Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (11 page)

M
ovie:
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982)
Scene:
When Elliott (Henry Thomas) first meets E.T. in his backyard, a crescent moon can be seen overhead.

Blooper:
In the famous bike-flying scene, the silhouettes of Elliott and E.T. pass in front of a full moon, yet it’s only three days later.

Movie:
Braveheart
(1995)

Scene:
In the beginning of the film, young William Wallace (James Robinson) is throwing rocks with his left hand.

Blooper:
In the next scene, a grown-up William Wallace (Mel Gibson) is throwing rocks with his right hand.

Movie:
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
(2003)

Scene:
At the veterinary hospital, Kate (Claire Danes) is hiding only a few feet away from the T-X (Kristanna Loken).

Blooper:
The T-X is
the
state-of-the-art Terminator, with heightened sensory awareness all around: sight, hearing, smell, even the ability to sense body heat. Yet somehow Kate—heavy breathing, sweating, and all—stays under the T-X’s radar and escapes.

Movie:
Titanic
(1997)

Scene:
The passengers are all boarding the lifeboats.

Blooper:
One of them is wearing a digital watch.

Movie:
Maid in Manhattan
(2002)

Scene:
Near the beginning of the movie, it’s six days before Christmas. There’s a fresh blanket of snow in the foreground.

Blooper:
Someone forgot to tell the trees—in the next scene they all have green leaves.

Movie:
L.A. Confidential
(1997)

Scene:
Toward the end of the movie, Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger) is talking to Detective Exley (Guy Pearce).

Makes sense:
Frito
means “fried” in Spanish.

Blooper:
An establishing shot shows them facing each other, but in each of their close-ups, the sun is behind their heads. Are there two suns in Los Angeles?

Movie:
Forrest Gump
(1994)

Scene:
After Jenny (Robin Wright) dies, Forrest (Tom Hanks) is visiting her grave. He says, “You died on a Saturday.”

Blooper:
The gravestone reads March 12, 1982 (it’s a Friday).

Movie:
Galaxy Quest
(1999)

Scene:
When Commander Taggert (Tim Allen) and Lieutenant Madison (Sigourney Weaver) first encounter the “chompers,” Madison exclaims, “Oh, screw that!”

Blooper:
That’s what we
hear
, but it doesn’t take a professional lip reader to see that she actually says…a word other than “screw.”

Movie:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
(1975)

Scene:
The audience is told that it is a “late November evening.”

Blooper:
In the very next scene, when Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon) are in the car, Richard Nixon’s resignation speech is playing on the radio. Nixon resigned in August.

Movie:
Pearl Harbor
(2001)

Scene:
When Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale) first arrives at Pearl Harbor, she walks past a tall building.

Blooper:
The building has a sign that says “Est. 1953”—12 years after the actual attack.

Movie:
When Harry Met Sally
(1989)

Scene:
During a car ride when Harry (Billy Crystal) first gets to know Sally (Meg Ryan), Harry is spitting seeds out of an open window.

Blooper:
An exterior shot shows that Harry’s window is closed.

Movie:
There’s Something About Mary
(1998)

Scene:
Ted Stroehmann (Ben Stiller) gets “stuck” in his zipper.

Blooper:
While trying to get free of the zipper, Ted somehow manages to alternate between wearing his tuxedo jacket and not wearing it, from close-ups to wide shots.

Good news:
Chrematophobia
, the fear of money, is curable. Send your dough to the BRI!

LAND OF THE GIANTS

Back in the early 1960s, little Uncle John saw a giant statue of Paul Bunyan at Freedomland USA, an amusement park outside New York City. Freedomland closed in 1964, but the Paul Bunyan statue is still around—standing behind a gas station in nearby Elmsford, New York. And it turns out there are a lot more Paul Bunyans around the country…if you know where to find them
.

W
HO’S THAT MAN?
If you’ve taken a lot of car trips you’ve seen them—18-to 25-foot figures of dark-haired, square-jawed men, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and work pants. Their arms are extended at the elbow, with the right hand facing up and the left hand facing down, often holding something, like a muffler or a roll of carpet.

What you might not know is that there are more than 150 of these gigantic fiberglass figures dotting America’s highways, advertising everything from tires to burger joints to amusement parks. Almost all of them were made by one man.

BIRTH OF THE BIG BOYS

It all started in 1962, when the Paul Bunyan Cafe on Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona, wanted a statue of their namesake to stand by the highway and attract hungry motorists. Prewitt Fiberglass in Venice, California, was happy to supply a figure of the giant lumberjack and created a molded Paul Bunyan character wearing a green cap, a dark beard, a red shirt, and jeans, and holding an axe.

That was it as far as Prewitt Fiberglass was concerned—one customer, one Paul Bunyan. But then owner Bob Prewitt decided to sell his business to a fiberglass boat builder named Steve Dashew. Dashew renamed the company International Fiberglass and, wanting to make a success of his new venture, started looking for business opportunities.

The leftover Paul Bunyan mold caught his eye. It was such an odd asset, he thought it might have value. Dashew began calling retail businesses around the country and asking them if they could use a giant advertising figure. A few said they could. When a story about one of Dashew’s customers appeared in a retail trade magazine, stating that sales had doubled after the Paul Bunyan went up, business in the giant fiberglass figures began to boom.

Q: What is a
doniker
? A: That’s circus slang for “toilet.”

PAUL BUNYAN’S FRIENDS

Dashew started to aggressively market the big statues across the country, and sold them by the score. At first they were all Paul Bunyans, but Dashew soon discovered he could modify the basic mold slightly to create other figures.

• He turned them into cowboys, Indians, and astronauts. All of the figures had the same arm configuration as the first Paul Bunyan, so they were almost always holding something, like a plate or some tires.

• International Fiberglass made other figures, too—such as giant chickens, dinosaurs, and tigers—selling each for $1,800 to $2,800.

• They made 300 “Big Friends” for Texaco, figures of smiling Texaco service attendants in green uniforms with green caps.

• They built Yogi Bear figures for Yogi Bear’s Honey Fried Chicken restaurants in North and South Carolina.

• To advertise Uniroyal Tires, they made a series of hulking women who looked a lot like Jackie Kennedy, holding a tire in one of her upraised hands. These women were issued with a dress, which could be removed to reveal a bikini.

But the figures made from the original Paul Bunyan mold proved to be the most popular, not to mention the most cost-effective for Dashew, who used the same mold over and over again. By the mid-1960s, the figures had made their way into hundreds of towns across the United States and were great attention-getters for retail stores and restaurants of all kinds.

BYE-BYE, BUNYAN

But by the 1970s, the big figures that had seemed so impressive years earlier were getting dingy, weather-beaten, and silly looking to the next generation of consumers. As sales of the statues slowed, Dashew concentrated his energies on other business ventures. In 1976 he sold the business and the Paul Bunyan mold was destroyed.

Today, most of the fiberglass colossi are also gone, having been destroyed, removed, or beaten down by the elements. But they haven’t all disappeared. In fact, almost every state in the Union has at least one. With businesses changing hands, the figures have been modified over the years:

Go to bed! Experts say if you go without sleep for 10 days straight, you’ll die.

• One Bunyan in Malibu, California, used to hold an immense hamburger. When a Mexican food joint bought out the burger place, he was given a sombrero and a serape, and his hamburger was replaced with a taco.

• A Bunyan at Lynch’s Super Station in Havre de Grace, Maryland, was dressed in desert fatigues in 1991 to show support for the Gulf War.

• One former Uniroyal Gal stands in front of Martha’s Cafe in Blackfoot, Idaho, holding a sandwich platter.

• Another Uniroyal Gal, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, has been dressed in a pair of Daisy Duke shorts, given a beach ball to hold, fitted with a queen-size stainless-steel belly button ring, and placed in front of the Men’s Night Out “private club.”

BIG MEN IN THE MEDIA

If you can’t get to see one of the giant statues in person, you can look for them in movies and on TV:

• A Paul Bunyan was featured in the 1969 movie
Easy Rider
.

• A modified Bunyan is pictured in the opening credits of the TV show
The Sopranos
. The figure, which holds a giant roll of carpet to advertise Wilson’s Carpet in Jersey City, New Jersey, is now a stop on the New Jersey Sopranos bus tour.

• Bunyans have also made appearances in the TV show
The A-Team
, in the 2000 John Travolta flick
Battlefield Earth
, and in commercials for Saturn cars and Kleenex Tissues.

*        *        *

PATRIOTIC PAUL

In the small town of Cheshire, Connecticut, a Paul Bunyan statue ignited controversy because zoning laws declared him too tall for any purpose other than holding a flag. The statue now functions as a flagpole.

In Greek mythology, Nike is the goddess of victory.

A PASSING FANCY

Creativity—why should it be wasted on the living? Now, thanks to some imaginative “grief counselors” (see
page 209
), our dearly departed have quite a few options as to where to spend eternity
.

O
UT OF THIS WORLD
The remains of more than 100 people have been shot into space by Celestis of Houston, Texas. They pack a small portion of cremated remains (or “cremains”) into a lipstick-sized aluminum container, load it into a NASA spacecraft, and blast it into an Earth or moon orbit. Timothy Leary and
Star Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry both chose this after-death option. Cost: $995 to $12,500.

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

LifeGem of Chicago came up with a brilliant idea: They compress portions of cremated remains into manufactured diamonds. It sounds like a hoax but it’s for real: after all, diamonds are carbon—the same stuff humans are made of—and it’s been possible to manufacture diamonds from carbon since the 1970s. So far they’ve made the blue-tinted diamonds (which get their hue from the boron present in human remains) for 50 clients, whose loved ones usually have the diamonds set into jewelry. Cost: $4,000 and up.

PUSHING UP DAISIES

San Francisco’s Creative Cremains mixes cremated ashes and flower seeds into the paper they use to make their handmade death-announcement cards. The cards are intended for grieving friends or relatives, who can cut them into pieces and plant them to create a flowering garden memorial. Cost: $300 and up.

SPEND ETERNITY WITH YOUR GOLF CLUB

A dizzying variety of companies will pack a portion of human ashes into keepsake items, from fishing rods to pendants to musical instruments. The objects can also be engraved with details of the deceased’s life. Cost: $150 and up.

The Statue of Liberty’s waist size is 35…feet.

GOING OUT WITH A BANG

Celebrate Life of Lakeside, California, will pack the cremated remains of your loved one into fireworks and then explode them on a beach or off a boat at sunset. Fireworks shows can be coordinated to music (“When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” “Wind Beneath My Wings,” etc.) and can even be rendered in red, white, and blue. Cost: $500 to $3,750.

GOOD G-REEF

Since late 1999, Georgia’s Eternal Reefs Inc. has mixed the ashes of more than 200 ocean lovers with eco-friendly concrete to create artificial “reef balls.” Once lowered into the ocean, the balls provide refuge for fish and other sea life. Eternal Reefs attempts to place the balls near areas of damaged coral to give plants a new home to cling to. Cost: $1,495 to $4,950.

DIG THIS!

The nutrients a decaying body gives off are typically wasted when enclosed in a traditional wood or metal coffin. The “green burial” movement encourages the deceased to go out in environmental style instead, buried in a biodegradable cardboard box or a simple shroud. This method is widely embraced in the United Kingdom, where some 150 burial grounds offer green burial. The United States has been slower to follow, but Memorial Ecosystems in South Carolina has buried 18 nonembalmed bodies in biodegradable caskets on its 33-acre site since 1998. Cost: $3,000 or less.