Multi tasking is a myth, the human brain simply wasn’t designed to focus on two things at once and magicians take full advantage. Our attention is pulled to one thing in particular due to the ‘moving-spotlight‘ theory. In short, the theory says that our attention is like a spotlight, highlighting one thing while leaving what surrounds it in the dark. When an item or action is within the spotlight the parts of the brain involved in processing it work more efficiently, but anything beyond the spotlight is barely processed at all, at least not by our conscious mind. This allows magicians to pull a sleight of hand right under our noses, as long as something else is drawing our spotlight what happens beyond it, to our brain isn’t happening at all.

The ‘misinformation effect’ occurs when information we are given after an event alters our memory of it. For example, a magician asks you to choose a card from the left side of the deck and return it without telling him. Before the razzle-dazzle where he guesses your card he may say something like ‘Now you chose any card you wanted, correct?’ And in the heat of the moment you will say you did. The truth is you were only given the option of the left side of the deck, but the ambiguous comments from the magician alters how you remember the trick, leaving you with a false memory making the trick seem perhaps more incredible than it was.

When you see a ball get thrown in the air, it comes back down. You’ve a seen it a million times. You know that what comes up must come down and so does your brain. In fact because of something called the ‘Memory-prediction framework’ our brain sometimes remembers certain actions so well, it stops paying close attention because it predicts how they will end. When a ball gets thrown in the air our brain instantaneously recalls memories of similar events and produces an idea of what’s going to happen next, but sometimes it’s wrong. When a magician puts a ball in a cup only to have it disappear when the cup is lifted, we are shocked because what our brain predicted didn’t come true. Our brains often feed us a prediction and convinces us we saw it happen, which leaves us even more shocked when the predicted action didn’t happen at all.

When we ‘pick a card, any card’ we are very rarely picking at random, no matter what it seems. It is usually the magician choosing for us, only without our knowledge. In many card tricks the card we apparently choose is ‘forced’ meaning the magician did something, mental or physical, to make us choose exactly what they wanted us to. But our brain will often over look or deny this as an option, in favor of free choice. Our brain simply does not want to believe it was forced and will often omit facts that may indicate that it was, instead jumping fully into the false idea that all choices were all our own.

The ‘woman sawed in half trick’ is old enough that most people know the secret. The head we see in one end of the box doesn’t belong to the legs we see at the other. But our brain insists and assumes it does, why? Because our brain is a sucker for continuity. When it sees a head in rough alignment with a set of legs it uses past experience to fill in the blank and tell us that obviously a torso exists between those two body parts. In many magic tricks an object is partially covered, and our brain uses what it CAN see to continue the image and fill in the blank, of course that is exactly what the magician wants.

Quick, look out the window. What did you see? Now look again, has anything changed? If the first time all you saw was your backyard and the second time there was a tiger, well you’re probably going to notice. But what if that bird perched in the tree moved slightly? What if a plant had moved in the wind? Our brains are susceptible to something called ‘change-blindness’ basically meaning that it’s actually quite bad at immediately detecting small changes. Its not necessarily that we don’t see them, but more that our brains have trained themselves not to worry about changes that won’t greatly affect us and as a result, if we aren’t very specifically focusing on something we’ll rarely register it consciously. Obviously magicians can utilize this to the extreme, we never notice small changes in what’s going on until the magician directs our focus to it.

Our Brain insists we have free will, and it also insists that it’s always right. Due to something called ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ our brain will make up excuses to rationalize events, even if it means you are going against what you thought or felt only minutes earlier. Our brain will force us to justify events if they don’t go how we expected. Magicians present a reality that doesn’t obey the idea of reality your brain is used to seeing. This creates a cognitive dissonance and a point is eventually reached where, no matter how hard it tries, your brain cannot rationalize the events it’s just seen. Our brain is used to rationalizing events after they occur, magic creates a situation which can’t exist and that leads to the unique sense of astonishment we feel.

You’ve probably seen any number of internet illusions where you stare at a black image then stare at a white wall to find the image still exists in your vision. That’s called an after-image and it’s really your brain seeing something for a short time after its gone. A magician can use this when switching an item from hand to hand, to your brain a coin may appear to be in one hand slightly longer than it was due to an after image, which gives the magician a fraction of a second longer to make the switch. A magician might even use an after image to remove your watch. Squeezing your wrist can leave an ‘after image’ feeling, leading your brain to believe your watch is still there even after it has been expertly removed.

Simply speaking, when your brain sees something new, fast and exciting it is helpless not to take notice. Due to ‘exogenous attentional capture’ your brain will always be drawn to something new that it has trouble predicting. A dove erratically flying from a hat will have the attention of you almost immediately as your brain takes at least a few seconds to process the event and asses its importance. Even a fast, curving hand movement will draw more attention than a slow straight one, magicians know this and will use exciting actions that your brain can’t help but look at.

Many magicians use humor in their acts in an attempt to charm their audience into submission. But this charm and charisma is actually having a chemical affect on your brain. It’s possible that the simple act of laughing with (or at) the magician’s terrible puns releases Oxytocin, the bonding hormone. Which makes acts of cooperation and social interaction feel good. Oxytocin release means you are less likely to be critical of the tricks you’re watching and even more likely to miss sleights of hand as you’re attention will be drawn to the magicians face. So everything, even the terrible puns are part of the trick.

Scott tweets @frigginboom. He also films himself.

The post 10 Ways Magic Tricks Your Brain appeared first on Listverse.

Disney often displayed his innovations at the annual New York World’s Fair. His attractions drew record crowds that spilled out from the waiting areas inside the pavilions and onto the fairgrounds. The implementation of switch-back lines (lines that fold in on themselves instead of remaining straight) allowed more people to be condensed into a smaller area in an efficient and organized fashion. Switch-back lines today can be seen in banks, airports, and of course, Disney theme parks. Disney later took the “waiting in line” concept to an entirely new level with the introduction of interactive lines. These are lines that actually become part of the ride itself. For example, Disney attractions like the Haunted Mansion, Tower of Terror, and Midway Mania (pictured above) all feature unique interactive lines.

Disney was responsible for many hugely influential innovations in his lifetime, some of them even unintentionally. Main Street, USA in Disneyland is widely recognized as the world’s first indoor shopping mall. Shops on either side of the street have openings which allow you to walk from one shop to the next, all under cover, from one end of the street to the other. The design may not have been done with malls in mind, but businesses have certainly taken the idea and run with it.

Moving large groups of people quickly and efficiently were some of the main tenets of Epcot (back in the days when Epcot was going to be a model city of the future). Disney pioneered the use of the all-electric PeopleMover system, which was planned to shuttle residents around Epcot. Also on the drawing board was the use of monorails for mass transportation of residents to and from the urban section of the city. Both systems are still in use today. The PeopleMover is located in the Magic Kingdom and actually passes through Space Mountain where a portion of the model of Epcot can be seen. The monorail is located in and around both the Magic Kingdom and Epcot. Disney’s monorail was America’s first daily-operating Monorail system.

Disney was a trailblazer in merchandising. He understood early on that the right merchandise could become an effective tool to promote Disney movies and TV shows. As soon as Mickey Mouse became popular, Disney manufacturers flooded him with ideas to cash in on the phenomenon. Disney only wanted the best products to bear Mickey’s name and image however. The studio negotiated a 2.5-5 percent royalty on all items, and at the depth of the Great Depression consumers bought hundreds of thousands of items from toys and ice cream cones to the famous Mickey Mouse watches. In the early 50’s the Disneyland television program aired the show Davy Crockett. A trade embargo with China led to surpluses of raccoon skins and inspired Disney to negotiate a deal for coonskin hats like the one worn by Crockett on the show. Demand exceeded expectations and the hats sold by the millions. Composer George Burns put together a song titled “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” for the show. The track quickly became a hit, selling ten million copies and spending a month at #1. Even though we take merchandising for granted these days, in Disney’s time these fresh innovations helped change American entertainment.

Long before a television sat in every living room, Disney understood their power. During the early stages of planning Disneyland, Walt and his brother Roy knew they needed money to help fund such an ambitious project. Roy traveled to New York to meet with network executives to discuss TV’s ability to finance and promote the park. ABC agreed to a weekly Disney series. The series debuted in 1954 with major success. The studio used the series to hype the theme park and promote Disney films. Walt insisted on filming as many segments as possible in color, even though most televisions still used black and white, because he believed color would become the new standard. A few years later, he moved his show to NBC, where the entire program was broadcast in color and retitled “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” With this 1961 television series, Disney Studios became the first ever to provide regular color programming for television. Disney clearly saw the value of the then infantile medium of television. He was aware of the power of promotion through TV and he used it to connect with the public in an entirely new way.

The 1965 New York World’s Fair saw Disney successfully introduce a number of never-before-seen ride innovations. Traditionally, theme park attractions included outdoor rides and perhaps a fun house / haunted house walkthrough. Disney radically changed this model, creating the standard for what we now consider “theme park rides.” When Disney was working on the “It’s a Small World” attraction, it was planned to be a walk-through attraction. Disney realized however, that he couldn’t handle enough people using a walk-through format. So, the attraction became a boat ride, where flat-bottomed boats were gently pushed along by underwater jets. The ride system was so successful that the Pirates of the Caribbean, originally meant to be a walk-through, was changed to a more realistic boat ride. Rides like Matterhorn Mountain, the world’s first enclosed steel roller coaster, and “Soarin” in Epcot, also fall into the parameters of “fitting into the theme of the show.” The Omni-mover ride system, where ride vehicles glide along on a continuously moving track, was developed for the World’s Fair and was used on the Ford Magic Skyway attraction. Rides like the Haunted Mansion in the Magic Kingdom (the fabled doom buggies) and Spaceship Earth in Epcot still employ the system.

Walt Disney dreamed of creating the first entertainment enterprise where children and parents could have fun together. While we may take such a concept for granted today, the idea was truly novel back in the mid-20th century. Traditionally, amusement parks only catered to children, leaving tag along parents with nothing to do. Walt envisioned a place where parents and children could share fun experiences with each other. Disneyland, which opened on July 17, 1955, was that place. Disney also surrounded his innovative park with an earthen barrier to insulate his guests from the intrusions of the outside world and place them in a reassuring atmosphere. Disney emphasized that the parks are about reassurance, that the world can be OK, that you can talk to a stranger in a public place, and that a public place can be clean.

Hastened by Disney’s participation in the World’s Fair, audio-animatronics became one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of theme park entertainment. Attractions like The Carousel of Progress, Ford’s Magic Skyway, and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln all featured Disney’s never-before-seen robots. The audio-animatronic figures moved and talked, grunted and gesticulated like real, live beings. It was a new toy for Disney’s creative staff, and a new way to tell stories in three-dimensional fashion. While the Carousel of Progress and the Magic Skyway featured rather anonymous characters, the Lincoln figure recreated the famed US president in jaw dropping fashion. It turned out, in hindsight, to be a radical machine; the first time the world was ever going to see a really believable animated figure. The latest and most sophisticated audio-animatronic figures continue to play prominent roles throughout the Disney entertainment world.

It is hard to imagine any aspect of animation that was not influenced by Walt. He created the first cartoon to successfully synchronize sound and picture (Steamboat Willie, 1928). He was responsible for the first feature length animated film (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937). He pioneered the use of the Circle Vision filming technique, which allowed him to shoot and present movies in 360 degrees, surrounding the audience. He was even the first to develop an optical printer that could combine live-action and animation together (The Three Caballeros, 1945). And as if this wasn’t enough, perhaps his largest contribution to the world of animation was his invention of the multi-plane camera, pictured above (Patent No. 2,201,689). The multi-plane camera is a special motion picture camera which allowed Disney to transform flat, one-dimensional animation into layered shots with depth and movement. Various parts of the artwork layers are left transparent, to allow other layers to be seen behind them. The movements are calculated and photographed frame-by-frame, with the result being an illusion of depth by having several layers of artwork moving at different speeds. It transformed animation in much the same way that computer graphics did years later.

EPCOT stands for “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.” No one can say just when the idea of creating a model city of the future occurred to Walt Disney, but as early as 1964, operating in secrecy, Disney began planning a true city of the future; a development combining the latest technologies and materials with time-tested concepts about livable communities. Epcot’s radial design surrounded a high-density urban core with low-density neighborhoods; at its center was a 50-acre downtown area housing hotels, apartments, convention centers and offices, and shopping and entertainment venues. Towering above was the spire of a cosmopolitan 30-story hotel, providing guests with a panoramic view of Walt’s sleek metropolis.

Transportation was important to Walt’s Epcot; the layout of the city was designed to discourage car use. Facilities could be accessed via PeopleMover, or, for those who did drive, an intricate system of roads allowed motorists to travel around the city without gridlock or even stoplights. An enclosed downtown Transportation Lobby enabled transfers between the city’s PeopleMover system and monorails linking to other parts of the planned Disney World development. Walt said Epcot would constantly be updated to project a vision of “optimum patterns of urban living” 25 years in the future, and was designed to be a dynamic environment that would “always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and new systems.” Sadly, Walt Disney died in 1966, before Epcot could be realized. Walt’s brother Roy decided to suspend master planning in favor of focusing all efforts on finishing the Magic Kingdom. The vision of Epcot still lives on today however, as one of four theme parks in Walt Disney World.

Ross is a patent agent and long time Listverse fan.

The post 10 Amazing But Overlooked Innovations By Walt Disney appeared first on Listverse.

At one time, the following things were revolutionary, offering us new ways of doing things or seeing the world. Some made bigger marks or stuck around longer than others, but all were important parts of the fabric of our society, and none will survive your lifetime. Your kids might not even know what you mean when you talk about…

When television began as a medium, it was only logical that veterans of other media were among the first to give it a shot—radio and film performers were the first television stars, and print and radio journalists were the first to pioneer the television news format. Some of these very people were also the first “celebrity” journalists, and by the height of their cultural reach in the late ’60s and ’70s, their sway over public opinion was formidable indeed.

During that era, the network news broadcasts were central to the lives of much of the populace—especially in the United States, where CBS news dominated for decades due to the guidance and on-air presence of Walter Cronkite, who anchored that network’s nightly news from 1962 to 1981. So profound was his influence that when he proclaimed the Vietnam War a stalemate on the air in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously lamented, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

Between 2002 and 2008, consumption of online news sources increased by one hundred percent, while broadcast network news has ever-so steadily declined in the face of pervasive competition from online and cable news outlets. Where once the opinion of a single news anchor could keep the President of the US awake at night, many Americans today would be hard-pressed to name a single network news anchor—and this trend seems almost certain to continue as the avenues to timely content grow ever more diverse. Even social media is edging up to the table—many credit Twitter with breaking one of the biggest stories of 2013, the Boston Marathon bombings.

The heyday of the network news anchor was also a formative time for television storytelling, and a transition from the techniques of radio and stage. Many early television shows were essentially filmed radio or stage plays, and one of the most effective ways to try out new ideas and techniques was the anthology series. These shows would use some sort of framing device to present a new story—with a different cast—every week, often employing a stable of writers and drawing from literary and theatrical sources. One of the most popular, Studio 60, ran for over a decade between 1948 and 1958, and helped to solidify the genre and its conventions; but another, debuting a year later, would have an enormous and lasting impact not just on television, but entertainment and storytelling in general.

The Twilight Zone was created in 1958 by Rod Serling, a veteran writer of anthologies like Kraft Television Theater and Hallmark Hall of Fame. A sort of pre-pilot, “The Time Element” aired on The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, another anthology series; by the time its run had concluded in 1964, it had established and cemented conventions of script, camera work, and acting that had not been present on television before, and continue to be used today. Too many famous actors to list here had breakthrough appearances on the show, and one of its head writers is such a towering influence on popular culture that he may yet garner a list unto himself.

The anthology format was used to great effect to explore the fledgling television medium’s language, boundaries and techniques—a purpose it appears to have largely fulfilled, as it is all but extinct today. Even separate revivals of The Twilight Zone in 1985 and 2002 couldn’t help bring it back.

We know that you come to Listverse for entertaining, informative content outside the rigid confines and dry reporting of news and academic outlets. There has always been this demand, but there has not always been the Internet to provide so much of the supply—in fact, the chances are very good that in an alternate universe, Listverse is a print magazine. Thirty years ago, it would have been.

While the print magazine industry has been sliding just as reliably and predictably as Internet use has been rising, they now seem to be on the edge of literal extinction, with even the most dependable and recognizable brands down double digit percentage points in circulation over the last decade or so. And there doesn’t seem to be any remedy—when Time ran a controversial cover of a breast-feeding mother, or Newsweek got weirdly suggestive with one of their covers, the brief flash of publicity did absolutely zero to increase circulation.

That’s because the type of targeted, specific content provided by magazines can now be had by anyone with an Internet connection, which will be a bit of a trend here. Not all such cultural forces can blame their demise on the Web, however—one of the biggest of the last half-century is all but forgotten today despite its singular uniqueness:

For those of you who don’t know, there was a time when there were movie theaters outdoors. We know, it sounds strange. The screens were gigantic, and each parking space had a little speaker that you could stick in your window. This may be starting to sound familiar as something you’ve seen in movies and TV shows about the ’50s, but not only did they actually exist—we promise!—but there were a LOT of them.

The first drive-in theater opened in 1933 in New Jersey. Over the next few years, several more popped up in California, Texas and Ohio. By 1948, fifteen years after their debut, there were over eight hundred; ten years after that, there were nearly five THOUSAND. They became neighborhood hubs, with some offering playgrounds and mini golf, and others able to accommodate up to 3000 cars within view of their titanic screens. For a brief period in the late ’50s and early ’60s, drive-ins eclipsed indoor theaters in popularity.

Three main factors contributed to the decline of the drive-in: increasing real estate costs, the nationwide adoption of daylight savings time—which shaved an hour from viewing time during the peak summer hours—and, of course, the advent of VCRs and home media. Speaking of which…

Readers of a certain age will remember the first time they walked into a video store, and saw all of the video carts, and realized that these were movies that you could take home and watch, which was just revolutionary. From the time home video exploded onto the cultural landscape in the late ’70s until the advent of the DVD, it was tough to go a few blocks in any decent-sized town without seeing a video store—but then, at the birth of that new format, something strange happened.

Despite being obviously superior to VHS tapes, the dominant format of years past, DVD sales and rentals did not live up to industry expectations; except in one completely unexpected area—online rentals. Netflix was established in 1997, the same year DVDs became widely available, and their model of ultra-convenient online ordering and mail delivery put an immediate and significant dent in brick and mortar DVD rental business. And that was BEFORE Netflix began digital streaming, which has since annihilated even its own DVD rentals.

With the type of content traditionally offered by video stores now available online something very close to 100% of the time—and Redbox covering the rest—the days of the physical video store are numbered. The largest chain, Blockbuster, was acquired by Dish network in 2011, and as of 2013 the number of US stores has dwindled down to around 500, from over 3,000 just five years ago. In 1989, there were almost 90,000 video stores in the US

Given what we’ve seen so far, it should come as no surprise that newspaper circulation is steadily dropping as more and more people migrate to the Web for current events. But it’s not dropping steadily—the drop is accelerating, and pretty rapidly. What’s more, behemoths like USA Today that traditionally buck these types of trends are no longer able to do so, and there are literally no newspapers whose ad revenue is growing.

At this point, the ability of these familiar mastheads to survive depends largely on two things—their willingness and ability to go digital, and whether anyone can figure out how to maximize ad revenue in this uncharted (for them) territory. While print newspaper ads still generate 20 billion dollars a year, that’s down from over 70 billion ten years ago—and Google now pulls in more ad revenue than all US newspapers combined, being slightly more savvy as to how to generate this sort of revenue on the Web.

While these companies may be able to adapt well enough to survive in a digital landscape, the physical publications themselves—which of course require overhead to print and circulate—will almost certainly be a thing of the past before long.

When Aaron Montgomery Ward printed the first mail-order catalog for his resale business in 1872 (on a single 8×12 price sheet), he probably had no idea that he was pioneering an entirely new sort of global commerce. By enabling customers to browse at their leisure and buy in private, Ward (and soon, his competitor Richard Warren Sears) had created an entirely new incentive to buy—that of convenience. By the dawn of the twentieth century, mail order was pulling in billions in today’s dollars; by 1908, you could literally buy a house by mail order.

While there are certainly plenty of print catalogs still in circulation today—over 10,000, according to the National Directory of Catalogs—their numbers are dwindling just as quickly as online catalogs proliferate. All of the largest retailers long ago made the move to the Web, and the vast majority of the print catalogs still in existence cater to niche markets, and even those serve largely as conduits to orders placed online.

Yes, as difficult as it may be to believe, 12 BILLION print catalogs mailed in 2009 represents a solid 7% drop from the previous year. It’s also relevant to note that the industry states that 70% of its demographic are married, female homeowners over the age of 50, many of whom might not be completely trusting of and familiar with the Web.

We don’t need to state the importance of the telephone—one of our greatest inventions, enabling instant voice communication anywhere, all over the world. Well, anywhere that telephone lines could be run. It is similarly obvious that cell phone use has risen every year since they became widely available. What is interesting, though, is that in 2012, the number of US households with no land line was in the majority for the first time ever. Many kids today have never used a phone that was not wireless.

While this doesn’t mean a whole lot to established telecom companies, who have largely managed to roll with the wireless punches (with some recently opting to end land line service altogether), it does have interesting implications for the millions upon millions of land telephones that have been and still are being produced—not to mention the thousands upon thousands of miles of telephone lines criss-crossing the world, a diligently constructed infrastructure that will soon be completely obsolete. Yes, utility poles accommodate more than just telephone lines, but it’s not as if the lines themselves will ever be able to serve a different purpose—and as the system falls into obsolescence, lack of maintenance will become a factor.

As an aside, the aforementioned older readers might remember how revolutionary telephone answering machines seemed when they were introduced—you need never miss another call! Even land lines come standard with voice mail today—when is the last time you saw a physical answering machine? If you can even remember, you’re probably in the minority.

Some of you may have seen this argument rising in prominence—that in the foreseeable future, all media will be digital. We’ve already seen the negligible impact of the DVD’s introduction, but the plight of its replacement format really serves to drive this point home.

The video format war of the ’70s, between VHS and Betamax, looked set to repeat when Sony and Magnavox introduced their competing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high-definition video formats in 2005. As the former war ended with a clear victory for VHS, the latter appeared to be won just as clearly by Blu-Ray—except that five years after this “victory”, the HD-DVD format lives on. By some measures, the formats are about equal in popularity.

This seems to illustrate a general lack of awareness about and/or passion for either format, and the music industry has proven decisively in recent years that the tactile sensation of holding physical media in your hand is dying a slow but inevitable death at the hands of convenience. As broadband and data networks ramp up their ability to provide high-definition video content, the incentive to pick a side in a format war is simply no longer there. Soon, when broadband-speed Internet access is available pretty much anywhere, any physical media format will be seen more as a barrier to obtaining content than anything else—as will the restrictions inherent to the greatest content provider in human history:

Although it has been said that we are living in a golden age of television programming, the television set itself—the big square box or long flat panel that sits in the middle of the living room, with cable, antenna or satellite plugged into it to receive broadcasts—looks like more of an archaic concept every year. Not to say that those flat panels won’t continue to sell like hotcakes; after all, they get cheaper every year. It’s just that they can hardly be considered televisions, when there is nothing distinguishing them from computer monitors.

As even the earliest home video devices demonstrated (set a timer, record the late show, watch it in the morning!), viewers will always jump at the chance to watch their shows on THEIR schedule, rather than the programmer’s. Quick (successful) adoption of DVRs by the cable companies further illustrated that point, and insanely lucrative licensing deals with Netflix and Hulu are all pointing broadcast networks toward a new business model—one that DOES NOT REQUIRE scheduled programming.

Even the least savvy viewers know that they no longer have to adhere to a network’s programming schedule to get the content they want.When your smartphone can alert you to the timeliest news content, your favorite cable programs are available for streaming practically immediately, and broadcast shows can be stockpiled on your DVR or streamed from multiple sites, it’s tough to make the case for scheduled programming being an attractive option for anyone—and it looks likely to get exponentially less attractive with each passing year.

The post 10 Cultural Forces That Are Dead Or Dying appeared first on Listverse.

During WWII, Frankfurt, Germany became one of the nerve centers of the war, and the city suffered no less than eight bombing runs by the Allied forces. It’s no surprise then that the area is filled with WWII era bunkers, even today. On the East harbor of the city lies an industrial labyrinth of old warehouses, buildings, and quite a few of those old bunkers. The German architecture firm Index Architekten took one of those bunkers and converted it into state-of-the-art music recording studios.

The bunker itself is the square concrete block on the bottom of the picture above, and the recording studios are located in the section built on top of it. In designing the structure, the original plan was to house the studios down in the bunker, but the roof had suffered major structural damage. Rather than replace it, they made the decision to fabricate the entire studio section out of wood and perch it on top of the bunker. Musicians can record there, then walk down to the living facilities located in the bunker proper.

The New Dutch Waterline was built as a defensive shield over the course of centuries. It started in the 17th century, when the Dutch began flooding specific regions of their land to protect key cities. These massive moats were perfectly planned—too deep for foot soldiers to cross, but not quite deep enough to accommodate ships. During the first and second World Wars, the Dutch further fortified these regions with rows of bunkers and pillboxes to protect their defenses against artillery strikes.

This example isn’t as visually striking as many of the other entries on this list, but from a historical standpoint it provides a wealth of information. In 2010, Rietveld Landscapers cut through one of the remaining bunkers, Bunker 559 (there were 700 in total), giving tourists a cross-section view of the inside—a slice of history, so to speak. A stairway leads down to the bunker and runs directly through the middle of it, before leading out across the waters of the natural preserve in the background.

In the heart of Shanghai, China, an approximated 2,000 leftover bomb shelters lie dormant from the tense period between China and the Soviet Union during the 70′s. In recent years, the government has released many of these bunkers to the public, and they’re being put to good use. One of the most striking examples is The Shelter, an underground nightclub that was built inside the framework of a 600 square meter (6,500 sq. ft.) bunker in the Xuhui district of Shanghai.

The atmosphere inside the nightclub is dense and moody, echoing with pounding drum and bass tunes—the perfect location for all-night partiers. Most of the original cement structure is left visible, but combined with 21st century furniture and interior design, not to mention some of the best sound systems in the area. Some sections rely heavily on the intrinsic nature of the bunker—”dark rooms,” with no light at all, just the music.

China isn’t the only country cornering the market on bomb shelter night life—on the other side of the imaginary Cold War conflict line, Moscow is joining the arms race with its own specially designed bunker. Bunker 42, formerly known as the Tagansky Protected Command Point, was built in the 50′s and operated up until 1986. The massive underground space (7,000 square meters, or 75,000 square feet) was designed so that 3,000 military officials could survive for three months without resupply. Now, it’s a bar, club, and restaurant.

It’s actually still in development, but the design is evolving into something that looks like a set piece from 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially the main lounge area, which was placed inside a long hallway with curved ceilings, complete with signature Russian opulence in the furniture and decor. While most of the bunker is being reimagined as a club, a small part will be retained as a Cold War museum.

Bomb shelters aren’t the only remnants of modern warfare—missile silos also played a deadly role in the clash of superpowers. And they present some very unique opportunities for remodeling. The SiloHome is built from an abandoned missile silo in Saranac, New York. Although the silo reaches an incredible 185 feet (56 meters) below ground, only the top two levels have been converted into living quarters.

The best part about the home is that—except for the wooden lodge above it—the entire structure is underground. And like any good bunker, it was built to withstand a nuclear attack. You enter through the above-ground lodge (which, it has to be said, is a very decent home on its own). Inside, a keypad encoded steel door swings open into a stairwell that takes you down to the first two floors of the silo, outfitted with every modern convenience you could ask for—yes, even a jacuzzi.

This 19th century fortification isn’t quite as ritzy as some of these bunkers, but what it lacks in glamor it more than makes up for in elegant style. The once-derelict tower sits on the picturesque coast of Suffolk, England, and for the longest time it was preserved by the English Heritage and Suffolk Coastal District Council as a national monument.

When it was bought by the architectural firm Billings Jackson Design, the plan was to turn it into the private home for the owner of the company, Duncan Jackson. The remodeled tower preserves the original brickwork, and the outer walls are almost unchanged, providing a stark contrast between the early 19th century style as seen from the outside and the sleek modern view from the inside.

The Tea House On Bunker in Vreeswijk, The Netherlands beautifully proves that bunker renovation doesn’t need to stick within the boxlike confines of the original structure.The bunker was built in 1936 as part of the line of defense along the New Dutch Waterline, mentioned in entry number nine. The project, developed and implemented by UNStudio, aims to alter the original structure of the bunker as little as possible, and it achieves that goal through a removable stainless steel installment that fits over the top, clicking into place like a couple Lego bricks.

Using the grounded weight of the bunker as a counter balance, the steel structure is able to jut out at an angle that seems to defy the laws of physics, giving the Tea House its unique profile. As a result, the actual meeting area (it was designed for business conferences) is left hovering over a 6 foot (2 meter) block of empty air.

Germany has, arguably, more derelict WWII bunkers than any other country. There are thousands of the structures across the country, and while many of them are left standing because they represent historical landmarks, others are still there simply because demolishing them would be an expensive process—they were, after all, built to withstand bombs.

A German architect named Rainer Mielke is doing his part to contribute to a solution by recycling some of them into apartments. He calls the project Bunker Wohnen (bunker dwelling, or bunker habitation). His apartments utilize the upper floor of the bunker along with an additional level built onto the roof as the living space, while the lower level is used as a parking garage for the residents. When one of the residents, Hans-Albert Eike, moved into the refurbished bunker, he invited the neighbors over for a housewarming party—and actually met several people who had used the bunkers as children during WWII.

During the Cold War, the U.S. government spent billions of dollars peppering the Midwest with missile silos. Some of them were so large they were practically cities buried deep beneath the ground. One of these hardened bunkers, in Topeka, Kansas, was specially built in the 60′s to accommodate a 4 megaton Atlas E nuclear missile—and nearly two decades later, the then-abandoned silo was bought by a schoolteacher named Ed Peden.

Twelve years later, Peden had drained the silo of decades worth of stagnant floodwater, shoveled out mountains of scrap and slag, and converted 604 square meters (6,500 sq. ft.) of the massive bunker into a veritable mansion, where he now lives with his wife. Their living space only encompasses a third of the entire site. Their whole house is underground except for a small sunroom on the surface. As Peden puts it, “We take the garbage up, and we mow the roof.”

Finally, one of the most impressive repurposed military bunkers is the Bahnhof Data Center, built inside an old Cold War era nuclear bunker 99 feet (30m) below the surface of Stockholm, Sweden. When Bahnhof, a Swedish internet service provider, purchased the bunker, they decided that with such a uniquely eccentric location at their disposal, they might as well design it to harmonize with that, frankly, villainous ambiance.

So Bahnhof went all out. The photo above offers a glimpse into the facility, but with over 1,100 square meters (nearly 12,000 sq. ft.) of space in the bunker, a glimpse is really all it is. Since the workers are underground, the bunker has simulated daylight, a series of greenhouses, and waterfalls flowing directly out of the walls. Beautiful, yes, and also nearly impenetrable—the front door is 40 cm (16 inches) of solid steel, and the facility itself was built to hold up against a direct hit from a hydrogen bomb. That security isn’t wasted either—the Data Center also houses private servers, including the sensitive servers for WikiLeaks.

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The man who is largely responsible for introducing advertising as we know it was none other than Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays’, nicknamed the “father of public relations,” studied his uncle’s writings on psychology and group mentality and learned humans react to feelings not facts. With this knowledge, he saw an opportunity to capitalize on people’s subconscious desires by selling goods with the promise of delivering power, status, sex appeal, glamour, health, and other things with emotional connections. His uncle also taught him that humans often act irrationally when emotions are involved and can be led to believe objects are a symbol of their character. Bernays used these theories to manipulate people into buying products they didn’t necessarily need or want.

One of Bernay’s first widely known marketing campaigns was for the American Tobacco Company where he was tasked with attracting more female smokers. Of course, he had one major hurdle to overcome—it was 1928 and there was a longstanding taboo about women smoking in public. So, Bernays’ consulted a psychoanalyst to help him get at the root of the taboo and was told that cigarettes symbolized the penis. Bernays shrewdly decided to center the Lucky Strike campaign on female power and independence, by advertising cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” equating smoking to female equality. His advertising efforts caused a national stir and almost immediately made it acceptable for women to smoke.

Bernays dominated the marketing arena throughout much of the 20th century and is the reason why those in the US consider bacon and eggs the quintessential breakfast, why Ivory soap is preferred by doctors, and, according to some, is the reason why people believe water fluoridation is safe and beneficial. He had so many successful campaigns that “Life Magazine” named him one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century.

From the start, it seems the idea of a consumerist, malleable society was linked with government ambition. Some of Bernays’ earliest work was as a press agent for the American Committee on Public Information during World War I. In that position, he promoted President Woodrow Wilson as a liberator, spread the tenants of democracy, and was so accomplished he joined the President at the Paris Peace Accords in 1919.

After seeing the effectiveness of propaganda, those in authority weren’t too keen on putting the art of manipulation back in the bag, so to speak. So, even after the war, both the government and businesses continued to use propaganda as a way to control citizens, and occasionally the interests of the government and corporations aligned.

For example, manufacturers were worried the high production and sales they’d grown accustomed to would dwindle once the war was over. Naturally, they didn’t want to see diminishing profits, so they used Bernay’s advertising strategies to convince people to buy more by linking goods to unconscious desires. At the same time, many presidents touted the ‘buy, buy, buy,’ mantra in the hopes it would boost the economy. President Herbert Hoover said to Bernays, “You have taken over the job of creating desires and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines, machines which have become the key to economic progress.”

Once consumerism settled in as the basis for the American economy, those in power gradually quit seeing Americans as citizens, but regarded them, above all else, as consumers.

Indeed, it seems today’s leaders treat us like potential buyers, and instead of giving us well-formed, fact-based arguments, they offer sales pitch-esque communications and package their platforms as if they’re destined for the marketplace. In 2002, when George W. Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card was asked why the administration waited months to explain the reasoning for invading Iraq, Card replied “You don’t roll out a new product in August.”

Overtime, the habit of referring to “citizens” as “consumers” became increasingly common, and now the terms are used interchangeably. This evolution, however, doesn’t sit well with everyone. According to a recent study conducted by Northwestern University, many folks take offense at being called a consumer, “as if their sole purpose and reason for existence on this planet is to consume—to eat, drink, use, watch, and buy stuff.” Interestingly, the study also found that being labeled a consumer automatically makes people behave more selfishly.

In an interview shown in the BBC documentary “The Century of Self” Bernays said the word “propaganda” developed a negative connotation after World War I and II, since it was associated with something Soviet Communists and Nazis used to perpetuate their command. To distinguish his profession Bernays quit calling his industry propaganda and renamed it “public relations.” Still, public relations was little more than a euphemism, as it continued to rely on the fundamentals of propaganda: half-truths, persuasion, and attempting to change public attitudes. Although advertisers weren’t coercing people into supporting a particular political party, they were using their messages to influence how citizens felt about clothes, cars, beauty, and everything in between.

Nowadays most of us know we can’t take any advertisement at face value. In other words, we understand celebrities are paid to carry a certain brand of bag, we see the Coke can placed blatantly front and center in our favorite TV shows, and we know cars are supposed to represent male sexuality. Yet, even knowing these ideals were completely manufactured, it’s nearly impossible to keep them from seeping into our own beliefs — that’s the strength of the propaganda.

Apparently, Bernays didn’t realize his form of marketing so closely resembled fascist strategies and was shocked to learn Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers Reich Minister of Propaganda, kept copies of Bernay’s writings and used them to engineer the rise of Nazism.

Early advertisers understood the only way to keep consumers buying was to ensure they were never wholly satisfied. Although most companies didn’t make shoddy products (although planned obsolescence is currently an issue), they did use ads to convince viewers they were somehow inferior if they didn’t have the newest, most expensive gizmo on the market.

Wall Street banker Paul Mazer made it clear when he said, “We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America; man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

It was no secret customer dissatisfaction was the goal for many manufacturers. Charles Kettering, director of General Motors, wrote an article for a 1929 magazine which he candidly titled “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” In it, he tried to persuade readers that continual consumption was the only way to sustain the economy. He said, “You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing, or accept hard times.”

While it may seem like it’s our economic duty to continually spend (and subsequently work harder), in truth we could all work a fraction of the time and still have enough goods and services to meet everyone’s needs. Secretary of labor James J. Davis discovered this fact in 1927 and discussed it in an interview with “Nations Business,” pointing out that America’s textile mills “could produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and only 14% of the country’s shoe factories were needed to provide every citizen with footwear for a year. Later in the interview it was suggested that all the world’s needs could be met by only three work days a week.

Facts aside, intuitively it seems like we should be working significantly less than our ancestors. After all, we have machines, assembly lines, computers, the internet, and a wealth of technology meant to make our lives simpler, yet, according to an ABC News article, we are working longer hours than at any time since statistics have been kept, and Americans are working more than anyone else in the industrialized world.

So, what gives? Why isn’t technology making our lives easier and why aren’t we all jumping on board the three day work week that was shown viable in 1927? Unfortunately, it’s all done for the sake of business profits. Working employees everyday and getting greater numbers of products to market is more profitable for business owners than just meeting everyone’s needs—that is, of course, if they can convince people to buy the products. But, thanks to Bernays and his followers, corporations know how to turn citizens into consumers, trigger their unconscious cravings, and make them purchase unnecessary products.

In his later life, Sigmund Freud became increasingly withdrawn from the world as he felt humans were innately evil and civilization was a largely ineffective construct meant to restrain our animalistic sides. Bernays and others latched onto this notion and felt it was their obligation to direct the masses towards what was best for society.

Bernays’ own daughter said her father felt the public’s judgment was not to be relied upon since people could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so they had to “be guided from above” by a group of enlightened despots. As expected, Bernays deemed himself one of the enlightened and used his advertising messages to influence the people towards his will.

Walter Lippmann, a 1920s political commentator, had similar notions and believed people would operate under a mob mentality if not adequately governed by the intellectually elite. He argued that the average person had too many limitations (selfishness, preconceptions, limited social contact, prejudices, etc.) to make socially responsible decisions. Such philosophies gave those in power the ability to justify their manipulative tactics.

For the elites to maintain dominance over the average man and keep him on the perpetual work/ buy machine, they had to link consumption with an emotion nearly all Americans share: patriotism. And nothing is a greater symbol of Americanism than democracy.

Those who judged themselves enlightened, like Bernays, saw nothing wrong with manipulating the public into thinking consumption was a democratic necessity. In fact, he may have believed it himself, as he said, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

The idea of consumption being fundamental to consumerism became so ingrained that today when someone speaks of anti-consumerism or anti-capitalism they are immediately pegged as a socialist or communist. Yet, others would argue a capitalistic, consumption-based society is by definition undemocratic because it perpetuates low wages and creates class divisions which prevent all citizens from having an equal say in the decisions affecting their lives. In other words, those with the most money have the most power and influence.

There were a few who spoke out about how unbridled consumerism led by corporations could result in excessive waste, depletion of resources, and a submissive working class.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt particularly stood out in his distrust of a corporate-run economy. In his 1936 “Acceptance Speech for the Democratic Nomination for President” he said, “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”

Fearing Roosevelt’s sentiments could undermine their influence, the industrial elite from corporations like General Motors, DuPont, and General Foods came together and formed the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Together they started spreading the message that Roosevelt was running the country into debt and was responsible for the slow economy. In a 1936 internal memo, NAM was tasked with “re-selling all of the individual Joe Doakes on the advantages and benefits he enjoys under a competitive economy.” NAM packaged its message with the idea that sacrificing a free economy would lead to the handing over of all freedoms to the government, including free speech, religion, and press.

In the 1920s, manufacturers realized they could expand their profits even further by targeting a largely untapped market—the poor and lower-middle classes. Obviously these folks didn’t have much disposable income, so businesses came up with a sort of workaround: the installment plan. These plans allowed consumers to buy expensive goods by agreeing to pay for the product in increments over a set period of time. Often this setup resulted in the buyer paying far more than the product was actually worth, yet it made it possible for many more people to purchase costly items such as cars, appliances, furniture, washing machines, and other luxury goods.

Creditors, debtors, and installment plans were nothing new for the time, but being in debt always carried a certain stigma. Savvy advertisers knew they had to remove the shame of debt if they had any hope of the masses taking advantage of the installment programs. And so they did. “A small cash payment,” “convenient monthly payments,” “a reasonable down payment,” and other persuasive sayings, which are all too familiar today, became mainstream. In some publications the number of advertisements mentioning installment plans more than tripled through the 1920s. Also, the overwhelming success of installment buying in the auto industry (thanks in large part to GMACs marketing efforts) made it socially acceptable to use installment plans to buy other types of goods.

Unfortunately, the Great Depression that followed the roaring 1920s was more painful for those who participated in installment plans, since their lack of income also meant the repossession of many of their belongings.

Unfortunately, it seems neither businesses nor citizens have learned from the mistakes of the 1920s and ’30s, since we’re still persuaded to rack up debt and live outside our means.

Content and copy writer by day and list writer by night, S.Grant enjoys exploring the bizarre, unusual, and topics that hide in plain sight. Contact S.Grant here.

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Some people will go to great lengths to see their favorite band or artist live in concert, so radio stations have long hosted contests to win tickets to such events. Some have more trouble drawing the line than others, as KOMP 92.3-FM of Las Vegas demonstrated in 1999.

DJ Greg McFarlane was trying to think up a radio contest for listeners to win Mötley Crüe tickets, and after he used his idea of making them re-enact the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape live on-air (albeit clothed) he was stumped. But, in a flash of inspiration, he decided he would make listeners drink a few ounces of his own urine (presumably after consulting a group of five year old children).

Three contestants actually came into the studio prepared to face the challenge, but got cold feet when they realized McFarlane was in no way kidding. Then, in McFarlane’s own words, “The fourth guy walks in, pushes everyone out of the way and throws it down like it was Pepsi.” So congrats to that guy, for winning tickets to the show, and condolences to McFarlane, who was immediately fired.

Weddings can be expensive. So BRMB radio in Birmingham, England, generously offered to cover the costs of matrimony for one lucky couple. There was a tiny catch, however—they would only do it if the couple agreed to walk down the aisle nude.

The winners of 65% of a listener vote, Kelly Clinton and Lee Wiggets, had been together for eleven years but had never married due to financial concerns. So they jumped on BRMB’s offer to cover all their expenses, and got married on March 15, 2011, wearing almost nothing but their birthday suits. The groom used a top hat to cover his crotch (which is admittedly a pretty classy way to cover one’s crotch), and the bride was able to wear a veil and some barely-there underwear.

An inability to conceive is undoubtedly one of the biggest problems a couple can face, and is sure to come packaged with its share of frustration and anxiety. Luckily for citizens of Ottawa, Ontario, local radio station Hot 89.9 was there to capitalize on that frustration and anxiety.

In 2011, Hot 89.9 started a contest called “Win a Baby” in which one couple would be chosen by listener vote to receive in-vitro fertility (IVF) treatments, a value of around $35 000. The contest naturally came under fire for commoditizing babies, as well as taking a financial and emotional problem for many couples and turning it into a popularity contest. To its credit, in spite of being pretty tasteless, it did promote political discussion about the lack of government aided IVF treatments in Ontario.

Sadly, most of us will never get an opportunity to attend our own funerals. But listeners of the German radio station Radio Galaxy in Aschaffenburg, north Bavaria, got the next best thing when they were presented with a chance to win their funeral.

No, the radio station wasn’t going to kill anyone (that’ll be later on the list). Instead, listeners sent in their own epitaphs in the hopes of winning 3000 Euros (around $4195 at the time of the contest) to be spent on death insurance, which would cover funeral costs. For those who don’t know, an epitaph is simply the writing on one’s tombstone. For example, the epitaph on the tombstone of Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, is “That’s all folks”. Winston Churchill’s is “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”

Not everyone has such a sense of humor about death, however, and the radio station came under some criticism including a lawsuit from the Association of German Undertakers.

When people have trouble getting a date, there’s only one place to turn: radio contests. One of these people, a man named Travis Harvey, did just that, and wound up the subject of Waukegan radio station WXLC’s “Win a Date with Travis” contest. It was a fairly straightforward contest, and a woman going by the name Jane Doe ended up winning herself a date with the man the station hailed as a “kind” and “great guy”.

Except he wasn’t, though, because he raped her. Originally slated to take her out to dinner, he told her he was too tired and instead invited her to his home for dinner. After one drink she felt extremely drowsy, and that’s when Harvey raped her.

Can this one really be blamed on the radio station? Doe thinks so, as she began a lawsuit against parent company NextMedia for $50,000 worth of damages. She insists they were negligent by not doing a background check on Harvey, who had been twice convicted of violating a domestic order of protection that had previously been taken out by another woman. She also sued Harvey, who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting her.

90.3 Amp Radio in Calgary, Alberta, in response to the body issues that many women have as a result of the glorified and pervasive images of airbrushed female models and celebrities, held a contest in which those same women could compete for a breast augmentation operation (hey, I didn’t say it was a helpful response).

The contest was called “The Breast Summer Ever” (because nothing goes together like sexual degradation and puns), and all contestants had to do was submit pictures of themselves and reasons for wanting to get the surgery. The reaction to the contest was mixed; some listeners were disgusted, though hundreds of people entered the contest.

In the end the winner was a transgender known only as Avery, who received 76% of the 30 000 online votes. Avery said in an interview that the breast implants will help her to not “have to face so much bigotry on a daily basis,” so the contest at least ended up helping someone in need.

German radio station RTL 89.0 had a MINI Cooper to give away, but they couldn’t be bothered to actually come up with a contest to do so. So they pretty much shrugged their shoulders and said they’d give it away to whoever would perform the craziest stunt.

Enter 39 year old Andreas Muller. Muller, who really, really liked MINI Coopers, needed a way to top the list. So he decided to offer up some valuable skin real estate and get a tattoo of the word MINI, in the one place where showing it off in public would likely get him arrested (his penis, for those who skipped the title and/or are really slow). Yes, this man really did get the word MINI permanently inked onto his Cooper, and he did it live on air with the female host looking on. And yes, he got the car.

If you’ve ever thought of a wife as something to be won in a contest, then you’re not alone! Because apparently there are a lot of radio stations who share your point of view.

100.3 The Bear in Edmonton, Alberta is one of many examples of radio stations that have offered the chance to win a foreign bride, and all of them have been highly criticized for demeaning women. The Bear’s “Win a Wife” contest sent the winner to Russia to be taken care of by a matchmaking service called Volga Girl.

Another radio station called Q104, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, created a contest called “The Male is in the Czech” where the winner would be flown to Prague, in the Czech Republic, to participate in a “dating-service” and the opportunity to pick a bride. The contest met with protestors who showed their disapproval by picketing the station. Also, because they were going for completely tactless, the last day of the contest was on International Woman’s Day.

Oh, and New Zealand radio station The Rock FM (we’ll talk more about them later) got in on the fun, too, sponsoring their own contest in which the winner would be flown to the Ukraine to pick a bride from an agency. After complaints, they changed the name of the contest from “Win a Wife” to, no kidding, the “Win A Trip To Beautiful Ukraine For 12 Nights And Meet Eastern European Hot Lady Who Maybe One Day You Marry” contest.

It’s starting to become clear that radio stations will turn anything into a contest, as long as they can make a pun out it. “Hold Your Wee for a Wii”, sponsored by KDND 107.9 of Sacramento, California, is no exception. And yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.

This was back in 2007, when people were still pretty excited about the Nintendo Wii. As it happened, KDND 107.9 had themselves one and were willing to part with it to the listener who could go the longest without urinating. Every fifteen minutes, contestants were given eight ounces of water. The last one to break and go to the bathroom would win.

As it turns out, people don’t just urinate for fun, and holding it in can lead to some big consequences. For one of the competitors, a woman named Jennifer Strange, the consequence was death. Strange drank around seven and a half litres of water before relieving herself, and died hours later of a condition called acute water intoxication. This tragic turn of events resulted in 10 employees of the radio station being fired, as well as a lawsuit that resulted in a 16.5 million dollar settlement for Strange’s family.

New Zealand radio station The Rock FM needed a contest for Valentine’s Day 2012, but didn’t want to deal with annoying restrictions like basic human decency. So DJs Jono Pryor and Robert Taylor came up with a brilliant idea for a prize: they would take care of all the costs of one lucky couple’s divorce. Provided the breakup occur live on-air, of course.

The Rock ended up choosing a winner, whose name was Sam. Sam (a woman) was scheduled to call her husband Andy on February 14, 2012, and tell him that she was leaving him. Instead of a depressing and heartbreaking phone call, what happened next was actually pretty awesome.

When the DJs called who they thought was Sam’s husband Andy, a woman answered. Confused, they asked if they were speaking with Andy, and the woman answered, “No, it’s not Andy and it’s never gonna be Andy and it wasn’t Andy to start with, you fucking idiots.” It turns out it was Sam’s lesbian partner Amber, who with Sam proceeded to tell Pryor and Taylor exactly how terrible they are and how disgusting their contest was.

The hosts clearly had no idea how to react, and pretty much just let themselves be berated. At one point one of them said “I feel like I’m in an episode of Scooby Doo, and we’re finally figuring out how you caught us out, and we woulda gotten away with it if it weren’t for you dastardly lesbians.” So, lesson learned? By the way, it’s really the kind of sabotage that has to be heard to appreciate fully.

Michael Alba is on twitter @MichaelPaulAlba. Follow him for your chance to win a baby!

The post 10 Insanely Misguided Radio Competitions appeared first on Listverse.

Spider-Man is without doubt one of Marvel’s most famous, popular, and money-spinning characters. But Spidey was very close to being kicked in the wastepaper bin mere moments after making it off the drawing board. Martin Goodman, head of Marvel at the time, told Spider-Man creator Stan Lee that he thought the new hero was a “rotten idea” for a comic book hero.

Goodman sincerely believed that the character would struggle to ingratiate himself with Marvel’s adoring fans, for the simple fact that people were scared of spiders—so they’d supposedly be scared of him.

Let’s list Superman’s visual attributes: tall, handsome, with a charming smile; broad shouldered, and with a full head of slicked-back hair. But things could’ve been very different indeed.

The son of Krypton’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, originally conceived of The Superman as a telepathic scientist obsessed with world domination. And the kicker? He was bald. An evil Professor Xavier if you will. Butby the time Superman had found a publisher—a six year process—the character had become the dashing hero, with a full head of hair, whom we know and love today.

One of Cap’s most popular features has to be his shield. He’s walloped Hitler with it, rescued it from the deepest, darkest depths of the sea, and beaten various villains to a pulp with his silvery shield of justice. But the shield was originally intended to be very different from the versatile disc-shaped one adorning Cap’s front covers today.

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby originally dreamed up a heraldic-shaped shield. But rival comic publisher MLJ already had a patriotic character called The Shield who had a very similar looking heraldic logo on his chest. Due to legal pressure from MLJ, Marvel (then “Timely”) changed the design—and by the time Captain America made his first appearance in America Comics No.1, in March 1941, the new shield had been penned, inked, and signed off.

Although Ben Affleck did his best to butcher the character in the movie version of the comic, Daredevil fans are some of the most loyal comic books followers out there (right up there with fans of DC’s Flash). But the acrobatic avenger of the streets very nearly fell from his perch a few moments after taking flight.

Stan Lee made it clear to the Marvel team: if there were even the vaguest whiff that the comic was causing offense to blind people, or blind organizations, he would pull the book from the shelves quicker than you can say Matt Murdock.

What’s the first thing you think about when you imagine the Hulk? The fact he’s bright green, right? Well, this very nearly wasn’t the case. Stan Lee always intended for the Hulk to be grey—and so he was, in the very first issue of the series The Incredible Hulk in 1962.

This didn’t last for long, however. Due to the fact that there were major problems with the inconsistency of the printing, they ended up having to choose a color instead. One of the most consistent colors in print at the time was green, so they opted for that.

When the comic book was first made into the classic TV show, the executive producer Kenneth Johnson pushed for the Hulk to be red, to symbolize anger. And in a further twist, as printing has become more proficient, a grey Hulk has appeared numerous times in the modern comic era. How long will it be until we see him in red?

The Joker has to be the best super villain of all time. But Batman creator Bob Kane was ready to kill off the evil jester in his very first appearance. As with many of Batman’s early villains, the plan was to have the Joker die through some fatal accident. Batman’s editor Whitney Ellsworth saw potential in the character, however, and forced Kane to include a panel showing the Joker coming back to life.

When the Symbiote—an evil alien-suit which takes over its host—was discarded by Spider-Man, writer David Michelinie didn’t know what to do with it. Eventually, he decided to give the suit to a woman. But Michelinie decided that she needed to hate Spider-Man so much that she wanted to kill him, so he plotted out a story which, in true comic fashion, is massively convoluted.

Brace yourself—this plotted version went as follows: a heavily pregnant woman is traveling in a taxi cab; Spider-Man distracts the driver, and the cab crashes into her husband. The husband dies in front of wife’s eyes, and she loses her baby due to the shock. She ends up institutionalized with mental illness, and promises herself that she’ll avenge the deaths of her husband and her baby.

When Michelinie moved over to Amazing Spider-Man, he pitched that very idea to his boss, who said that the readers would never see a woman as a realistic physical threat to Spider-Man. Eventually, Michelinie came up with the character of Eddie Brock instead—the name eventually becoming synonymous with Venom.

Stan Lee and artist Don Heck created Iron Man at the height of the Cold War in 1963, when the American people were very much aware of war and its impact on their lives.

On paper, Tony Stark offered no alternative to this; in fact, he really wasn’t the most like-able superhero at all. He was an arms dealer, a bit of a womanizer and more arrogant than possibly any other comic book creation. But this was the point. Lee was challenged by his publisher Martin Goodman to create a superhero who was also a “wealthy capitalist war profiteer.” Lee took on the challenge, believing all the while that Stark would be a big hit—and he was dead right.

Perhaps one of the reasons for Iron Man’s success was the fact that he was loosely based on the celebrity Howard Hughes, who embodied many of the superhero’s traits in real life. And when the artist Heck first sketched the hero, he imagined the popular actor Errol Flynn.

Throughout the Golden Age (1930s and ‘40s) and the Silver Age (1950s and ‘60s) of Comic Books, the industry had many critics. One such critic was Fredric Wertham, a child psychiatrist who believed that comic books were turning American youths into perverted juvenile delinquents.

In true comic book fashion, however, a hero saved the day. Dr. William Moulton Marston was not only an American psychologist, but also a passionate advocate of women’s liberation. And Marston had the complete opposite view to that of Wertham, believing that comics could have a considerably positive affect on kids’ ethical groundings.

To prove his point, Marston created Wonder Woman in an attempt to educate Marvel’s readers about feminist ideals (Marston believed that a period of ‘American matriarchy’ was coming . . . although he also believed this would, in part, be achieved through the enslavement of men via seduction).

Of course, the comic-book hater Wertham saw the worst in this new character, and despised what he called the “lesbian overtones” of the book. We should also bear in mind that Marston was rather liberal in his personal life; he lived in a house with two women, and had children by both of them. In fact, both his wife Elizabeth and his mistress Olive were huge influences on the creation of Wonder Woman.

Incidentally, Marston was also responsible for inventing one of the early polygraph machines—which is the reason why anyone caught in Wonder Woman’s lasso is compelled to tell the truth.

Wolverine was created by writer Len Wein, because he needed a character who could do battle with the The Incredible Hulk. The Wolverine made his debut in issue 181, way back in 1974, as a Canadian special agent ordered by a government department to capture Hulk and “bring him in.”

The early Wolverine displayed many of the traits—the claws, the yellow-and-blue costume, and the mask with the pointed ears—which would remain when he became a fan favorite as a member of the X-Men. But things could have been very, very different.

The character of Wolverine was conceived when Wein decided that he wanted to create a character who would be popular in Canada. He knew that heroes based on animals were a big hit in the US, so he brainstormed Canadian animals, eventually narrowing it down to two: The Wolverine and The Badger.

Thankfully, Wein’s editor stepped in and suggested that the connotation of a wolf would make for a better superhero . . . and so the entire Marvel Universe dodged a bullet of considerable size. “This summer! In a cinema near you! The Badger!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

Gareth May is an author and the co-editor and founder of His ‘n’ Hers Handbook—a lifestyle website for couples with a geeky twist. His debut book, 150 Things Every Man Should Know, published in November 2009, was selected as one of the best books of the year by The Independent on Sunday. It has been published in the USA, Russia and China. His second book, Man of the World, was published in June, 2012. Born and bred in Devon, he now lives in London.

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That is, of course, unless the idea is hatched by a manufacturer of consumer products. In these circumstances it can result in tons of misspent advertising cash, warehouses full of unsold product, and people making fun of you on the Internet until the end of time. For example:

Colgate is a company that has done one thing very well for a very long time: make toothpaste. Since toothpaste is technically something that goes in your mouth, somebody had the bright idea that Colgate should branch out into other things that also go in your mouth—such as food.

The result was Colgate-brand Kitchen Entrees, cheap microwave dinners with the Colgate brand slapped on the front. Remarkably, people did not line up in droves to buy TV dinners from the maker of their oral hygiene products—in much the same way that people likely would not warm to soft drinks made by Listerine.

So ill-conceived was this product that in the short time it was available, its very existence managed to drive down sales of Colgate’s toothpaste—making this perhaps the least effective branching-out ever attempted by any company in history.

It’s easy to see how this could look good on paper. People get fat because they don’t exercise enough, and because they eat too much. The simple solution: make them exercise while they’re eating! But how? Why, with weighted dumbbells for utensils of course! Okay, so maybe it didn’t even look that good on paper, either.

Apparently these are actually still available on the Internet, under the name “Knife and Fork Lift,” which is just . . . we just don’t have any comment on that. The knife and fork weigh one kilogram each, while the dessert fork weighs twice that—because, as we all know, desserts are more fattening. So you can burn more calories with the heavier spoon while eating your fattening dessert. We’re trying to picture someone making this business pitch to a loan officer with a straight face—and it is not working.

These things are marketed as a “gift” for dieters, but unlike most gifts they cost $160 for the complete set.

We had to do a lot of checking to make sure this wasn’t some kind of weird photoshop-based prank—but no, the Egg Cuber is a product that really exists. It doesn’t cut the eggs into a cube; it molds them into a cube, producing a hard-boiled egg straight from your nightmares.

On the surface, this seems harmless enough—but we would no sooner go near a square egg than we would choose to munch on a square apple. Just looking at the picture makes us feel a little funny, because this shape seems like a really obvious way to broadcast that this thing is not natural and should not be eaten, or even looked at for too long.

The strange thing about these, aside from the fact that the people modeling them on the box do not appear to be doing so at gunpoint, is that the image doesn’t immediately seem to match up with its description. We’re not sure what we would expect something called “Wonder Sauna Hot Pants” to look like, but it sure as hell would not be this.

For one thing, “Hot Pants” means something else, and this meaning was well-known by the 1970s, when it is obvious from the picture that this product existed. And we would not expect a “Wonder Sauna” of any sort to have anything to do with short shorts—or garments of any kind, really. Are the pants actually hot? Don’t saunas usually have burning coals in them? We’ll refrain from asking the next logical question.

Apparently these were meant to “help” gullible people who hoped to slim down through some unexplained process. But we’d hazard a guess that the only thing this product ever helped anyone do is be mistaken for a flotation device.

The CueCat, released in 1999, was a stylized, glorified barcode scanner that connected to your PC. Its purpose was to scan little barcodes, or “cues,” which would direct your web browser to a URL. The fact that you’d have to be reading a magazine in front of your PC to have a use for one was the least of its problems.

Amazingly, this product gained the confidence of several very big-name investors, such as Coca-Cola and Radio Shack, to the tune of 185 million dollars in investments. The barcodes even showed up in Forbes and Wired magazines for about a year. And all it ever did was address a non-existent need, being “unnatural and ridiculous” to use according to tech critics. It assumed that people would want to make their print magazines interact with their computers, which is ludicrous.

On top of all this, in September 2000 the company’s website experienced a security breach whereby CueCat users’ private data was compromised, which had in fact long been a concern. The product has variously been called one of the worst tech products of its decade, or even of all time.

One of the more nonsensical products in the crowded nonsensical field that is late-night infomercials, Perfect Pancake offers an unbelievably simple solution for those who have a hard time flipping pancakes: flip the whole damn griddle. It’s essentially two griddles stuck together with a handle.

Of course, it’s pretty tough to check on how your pancakes are coming along, since they’re closed up inside this clamshell thing. So you could be in for a surprise when you open it up: maybe you left them in a little too long, and the batter is baked to the inside of the stupid thing like ceramic. Or maybe they’re undercooked, leaving you with a plate full of gooey crap. Maybe flipping pancakes with a spatula . . . just isn’t that hard.

Do you know what cigarette smokers like about smoking? It’s the smoke. They like inhaling the smoke and holding it in their lungs—and that is, in fact, why it’s called smoking. And smoking isn’t good for you, but trying to mitigate the risk by producing a smokeless cigarette is like trying to avoid gun injuries by producing a gun which can’t be loaded with bullets.

Things went very wrong with this product from the get-go: users in test markets complained that it was difficult to use and tasted like crap, and the company’s projection that smokers would acquire a taste after a few packs didn’t pan out—most people tried one and gave the rest of the pack away.

The “smokes,” manufactured by RJ Reynolds, worked by heating and aerosolizing tobacco flavoring—and although they didn’t work too well for delivering tobacco flavor, they did work pretty well for delivering crack. They were found by crack users to be a cheap and easy way of modifying their stuff. This quickly-discovered fact only hastened their demise from the market: they lasted for less than a year.

Now here’s another concept which must have sounded quite revolutionary at first: “What if we print books . . . with the words sideways? People could read them in bed while laying on their side! Why did nobody ever think of this before?!”

The problems with this idea should become obvious after about ten seconds of cursory thought on the subject. For one thing, people obviously don’t maintain the same position for hours on end while reading in bed. What if we want to lie on our backs for a while? Do we switch to a standard version of the same book? Or hold the sideways book a little differently—which leaves us with the very “problem” you were trying to remedy in the first place? And, most importantly, what if we want to read a chapter or two while we’re not even in bed?

Also, it’s not like they make all the books in this format, is it? Indeed, the website lists a handful of titles, none written a day more recently than eighty or ninety years ago.

So perhaps for a few very special people who always lie in the same position every night, who want to read the same handful of “classic” books over and over again, and who have never heard of a Kindle, this might be a pretty good solution.

Once again, we feel the need to make the point that this is an actual product: it really exists. It is not something one of our editors Photoshopped for a joke.

The “Kush Support” is a breast separator—another well-intentioned but rather odd solution to an imagined “problem.” It’s designed to prevent the large breasts of large-breasted women from resting atop one another while the owner is sleeping on her side—which we honestly had never realized was an issue.

We suppose that there is no possible shape for a breast separator which is not reminiscent of . . . well, we’re all thinking the same thing. But apparently this isn’t a gag product—just another product of highly questionable necessity.

You may be surprised that this is the only Ronco product on the list, but a lot of their stuff could at least be somewhat useful to some conceivable segment of society. We’re not sure how this product has enjoyed such a long run—that’s to say, we don’t know who the hell is buying toupees in spray cans—but here we are.

The product is technically called GLH, or Good Looking Hair, but it’s been known colloquially since its introduction in the 1970s as Spray-On Hair. It is exactly what it sounds like: a spray can which can cover your bald spot. It’s still available online today, though even the earliest commercials were less than convincing (as you can see from the photo above), and the entire premise sounds more like a Saturday Night Live commercial parody than anything else.

While the rest of the products on this list at least partially fulfill a (somewhat misguided) promise, Spray-On Hair seems to achieve the opposite of what it promises. Spray-painting fake hair onto your head will call more attention to your bald head than simple baldness would have done in the first place.

Mike Floorwalker blogs, Tweets, writes, edits and occasionally sleeps.

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The first time you notice a new type of scent you will subconsciously connect this scent to an item or a person. After that the scent will trigger the response that you experienced to that person or item and a happy response. Let’s see how we are all affected by this…

Buyers of Apple computers, iPhones and other products know it all too well, the smell of a new device. This very specific smell is rumored to come from inside the devices, but some have suggested that the packaging is responsible. The plastic iPhone has the same smell as the aluminum MacBook, so the scent is probably not added to the plastic. Apple has never owned up to these tactics, but an Apple Mac scent has been produced by the Air Aroma company, combining the smells of cardboard, ink and other ingredients. If you can’t afford a Mac, you can at least make your old PC smell like one.

The Holiday Inn hotels chain has been using scents combined with the right kind of music to invite you to stay longer in their rooms, lobbies and bars. The company uses a rose scent for weddings and a leather-based scent for business meetings and similar functions. Even the chlorine pool smell comes from a bucket of powder that is added to the air system in the mornings! Should you have something to celebrate, the Holiday Inn will make your party smell fruity! This type of sensory marketing is used by many hotel chains.

MacDonald’s use aggressive tactics to sell you their fries and other products. Focusing on ‘hot’ times in the day (lunch time for example) the company throws adverts out that are specifically aimed at those driving a car. Examples of one of these ads: one advert for fries features a sound that you could describe as something in between a deep fat fryer and a car heating system. The voice over even announces that the smell of fries being cooked will be transferred to your car, after which you are prompted to go and buy some. This type of advertising can hardly be called subliminal. Apparently the company thinks that subtlety should not be wasted on its customers. That’s why their restaurants feature so much red. Pay, eat fast and go away quickly. Before you can even ask for the wireless password and stay.

Nike stores use a mixed flower scent to direct you towards the more expensive shoe designs inside, but after an incident in which their shoes started smelling of cat urine after wearing them once, maybe they should have added it to the insoles of their designs instead. Apparently you want to spend up to $10 more on their shoes if they are diffusing flowery scents. The shops are light and often have white walls with black decorations or images in neutral colors. This makes you relaxed enough to pay up for their shoes.

The famous M&M World Store in London has a surprisingly strong chocolate scent when you walk in. You would expect that wouldn’t you? You want to feel like you are entering Willy Wonka’s chocolate lab when you go there. But then you look around and realize that all their wares are prepackaged. And you realize that the strong smell of chocolate is being sprayed at you with a vengeance. And your happy chocolate bubble bursts.

Scents mess with our rational thoughts and connect with our emotions. And what can be more irrational than blowing your monthly pay check on a slot machine or casino game? The scent masters at Aromasys have been involved in choosing the right scents for the right resort. The Mirage hotel and casino uses a scent that is based on Polynesian tones and the well known Bellagio may subtly remind you of Italy. The venetian uses a strong Aromasys scent called Seduction, with strong notes of musk. The scents are aimed at the type of surroundings, the theme of the venue and the type of clientele visiting the venue. Musk is often referred to as the strong manly scent of success. Unfortunately this slightly primitive notion is not supported by the Moschus deer, who would like to hold on to their musk gland sac, if you please.

If you think that you are overweight because you ingest more calories that you burn off, or because your digestion is slow, think again! You’re just not sniffing up the right scent. Apparently tests have shown that surrounding yourself with the right weight loss promoting scent can help you shed those pounds in a heartbeat. There is a huge marketing machine behind this notion and companies like Slimscents, Aromapatch and Prends-Moi really want you to drop your money on that new scent that makes you lose weight. Just make sure to stop driving around in your car to avoid hearing MacDonald’s adverts. Here’s a tip, surround yourself with the smells of peeling fresh fruit and cooking vegetables around dinner time.

Net Cost is pretty big on using scents to make you put some more stuff in your shopping trolley. The scents of chocolate and of fresh bread are used in the shops air system. The Net Cost grocery store in Brooklyn New York was one of the first supermarkets to use this to influence their customers senses, and apparently it really works to make people slow down and check out the products displayed in the shop areas where the goods can be found.

Most morgue and funeral home workers know the smell of a slowly decomposing body all too well. The favorite scent to use in a funeral home is a type of industrial strength cinnamon spray. This spray is a great deal as cinnamon creates a trusting and homely warm feel for visitors to the home, and does a great job in disguising the smells of human decay. If a body is not embalmed before a funeral service or cremation, you can be sure to notice a slight hint of cinnamon during your relative’s service. The icing on the commercial cake is the fact that this scent will make you want to come back and book your own service there too.

Imagine a long haul flight whilst breathing in perfumed air. It seems weird to imagine that even airlines use scented air on their jets. Singapore Airlines has used its scent called Stefan Florida Waters, on its hot towels and on its flight attendants. This way the plane smells fresh when you board, and the scent is spread every time an attendant walks past. According to the airline this enhances the travelers experience of a relaxed flight. After your holiday you will want to book with them again.

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Yes, before YouTube or even the Internet, there were viral videos—and while they may have been VHS tapes passed around at work or school, or grainy films shown at underground festivals, they are totally recognizable as every bit the same phenomenon we know and love from the online world. Before Star Wars Kid and the Dramatic Prairie Dog, there was . . .

This legendary 1936 “educational” film was ostensibly produced to warn parents about the dangers of the demon weed. It toured around the country for a couple of years under many titles (such as Tell Your Children, its original title, and The Dope Addict), taking advantage of strong anti-marijuana sentiment at the time—the Marihuana Tax Act, the first law to allow for imprisonment for possession, was passed in 1937.

The film was rediscovered in 1971 by none other than Keith Stroup, the founder of NORML, while snooping through the library of Congress archives. Keith bought a print for 300 dollars, and before long it was popping up at college film festivals across the US, where it was hailed as a masterpiece of unintentional hilarity. Since this was before videotape was in wide use, distribution of the prints was handled by a small specialty film distributor called New Line Cinema, which you may have heard of—their hand in distributing Reefer Madness brought enough success for them to start producing their own films by the late ’70s.

Since the film is in the public domain (only the colorized version is copyrighted), it found its way to video as soon as videotape became widespread. It’s easy to find copies on VHS or DVD (or, for that matter, on YouTube) today, but in the pre-Internet era, you had to know somebody who had a tape, live in a town with a really weird video store, or go to a really cool college.

Here’s an item that originated as a Portland, Oregon newscast in November of 1970. In it, there is a beached whale carcass, for which the town has a unique plan of disposal. If you’ve read the title of the entry, you might see where we’re going with this.

The Oregon Highway Division decided that the most prudent way to remove the carcass was to vaporize it with a huge amount of dynamite, and the newscast actually recorded the event. As you can imagine, the plan seemed to have gone very well at first, for the whale carcass vanished as if by magic; however, the thousands of rotting pieces of the carcass—some tiny, some not so much—were still around, way up in the air. And they were now on their way down. Predictable, horrifying and yet hilarious mayhem ensues.

The event became part of Northwest lore, like Bigfoot, except it was real. For a couple decades it survived only as urban legend and a few scattered bootlegs. Somehow, the original videotape of the newscast made its way to humorist Dave Barry in 1990; he immediately wrote a hysterical column about it, and bootlegs of the tape surged. Copies began appearing on Bulletin Board Systems—sort of a primitive early Internet—across the US around 1994, and today the legend of the Exploding Whale lives on.

On May 31, 1986, buddies Jeff Krulik and John Heyn had just bought a Camcorder—an old-time device that shoots cheap-looking video. Anyway, it was pretty cool for the time and being music fans, they decided to take it down to the local arena in Landover, Maryland, where Judas Priest and Dokken were about to lay down some mid-’80s rocking. They didn’t have tickets to the show—they just cruised around the parking lot, talking to tailgating metal fans, and shooting seventeen minutes of video footage that is transcendentally hilarious.

Mullet-headed, tank top wearing lunkheads wax philosophical about how much metal rules, and everything else sucks, including “that punk shit” and, in a timely reference, Madonna (“she’s a dick” opines one guy thoughtfully). Booze is everywhere and one guy responds to “where are you from?” with “I’m on acid”. There’s howling, hooting, devil horns and non-sequiturs aplenty; it is, in short, a perfect time capsule of the mid-’80s US mainstream metal scene.

There being a limited market for short films of this sort, the two friends dubbed dozens of VHS copies, which they handed out to anyone who wanted one. Copies began showing up in funky video stores across the land, and the tape had reached legendary status long before its first appearance online in the mid-2000s. Subsequent attempts by the filmmakers to re-capture lightning in a bottle with titles like Yanni Parking Lot and Pro Wrestling Sidewalk have somehow failed to live up to the original.

Todd Haynes has always been an interesting filmmaker, and he’s received Oscar nominations for Far From Heaven and his bizarre Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. His first project, a forty-three minute film released only to film festivals in 1987, is one of the more singularly bizarre entries on this list.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was a reasonably straight-faced, comprehensive account of the Carpenters’ rise to fame, beginning with their discovery in 1966 and ending with Karen Carpenter’s untimely death in 1982 from anorexia. The film, however, was not shot with actors. It was shot with Barbie dolls. Barbie played Karen, and the doll was literally whittled away with a knife throughout the course of the film to show the anorexic Karen wasting away.

Needless to say, Richard Carpenter was incensed when we he learned of the film for many reasons—not the least of which being that Haynes never got clearances for the music used in it. Carpenter sued and won, and all existing copies on film or videotape were ordered to be collected and destroyed. Of course, we know how that turned out—bootleg copies circulated freely until the advent of the Internet, where it survives to this day.

As head of Rocketship Animation Studios, Marv Newland has assisted in the production of many animated spots for many clients, including promo and network IDs for MTV and Nickelodeon that would probably set off nostalgia alarms for many of you reading this. As would his first—and perhaps most well-known—project, which he drew himself in two days, in a room that he was serendipitously renting from an actress who was the voice of Snow White in Disney’s 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

The film, Bambi Meets Godzilla, was known to play occasionally to fill time gaps during the early days of cable networks like HBO and Showtime; less than two minutes long, most of the film consists of the opening credits, shown over an animation of Bambi grazing in a meadow. Of course, everything is credited to Marv Newland, except Newland himself (“Marv Newland Produced By Mr. And Mrs. Newland”). Then, Godzilla makes his appearance… or at least, his foot does.

The deadpan short was a running joke for years in the late ’70s and early ’80s, even if nobody could quite remember where and when they had seen it.

Perhaps the most widely disseminated video on this list, Hardware Wars is a thirteen minute Star Wars parody, produced in 1978, in which everything is hardware. Well, almost everything. It’s done in the style of an extended teaser trailer for a full-length film that was sadly never produced.

After launching from a cassette player starship in an escape pod (a cassette, of course) droids 4Q2 and Arty-Deco crash land on the surface of a planet which is clearly a watermelon. After being discovered by Fluke Starbucker (played by future famed music producer Scott Matthews), the trio meet up with Ham Salad and the Wookiee Monster (who looks suspiciously like the Cookie Monster painted brown); meanwhile, the evil Darph Nader (a play on famed consumer advocate Ralph Nader) ends his interrogation of the Princess by blowing up her home planet of Basketball (self-explanatory). The film concludes with a squadron of bottle openers leading an assault on a waffle iron, the tagline “May the Farce Be With You”, and the assertion that the film was shot “on location in space”.

Hardware Wars screened at film festivals (winning Most Popular Short at the Chicago Film Festival), as a short feature in some theaters before the feature attraction, and on cable throughout the early ’80s, and was even available for rent at some of the funkier video stores of the day despite its brief running time. When all was said and done it had made around a million bucks, and is still considered the most profitable short film of all time—especially considering it only cost $8,000 to produce.

In 1988, Winnebago salesman Jack Rebney was picked to star in a promotional video showcasing the recreational vehicles, likely because of his previous experience as a broadcast journalist. Nobody knows how much of a success the promo video was, but its outtakes have taken on an incredible life of their own—unknown members of the crew edited them into the compilation known as Winnebago Man, one of the most virulent viral videos of all time.

In the video, Jack loses his patience. A lot. He is unhappy with the script, the crew, the set, and presumably his life and the faces of everyone around him. He makes his unhappiness known through some of the most colorful cursing any of us have ever heard in our lives, and suffice to say his mood does not improve for the duration of the video.

Copies of this circulated on VHS and appeared (in heavily edited versions) on “funniest home video” type TV shows before the advent of the Internet, where it popped up as early as 2002. In 2009, documentary filmmaker Ben Steinbauer hunted Rebney down for a documentary about the video, also entitled Winnebago Man, only to discover that Rebney had no idea he was famous. The documentary won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at both the Sarasota Film Festival and the Edmonton International Film Festival.

In 1987, an Ontario College of Art and Design student named Todd Graham effectively unleashed the mashup on the world. Apocalypse Pooh is pretty much what it sounds like; mostly video from the award-winning Winnie The Pooh shorts The Honey Tree and The Blustery Day set against edited portions of the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now. Occasionally, the opposite aesthetic is employed, with footage from the film set to pieces of soundtrack from the animated shorts.

The film played almost exclusively at two distinct types of venues—contemporary art houses, and comic book conventions. The ever-popular bootleg VHS copies circulated mostly at the latter, and the film’s legend grew.

The version available online is a restoration by a colleague of Graham’s. This film is notable for being incredibly weird, and for inventing the concept of the mashup far in advance of the familiar Web phenomenon. Also, British journalist and critic Kim Newman described Tigger’s entrance in the short—cut to the dialogue “it’s a f——ing tiger!”—as the greatest moment of Tigger’s screen career.

Robert Tilton was an over-the-top televangelist from the late ’80s and early ’90s, known for his infomercial-style “Success-N-Life” program. In this program, he often had protracted conversations with the Almighty, wherein he would pause for dramatic effect while making faces that seemed to beg for . . . some kind of sound effect. In 1985, a couple of unidentified guys decided to remedy the omission.

It was at that time that VHS copies of compilations of Tilton’s heavenly conversations, with titles like Joyful Noise and Pastor Gas, began circulating. Well-timed sounds of flatulence were inserted into the preacher’s diatribes.

After an LA radio station mentioned the video on the air, the creators began selling the bootlegs, which were (and still are) widely imitated. Many different “episodes” of Tilton’s flatulent ramblings can be found online today.

In 1992, a couple of University of Colorado students screened for their peers a short animated film they’d made entitled The Spirit Of Christmas. In it, four boys build a snowman, and bring him to life with a magical hat (as in the the classic “Frosty The Snowman” special). Except this Frosty is a homicidal monster, and immediately kills one of the boys, prompting his friend to exclaim “Oh my God! Frosty killed Kenny!” which may sound a little familiar.

The CU students responsible for this deranged piece of work were Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and the four boys—with a couple of their names switched—were the very first versions of the four main characters from South Park. For a few years (you guessed it), bootlegs circulated around campus and eventually made their way to executives of the Fox network, who commissioned the duo to make a new version of “Spirit Of Christmas” as a video Christmas card for their friends. Both were animated using only cardboard, construction paper, and an ancient 8mm film camera.

The new version (now called Jesus Vs. Santa to differentiate between it and the original) went viral as well, though this virus was initially confined to network television executives—dozens of them. As a result, the short—which eventually became among the first viral videos on the newfangled Internet—got the attention of Comedy Central, which brought Parker and Stone on to develop South Park. Though all subsequent episodes of the series have been computer animated, the pilot episode—”Cartman Gets An Anal Probe”—was also animated with cardboard and construction paper, just like the originals.

Floorwalker blogs, tweets, and does other things that sound less ridiculous.

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