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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange, this is Pascual and this week we’re going to be talking about movie myths. That’s everything from the urban legends we all know from certain movies to maybe a little time traveling in silent films. But first, let’s see what Celestia is skeptical of this week.

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0:01:02
Celestia Ward: So I’m skeptical this week about something from many, many decades ago. You may remember in your childhood, the Berenstain or Berenstine Bears.

0:01:12
PR: Oh yeah, I’ve heard that debate a few times.

0:01:15
CW: Yes, there’s been a plethora of articles over the past couple of years about the Mandela effect and the Berenstain bears. And the idea behind the Mandela effect is there’s some people who believe it’s a parallel universe like I remember this happening. I remember Sinbad acting in Shazam for April 1st last year.

0:01:44
PR: He intentionally leaned into that joke.

0:01:47
CW: And then of course Nelson Mandela, people remember him dying in prison and that’s not actually what happened.

PR: Yeah.

CW: But we have large groups of people believing a thing. And with the Berenstain Bears, I had many of those books as a kid. And so the Mandela effect is basically when people believe, a group of people sometimes believe, that they have lived in a different timeline or reality than most other people because they’ve experienced this. It’s one of those, you know, I saw it with my own eyes. I remember it. My memory is perfect. And it was the Berenstain Bears.

0:02:24
BR: As opposed to Berenstain.

CW: Yeah, so they’re like I’m from a parallel universe or now of course there’s some people who believe yes I’m from a parallel universe because I remember these things differently yeah and then there’s you know the most most other people know about the Mandela effect and understand it as this is just a weird collective consciousness thing where a lot of people are misremembering something the same way. And the thing that makes me skeptical of the Mandela effect in the particular case of the Berenstine Bears, I’m sorry, Berenstain Bears, is that I’ve never seen, I’ve read like probably 10 or 12 articles on it, and I’ve never seen a single one of them treat it from the design aspect. Now, the Berenstain Bears, when a parent or a teacher reads the book to the kid, they often will read the title but maybe not necessarily the branding of the book. It’s not like you say, and today, Billy, we’re going to read the Sesame Street book of The Alphabet Adventure. I’ll just say today we’re going to read The Alphabet Adventure. So the kid probably has not heard the Berenstain Bears out loud a whole lot.

0:03:41
BR: Okay, so I have a question here. So was there, and I don’t know the answer, I’m not prompting you, was there a TV special or series in which there was an announcer that said the title or was it just only in book form?

0:03:54
CW: I don’t know, but the fact that I have a clear memory of being read the books and reading the books myself and I have no clear memory of seeing it on TV, leads me to indicate that most people probably know them only as books.

0:04:07
PR: There was a Berenstain Bears show, I think it started in the late 80s, and actually the theme song, he sings it, and it’s in kind of a twangy country kind of…

BR: So it’s a bit ambiguous anyway.

PR: And so, and if you listen to it, I mean, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s just, and that’s the thing about Berenstain, Berenstein. Most people, if they’re not making any emphasis on those vowels, probably you will probably hear Berenstain and in your brain will turn it into Berenstein because you’re used to hearing things ending in stein or stein and not so much stain.

0:04:43
CW: Like a forced rhyme.

0:04:45
PR: Yeah, exactly.

CW: Okay. Well, um, that’s a little bit actually that would have been past my time if it was in the late 80s I was already yeah other things besides cartoons.

PR: I had a brother that was still young enough when it came.

CW: Yeah, I was trying to get into rock concerts and stuff but looking at the books the thing that I’ve noticed is Nobody that I’ve nobody none of the authors of these articles. I’ve read have touched on the fact that from a design standpoint, it’s set up for kids to make that mistake. All the titles of the Berenstain Bears books are in a regular typeset font, Arabic letters, not cursive, which is the first thing children of that age group learn. They learn the alphabet in Arabic letters. You don’t get cursive until much later, and these days they aren’t even teaching cursive in third grade, but it used to be, when you get to third grade, that’s the hard grade because you have to learn cursive and you have to have to learn your timetables. So kids well under the third grade level are reading the Berenstain Bears. And the only part of the book covers that are in cursive are the Berenstain Bears. And if you look at the way an E and an A looks in cursive, they’re very, there’s to a young child’s eye, they’re very similar. And it’s very easy to just read it as Berenstine because it’s in cursive. And that to me kind of explains the whole Mandela effect for the Berenstain Bears anyway. I got no explanation for Sinbad. I’m going with parallel universes for that.

PR: Might explain his fame a little bit. I kid, he’s a nice guy.

CW: But yeah, I’m just, I was just wanting to bring that up that that’s always kind of bugged me that nobody brings up the fact that the Berenstain Bears masthead is in cursive and they’re presenting it to an age group that has no knowledge of cursive.

BR: Or would not distinguish between the two or is less likely to.

PR: Yeah, yeah. That is, I think that is one of the better theories I’ve heard in the sense of making sense of the misremembering or what prompted people to misremember it is that they couldn’t really make it out as well as an adult would and why would an adult make anything out of it.

0:07:10
CW: And they do mention Berenstain bears in typeset font in the interiors of the book. But when you’re remembering your childhood memories, you’re remembering visual things from the covers of the book, and chances are you had a bunch of books, you didn’t read all of them, you knew them by the covers. And as a little kid, you just could not discern the difference between the E and the A, and so your mind filled it in with an E.

PR: And that is such a small difference when you look at any, I mean, any, even in printed word, you know, an A and an E being different, being bookended by different, by the same letters. I mean, you put them on top of each other, it would be easy enough for you to just not even because when you read, I mean, we, we know that psychologically, uh, the more familiar words get, the more you just see the, like the first and last letters of them and you just process what’s in between.

0:08:02
BR: At some point, I’m reading it. It’s like a symbol. That’s how branding is intended to work. That’s exactly right. When you see Coca-Cola, you’re recognizing the script, you’re recognizing the… The big swoopy thingies. You don’t need to like, read, Coca-Cola. It’s like, Coca-Cola. It’s a quick thing.

0:08:25
CW: Yeah, but the process now, I’ve had to teach some kids to read in fairly recent memory. So you guys probably forget the stage where you’re sounding words out.

0:08:53
Yeah, yeah.

0:08:54
CW: You just say it’s the Berenstain Bears.

0:08:55
PR: Yeah, and especially with just the dying popularity of cursive in an academic sense. I mean, it’s almost no wonder it happened, you know, in this era where now you have kids who are becoming adults who didn’t, weren’t even taught cursive and they also, I mean, and the Berenstain Bears never, I mean, their popularity as children books haven’t waned. I mean, they still sell them. And so these kids grew up with them and I think they’re the generation kind of reinforcing it because I used to go on Reddit on, there’s a subreddit called What Is This Thing? And people would put like, they’d find objects and be like, what is this?And then they’d group, they almost always figure it out, but more and more I was noticing in the last few years people will post just a document in cursive And, I’m just like like it’s crazy to me. I mean I It’s like I can I read it like it’s plain English, and I’m just like yeah, that’s like mind boggling. I mean, I don’t think I necessarily like I don’t have a problem with it I mean I have not written in cursive since first grade probably or second grade. I mean I just don’t write in cursive and you know and it’s never been a problem for me so I understand why you probably wouldn’t but you know it’s probably important to know how to read it because there’s a lot of history that’s in cursive. I mean it’s hard for people who can read cursive to read some of the cursive from like back in you know 1700s and those real angled you know so.

0:10:24
BR: The S’s and the F’s and whatever this is.

0:10:26
CW: Well, yeah, I’ve got friends who teach high school, not like grade school, we’re talking high school. And they’re like, yeah, if I want a kid to take a note to the coach or the next room or something, and I don’t want the kid to read what the note says, I just write it in cursive.

0:10:41
PR: That’s amazing.

0:10:42
CW: It’s like a code. And so yeah.

0:10:46
BR: The code talkers for the 21st century.

0:10:49
CW: So yeah, we’ll probably have a whole new resurgence of the Berenstain-Bears-Mandela effect, where the parents won’t understand what the cursive means.

0:10:57
PR: Right, yeah.

0:10:58
CW: They’ll just fade into like, oh yeah, I remember, back in the 2000-aughts, people thought that this was actually Berenstain, but it’s clearly Berenstain. So who knows? And then we’ll flip back to that parallel universe and it’ll all be good.

0:11:14
PR: Yeah.

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0:11:15
PR: So this week we’re going to dig into some interesting mysteries around movies and the appearance of things like ghosts and dead bodies and time travelers. So it’s fascinating especially because there’s a bit of a history with this. This isn’t like a new phenomenon just because of the internet.

0:11:51
CW: Yeah, it’s a relatively modern phenomenon since the birth of movies Sure. Yeah, it’s like legends and curses and ghosts, oh my!

PR: So what are some examples? You just kind of mentioned Wizard of Oz.

CW: Indirectly.

PR: Yeah, I recall that they said a munchkin hanged himself on camera.

CW: Yes, and you could see it in a certain scene!

PR: And there was also I was at three men and a baby There was a ghost out on the balcony.

CW: That was a really big one. Do you remember that one?

PR: I remember that hitting the news. I mean, yeah, that was Especially back in the 80s when you couldn’t just like go on YouTube and look up the scene. You know you had to depend on like a media outlet to get the get the copy of the scene

0:12:45
CW: Yeah, I have a friend who had the VHS tape.

0:12:49
PR: Sure, yeah. And I think this even was discovered while it was still in its theatrical run, if I’m not mistaken.

0:12:57
CW: Well, the whole concept of these, it’s fascinating to me because it’s like a digital treasure hunt. Oh, I’ve got this secret. Now, there’s a whole bunch of skeptical angles on here. There’s conspiracy theory, hidden knowledge. This is a clue to the Illuminati. It’s a clue to this thing that the studio’s trying to cover up.

0:13:19
PR: Right.

CW: And you, oh, I’m part of this in-crowd that knows about this. And then you bring your friend over and you watch the movie and you pause it and you don’t get it on the right spot, so you back it up and you pause it again. You’re like, there, there it is, there it is. And it’s exciting like you’ve discovered something that you just heard a rumor about and you’re confirming it with this. And then it also brings in pareidolia yeah and there’s a lot of and I’m sure everybody can remember some weird thing they heard about a movie because there’s so many of them and then there’s the situation where you have people who have died on movie set everybody remembers Brandon Lee son of Bruce Lee getting shot because a gun was mishandled and ended up with a real bullet in it and then oh that means and there’s a curse it’s connected to Bruce Lee and there’s you know it’s because you know he co-opted the martial arts for Hollywood and yeah and people ascribe all these reasons to it and I’m remembering I remembering I used to go out and do movie night with some old cartoonist friends of mine fellow that was an older guy he was a mentor of mine and he also collected 16 millimeter movies and he had some weird film collector friends and one of them would bring over a 16 millimeter movie or shorts he tended to truck in shorts because they were cheaper to buy. I saw all the really like 1940s Batman shorts they were terrible oh they were so terrible but along with the movie he’d have a giant book that he’d put together he’d compiled himself because he was really into this and he’d open it up and as we were watching this short from the 1940s he would tell us how every actor on screen had died. Like oh this guy died two years later in a bar fight and oh oh that lady she lived to the age of 75 and then she died of cancer and that just reinforced to me at an early age that everybody who acts in the movies eventually dies.

0:15:14
PR: Wow, that’s a stunning fact.

0:15:16
CW: I know, can you believe it? Celebrities as much as we’d like them to be immortal, they actually die sometimes. And it’s not due to a curse, it’s due to them being human.

0:15:26
PR: Yeah, unless you’re inhuman like Betty White. By the time this airs, mark my words, she’ll still be around.

0:15:36
BR: Just like Abe Vigoda. Oh!

0:15:37
CW: Or Bob Denver hasn’t he died?

PR: yeah, he keeps dying like every few years. It’s always tragic

0:15:43
BR: Yeah, it’s always tragic.

PR: Someone’s always really upset about it on Facebook Well, I think you know part of it is you know like so as we’re saying that there’s lots of different angles into it like Celestia was saying. Curses the stories of the Exorcist curse or the you know people being injured and just something bad happening.

0:16:04
CW: You’re filming on Indian burial grounds.

0:16:07
BR: Right, right, right. And then you have the inherent fascination and tension between real life and cinema life. And so you have cases where that sort of blends together, as you said, when there’s death on sets, right? With the Twilight Zone films, actor Vic, someone died, Victor Mature, I think someone died on the set of Twilight Zone. And any time you have an action film, particularly a stunt, I mean stunt people die on occasion. It’s despite best efforts.

PR: Statistically pretty much a guarantee to happen at some point on a long enough timeline.

BR: Yeah, and they do inherently dangerous work.

0:16:50
CW: And people die and they get diseases or they’re in car accidents and die. Oh, I forget, which was the movie that was supposed to be the most cursed movie ever? Was it Rebel Without a Cause? Because half the actors died pretty quickly after that. But you got to think about it in terms of statistics. If you’re an actor, if you’re a successful actor, that means you act for most of your life. You’re acting for decades. Eventually you’re going to die. And the odds are it’ll be right after, or right after you have filmed something, or during the time you’re filming something, or right before, right after you’ve agreed to film something.

0:17:27
BR: Any of those can be used as a curse.

0:17:30
CW: Yeah, in fact I was reading something about, there’s a whole bunch of supposedly haunted movie scripts that various actors have read for and all the actors who read for this part died. And one of, I forget the name of it, Autuck or something, it was about some overweight, crotchety Eskimo guy.

0:17:51
BR: Oh yeah, I’ve seen this.

0:17:52
CW: And the fact that they auditioned or they were hoping to get all these overweight comedians who they just happened to be like John Belushi and Sam Kinison and Chris Farley and John Candy. And I don’t know about all of them, but plenty of them indulged in things like cocaine. And when you’re 350 pounds and you’re indulging in cocaine, that shortens your lifespan. So it’s not so much that the script was cursed, it was the typecasting.

0:18:20
BR: The demographics of the actors.

0:18:21
CW: Yeah, the demographics of the actors definitely had a bit of a curse on it, but it was a health curse, not a supernatural one.

0:18:28
BR: You also have the angle of the veneer between fiction and reality being thin through things such as subliminal messages. There’s a scene in The Exorcist where you see the face of a demon. I think it’s Pazuzu or something. There’s one or two frames where Friedkin, I think, put in a skull or something. It just happens real quick. Is it subliminal? Kind of? Does it mean the message of Satan went to your soul? No.

0:19:00
CW: We could do a whole episode on subliminal messages.

0:19:03
PR: Sure.

0:19:04
CW: Whether or not that works.

0:19:05
BR: Well no, but that sort of, that cachet is intriguing to people. Like, ooh, there’s a subliminal scene in there. And what?

0:19:15
CW: Well, it’s almost, again, it brings in aspects of a treasure hunt. You’re like, oh, well, I heard that they put the scene of a demon in here. So you rent the movie, and that’s back when you didn’t have a whole lot to do, so you brought your friends over for eight hours. You sat there trying to hit the pause button in just the right spot.

0:19:30
PR: Right, and then it’s all like out of tracking, and then you have to rewind and do it.

0:19:34
BR: Fast time to Ridgemont High.

0:19:36
PR: It was a fun time.

0:19:37
BR: And also, with a lot of them, there’s parallels to ghost hunting and ghost photography because, you know, typically what happens with photograph evidence of ghosts and also video evidence is, and we’ve talked about this on the show before, where there will be lots and lots of footage, lots and lots of photos, and someone will take the time to comb through them looking for anything weird.

0:19:59
CW: Anomaly hunting.

0:20:00
BR: Anomaly hunting, yes, anomaly hunting. And that’s what a lot of this stuff is like. Oh, well, if you see this one frame, you know, and you see the munchkin who’s suicide, you look at this one frame of three and a minute baby, there’s… So it’s this… It’s straight out of ghost hunting, this sort of anomaly hunting and combing through these sorts of things. And oftentimes, of course, one question that will come up is, well, why is it only discovered after the availability of VCRs and DVDs to freeze the frame. How is it that no one on the set notices at the time?

0:20:34
CW: Yeah, it’s evidence of the fact that continuity editors are not perfect.

0:20:41
PR: Well, especially back then when you physically had to cut, you had to splice the film by hand and physically tape it together. Editing, and Celestia knows this, editing is a laborious process even on a small scale. Being able to do that with physical media, you’re looking through a magnifying glass at a backlit slide, you’re not looking at it on a big screen. You’re going to miss little details in the background. That’s why a lot of movies from pre-digital age or pre-tape age, I guess you’d say, had a lot of little missed moments in the background, and it’s because people just could not possibly have caught all that stuff.

0:21:25
CW: I’m really curious to hear your take on this, Pascual, because you’ve got a background in working in Hollywood for movies and TV and productions. Probably not in the day you never actually had to cut celluloid, I’m assuming.

0:21:37
PR: No, no, thankfully. I did it once in a, I took a film class that was actually just for fun. I’ve mentioned in the past that I was not set out to try to be a filmmaker for a living. I just sort of fell into it. But I did take a film class once upon a time that we did film on reel-to-reel cameras, old ones, specifically because the teacher wanted to teach us filmmaking on a format that you can’t just roll back on and you just have to commit everything. And to make a one minute video, it took me about 10 days of editing. So.

0:22:17
BR: Oh, wow.

0:22:18
CW: That’s worse than stop motion.

0:22:19
PR: Yeah, it was very labor intensive. And because it was a one semester class so I barely knew what I was doing so it was it was intense and you know all the students did it in the classroom and it was definitely something I wouldn’t wish on anyone these days I mean editing is a much more streamlined process but there comes a point in in even digital editing where you’re going to you know I mean I edit a lot of I still edit a lot of video and I get to a point where, you know, even in like a little five minute promo or something, I’ve done like 10 revisions of it, 12 cuts per minute and it’s like, I’m just so burnt out on it that I’m like.

BR: I don’t even care, whatever.

0:23:07
PR: There’s stuff that like, you know, it’s like I still do my best and I still think that the final product always looks good, but I’m not gonna catch everything.

0:23:15
CW: Well, yeah, and that’s, I mean, you apply that to book editing too. When I first became a book editor, the woman whose job I was inheriting because she was retiring, I said, well, what advice would you give me? She said, when I first took this job 40 years ago, my goal was to produce a perfect book and I’ve never done it in 40 years. There’s just no way. Something will get by you. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. No movie would ever be released. Or actually, the other phrase I’ve heard from movie making people is, no movie is ever released, they always just manage to escape.

0:23:49
PR: Yeah, that is true.

0:23:51
BR: Gets away.

0:23:52
PR: Absolutely true. It’s usually because of a deadline. No, I agree with that. Even further than the editing, the process of filmmaking and shooting, a good director of photography always has a very good visual plan and is pretty good at catching details. A great DP, I mean, there’s a bunch of different people that are involved with how a scene turns out. And the two people that I think, well, the three people that really you count on to get everything to look right are the director of photography, first and foremost, the script supervisor actually, there’s always someone sitting off-camera with the script making sure that everything plays out exactly how it’s written or at least they don’t, you know, they check for continuity, make sure that like the bottles aren’t out of place behind them or something, and then of course the director. And so those three people, you know, they all have their eyes on things, but the thing is is that you still see continuity errors in movies all the time. I mean, there’s always little slips.

0:24:55
CW: Yeah, there’s whole websites devoted to that.

0:24:57
PR: Yeah, and it’s because like, well, in this one minute, all three of those people were focused on just the actors because they wanted to make sure that it was, or this was the 30th take, and it was perfect, except that someone moved something, and the director was like, I guess we’re just going to live with that. So the fact that these things get into film is just very understandable. That’s really where I am with it.

0:25:21
BR: Well, you looked into the Three Men and the Baby story, right?

PR: I did. Give us a rundown on that.

0:25:26
PR: So in Three Men and the Baby, it was a movie from, I guess, probably the mid-80s. It was Ted Danson was the lead in it. That’s not even a name I think people recognize anymore.

0:25:38
CW: Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and the other guy.

0:25:41
PR: Steve Guttenberg.

0:25:42
CW: Steve Guttenberg, yeah.

0:25:43
PR: Those are all names that I’m fairly confident that half our listeners are not going to even remember. I personally remember them very well because my mother was in her 30s when Tom Selleck became famous.

0:25:54
CW: Oh, yeah. Actually, Magnum P.I. was like the first show I remember my mother really enjoying.

0:25:59
PR: Yeah. I was saying my mom was…

0:26:02
CW: Moms love them some Magnum P.I.

0:26:04
PR: They love those hairy chests and mustaches.

0:26:06
BR: Mine was the Rockford Files.

CW: Oh, the Rockford Files.

0:26:10
My mom was a huge James Garner fan, so I grew up hearing…

0:26:14
CW: And for all you listeners who are millennials and under, Ted Danson, he was in Three Men and a Baby, and he’s the guy on The Good Place, except this is before he had white hair.

0:26:28
PR: Yes, yeah, yeah. So anyway, there was a, he played a character named Jack Holden, and there’s a scene in the film where he is in his apartment, and he’s with his mother in the scene, and they go walking through the apartment, the shot walks through the apartment, and in the background, you see a pretty distinct figure. It’s a person looking through the curtains and they’re standing in the room in front of the window but between the curtains in the window.

0:27:04
CW: An ominous figure.

0:27:05
PR: Yes.

0:27:06
CW: Through the gauzy curtains.

0:27:08
PR: Yes. And it looks like a small person. And so when the…

0:27:12
CW: Was it like a small person, like a midget, like had hung himself?

0:27:16
PR: No, that… No, no, not like Wizard of Oz, but this one, it looked like a little boy. And so that was the thing. Everyone’s like, there’s a ghost of a little boy in the background, in Three Men and a Baby. And Ted Danson’s character… So this scene, it’s very obvious that something is in the window there, and it looks very human, it’s not very mistakeable.

0:27:40
BR: It’s not like a coat rack or something.

0:27:42
PR: Yeah, it’s not like vague. It’s pretty clearly a shirt with some different colored clothes. And it does look like maybe a child or something. So what ended up happening was a big, I mean this made the news. This is something people talked about for a while and the funny thing is and this is something where people’s inattention to detail actually came into play because the movie itself reveals exactly what it was and that’s a that’s something that did not get talked about at all like nobody analyzed the film enough at the time to pick this up. The film very clearly shows you what it is. And it’s Ted Danson’s character is an actor. And there’s a storyline that has to do with a dog food commercial. And this is a scene that was, I believe that storyline was cut from the film. So the storyline that explains.

CW: It’s in the deleted scenes, I bet.

0:28:43
PR: Yeah. So now, but this object was in the movie. So the scenes that involved the dog food commercial didn’t happen, but there was, it involved a cardboard standee of Ted Danson wearing a top hat and a coat.

0:29:00
CW: There was a little like, like, like cardboard cutouts. Yep. Almost a life-size version of like Captain Kirk and Mrs. Mockingbird.

PR: Yeah, like, yep, like, or one of those things that like tourist traps in Hollywood impose with, you know, and that’s exactly what it was, and he’s wearing a top hat and a coat, and he’s very fancy looking. That standee is shown very clearly in another scene where he goes to look out the window, much later in the movie. He goes to look out the window, and the standee is very clearly up against the wall next to the window.

BR: In the same place?

0:29:32
PR: In the same place. The part that baffles me is that, because I hadn’t seen this movie at the time, because I was a kid. I had no interest in seeing that movie. But the standee is just leaning up against the wall and the part that baffles me is that the appearance of this standee never raised a flag, I mean forget the ghost, like why is there a cardboard cutout of Ted Danson leaning against the wall when he walks to look out the window? Nobody asked that question. Well, it was that very cardboard cutout was behind the curtain and because it was kind of leaning away from the camera it looked a little shorter and because of the distance and the angle.

CW: The continuity editor was doing their job.

0:30:10
PR: Yeah.

0:30:11
CW: Okay, whenever we pan by this window there has to be a cardboard cutout standing.

0:30:14
BR: Yes. Why is it there? Who knows?

0:30:17
PR: I’m certain, yeah, there had to have been at least an editor or something who saw that scene and this is the part that also kind of baffles me. I mean, I may, I will admit, like, I don’t remember everything the media did surrounding this when it happened. It may have been that the story blew up and then they never followed up on it. I think that’s probably likely.

0:30:38
CW: Well, I read into it too, and there was some interesting follow-up in terms of folklore happening real time about what this was. And first though, I want to say, I looked at the image, of course, to bone up for this episode and human heads are different when you’re young compared to when you’re older. Yeah, the size of the head really really impresses upon you how old somebody is.

PR: Yeah, you really grow into your head grow into your head.

CW: Yes That’s why babies are like half head And they’re so cute if you like 10 years old and your head is like still pretty big compared to your body. And he’s got that top hat on and I’m like, oh that is such a great illusion of youth because the top hat is dark. It looks like, again, he looks like he’s got like a big bowl cut or something and it just looks like you see the darkness of the hat and the hair and you see the skin on the face and it really looks like, even though it’s Ted Danson in a top hat, it’s like that’s a child’s head. Because look at how big it is compared to the rest of the body. Now, we put a top hat on either one of you and I blur my eyes, it’s going to look like you have a giant big head with like dark hair on top of you. And that’s what’s going on here. The gauzy curtains essentially is like blurring your eyes. And I just found that neat as like the standee is just the right height to be a kid. And if the standee did not have the top hat, I bet you people would not have been like, it’s the ghost of a little boy.

0:32:02
PR: Yeah.

0:32:02
CW: It would have looked like there’s this weird, like, miniature, like, jockey figure there.

0:32:05
PR: Yeah.

0:32:06
CW: But yeah, so that really explained to me why people thought this was a ghost child.

0:32:11
BR: So you guys did more research into this particular legend than I did. So was there a death of a child actor associated with this? Or where did the ghost come in?

0:32:21
CW: Well, that’s Ben’s ears. I knew his ears were going to perk up on real-time folklore here. Many rumors started once people started noticing this figure and people started saying that it was the ghost of a boy who had died in the house where the movie was filmed. As part of their evidence, because you’ve got to have evidence for something like this, in the scene with Ted Danson and the woman playing his mother there’s another window and there’s a weird shape Formed by some darkness and it kind of resembles what a shotgun would look like if it was standing on its barrel.

PR: Right right.

BR: Does it does it really?

CW: So therefore it was a little boy who had shot himself in the head with a shotgun To commit suicide when he was 9 years old proof Yeah, that’s I mean ergo boom That’s what happened kid shot himself with a shotgun because you can sort of see a shape that looks kind of like a shotgun Yeah, and it looks like a little boy. Huh?

0:33:20
BR: I’ve seen I’ve seen stories go on much less than that.

0:33:23
CW: Now now the rumors started getting traction in August of 1990 which is right around Right around right around when the sequel three men and a little lady. And according to Tom Selleck, who actually talked about it last year on Jimmy Fallon, he’s like, I don’t know if Disney was behind that. He even mentioned it. He said, I don’t know if Disney was behind it. Maybe they were, because VHS sales took off.

0:33:54
CW: They went through the roof.

0:33:56
P: That was a day and age where you couldn’t just, like I said, go to YouTube. You couldn’t go to YouTube. You had to physically bring the videotape into your home, at the very least rent it. And people who were probably more invested in that kind of urban legend would have bought it.

0:34:12
CW: Yeah. Well, the urban legend kept spreading because people were starting to, little stories started to pop up saying that the reason why people found out about the ghost is because the mother had unknowingly rented the movie, and when she saw her dead child in it, she went insane and had to be committed to a mental hospital. Other people said that she was trying desperately to argue with the studio to remove the scene, to recall the whole movie, and she was making the rounds on the talk shows, telling everybody about her tale of woe.

0:34:46
PR: Oh, please tell me she made it to Geraldo.

0:34:49
CW: Well, there was never such a woman.

0:34:51
BR: What?

CW:  Believe it or not.

0:34:54
PR: If there was, she would have been on Geraldo during the Satanic Mania.

0:34:58
CW: Geraldo would have bought it hook, line, and sinker.

0:34:59
PR: Oh, yeah.

0:35:00
CW: It would have been like, let’s open the vault.

0:35:02
CW: Yes, trust my mustache.

0:35:04
PR: Look at this stache.

0:35:06
CW: With a stache like he owes it.

0:35:07
PR: I call it his crust-stache. Tom Selleck rocked the mustache so much better.

0:35:11
CW: Not Geraldo.

0:35:12
PR: Not Geraldo.

0:35:14
CW: But even, speaking of Tom Selleck and his mustache, when he was on Jimmy Fallon, he pointed out, he’s like, yeah, people said it was a ghost of a boy that had died in the house. But here’s the thing, there was never a house. That was a soundstage. Yeah. In Toronto. We just, we built that.

0:35:32
PR: I will tell you a little known secret, apparently, in Hollywood, is that if there’s an interior you see for more than a couple minutes in any movie, I guarantee you it’s on a soundstage because nobody wants to do location shooting that long. It is so hard to do. So, I mean, before you jump on the train with urban legends and locations, make sure they’re at a location.

0:35:55
CW: Hyman’s categorical principle.

(MUSIC)

0:35:57
Hey Squares and hey strangers, a big thank you to our current patrons, especially to our sponsor level patrons, Amy Fruchour-Kelley and Angie Matt Key. Thank you! enjoy our content, stop by patreon.com backslash squaring the strange and drop us a dollar or two. We have more planned goodies to roll out for supporters, so keep an eye out for announcements in the coming weeks ahead. And if you can only open your heart to us right now and not your wallet, then do take a moment and leave us a kind review on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast hub. And click like on our Facebook page to get some updates and visual content. Until next week, stay strange everybody.

0:36:55
BR: Okay, so let me talk a little bit about a case that I investigated and this is whether Elvis Presley, The King, appeared in Home Alone.

0:37:08
CW: What?

0:37:09
PR: I’m going to say no just right now. I think that his death might have been a little before that movie.

0:37:17
BR: I think you’re right.

0:37:18
CW: Sorry, as the person who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada here, I gotta say, could be.

0:37:23
BR: Could be. Well, you see Elvis all the time, right?

0:37:25
CW: Could be. I saw him the other day in the grocery store.

0:37:28
PR: You know, I imagine.

0:37:29
CW: I have seen Elvis playing bingo. I have seen him at the grocery store. I saw him at the grocery store last week, I kid you not. And I’ve been behind him in traffic like five times.

0:37:39
PR: Man gets around, that’s for sure.

0:37:41
BR: Now I have actually, I’ve never seen Home Alone. Oh wow. I’ve never seen the film.

0:37:47
CW: No need to brag.

0:37:48
BR: No, well, nor sequels. I just, just not, I remember seeing commercials and like, nope, not even remotely curious. I don’t care how cute the kid is.

CW: You’re more of a Werner Herzog guy.

PR: His version of Home Alone did not end as well.

BR: Mine was very existential and angsty. But anyway, apparently a lot of people did see the film and several of them noticed, including a guy that contacted me. He said, look, the weirdest thing, I live in Hollywood, I work there, and can you help me figure out what’s going on? So apparently, when I was asked to look into it, I didn’t know much about it. I researched urban legends, of course, and conspiracy theories, and this is one of them, and also film stuff. So I was a little surprised that it hadn’t crossed my desk before, but apparently this is a big thing. And so the story is that in one particular scene, about halfway through the film, there’s a scene where Catherine O’Hara’s character as at a airport. She’s arguing with somebody at a desk and about two extras behind her there’s a man wearing a turtleneck and a sports coat and apparently some people including the guy that contacted me believe this is Elvis Presley.

0:39:06
CW: Yeah, I’m looking at a photo right now over Ben’s shoulder here and there’s a passing resemblance I guess but I mean he’s also got a full beard. Yeah, kind of obscures the facial features there.

0:39:17
PR: Yeah, that’s you if there’s one thing I can tell you about the difference between a person With a beard and that same person without a beard that difference can be vast.

0:39:28
CW: People don’t recognize me when I let mine grow out.

BR: Even at the carnival?

CW:  Well, yeah, listeners, you can probably find this still image pretty easily by Googling Elvis Presley in Home Alone.

0:39:45
BR: So, here’s the thing. So, yeah, so check it out, Elvis Presley in Home Alone. So there’s, so he sent me the thing and my first question is, number one, why do you think it’s Elvis? And, well, it looks like him. It kind of doesn’t, but okay. But then, but it was, so I was trying to sort of tease out why exactly he thought this was the case now now understand that this was presented to me as a conspiracy theory It wasn’t just that Elvis appeared in Home Alone it was that it was knowledge that Elvis was in Home Alone and The the director knew it and everyone else knew it and they they covered it up. So there is this interesting blend of urban legend conspiracy theory, all that other stuff.

0:40:26
CW: And wishful thinking.

0:40:27
BR: And lots of wishful thinking. And so I did something which I’ve rarely done in my life. I asked him for more information about his conspiracy theory.

0:40:38
CW: Tell me more, young man.

0:40:39
PR: I’m sure that worked out really well for you.

0:40:42
BR: Usually, that’s the last thing I want to do is, oh, tell me more. Because then you’re gonna get you know a 40 page screed. Lots of capital letters lots of handwriting lots of symbols

0:40:54
CW: Well was he at least nice about it?

0:40:57
BR: He was nice about it. Okay, and he sent me this stuff, and I was very I was very clear about tell me Precisely within a paragraph or two don’t don’t send me your your you know your 40 page screeds

0:41:06
Why exactly do you think is the case and and he never really answered my question sort of danced around like well.

CW: Was he doing that thing where he was shifting the burden of proof and saying that you should prove that it’s not he was leaning that way and I always have none of it

0:41:20
BR: I know where the burden of proof lies sir so so I said okay well and again I didn’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole just because partly because there’s different angles into this conspiracy so the movie was directed by Chris Columbus, not the Explorer, the director. And apparently Columbus had previously done a movie with a theme that involved Elvis. I think it was called Heartbreak Hotel or something. I never saw it, but it was, the director had some somewhat tangential connection to Elvis.

CW: Now we could start a whole new conspiracy theory here and say whatever actor played Elvis in that Elvis movie was really Elvis. But it was covered up.

BR: Well, yes, there was this whole thing and so anyways, there was this connection. So you know, again, it gave interesting insight into the conspiracy mindset because he’s like, well, look at that. The director had this connection and of course, he’s seeing stuff everywhere. So I tried to pin him down and say, okay, why do you, first of all, how is Elvis Presley who died much before long before 1990?

CW: Allegedly.

BR: Allegedly. So we think. Could be on the set and no one noticed I mean if you have you have actors you have background extras you have casting if there’s lots of people and If you’re gonna say that a person appears on the set who’s not widely known. That’s one thing. Yeah, this is Elvis Presley.

0:42:50
CW: Elvis is not exactly obscure.

0:42:52
BR: This is one of the best known people in history.

0:42:56
CW: Even with a beard, well see, it’s kind of hard to discern how much that looks like Elvis from that still photo that’s kind of blurry because he’s like two people behind the main focus of the camera, but if Elvis Presley was in this room right now with a beard and I was 10 feet from him I’d be like, it’s Elvis!

0:43:14
PR: Yeah.

BR: With a beard, 10 feet away from me.

0:43:16
CW: With a beard, yeah.

0:43:17
PR: Or at the very least, you’d be like, wow, you look a lot like Elvis with a beard. I mean, at the very least, if it were that uncanny, because, I mean, we all know, that’s a face just about anyone will recognize.

BR: And forget the face, the voice, the mannerisms. How he acts.

PR: Yeah, he walks in with that southern swagger and you know come on.

BR:  Yeah I mean I mean so even if he says nothing we all have mannerisms I mean just yeah there’s some of these would give it away.

0:43:43
CW: He wouldn’t be able to disguise how he walks and talks and acts because I don’t know if you’ve seen the movies Elvis was in but he was not a good actor yeah no so he would not be able to like take on a different he’s no Gary Oldman.

0:43:57
BR: Yeah send your hate letters to Celestia. So I was asking him again trying not to go too far down the rabbit hole with him, I said, okay, why do you think, how did Elvis end up being in Home Alone? He’s like, well, Elvis wanted people to know he was alive. I said, okay,

PR: There’s a couple easier ways to do that.

BR: So his brilliant scheme for Elvis wanting certain people to know he’s alive is to get himself cast as an extra in this one scene in an airport. This is a big plan. Yeah

0:44:30
CW: A Press release wouldn’t have worked?

0:44:33
BR: And then so then he is so when I started to pin him down that he’s like well There’s lots of goalposts moving in my right right this guy anyway, so the the next thing that really nailed it for him Was that the actor had not been identified. This to him was like the smoking gun, golden bullet, golden ticket, whatever it is. So he’s like, okay, who’s the actor? I’m like, I don’t know. And what? Right? So it was interesting to him, the fact that this actor had not been identified, as far as we know, was, well, there you go. And I was like, whoa, hold on here. Like, there’s a lot, you know… Pascual. So, you have some experience on sets. Yes. So, tell us just a little bit about casting extras and background actors.

0:45:26
CW: I.E. herding cattle.

0:45:28
PR: Yeah. So, first off, that is not done or vetted by anyone who would be familiar with who anyone is. What it is, is…

0:45:41
BR: It’s usually some drunk guy, he’s hungover, he’s like, okay, whatever.

0:45:45
PR: The casting department, so there’s kind of tiers of what they do, and there’s getting featured actors and lead actors, and they’re involved with the director and producers and all that, and that’s all done as a process of vetting individual people. Casting for extras is not a casting process. What it is is there’s a number of agencies. There’s one called Central Casting, probably the most famous one. You walk in there like it’s a temp agency basically. You give them your information, a little bit of information about ethnic, the way you look specifically, your skin tone, height, weight, like facial hair, no facial hair, tattoos, and then they group you, you know, they put you into categories and they have thousands of these people in their database. And then those, someone’s like, okay, we’ve got an airport scene and we need people that look like they’d be at an airport, which that’s a very generic thing. So they probably just get just about anyone who’s available. They’ll just say, okay, there’s an open call for this. And there’s also, Central Casting themselves might put out an open call to the public, too, to say, hey, we need extras to fill up O’Hare Airport.

0:46:58
CW: And you wouldn’t, I mean, for a scene in an airport, you wouldn’t need people to be in wardrobe. A friend of mine did a little bit of extra work in L.A., and it was his mission to get on a Batman movie. And he got cast as an extra that required wardrobe. So they did take his name because they had to give him a jumpsuit. He was a prisoner in one scene and then he was a roughneck in another scene. So they gave him like a flannel jacket to be all roughnecky and then they gave him the orange jumpsuit to be all prisoner-like. But that guy in the airport is just wearing like a blazer and a turtleneck. They’re just pretty average. I’m imagining that he owns that outfit. There’s no reason to put his name anywhere.

0:47:41
PR: No, but the thing I will say about this, and this is something that it’s, I think it’s kind of funny because I’ve dealt with working with extras. I mean, I’ve herded them myself when I was a PA. And I can tell you this, there are basically two forms of extras. I mean, there’s really a few different categories. So there’s featured extras, which would mean that they’d like walk up to a counter and place an order. If you speak, that creates a whole different tier of pay, and there’s union involved with that, even if you’re not union. I mean, even if you’re not union, a union film, you still have to fill out the paperwork. is face front towards the camera is absolutely going to have filled out a SAG document, Screen Actors Guild document, or after it just depends on the union that governs it. So this guy’s name is somewhere. His name is in the accounting. This is 1990. Yeah, but it still exists. The accounting absolutely is somewhere in the vaults of, I don’t know, Paramount or whoever produced it. That information absolutely 100% will be somewhere because this is post-union. The union will have this information and I highly doubt they would have lost it. They were electronic databases at this point.

0:49:06
CW: So, Pascual’s on the side of this guy and me. We think it’s Elvis.

0:49:09
PR: Yeah, so it’s probably Elvis, but the funny thing is if you’re gonna make that claim, there is a way to figure out who that is. And you go to Central Casting, you go to the studios, you go to the union. You can probably go to the union, this was filmed in Chicago, you can probably go to the local chapter of the union in Chicago of SAG or after, whoever, I think it would have been SAG back then, and you say, I need to find out who the extras were in this scene of Home Alone. They have this broken down. Information is there. It’s not that mysterious. Someone most likely will accommodate you on that because these are a matter of union record and most likely, unless there’s some reason it’s sealed, I mean there’s just no reason they wouldn’t have that information.

0:49:58
CW: Right. So you’re spelling it out. Anybody who actually believes that that’s Elvis, that’s all they need to do. They need to go to Chicago and do the legwork. And-

0:50:05
PR: Just do the legwork. Email the SAG local, you know, whatever in Chicago and ask if they handle, if they have the paperwork for the extras from Home Alone. And most likely someone’s got it. Someone’s got that information. The studio probably has it. You can make an inquiry. And these people aren’t impossible to reach. It’s just that no one thinks to do that.

0:50:27
CW: So you did all that, right Ben?

0:50:28
BR: No, no, well again it was the case of where, you know, again, burden of proof.

PR: Right, that’s the thing, like why do I have to go to Chicago?

0:50:38
BR: Not my job. Not my job.

0:50:40
PR: You could be, you could do great in the union with a line like that.

0:50:44
BR: Not my job, man. I’ll be in the back with the sandwiches. But no, I mean, the guy that contacted me, his big thing was, you know, was we don’t know his name. First of all, we don’t know that we don’t know his name.

PR: Right.

BR: Have you looked? Number two, even if we don’t know his name, so what?

CW: Yeah, that doesn’t prove anything.

BR: Yeah, I mean, you know, but and I said there’s any number of reasons why his name might not be known. First of all, I hadn’t heard about this particular conspiracy, so it’s… the guy that contacted me was acting like everyone in the world knows this is a huge mystery.

0:51:17
I was like, no, even if the actor might be retired, he could be dead, he could not know that anyone even thinks that he’s Elvis, I mean, there’s all sorts of different reasons. And the fact that this one particular background actor, the fact that you don’t know his name means nothing, and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s Elvis.

PR: There are so many factors in this that just it’s like even if it literally looked like Elvis in his heyday it still doesn’t mean it’s Elvis.

CW: I’ve seen a lot of guys who look like Elvis.

PR: Yeah I was gonna say.

0:51:52
CW: In his heyday. I mean there are. If I were to assume every one of them was actually Elvis.

PR: Yeah and I mean the competition must be fierce in Vegas there must be guys that are dead ringers.

0:52:02
CW: Oh yeah, I rode the elevator with a Michael Jackson impersonator who had clearly had surgery to look a lot more like Michael Jackson. People go to great lengths.

0:52:11
BR: If you’ve seen the documentary Bubba Hotep, you know what exactly happened to him.

0:52:18
PR: Now he’s making…

0:52:19
CW: He’s in a resting home somewhere.

0:52:21
PR: Or fighting zombies.

0:52:22
CW: Well, I love that ascribing of motive. Why would Elvis do this? Well, he wanted people to know he was alive. Because that’s what I do right after I fake my death. I leave telltale evidence that I’m actually alive.

0:52:36
BR: That’s the only way to do it.

0:52:39
CW: I had regrets. I had second thoughts about it. But yeah, oh wow.

0:52:44
BR: You go to all this trouble to make sure the world thinks you’re dead, and then you make sure that you’re within camera range in home alone.

CW: And then you, you’ve just faked your death Elvis what are you gonna do now I’m going to central casting yeah to wait in lines for four hours to be an extra in an airport

0:52:59
PR: I may very well do an inquiry I know the right people to ask like but my prediction is if I get a name and a face people will be like well that’s his alias yeah if I find the guy and go to his house and interview him people will be like that’s his that’s his fake…

0:53:38
BR: Well, Pascual, you were digging into a sort of a weird, sort of anachronistic story. What was that about?

0:53:46
PR: So there, and this one, it has everything. I love movies, and I love time travel.

0:53:56
CW: We did a whole episode on that.

0:53:57
PR: Yeah, we did. And this is not about movies about time travel, it’s about time travelers being found in silent films.

0:54:07
CW: Oh, is this like Spartacus where there’s a guy wearing sunglasses?

0:54:09
PR: Yeah, same, same, yeah, that sort of thing. I mean, so the broad topic, there are a number of times people have seen someone doing something, it’s always in the background where they’re, they’re doing something that, that looks familiar, they’re wearing something that looks familiar to modern age, and so they become very convinced that this person could not have been doing this had they not been a time traveler.

0:54:38
BR: Right. So you see someone hunched over something, or they’re listening to a radio or a cell phone, or we’re imposing our modern sensibilities and actions on what people…

0:54:48
CW: Oh yeah, there’s tons of scenes in the old Star Trek next generation where they’re using iPads. Yeah

0:54:54
PR: Yeah, I mean they had flip phones Yeah, flip phones in the original series. You’re right a side note the the original flip phone the Motorola Star TAC was Intentionally designed to look like something from Star Trek the name Star TAC Was intentionally made to sound like Star Trek. I love what phone was based on Star Trek.

CW: I knew that!

0:55:18
PR: But this one I want to talk about a specific one one that I found a little more interesting than than most It was Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 silent film the circus in the background in the DVD extras, so this wasn’t, I don’t believe this was actually in the film itself.

CW: I read up on it too, it actually was not a scene from the movie, it was footage of people going into the premiere in the Chinese theater, in the the Grauman’s Chinese theater.

PR: Yes.

CW: This was a, you know, patrons, movie patrons going in to see the movie.

PR: Yeah, yeah, and in the background you see newsreel type stuff.

CW: Yeah, because a time traveler would never be dumb enough to actually just be an extra. Sign up and be an extra like Elvis.

PR: There is a common thread here actually.

0:56:15
CW: The time traveler would want to keep it on the DL, so they would just go to the premiere.

0:56:19
PR: Right, they’re like let’s go to a high-profile public event that’s being filmed but not under the guise of being an extra. But there is a person walking by in the background in this clip that they appear to be talking into a cell phone. If you were to be able to take the context out of that scene, it’s not 1928, and we’re just seeing a scene of people walking by, I would probably assume that was a person on a cell phone.

0:56:52
CW: I watched it, it’s very convincing

0:56:54
PR: It looks like a person on a cell phone

0:56:56
CW: Get off your damn phone lady

0:56:58
PR: The only reason I know it’s fake is because she’s not holding it in front of her mouth like a pizza like everyone does these days but that’s a different story

0:57:04
BR: I have a quick question I’m no historian we know this but how many cell phone towers were there in 1928?

0:57:14
PR: There were…

0:57:16
BR: Do we have a number?

PR: I’m going to ballpark it at probably zero. I think that’s around… Roughly zero. Give or take zero.

0:57:30
BR: We’ll just say there were zero cell phone towers or networks.

0:57:34
PR: Or maybe less. Zero or fewer?

0:57:37
CW: You’re anticipating one of the CNN articles I read about it had a very clever little snippy line at the end that said, we’re just curious who operates her mobile network. Like the first part of it was like, oh yeah, very mysterious. How do we get coverage like that? That’s what we want.

0:57:56
PR: What is that, Verizon? No, it’s RKO. I don’t know if that joke’s gonna hit, but yeah, so and it is definitely You know visually it looks it looks you know I mean, I definitely would think it was a woman on a cell phone if it didn’t know for sure it was from the 20s But because I know for sure it’s from the 20s it certainly suggests a person on the phone, but I Know it’s from real back your confirmation bias and just say that that might not be that like let’s you know

0:58:28
PR: I mean, I it’s a point where you pull out Occam’s razor and not just to splice film you use it to Cut through just the general idea that is is it possible that it’s a cell phone and how possible is it? Not very.

0:58:44
CW: Well, we got we got time travel on one hand and literally almost any other crazy explanation you can come up with. Like maybe this woman has a small black box containing her husband’s ashes and she regularly holds it to her face and talks to it because she misses him. That’s more reasonable than time travel.

0:59:04
BR: Maybe she mutters to herself.

0:59:07
CW: While holding a box to her head.

0:59:08
PR: She does have a box to her head.

BR: But maybe she thinks it’s a seashell.

0:59:15
PR: Yep.

0:59:16
CW: Well, as it happens, Ben, we have a very reasonable explanation.

0:59:20
PR: We do.

0:59:21
BR: Do we?

PR: Absolutely do.

BR: See, this is where my not doing any research comes really handy here. Well, this is the great thing about the internet, let me tell you, Ben. It takes me the five minutes before we do the show to learn everything I need to know. No, but so this woman, now this is, we’re talking about the most plausible situation that I would consider this solved. So the woman walking by with something pressed to the side of her head to her ear is not a sight that would have necessarily been so rare to see back then.

CW: Do tell.

PR: Yes, so there were a number of companies at the time who had been working with microphone and amplifier setups to aid people in hearing.

1:00:09
CW: Ah, and hearing aid.

1:00:11
BR: That sounds eminently plausible.

1:00:13
CW: And that sounds fun. I think that technology might catch on.

1:00:16
PR: Yes. So, and there was a company, Siemens, they at the time had already produced and released to the public a hearing aid that was a Was called an audio phone and it was a phone and it had a it was a box shape that very much can suggest a cell phone It looks you know kind of like it’s about the dimensions of a smartphone.

1:00:46
CW: They call it pocket sized and it was smaller than 8 inches by 4 inches and could have easily been held in one hand and they filed the patent for it in 1924, which is four years before this time traveler was spotted with it.

1:01:01
PR: Yes, and it is, if you look at a picture of it, I mean it looks like what she’s holding, you know, and granted we’re looking at old film and you know we can’t read the text on the box, but that existed and was not just a magical device that people, you know, which is why nobody was baffled by why she was talking into a box, because she had an audio phone up to her ear and was able to hear. Like, I mean, it was hearing aids didn’t fit in your ear back then, so that’s pretty much the most plausible thing and the most accepted answer to the question of was she talking on a cell phone?

CW: Well, I mean, to add some more evidence piled on top of that, I read an article called Debunking the Charlie Chaplin Time Travel Video from The Atlantic and the author, Nicholas Jackson, points out that the woman was also dressed, if you look, she’s dressed in a really fancy sort of hat and a long fur coat. She was obviously one of the higher class individuals who would have the expendable money, not only to attend a first night premiere of a movie, Charlie Chaplin’s movie, but to purchase the latest technology to help her hear.

BR: Yeah, she was not a street person who would be trying to rub two nickels together.

1:02:34
PR: One of the most common forms of hearing loss, or the most common issues with hearing loss is being able to hear in a crowded place, which is to say that my grandfather had to wear hearing aids, but if he was at home with us in the house, he didn’t have to wear them. If we went to a restaurant or something, he couldn’t hear anyone without it. And so it would be highly likely in a public situation you’d see someone with a device like that using it to hear.

1:03:07
BR: And as well, to be fair, many of the silent films were accompanied by live music.

1:03:12
CW: Yeah, usually live piano at least. Yeah.

1:03:15
PR: Yeah, and I mean, like you said, a premiere, even to this day, is not attended by people who can’t afford these things.

CW: That’s why you’re dressed to the nines when you go out to something like that. Now, did you watch the original YouTube clip that broke the story of this time traveler?

1:03:31
PR: I don’t know if I watched the original clip. I am aware that there was a guy who put a clip out and…

1:03:36
CW: Yeah, I’m a little suspicious. I only… I watched a bit of it and the fellow who apparently discovered this time traveler was a guy named George Clark. He lives in Belfast and he posted the clip in 2010. He’s like, I think I’m the only one who’s ever noticed this and I just can’t think of any other explanation. But he begins his clip by… it’s almost like an infomercial. My name is George Clark and I work for such-and-such films. He’s a filmmaker.

1:04:03
PR: Oh.

1:04:04
CW: He’s like, you may remember me from this movie, The Bone, what it was like, The Bone Battle.

1:04:09
PR: It’s like a Troy McClure.

1:04:13
CW: He’s like, and we’ve got this other movie coming out and many more you’re going to hear from, you know, as the years go on. And I’m like, this could have been a very, very clever bit of viral marketing.

1:04:24
PR: Yeah.

1:04:25
CW: This thing got millions of hits and before people saw the time traveler they got to hear this guy promoting his movies.

PR: Yeah, yeah. That’s…

CW: There’s my movie conspiracy theory.

1:04:37
PR: At the very least there’s reason to be doubtful.

BR: Well my only question would be was she texting during the film? It’s probably not a cell phone.

PR: That’s another thing. That’s just a smart phone. I didn’t even know you could talk into those. So I did a little bit of Googling while we were sitting here doing the episode and I tried to figure out who the extras casting was for Home Alone.

1:05:09
BR: You’ve already done far more research than any of the conspiracy people that I’ve already been talking to.

PR: I’m gonna hand you guys the tool you need, okay? Now, I couldn’t find a clear video of the credits, the end credits of the film, because someone just filmed it with a cell phone camera and…

CW: Well, you had five whole minutes. You mean you didn’t solve the whole thing?

1:05:30
PR: About like a minute and a half into the credits, you’ll see it’s after all the art department stuff there will be casting that’s where the casting credits are there is a line that says extras casting okay extras casting these are the people who determined who that guy was and in sitting here talking about all this stuff I went ahead and did a little bit of googling to figure out who was in charge of casting for Home Alone so that we can maybe hand some of you folks a little bit of a clue as to how to uncover this mystery. So about a minute into the end credits of Home Alone there is a line that says extras casting and in that casting credit it says Holzer Roche so H-O-L-Z-E-R space R-O-C-H-E. It looks like that’s two different last names. So Holzer Roche Casting is the casting company that took care of the extras. They did the extras for Home Alone. So Holzer Roche are also known, it looks like right now, known as Holzer Roche and Ridge. They are the the ones who did it and they will most likely have the information about who was in that scene at that time.

CW:  So you’re just handing them like the Holy Grail on a silver platter?

PR: You can go Contact them find their information contact them and they will they will most I mean unless some freak occurrence Led them to lose the records, they should have that information on file somewhere. And it looks like they’ve continued to be in operation.

1:07:18
CW: So any conspiracy theorists who wish to learn for a fact what alias Elvis used when he was an extra in this movie, you can get your Pulitzer, collect your $200, and pass go.

1:07:35
PR: You’ll be famous, I’m pretty sure. So it’s worth it, but look it up Holzer Roche casting Holzer Roche and Ridge casting Look up those names and you will find the people that will probably have that information. You could also try to reach out to Fox Studios ask for their archives there’s usually someone who’s in charge of of all the paperwork that was done for all the films because if you’re working with unions you keep that paperwork because you do not want to have a problem there. So there you go. That’s all you need to do to figure it out.

1:08:07
CW: We’re gonna have to get a new segment jingle called conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory homework.

1:08:12
PR: Right. Your homework this week is to follow up on all that stuff I just gave you. You can figure this out. I assure you, you can. I’m surprised the journalist hasn’t tried, but maybe it’s just not big enough. I don’t know, but we may have a follow-up on this. I might get a wild hair and just decide to give it a shot myself.

1:08:32
BR: Go for it.

1:08:33
PR: As if you don’t have enough to do.

1:08:34
PR: Right.

1:08:35
BR: Maybe Kenny Biddle will jump on it and get it done before the episode’s even out.

1:08:38
CW: Damn that Biddle!

1:08:41
PR: You’re not gonna beat us to the punch on this one, Kenny. But yeah, so just check it out. Use these tools I just gave you, which are the tools of paying attention to who is in charge of the people on the camera because someone’s accountable for that. It’s not a mystery.

1:08:58
CW: Likewise, the props master probably could have told you who the ghost boy in the window was.

1:09:04
PR: Exactly, exactly.

1:09:05
CW: Well, this was fun, and we could always do a follow-up episode because there are plenty of other movie mysteries. We didn’t even get into the stuff involving mysterious deaths of actors or linked deaths of people connected to actors and curses and all the other stuff.

BR: We should do a show on that.

1:09:22
PR: We should.

1:09:24
CW: But we hope you’ve enjoyed this little romp through a few interesting little treasure hunts in your favorite movies from old.

(MUSIC)

1:09:36
We would like to thank our sponsor-level patrons, Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaringthestrange. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here in Strange Studios, and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a five-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again strangers.

1:10:13
So that about does it for this week. Next week we’re gonna be talking to a friend of ours who I am proud to say is a listener. Hopefully you are hearing this right now. Our friend Eric Myers. He is a film writer and director who recently did a film called Butterfly Kisses which is a really great horror film and I’m excited to say that Ben and I are involved in that film. I don’t want to give it away we may talk about it on the episode so you’ll definitely want to tune in but Eric Meyers, director of Butterfly Kisses, will be talking to us next week and we are really excited but and we are really excited, but until then, we’ll see ya. and of course, our listeners and patrons.

1:10:54
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, of Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo