out that this person inside the suit was a woman?” midway through the game’s development. The Metroid team already counted Ridley Scott’s female-led, sci-fi horror movie Alien as one of the game’s chief inspirations, so they decided to run with that innocent suggestion—and the rest is gaming history.

16. WE MAY NEVER KNOW WHO JUSTIN BAILEY WAS.

Justin Bailey was a programmer. Justin Bailey was an inside joke. Justin Bailey was referencing British slang for “bathing suit.”

If you played Metroid in the 1980s, chances are you’ve heard one of these explanations for the game’s most infamous password. Entering “Justin Bailey” and keying in an additional 12 blank spaces allowed players to begin the game with heroine Samus Aran appearing in a leotard instead of her armor while being supplied with a full arsenal of missiles. Where did he come from? Was he man or myth? Or was it all just one very weird fluke?

Turns out, he could very well have just been a bored player who accidentally became the most famous (and hypothetical) NES gamer of all time. (Click here for a much more detailed explanation.)

17. THE ARCADE VERSION ENDING OF DOUBLE DRAGON II: THE REVENGE IS DIFFERENT FROM NINTENDO’S.

The end of Double Dragon II: The Revenge differs on both the NES and arcade. On the NES, damsel-in-distress Marian is brought back to life after being killed early in the story; the arcade version ends on a much more dour note, leaving her dead. You can compare both versions below:

18. A SEQUEL TO MEGA MAN 2 WAS ANNOUNCED, BUT NEVER MATERIALIZED.

In 2010, Capcom announced that it would release Mega Man Universe for the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade the following year. The company promised that the new video game would have similar gameplay to Mega Man 2 and would give the player the ability to customize their own levels and stages. But a few months later, Capcom canceled the game and apologized to Mega Man fans who were anticipating the new release.

Capcom didn’t disclose a specific reason why they canceled Mega Man Universe, instead citing “various circumstances,” which might have included the exit of the designer of Mega Man Universe, Keiji Inafune.

If Mega Man Universe had actually been released, it would have been the first time the character would have been called “Mega Man” in his native Japan. Historically, the character was called “Rock Man,” but was changed when the video game was imported to the United States.

19. NINJA GAIDEN REVOLUTIONIZED THE CONCEPT OF CUTSCENES.

Ninja Gaiden‘s director, Hideo Yoshizawa (credited as Sakurazaki), wanted the NES version of the game to have a much deeper story than the arcade version, so he implemented 20 minutes of cinematic cutscenes. Though standard now, a story told through cutscenes was revolutionary at the time.

20. BEFORE PUNCH-OUT!’S OFFICIAL RELEASE, 10,000 JAPANESE FANS GOT A GOLD VERSION.

Nintendoficionados who submitted high scores from 1987’s Golf U.S. Course Famicom Tournament received gold-colored Famicom (the Japanese equivalent of the NES) cartridges containing Punch-Out!’s near-identical precursor, with Super Macho Man as its final foe.

21. TO ADVANCE IN STARTROPICS, YOU NEEDED TO HAVE THE BOX.

In StarTropics, to advance the story, players were required to input a code that was attached to a letter. However, the letter didn’t exist in the game; it was physically included in the box the game came in. This obviously caused problems as players could easily lose it (or wind up with a rental copy lacking the letter at all) and be stuck forever, so Nintendo had to reprint the code in Nintendo Power magazine to try and help confused gamers.

22. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA’S “ZELDA” IS NAMED AFTER ZELDA FITZGERALD.

Despite being conceived in Japan, The Legend of Zelda’s titular princess was named after a native Alabaman. Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that Zelda Fitzgerald—novelist, feminist, and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald—was the inspiration for his Hyrulian heroine’s handle.

23. THERE IS SIGNIFICANCE TO LINK’S NAME, TOO.

Originally, The Legend of Zelda was meant to be a game that spanned in-universe time periods, beginning in the canonical “past” and ending up in the “future,” with the Triforce acting as a mode of transport between them. The series hero’s unusual moniker was meant to symbolize his role as a link between the eras. But Nintendo’s current position is that he is a “link” between the player and the game.

24. SHIGERU MIYAMOTO WAS DISAPPOINTED BY ZELDA II.

When gaming site Kotaku asked Miyamoto if he’s ever made a bad game, the designer responded that Zelda II: The Adventure of Link didn’t live up to his expectations. “We could have done more with [Link],” he said. “It would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the [NES] hardware wasn’t capable of doing that.”

25. GHOSTS ‘N GOBLINS IS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE TOUGHEST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME.

Not only is Ghosts ‘n Goblins known as one of the hardest games of all time, you actually have to beat it twice to actually complete it (it turns out the first play-through is all just a dream for the player).

Still unknown to many American moviegoers, Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier has nonetheless had a successful career provoking and entertaining art-house audiences worldwide. From the depressing musical Dancer in the Dark (2000) to the sex-obsessed Nymphomaniac (2013), von Trier knows what pushes people’s buttons. And it all started, really, with 1996’s Breaking the Waves, his fourth feature but the first to gain international attention. The strangely touching drama about religion, love, and sex was released 20 years ago. Let’s dive in and examine its secrets. 

1. IT WAS INSPIRED BY A CHILDREN’S BOOK.

As a child, Lars von Trier loved a picture book called Guldhjerte (Goldheart), about a little girl who goes into a forest and ends up giving away everything she has to others, leaving her with nothing. “It seemed to express the ultimate extremity of the martyr’s role,” von Trier said. “Goldheart is Bess in the film.”

2. A COMPUTER PROGRAM HELPED IT GET FINANCED.

Unsurprisingly, von Trier was having trouble finding financial backers for his 158-minute movie about a slightly dim woman who talks to God and has sex with strangers in order to heal her paralyzed husband. His luck changed when an organization called the European Script Fund built a computer program to analyze submissions for their “artistic and commercial relevance.” To von Trier’s surprise, his Breaking the Waves screenplay “got top marks” and was funded. “It must have had all the right ingredients: a sailor, a mermaid, a romantic landscape—all the stuff the computer loved,” the director said.

3. HELENA BONHAM CARTER DROPPED OUT AT THE LAST MINUTE.

Von Trier said the well-known actors who were approached to play Bess “didn’t want to lay their careers on the line” with a movie that’s “a strange mix of religion and sex and obsession.” He didn’t name any others, but he did say that Helena Bonham Carter—then best known for her roles in A Room with a View (1985), Hamlet (1990) and Howards End (1992)—was going to play Bess but quit just as production was beginning because of the physical and emotional demands of the role. 

4. EMILY WATSON HAD NEVER BEEN IN A MOVIE BEFORE.

The London-born actress had ample stage experience with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but she’d never acted on film. She described it in a Criterion DVD bonus feature interview as being “like falling off a cliff, but falling off a cliff backwards.” Her performance earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination. 

5. THE MOVIE GOT WATSON KICKED OUT OF THE QUASI-CULT SHE BELONGED TO.

Watson grew up in what she described as “a kind of quasi-religious cult,” and was technically still a member of it when she was cast in this film. “When I accepted the job, I was ostensibly cast out,” she said. “I was told, ‘Go your undignified way.'”

6. IT CONDEMNED A TALENTED CINEMATOGRAPHER TO HELL.

“Anthony Dod Mantle, you are a sinner and you deserve your place in hell.” So says the stern minister at the funeral scene glimpsed in the first half of the film. If the name Anthony Dod Mantle sounds familiar, that’s because he’s now a well-known cinematographer who won an Oscar in 2009 for his work on Slumdog Millionaire. He was a location scout for Breaking the Waves.

7. STELLAN SKARSGÅRD TOOK A NEW APPROACH TO PLAYING JAN.

The Swedish actor, then 45 years old, told an interviewer that he wanted to play Jan in a way that was different from other characters in love that he’d played. “Normally when I play a person in love, I mix the love with a little narcissism, a little selfishness—all those things we all have in us that are the reason that nothing is ever pure. But this love had to be absolutely pure. That is the key, his longing for pure emotions.”

8. EVERYONE WAS A LITTLE NERVOUS ABOUT WORKING WITH LARS VON TRIER.

The Danish provocateur had a well-earned reputation for being too controlling with actors. “He really made his film at home at his desk,” said Skarsgård, “and then he just executed what he had already decided, which meant there was no room for the actors to expand in their roles.” (After seeing von Trier’s Element of Crime (1984), Skarsgård famously said, “I’d like to work with this director when he gets interested in people.”)  Watson, who had never made a film, had to trust a man she didn’t know, but she said it was a positive experience. “He’s very odd,” she said. “But then—you know, he’s an artist. We’re all odd. He’s just really quite odd. But so what?”

9. THE ACTORS WERE ALLOWED TO IMPROVISE, BUT MOSTLY DIDN’T.

By the time he made Breaking the Waves, von Trier was comfortable enough with the process to stop moving the actors around like chess pieces and let them make their own acting choices. “If there was anything we wanted to change, we were allowed to change it,” Skarsgård said. “But most of the lines were so well written that they stayed.” (That’s especially impressive considering von Trier, a Dane, was writing dialogue for English-speaking characters from rural Scotland.) The speech that Bess’s sister-in-law gives at the wedding was written by the actress, Katrin Cartlidge, but von Trier’s script otherwise remained pretty much intact. 

10. IT WAS TURNED INTO AN OPERA.

The trend over the last couple of decades has been to turn popular movies into Broadway musicals, but of course von Trier fans would have different ideas. Royce Vavrek, a Canadian writer who has loved Breaking the Waves since he saw it as a teenager, collaborated with composer Missy Mazzoli to produce an opera adaptation that premiered at Opera Philadelphia in September 2016. (It got good reviews.) Von Trier, an opera buff himself, gave his enthusiastic blessing to the project, but wanted no part in its creation: “My work was finished when the film was finished,” he said. 

11. THE FIRST DVD VERSIONS WERE BOWIE-LESS.

Each of the film’s chapter breaks features a song from the early 1970s (when the film is apparently set), with David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” attached to the epilogue. But licensing issues forced a change for the first home video releases, with Elton John’s “Your Song” substituted for the more expensive Bowie. It wasn’t until Criterion’s new edition in 2014 that “Life on Mars” was restored. 

12. IT’S STILL VON TRIER’S MOST SUCCESSFUL FILM IN AMERICA.

Breaking the Waves made $3.8 million at the U.S. box office, a solid showing for an independent film in 1996. In terms of tickets sold, none of von Trier’s subsequent efforts—including Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist, or Melancholia—have surpassed it. (Not in America, anyway. Dancer in the Dark made $35 million overseas.) Bonus fact: von Trier, who has a fear of flying, has never been to the United States.

Additional sources:
Criterion DVD bonus features

Party Down—not to be confused with reality show Party Down South—is a hilarious sitcom that ran for 20 episodes on Starz, from March 2009 through June 2010. Created by Rob Thomas, Paul Rudd, Dan Etheridge, and John Enbom, Party Down follows a group of Hollywood-based cater waiters who aspire to be something more than the pink bow ties they’re forced to wear. Henry (Adam Scott) gave up acting, while Kyle (Ryan Hansen), Casey (Lizzy Caplan), and Roman (Martin Starr) seek out acting and writing opportunities, and their boss, Ron (Ken Marino), wants to open an all-you-can-eat soup restaurant.

Jane Lynch (Constance) left the show near the end of the first season because of a contractual obligation to Glee, but Megan Mullally joined the cast in the second season as Lydia.

Each episode focuses on a different party and catering gig, with hijinks always ensuing. Because it aired at 10 p.m. on Fridays, hardly anyone watched the show. Through the power of DVD and Netflix, people slowly began to discover it, and Party Down eventually developed a cult following.

Despite the producers attracting esteemed guest stars like J.K. Simmons, Starz cancelled Party Down on June 30, 2010. Since the cancellation, rumors of a Party Down movie have been batted around, and a few cast and producer reunions have occurred. Here are 16 facts about the misanthropic series. Are we having fun yet?

1. IT WAS INSPIRED BY THE OFFICE.

Rob Thomas’s ex-girlfriend hooked him into watching Ricky Gervais’s original version of The Office. “It changed everything I had thought about television comedy,” Thomas told Details in an oral history of the show. “So I started calling my friends over, because I wanted someone to tell me that I wasn’t crazy and this was the greatest TV show that had ever been done. The guys I called over were the guys who ended up doing Party Down: Dan Etheridge and John Enbom and Paul Rudd.”

Thomas and friends met every week to watch the show, and then developed some ideas for their own series. “One of the very first ideas was, what happens to the ‘Can you hear me now?’ guy when that campaign dries up? What do you do if you’re 30 years old and you can’t get a job, or don’t even know if you want to do that anymore?” Rudd said. 

“If The Office is a show about people who have really given themselves over to the rat race, let’s do a show about people who’ve chased the dream for far too long,” Thomas said.

2. ROB THOMAS FILMED THE PILOT IN HIS BACKYARD.

In 2007, when Veronica Mars‘s episodes got reduced (and the show got canceled), Thomas found himself with a free month, so he called his friends to come to his house and film the Party Down pilot. He hired Adam Scott, Ken Marino, Ryan Hansen, and Jane Lynch, all of whom he had worked with on Veronica Mars.

Etheridge, Enbom, and Thomas co-directed the pilot and paid the actors $100 a day. The only casting differences were that Andrea Savage played Casey and James Jordan played Roman. The pilot was used as a demo and never was meant to be aired on TV. “We knew it could never be broadcast,” Thomas said. “We had a whole neighborhood Oscars scene in which we used plastic Oscar statues—just that scene alone meant it could never be aired because there is no one more protective of their brand than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. We also used music that we didn’t pay for.”

Thomas initially sold Party Down to HBO, with Rudd slated to play Henry and Steve Carell as Ron. It didn’t work out with HBO or with the actors, so Thomas shopped the pilot around town. Starz wanted to get into comedy, so they signed on.

3. A POOR ECONOMY HELPED THE SHOW GET MADE.

In 2008, the world was in a financial crisis, and the Writers Guild of America had been on strike (it lasted 100 days). This allowed for many of the actors to be available. “I think it worked in our favor with the economy going to sh*t because that was one of the reasons why so many amazing actors [appear on the show],” Starr told /Film. “It made it much easier, because people were glad to be working at all and our show offered something much different.”

4. NO, IT WASN’T IMPROVISED.

“People ask all the time, ‘Was the show improvised?’ And I just take that as a huge compliment to the writing, to the performance, and also to the visual style,” Fred Savage, one of the show’s directors and producers, told Details. “Ninety percent of what you’re seeing is all scripted. The 10 percent that’s improv is some of the best moments.”

5. ADAM SCOTT TRAINED TO BE A BARTENDER.

To play a bartender on the show, Scott had a bartender friend give him some tips. “They actually did come in handy, because especially in season one, I had so much dialogue while I’m making drinks, that if it didn’t look like I at least sort of knew how to make a drink, it would just be distracting,” Scott told Details. “And I really had to make those things. I mean, they weren’t accurate. It was just pouring things into a cup. But I had to do it without looking like a complete dipsh*t.”

On the other hand, Hansen didn’t do any training. “I think we were supposed to be kind of sh*tty caterers anyway, so I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m not going to take that bartending class,’” he told Details.

6. LIZZY CAPLAN LIKED THAT THE SHOW CATERED TO COMEDY SNOBS.

“Our fans, even though we didn’t have huge numbers, were exactly the type of people we were hoping to impress: smart and vocal and funny and almost snobby about their comedy preferences,” Caplan told HitFix of the series’s fan base. “You look at hugely-rated shows like Two and a Half Men that get like a gazillion viewers—I have the sneaking suspicion that not one of them watches Party Down. I think if a girl who liked Party Down found out that her boyfriend liked Two and a Half Men, she would break up with him.”

Caplan wished the show would’ve reached a bigger audience, but that wasn’t the point. “It always sort of felt like the appeal for our fans was that the show felt like it was theirs,” she said. “It belonged to them, and they discovered it, and they told their circles of friends. It was like a secret club of people in the know. Of course, secret clubs don’t usually lead to TV show pick-ups.”

7. HANSEN DESCRIBES PARTY DOWN AS A “VERY DEPRESSING COMEDY.”

Hansen’s character, Kyle, was based on the stereotypical Hollywood actor/musician/model who uses his good looks to get by. “Our show definitely captures the realistic side of what people have to go through, in order to make it in L.A. and do their dream,” he told /Film. “It’s realistic, definitely, but it’s also very depressing. This is very depressing comedy. Which is funny.”

Thomas and the other creators came up with the phrase “crealism” to describe the show—comedy realism. “How far can you push the universe and yet still believe it exists in the real world?” Thomas told Details. “Most comedies on prime-time television exist in a comedy universe. I’m an enormous 30 Rock fan, but that is a comedy universe. We tried to keep Party Down in a universe people recognize, because it makes the pain and the humiliation all hurt a little more.”

8. SCOTT DIDN’T CARE IF ANYONE WATCHED THE SHOW.

Not a lot of people watched the show when it aired—the second season finale drew just 74,000 viewers—but that didn’t bother Scott. “I think part of what was so special about it was us not knowing if it would ever be seen, or if people would ever be into it, or if it would ever even be as good as it was feeling to us,” he told Interview Magazine. “So we had this sort of gang mentality of it being us against the world. Who gives a sh*t if anyone ever sees this? So there was something really fun about that—that no one was paying attention to it, so we could do whatever we wanted.”

9. AN ADULT FILM-THEMED EPISODE LED TO AN AWKWARD ENCOUNTER WITH THE POLICE.

After filming the adult video film awards episode, “Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty,” the prop person had a lot of adult paraphernalia in her car. She got into a car accident, and when she arrived at the hospital, the cops discovered the props. “And when the cops showed up to check out her car, her trunk was completely full of dildos and sex toys and whatnot,” Enbom said. “She was in no position to explain what was going on.”

10. THE CAST REALLY DID BOND.

In an interview with Details, Jane Lynch explained how spot-on the casting was, and how everyone “adored each other.” “We had such a good time,” she said. “I started smoking. Everybody was smoking. Except for Ryan. We would go out afterwards, and I never do that. I never fraternize with my coworkers.”

11. STARZ ENCOURAGED THE PRODUCERS TO ALLOW FOR SOME NUDITY.

“Let’s put it this way: We were asked by the network, and not in an offensive way, to explore premium content, and part of that was some nudity if it was possible,” Dan Etheridge said. “It made us all flinch a little bit. Porn awards [“Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty”] was born from trying to take that request and figure out a way to do it that will enhance the show. Failed orgy [“Nick DiCintio’s Orgy Night”], similar thing.” According to Caplan, “[Starz] loved boobs. I think it was coming from high up. There were just random boobs flying around in our show sometimes.”

12. MEGAN MULLALLY BROKE HER WRIST DURING THE SECOND DAY OF FILMING THE SECOND SEASON.

As she was driving to work, Megan Mullally got into a car accident. “I broke my wrist,” she told Details. “The other person was fine, thank god. I’ve never had a broken bone, but it wasn’t a horrible tragedy or anything. Apparently, when Dan and John got the call that I’d been in a car accident, that’s all the information they got. They didn’t know if I was, like, dead, or fine, or anything. And then apparently the thought crossed their mind that I was just trying to get out of being on the show and it was all a big ruse.” The writers quickly wrote her broken wrist into the script.

13. KEN MARINO LIKED ENDING THE SHOW AS IS.

“I would have loved to do maybe one more season,” Marino told Details. “But there’s that feeling now that the show is contained in these five, six hours of story, and how much more story do you need to tell? There’s something quite nice about that. You watch it, and you’re done, and you say, ‘Oh, I like that nice piece of TV.’”

14. SCOTT DIDN’T LEAVE PARTY DOWN TO PLAY BEN ON PARKS AND RECREATION.

It may seem like Scott departed Party Down for the better opportunity to star on a hit show, but that’s not how it went down. In 2009 Chris Albrecht took over Starz and left the cast and crew hanging. “There was a misconception out there when the whole thing happened that I was leaving an active show,” Scott told Details. “They were in the process of killing Party Down when I took the Parks and Recreation job. What I did was go to Starz and say, ‘I’m getting an offer from one of my favorite shows. I would love to do it, but if you want to keep me around for Party Down we can have that conversation.’ And they said, ‘Have fun on Parks and Recreation.’ The message was very clear to me.”

However, Scott felt conflicted for “leaving” the show. “Ken and I had this long heart-to-heart on the phone where I realized halfway through I was kind of calling to get his blessing,” Scott said. “He was basically telling me, ‘You need to do this. It’s time to say goodbye to the show.’” In June 2010, Starz officially announced there would not be a third season.

15. CHILDRENS HOSPITAL HAD A MINI PARTY DOWN REUNION.

Ken Marino and Megan Mullally both star on the show Childrens Hospital. During the end credits of season 3 episode 13, from August 2011, Casey, Kyle, Lydia, Roman, and Ron—sporting those signature bow ties—appear to be catering a “Jew mitzvah” at the hospital.

16. A PARTY DOWN MOVIE IS PROBABLY NOT HAPPENING.

Since the show went off the air, Rob Thomas and cast members have constantly been asked about a Party Down movie. In a 2015 interview, Thomas said he hoped it would still happen. “I would say that if you were to ask every producer on the show and every actor on the show, everyone would love to do it,” he told Variety. “The problem is they all became big stars and have their own shows and trying to schedule that … everyone is doing too well for us to be able to schedule a Party Down movie.”

When HitFix asked Adam Scott about it in December 2015, he responded with: “I kind of doubt that’ll ever happen. I mean, if anything were to ever happen, it would probably be some more episodes, but I don’t know. I feel like it’s been a little while. It would be super fun, but I also feel like maybe it’s best to kind of leave it. Like, why screw something up? Or why take the risk of screwing something up? On the other hand, if everybody else was into it, I would totally do it.”

But if the movie did get off the ground, Thomas has an idea. “We talked about structuring it like Four Weddings and a Funeral,” he told Collider in 2011. “We don’t envision the movie as one long party. We think each act would be a new party and we’d stretch it out over the better part of a year so we’d be able to see the growth and do long arch stories for our characters and get some finality to some of the existing storylines.”

Cher’s career made her more famous for singing than acting, but on December 16, 1987, Moonstruck arrived in theaters and transformed her into a full-fledged movie star, and a few months later she won the Best Actress Oscar for her spellbinding performance. Cher plays Loretta Castorini, a widow living with her Sicilian family in Brooklyn. Despite being superstitious about love, she agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello), that is until she meets his jaded brother (Nic Cage), goes to see La bohème with him, and realizes “I love him awful.”

Director Norman Jewison referred to the movie as “an operatic multi-generational romantic comedy,” which is one reason the movie grossed an impressive $91,640,528 and won three Oscars, including ones for Olympia Dukakis and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley. Here are 13 moony facts about the movie.

1. THE ORIGINAL TITLE WAS THE BRIDE AND THE WOLF.

An earlier draft of Shanley’s script had it named The Bride and the Wolf, but the title perplexed Jewison. “I said, ‘The Bride and the Wolf? It sounds like a horror film,’” he revealed to the DGA. “So we had a big battle about that and it ended up being called Moonstruck because I convinced [Shanley] it’s about the moon. Everybody’s talking about the moon. The father’s talking about the moon, the full moon. We keep shooting the moon. It should be called something. What is it? She’s moonstruck. That’s a good title. So we called it Moonstruck.”

It should be noted the definition of moonstruck means “mentally deranged, supposedly by the influence of the moon; crazed dreamily romantic or bemused.”

2. JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY BASED THE STYLIZED DIALOGUE ON REAL PEOPLE.

Shanley admitted to Bomb Magazine that Moonstruck’s language has a certain affectation and poetry to it. “I remember somebody saying, ‘People don’t talk that way, but if he talks that way in the movie you buy it,’” the playwright said. “There’s truth and not truth in that. I said, ‘Well, it’s not the way all people talk, but I was on the train and I heard two women talking and they were talking in the exact style of Moonstruck.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, I chose that.’ And that’s what style is all about. It’s just making a choice about which of the many things, many aspects, you’re going to choose to go with for a whole picture or play.”

3. CHER WAS AFRAID TO TAKE ON LORETTA.

In 1987, Cher wasn’t new to the acting world—she had been nominated for an Oscar in 1984, for Silkwood—but she was worried fans still wouldn’t take her seriously as an actress. A few months before Moonstruck was released, The Witches of Eastwick and Suspect came out, so she was in demand. “It wasn’t like Mask, which I felt I just had to do,” she told the Los Angeles Times about Moonstruck. “I was a little frightened because there seemed to be all kinds of possibilities and all kinds of risks here. I wondered if, at this point in my career when there might be some people out there interested in seeing my movies, they would accept me in this role.”

4. NIC CAGE WANTED TO MAKE PUNK FILMS, NOT MOVIES LIKE MOONSTRUCK.

When Cage was in his early 20s, he “wanted to make the kind of movies that are essentially punk gestures,” he told Baltimore Sun. “I read the screenplay to Moonstruck and thought, ‘I would never pay money to see this film!’ But my agent insisted I do it, practically forced me to do it. When I saw the finished film I didn’t know what in the world to make of it. That was my era of wanting to make new-wave, alternative films.”

His follow-up film, Vampire’s Kiss, was completely different from Moonstruck (for instance, Cage eats a live cockroach). “I was in such a state of shock that I had made a sweet, romantic movie I had to go and do Vampire’s Kiss right after,” he told The New York Times.

5. DUKAKIS AND CHER DIDN’T THINK THE MOVIE WOULD BE SUCCESSFUL.

In an interview with AV Club, Dukakis confessed she didn’t think the movie would be a hit. “As a matter of fact, one day we were sitting around talking, and somebody asked Cher what she thought was going to happen, and she gave it the thumbs-down,” the actress said. “Nobody really expected too much out of it. And then look what happened. And that’s because we were all stupid and didn’t understand what Norman Jewison was really doing. The guy’s incredible, you know?”

6. NORMAN JEWISON KNEW THE MOVIE WOULD WIN OSCARS.

In the same interview with AV Club, Dukakis said she knew the movie was a big deal when she went with Jewison to a benefit in Canada where he screened the film. “And he said, ‘You know, you’re gonna get an Academy Award for this.’ I looked at him like he was stark-raving mad. I thought, ‘This little movie and that little Italian lady are gonna get an award?’ I said, ‘You really think so?’ He said, ‘Yeah!’ I thought, ‘He’s just being nice because I came up here to do the benefit for him. He thinks he has to say something nice to me.’ And then all that happened. It was just amazing. The writer got it, I got it, and then Jewison didn’t get it. Can you imagine?”

7. MOONSTRUCK CHANGED OLYMPIA DUKAKIS’S LIFE FOR THE BETTER.

By the time Moonstruck came around for her, the then 55-year-old had mostly made a name for herself in theater. But when she landed the role as Cher’s mother, Rose Castorini, and ended up winning Best Supporting Actress (and saying the line, “your life is going down the toilet,” something her mother said to her once), she became famous.

“It’s like somebody said ‘Look, she waited all these years, let’s give her something good,’” she said on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight. “And it was incredible. And that changed my whole life. My daughter was going to college on credit cards when I did that movie. After that, we were able to send our children to college with no problems.”

8. CHER ENJOYED PLAYING THE “BEFORE” LORETTA MORE THAN THE “AFTER” LORETTA.

The “before” Loretta entails the gray-haired widow and the “after” is when she falls for Ronny. “But I much prefer playing her ‘before’ than ‘after,’” Cher told the Los Angeles Times. “The freedom is not interesting to me because that’s something I know, usually. Yet I don’t think of her as being constrained, exactly. My idea was to play her more as bossy and controlled.”

9. THE GRANDFATHER RELEASED TENSION FROM A SCENE.

During shooting of the climax, cast members lost their cool because they couldn’t get the timing right. According to The New York Times, Jewison said Cage threw a chair at another actor, and Cher was threatening to report Jewison to the Screen Actors Guild for keeping them through lunch. Feodor Chaliapin Jr., who played Cher’s grandfather, walked into the room and told them to “calma, calma, calma” and, “This is a Feydeau farce, and in a Feydeau farce we pull everything together in the last scene.” After he said that the rest of the cast behaved themselves and finished the scene.

10. CHER USED SONNY BONO’S FAMILY AS A REFERENCE POINT.

Cher, who is part Armenian and part Cherokee, didn’t know how Italian families worked. “I didn’t come from that kind of family. I really didn’t relate exactly to it, but I had a sense of it, like a distance sense of it,” she told Good Morning America. “Not like something that you can relate to first hand. I’ve known some families like that and I got feelings of it. After a while I thought I might be able to do this.”

But her Moonstruck family reminded her of her ex-husband’s family. “It kind of reminded me of Sonny’s family,” she told the L.A. Times. “Everybody eating and talking and shouting—but you have such good times.”

11. CAGE WASN’T ALLOWED TO SPEAK LIKE A WOLF.

Going along with the wolf theme, Cage said he desired to speak like Jean Marais in Beauty and the Beast. “He had that accent and his voice was very gravelly—and I thought of my character in Moonstruck like a wolf who spoke with a growl,” Cage said. “And so I was talking like that in the movie and I got a call from the director, Norman Jewison, and he said, ‘Nicolas, the dailies aren’t working.’ And then I started hearing names of other actors and I thought I was going to get fired. I had to quickly drop the Jean Marais.”

12. DANNY AIELLO HATED THE MOVIE.

On The Diane Rehm radio show, Aiello, who played Loretta’s fiancé and Ronny’s brother, told the host he “couldn’t stand the character I played.” He continued, “Norman Jewison, the director, when I told him, he said, ‘Are you crazy? You’re wonderful.’ But in my neighborhood you can’t play a wimp on the screen. You know, people didn’t even know me as an actor, but to see me as they didn’t know me, was troubling in the area where I live. So it did adversely affect me at first. All I know is that I was stupid looking on the screen.”

Aiello also felt Cher should’ve picked him over Cage. “I said, ‘Do you think Nicky Cage is going to get a woman what I have?’ I said, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ I said, ‘Cher would be with me from the beginning.’” Despite not liking the role, it earned him more money and “it elevated a lot of other parts for me in comedic situations and so forth,” he said.

13. THE MOVIE MADE CAMMARERI BROS. BAKERY WORLD FAMOUS.

Ronny works at the Brooklyn bakery, and even though the bakery is only featured in a couple of scenes, it caused tourists to flock to the place after the movie was released. One of the owners, Gilberto Godoy, used to sign his autograph on bread bags, as he played a baker in the film. Jewison told The New York Times, “Whenever I can, I like to cast people who do the same job in real life,” and he picked that particular bakery because “It has one of the few coal-fired ovens left in the city,” he said. “Heat and humidity are always there. And bread is always rising, and there is an incredible smell. It helps the actors to be in a real environment.”

Godoy refused to close the bakery for the filming—he had a quota of 5,000 loaves a day to meet—so for three days he worked around the cast and crew. “It was hysterical,” Jewison said. “We had trucks, lights, cameras, Cher—and the poor guy was still baking.” The cast and crew did benefit from complimentary breads, though.

The tourists kept the bakery afloat until 1998, when the bakery briefly closed. It eventually moved into a different location and reopened. But in 2013 the 92-year-old bakery filed for bankruptcy.