Re the Willie Nelson song: "Time of the Preacher" was a recurring theme (both external and diagetic) in the dark, paranoiac BBC miniseries EDGE OF DARKNESS…which hit the air a few years before the comic hit the stands. If it didn't actually light the spark in Ennis ' brain for the comic, it's certainly not out of…

The Siege of Firebase Gloria comes fairly close.

Never published in the US, but Amazon UK will be happy to sell you Peel 's semi-auto biography MARGRAVE OF THE MARSHES. ("Semi" as he died halfway through writing it and it was finished by his wife.) Fascinating reading.

Laing was also something of a proponent of LSD and similar psychedelics. (Coincidentally, I just watched a very odd and banned-from-broadcast piece from ITV's 1960s arts program TEMPO, featuring an interview with Laing intercut with the same mundane scene shot from multiple angles and with crude attempts at…

Well, considering that the last iteration of Tom Swift was largely written by an SF author and artist who'd also spent some years as a semi-pro pornographer…yeah.

According to Prowse, Lucas apparently believed he did it, and deliberately…which was why when Vader's mask finally came off, the face under it was Sebastian Shaw's instead of Dave Prowse's.

What the hell did I just read?

The cleanliness obsession was probably true: my mother's parents both worked for a huge dry-cleaner/laundry in Hollywood, and Grandma remembered Joan Crawford as a regular - including bringing in the dresses from Christina's dolls once every two weeks.

There was a little more intended subtext to the name planned for the following story "War of the Gods", with the intended reveal that Cain and the Pegasus had indeed survived the battle…only to be seduced to their own destruction by Count Iblis (AKA Satan.) The denouement was supposed to be Cain's daughter (who'd…

A past friend (Jewish but ecumenical) had spotted a lot of the Mormon influences and references in the original show - and found himself sitting next to Glen Larson on a flight to L.A. and having about a 2-hour conversation about it. The original has far more Mormon overtones than the reboot, and it was very…

I think Nicholson and his "whoop-whoop-whoop" made more sense than this.

Probably around the same time that The Love Boat had Sonny Bono as an Alice Cooper/Ozzy Osbourne amalgam with punk overtones.

Even Dragnet was generally tolerant (though still frequently condescending) toward hippies - at least the real sort as opposed to wannabes or those who preyed on them.

It's a shame the '90s animated Superman never adapted the bizarre "Goody Rickels" storyline with Rickles playing himself and his doppelganger.

Major Dad absolutely should have gotten a day. (And there were plenty of good episodes to pick from.)

Taco was one of the original three flavors, and when Frito-Lay brought it back it was in the replica package. (They've also played around with retro packaging on Fritos and Ruffles since then.)

The all-time pinnacle was a long series of magazine stories before and after WWII featuring a hard-drinking Scots engineer, "Mr. Glencannon." The stories were so popular that his fictional tipple "Duggan's Dew O' Kirkintilloch" was finally bottled and marketed for real…and it's still around. (God knows why - it's…

Interestingly, though, neither the BBC nor ITV ever went to the length of covering up or faking "naturally-occurring" things like beer taps, cigarette packs, drinks cans etc.

One could also plead fidelity to the source material: the Bond novels are loaded with brand names (Fleming wasn't getting paid, he just felt it added cachet. Funnily, the author he borrowed the technique from, Rex Stout, changed to using fictional brand names at the first hint that he might be influencing sales.)

The most jaw-dropping had to be the Marlboro placement all over Superman: The Movie, up to and including Lois Lane lighting up.