Did the widow of the creator of Charlie Chan sue Jack Benny over his use of the character on his show?

I want to share a secret with you, so don’t tell anybody, okay? I’m really a superhero.

When things in the world are tense, I slip into a phone booth, change into my costume, and become … Trivia Man!

“Faster than a speeding typist … more powerful than a split infinitive … able to leap tall arguments in a single bound!

“Look! There on the page! It’s a line … it’s a scan … it’s Trivia Man!

“Trivia Man … strange visitor (you said it, brother) from another reality, who came to Earth with powers and abilities barely noticeable amongst modern humans! Trivia Man! Who can change the course of a person’s expression, bend metaphors with his bare mind … and who, disguised as Jack Bagley, mild-mannered columnist, makes a living saying silly things to make people smile!”

Enjoy this week’s episode of Trivia Man!

Did you know …

… Soymilk does not have to be refrigerated until after it has been opened? Learning that, one would rightly question why, then, do grocery stores and supermarkets sell it out of the refrigerated section only? Well, it’s because the producers of the drink want it to seem more like cow’s milk, which has to be kept cold all the time (It’s all about the marketing, folks).

… The Christmas song “Do You Hear What I Hear?” is really about the Cuban Missile Crisis? The song was written in October of 1962 by Noël Regney (1922-2002) and his wife Gloria Shayne Baker (1923-2008). The pair wrote the song as a plea for peace when the world was teetering on the edge of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis (It must’ve worked, then).

… The people who founded the American republic didn’t have much of a sense of humor? For instance, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) – while one of the most highly educated of the Founding Fathers – was not allowed to write the Declaration of Independence. The other Founding Fathers were afraid he would put jokes into it (Oh, I don’t know, Ben’s jokes might have added some oomph to it).

… In early drafts of the movie Back to the Future, the character of Doc Brown had a chimpanzee, not a dog? The animal was changed after the head of Universal Pictures at the time, Sidney Sheinberg (1935-2019), said no movie with a chimpanzee had ever made money (He must’ve never seen Bedtime for Bonzo, then. That movie helped make a president).

… Rhinoceroses are related to horses? The rhino is descended from an Indian animal known as a Cambaytherium, which lived 54.5 million years ago. The horse is also descended from the Cambaytherium, making the horse and the rhino distant cousins (And thus does hope for a unicorn spring eternal!).

… It’s sometimes best to seek permission first? On November 1, 1959, an episode of The Jack Benny Program featured guest star Jack Webb (1920-1982), and he along with star Benny (1894-1974) performed a very funny spoof of Charlie Chan movies, with Benny as Chan and Webb as “Number One Son.” The skit was centered around a Chinese laundry rather than a crime story, and Webb performed his role as his classic Dragnet character Joe Friday during the sketch. After the show aired, however, Benny, the CBS network, and the show’s sponsor, Lever Brothers, were sued by Eleanor Biggers (1887-1976), the widow of Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933), the writer who created the Chinese detective. She sued for “unauthorized use of the character of Charlie Chan.” The case was settled out of court (I’ve always heard it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, but apparently it can also be more expensive).

… Total solar eclipses happen because of an astronomical coincidence? The Moon happens to be 400 times smaller than the Sun, but it is also 400 times closer to the Earth than the Sun is. That means that, from the surface of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size. When a solar eclipse takes place, the Moon moves directly in front of the Sun as viewed from Earth, and the Moon completely – but just – covers the Sun’s visible surface.

… A very lonely whale lives in the oceans? First detected in 1992, a whale song at a frequency of 52 Hz was recorded … but there was never an answer. No other whale uses that frequency to communicate, so it appears that this poor whale is destined to be alone its entire life (I’m hip, brother. I’m hip).

… Two of the keys on a telephone keypad were designed as emergency call buttons? When touch-tone telephones were being developed in the early 1960s, the idea was to have two buttons which would be emergency contacts – one to the local police, the other to the fire department. Technical hurdles remained to be crossed but those became moot by 1967, when the first 911 systems were being developed. The two pre-set buttons on the touch-tone phone were replaced with * and # instead.

… Studio executives can be cheap in ways that really come back to haunt them? For example, to avoid having to pay Star Wars creator George Lucas (born1944) an additional $500,000, executives of 20th Century Fox instead gave him all licensing and merchandising rights to the 1977 movie. The decision made Lucas a billionaire. (You have to love it when things like that happen.)

… A law in Kentucky makes it illegal for a woman to wear a bathing suit on a highway unless she is armed with a club or is escorted by at least two police officers? Additional trivia note: The law has a provision that says it “shall not apply to a female weighing less than 90 pounds or exceeding 200 pounds,” (Make of that what you will).

Now … you know!

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