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10 Movies That Famous People Don't Want You to See
Hey, remember The Star Wars Holiday Special , which George Lucas has basically begged you to never watch? It turns out there are a whole bunch of movies that the stars have been trying to hide from everyone, mainly because they're afraid someone will make fun of them. That's all right, though.
5 Reasons Pop Culture Is Run by Fan-Fiction
If you spend much time online, the words "fanfiction writer" probably don't fill you with gushing respect. For those lucky enough not to know, fanfics are amateur, nonauthorized stories relying on the plot or characters already created in movies, television shows, video games and just about everything else that you can imagine. In other words, it's pretty much the text-based equivalent of pirating someone else's music, remixing it badly and then shouting your own inferior lyrics over the top. Luckily, it's confined entirely to a small Internet subculture, and we can congratulate ourselves on having nothing to do with it ... Or maybe not.Cracked
There are a million self-help books out there reminding us that success is all about bouncing back from our failures. We're kind of sick of hearing it, to be honest. But what most people don't realize is how many successful businesses only happened because of a sudden disaster. These are the global empires that only struck gold because fate forced them to at gunpoint. Prohibition Invents the Official Soft Drink of Planet Earth The Company:
6 Global Corporations Started by Their Founder's Shitty Luck
Donald Duck Discovers a New Molecule 20 Years Before Science Carl Barks and the ducks did so much for the scientific world that Cornell University named an asteroid after him . This was, of course, after he was published in a scientific journal for his comic book that accidentally discovered a new molecule ... A 1944 Donald Duck comic had the titular Donald being struck on the head while helping his nephews with their science experiment. He then invents an explosive called "Duckmite."
5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck (Seriously)
With most every classic novel comes some outlandish interpretations. Some people have wild fringe theories about Harry Potter as an allegory for young gay love and Lord of the Rings being about WWII and the atom bomb. But some of these laughably wrong interpretations stick. In fact, you were taught some of them in school ... Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
6 Books Everyone (Including Your English Teacher) Got Wrong
One of the small comforts of watching a movie is knowing that, yeah, those guys might be idols up on the big screen, but off-camera they're probably just like the rest of us: 30 pounds overweight, living in an abandoned semi-truck cab and selling weed for denture money. But every now and then, we come across actors whose real lives are even more incredible than their fake ones. Like ... If there's one thing that Han Solo is really good at, besides stupid ear-piercing decisions, it's being America's favorite aging action hero. The assumption, of course, is that in real life, Harrison Ford is nothing like the smooth operator he plays in movies, especially after we get a gander at that screaming midlife crisis of an ear hole up there.
11 Celebrities Who Were Secretly Total Badasses
So, the headlines say somebody else has died due to video game addiction . Yes, it's Korea again. What the hell?
5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted
If you want to motivate people, you don't rely on logic and reasoning. No, what people need is a symbol. A slogan, a flag, the face of a hero to stick on a T-shirt. So what do you do if the real world doesn't provide you with something people can rally around?
8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite of What You Think
6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly
It's a running theme here at Cracked that a lot of what we think we know about history has been filtered through many centuries of utter bullshit. Our image of the past is largely made up of Hollywood inventions, propaganda and uneducated guesses. So you will probably be surprised to find that... The Pyramids Were Smooth, White and Shiny The Perception: We get so busy being amazed by the Pyramids, with their massive, meticulously layered sandy golden bricks, that we forget that what we're seeing are the broken-down remnants.
17 Images That Will Ruin Your Childhood
Nostalgia is a sucker's game. We imagine all the toys and TV shows from childhood as perfect and awesome purely because our immature brains hadn't developed the ability to joylessly pick things apart for their flaws. The songs we liked at age 10 weren't any better than the Justin Bieber stuff the 10-year-old girls love now.Everybody is a comedian these days, and the Internet has given us all an enormous stage. Maybe the best example is a supposedly comedy-free site like Amazon.com. The deal is, anybody can write a review, on any product, whether they have bought it or not. So it's just a matter of finding a baffling/ridiculous/useless product and watching the Internet's sarcasm run wild. For instance, just check out the reviews for ... The "Guardian Angel" Acupuncture Device
8 Stupid Amazon Products With Impressively Sarcastic Reviews
Since moving the Muskets! franchise to Hollywood, I've discovered the truth in that old adage: it's not what you know, it's who you know. For example, I know Javier who runs the avocado booth at the weekly farmer's market, and now I literally take baths in guacamole. It's only a matter of time before I leverage that relationship into a film deal (I mean aside from that guy from the fetish website who came and filmed me in a bathtub of guacamole for four hours).