Stuff You Should Know - Some Nutso Fan Theories

Episode Date: May 4, 2017

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On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I almost forgot who I was for a second.

There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Yeah. There's Jerry. Or is she really there? I don't know. I don't even know anymore. Because it just occurred to me, we're doing a show on TV show Fan Theories,

and we have our own little fan theory here that Jerry doesn't exist. Yeah, that's true. That's a fan theory. Which is sort of a common thread in a lot of these, is either like, oh, they were really dead, or, you know, or they didn't exist to begin with. Right.

And so we've heard from people for years that think that Jerry's made up. I love it. Yes. Because they're right. We're not saying. No. Jerry's totally real.

Or is she? Or is she? I'm looking at her right now. So I was going through the internet, looking for think pieces, essays, on why people come up with fan theories, or what about fan theories make them, you know, make shows better.

Couldn't find anything. No, I think the answer is obvious. I think that's why I couldn't find anything too. People just have time on their hands. That's not what I was going to say. Oh, what are you going to say? I was going to say that it takes something that's already pretty enjoyable and adds

entirely new dimensions and depth to it. It takes something familiar, and you can go back and re-watch it through different lens now. Yeah. And you have time on your hands. Right. It's definitely not something that super busy people do.

You know? No. And then I also was like, maybe I should just calm down. We don't have to explain everything. We can just have fun sharing fan theories. That's what we're going to do. It's like a summer break one. Yeah, this feels like one of those.

We're both drunk. Sure. Pretty drunk. Just kidding. Kids out there, we're just joking. Should we just get right into these? Yes. Some of these are going to be shorter.

Others are going to be a little longer. And we're just going to kind of jump around, right? Should we start with the granddaddy or end with the granddaddy? Well, is the granddaddy to you? Say it by the bell. No. You like that one, though? Yeah, and I thought maybe if I said it.

Yeah, I think we'll start with, say by the bell. I don't know why I thought if I said it really fast. Only I would know what you were saying. We'll start with, say by the bell. We'll finish with the one that I know you're talking about. OK, cool. That's very clickbaity, I know, but you won't believe the last one. One of the things that is really hard to do when it comes to fan theories.

We should say, I guess we should define a fan theory is basically it's where somebody who likes a show says, hey, you know this show that you think means this or is about all this? It's actually this is what's going on almost all the time. It's just somebody's idea. But the part of the backbone of a fan theory is that it has to hold up in just about every circumstance. Yeah, and I'll get one out of the way quickly is a bad example, because to me, a bad fan

theory is a murder she wrote. She was really a serial killer because, you know, you never found out what happened to her husband and all these people are dying around her. I like that one. Yeah, but it's just too easy. It's not like, to me, a good fan theory is one where you can say, and this happened and look at this. Right, right.

What about this? OK, so I know what you mean. And yes, a fan theory doesn't have to do there, else it's just some schmo saying something somewhere. Yeah. But murder she wrote has a couple of things to back that up. Besides the husband and the murder is what is. The husband, I think, is whatever.

But the point that I've seen here, there, number one is Jessica Fletcher is a murder author, a murder mystery authorist, and she murders follow her everywhere she goes, right? Think about the last time you stumbled upon a murder. Well, that's just called TV. OK, so that's one thing. Hold on. And then secondly, even when she travels, she stumbles upon new murders. But more to the point, in her little town of Cabot Cove, a population 3,500, a significant

number of the, say, 274 episodes of murder she wrote took place there. If even 200 of those murders happened in a town of 3,500, it would be the murder capital of the world, percentage-wise, per capita. So I see what you're saying by the fact that she's a writer, it's not like she's a detective. Like you can't say, boy, the A-team were always getting in these crazy adventures, like they were hired to each one. Yeah, they were seeking it out. She just happens to be sucked into it.

She just happens to be there, right? I've never seen that at a TV show, either, so that probably doesn't have to do with it. Never seen murders she wrote, because I was a 13-year-old boy, not a 65-year-old person. It's even better now. Oh, really? Yeah. You're rewatching it? Oh, yeah.

It's on Netflix, and I think Prime. Wow. Oh, yeah, man. It's good. Check it out. And I'm not saying, like, oh, murder she wrote's good, I'm a hipster. I've been watching Murder She Wrote for years, and years now, pal. Yeah.

You don't have a beard? No. But, but, hold on, I think I want to extend this for a second. You raised a very good point, and I feel like I defended Murder She Wrote with that same point, that a fan theory has to have meat on its bones. Yes. It can't be an off-handed thing. It can't prove what you just said.

Prove why Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer. Well, there's a couple of them. It's a little thin, granted, but there's something to back it up, which makes it a decent fan theory. Not the best, but a decent one. The other thing is, it's really difficult to pinpoint the origin of fan theories. Oh, yeah, like, who did this first? Yeah, who came up with this idea?

What, loser? Well, I've got one for you. So we were going to talk about the Save by the Bell fan theory. People are just, like, nervous with anticipation about that one now. As far back as I can tell, it looks like a person, a writer on the website, cracked, cracked the website, a writer named, man, I lost their name, Logan Trent, in 2012 wrote a post called, Save by the Bell, A Conspiracy Theory. Oh, so he originated this one?

As far as I can tell, he gives zero credit to anybody else, and the way that the post is written, it really comes across like he is laying out his argument himself. So it's possible, and if you had this idea prior to 2012, and you're not Logan Trent, let us know. But I'm bestowing Logan Trent with the origin of the Save by the Bell fan theory, which is one of the best. Yeah, and big shout out to Cracked, and Mental Floss, and our own article, and who else? It was...

MeTV had a good one. Paste Magazine had one. There's a lot of good fan theory articles out there. All right, so at long last, Save by the Bell, and I like this one. And I don't remember watching the show at all. But I know these characters and the gist, so I had to have watched it at some point. You didn't watch Save by the Bell? No, I wouldn't.

I wouldn't in my wheelhouse. I guess not. I was a little older teenage boy, slash college. Well, they had Save by the Bell of college years, just for you. But I do know these characters, so it had to have absorbed into me somehow. So here's the deal. Pre-Save by the Bell, this I did not know. There was a TV show, was it called Good Morning, Miss Bliss?

Yes, and it was unbearably bad. So you saw that, too? Yeah. So the idea of this show is, there's this boy named Zach, this is in Indiana. Not just Zach, Zach Morris. Yeah, the Zach. Played by Mark Paul Gossler. Right, yeah.

This was in Indiana, of course, not California. And he was a troublemaker, and there was a teacher named Miss Bliss, who was super smart, and always thwarted him. She was, what's the name of the lady who was in the original Parent Trap? Played the two twins, Hayley Mills? Yeah. It was her. Oh, okay.

Apparently, when you sign a contract with Disney as a child, they owe you for life. He has a couple of friends named Mikey and Nikki. They're always putting them in his place. He has a brother, his parents are divorced, and by all accounts, Zach Morris and Good Morning Miss Bliss is a bit of a schlub who's always sort of getting his comeuppance from other people. Yeah, kind of a loser. Yeah.

Basically, the opposite of Zach Morris, it's say by the bell. Did they ever say Zach attack? No, I think so. I think there's a t-shirt even that said that. So flash forward, and how many years later was this? A couple. So, Good Morning Miss Bliss goes off the air. I get the feeling it wasn't very popular, or they wouldn't have rebooted it as saved

by the bell. They would have just kept it going. Exactly. It's a save by the bell comes along, and now Zach is at Bayside in California. He's Mr. Everything. As this article points out, he's the most popular kid in school and excels in everything. Sports, music, casual, racism, whatever. Right.

That's Logan Trent's wording. He's the alpha in his circle of friends, Mikey and Nikki are gone. Yeah, they're just gone. No explanation. Right. And there's no explanation for any of this, like how he got to California. But it's the same character, right? It's the exact same character, but there are some huge, huge changes.

Like at his core, he is a different person. Actually, not necessarily at his core, but as far as how he's treated and viewed by his peers and everyone else. He's the differences night and day. He's not a dweeb anymore. He's not a loser. He's a total winner. He's Zacatech.

As Logan Trent points out, if he were to miss a quiz rather than fail, he would convince the teacher to hold a bake-off, and then he would win the bake-off by cheating. That was how he went through life. And also very notably, his parents were no longer divorced, they were married, and he didn't have a brother. He was his only child, and was beloved by all. Right? Yeah.

He had, I think Slater went from his rival to his sort of his pal, but his, you know, his second, yeah, his wingman. Right. Screech was around in both, but I think he was sort of screech in both, right? Yeah. Didn't change much. Right. Yeah, Screech has always been Screech.

What can you do with that? He'll stab you in a bar. All right. So what's the big reveal? What's the fan theory? The big fan theory is that, Saved by the Bell, is the daydream fantasy of Zach Morris, who's actually living back in Indiana at John F. Kennedy, Jr. High. And that the whole, it's great, man, and that the whole premise of this fan theory is revealed

through the theme song. Right. Right? The theme song, the theme song talks about, like, how harried Zach is. Yeah. Well, it's all first person, right? But you assume that it's talking about Zach, because the whole show is, it revolves around Zach.

He's the narrator. Yeah. And he's having, like, a lot of trouble, like, getting ready, and he gets out to the bus just in time to see it fly by, and the teacher's going to pop a test, and he knows he's in a mess, and he's dogged all his homework, and if you actually watch the show, nothing ever gets Zach. He's untouchable. Yeah.

So, in the theme song, it says, it's all right, because I'm saved by the Bell, right? Yes. Which this fan theory suggests that once he settles in, either settles in to class and starts daydreaming, or gets home at night and starts dreaming, he can go off to Bayside, where he's the biggest winner around. That is the Bell. Right. So, the fact that these lyrics, by the time I grab my books, and I give myself a look,

I'm at the corner just in time to see the bus fly by, and then eventually riding low in my chair, so she won't know I'm there, meaning the teacher. This all is Zach in Indiana. It describes a different person doesn't make any sense that these lyrics, if you had not known that that was a show that existed, and all you knew was saved by the Bell, these lyrics don't make any sense. Exactly. But they do, if it is all a fantasy in his imagination.

Sadly, it also makes sense if you think that the producers hired the composer before they were really aware of what the show was going to be like, and that's what the composer came up with lyrics-wise. Yeah. It's not nearly as fun. Well, the other thing I like about fan theories is that they are almost 100% not real. It's just fans having fun. Yeah.

I like the idea to imagine some subversive writer that's like, oh, well, here's what we'll do. Right, exactly. This is all an elaborate fantasy of this Zach guy. I've got one other thing that I think the cracked article points out, if not someone else came up with it later. They pointed out that Zach has the power to stop time and address the camera. He breaks the fourth wall fairly regularly, and he can just stop time and move around

within this frozen time, which also, I mean, that's a weird thing for somebody to be able to do if they're not in the middle of their own daydream. Yeah, or nightdream. Love it, man. That's a good one. And things like Mikey and Nikki disappeared. At one point, Kelly is in love with him, and then she just is gone with no explanation. Yeah, he could.

People kind of pop in and out sometimes with no explanation at all. I think Kelly dumped him, and then all of a sudden she's gone, and she was like one of the characters throughout the entire save by the bell. And then she's just gone once she dumps Zach. He's really bad at school, but he got a 1502 in the SAT. All this stuff is dream stuff. Right. Well, that's another point that Logan Trent makes, is that a 1502 is literally impossible.

You can't score a 1502 in the SAT. Yeah, it's 1500, right? Yeah. It's even more evidence that all this is made up by, apparently, a not-so-smart kid. Man. So that's saved by the bell, man. You want to take a break and then get back to it? Yeah, I think so.

I could do this all day. All right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when

the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Uh, all right, we'll go through a couple of quicker ones here.

The Fresh Prince is dead. Yeah. I can't really don't need to say anything else to you. Well, in the, uh, the TV's theme song where he talks about getting in a fight and that's the whole reason he's sent to Bel-Belaire. Yeah, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire, it's a TV show from 1990 to 1996 and the rap that Will Smith, the real life Will Smith actually plays a character named Will Smith and he talks about getting in a fight and getting sent off to Bel-Aire to get out, you know,

to get him away from the rough neighborhood in, uh, what, Philly? Right. West Philadelphia. The Ford and Rays. And, um, so the theory is that he was actually killed during this fight and, um, everything else is, you know, his, uh, journey in the afterlife. Yeah. The cab that picks him up to take him in Bel-Aire, the rare cab, uh, is supposedly God or some

sort of, um, ethereal figure that's taking him to the afterlife, which is Bel-Aire. Uh-huh. His parents are like basically non-existent, but they show up a couple of times. Uh, this is explained away by the fan theory as his parents visiting their son's grave. Right. I think it's pretty awesome. Yeah. And then, um, Boyce de Men apparently showed up at one point, but they were like a heavenly

choir. Oh. I don't remember that episode. Huh. So that, put all that together, Fresh Prince is dead. That's right. What do you want to do next? Should we do, do, uh, the, the two of them from Gilligan's Island?

Yeah. The drug one's super lame. Yeah. I thought so too. And this one theory that the, the, and this one's, you're right, it's just dumb, that, that Mr. Howell on Gilligan's Island paid Gilligan and the Skipper to take him out to see to do a drug deal, which is why he has a trunkload of cash, a trunk full of cash. Right.

Ginger's got a drug habit, Marianne's a federal agent. This just sounds like, you know, like, uh, someone smoked some weed and came up with like, like someone said, Hey, what's your first idea of what Gilligan's Island could have been other than what it was. And they went, Oh, a drug thing, man, I think you nailed it. But there's a better fan theory for Gilligan's Island agreed that Gilligan's Island is hell that this, like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air takes place in the afterlife, but not in heaven in hell, or at least in purgatory that the, the, the Mino shipwreck, um, caused

everyone on board to drown and that in hell, each one of the characters represents one of the seven deadly sins. Ginger's lust, Marianne is envy, professor's pride, Thurston Howell, of course, is greed. Uh, Mrs. Howell, I've seen a sloth and gluttony. Seem that too. I've also seen Skipper is either gluttony or wrath. Wrath makes a lot more sense. And then Gilligan is sloth or is Satan himself.

Yeah. And one of the giveaways for Gilligan being Satan, well, there's two of them. One is that he's always wearing a red shirt. Oh, well. So obviously Satan, Cause it's Satan wore a red rugby shirt. Right. Uh, and then, uh, he's always, although it seems like it's always, uh, accidental, he's

always thwarting their plans. Like every time they get something, something going to get off of the island, Gilligan is the one who somehow screws it up and they're stuck there again. So he's keeping them in hell. This one actually has legs. Yeah. Apparently Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of Gilligan's Island, uh, in a book confirmed that they did, or it was his idea that they did stand for the Seven Deadly Sins.

Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. So there you go. One of the rare fan theories that actually was true. I'm sure whoever, whoever thought of that was like, no. Yeah. I was right.

Well, that makes me wonder if somehow it got out or something. Maybe. Or he was retroactively just being like, yeah, yeah, that's what I meant. Sherwood Schwartz. Here's a quick, uh, spot from Star Trek one that I kind of liked. We'll do both of the Star Trek ones about that. Okay. Um, and, um, uh, on record is not having watched Star Trek.

Yeah. Me neither. But, uh, in Star Trek, six, the undiscovered country, the undiscovered country. I'm sorry. People are so mad at me right now. Trekkies. Yeah. Uh, and an ancestor of mine maintained that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever

remains however improbable must be the truth. And that was Spock and that movie. And the source of that was Sherlock Holmes himself from the sign of four from an 1890, uh, uh, book. And so the idea here is that Spock is related to Sherlock Holmes. It's a little weird. How about that? But I could see it.

I mean, they're both pretty rational. Yeah. Well, Sherlock Holmes, he loved his speed balls. I don't think Spock was ever into those. No, he was more involved. You know, Sherlock Holmes loves speed balls though, don't you? I did not. It doesn't surprise me.

It surprised me at first. Really? Yeah. So there's another, um, Star Trek one. I love this one. But Andy Griffith is the pre-apocalyptic world that leads into Star Trek and this one is pretty awesome. So it's based on a Star Trek episode, Chuck Meary, M-I-R-I, like Siri, but with an M.

Yeah. And, um, in this episode, the Star Trek crew beams down to Earth and it's very obvious it's Mayberry, but it's like a post-apocalyptic Mayberry. It's peopled entirely by kids and the reason why it's peopled entirely by kids is because some disease has broken out where, um, you die at the onset of puberty. Yeah. And it's, uh, well, it is Mayberry because it is Mayberry. It's literally the same back lot that they shot both shows at and they just outfitted

Mayberry to be post-apocalyptic right down to like Floyd's Barbershop. Yeah. But I think they just scratched out Floyd. They scratched out the F and it just said Lloyd. Oh, did it? I don't know. I think it said Floyd's. Did it really?

Yeah. Oh, it's that on the nose, huh? I think so. Oh, this one's great. This is a great fan theory. Does that seal it for you then? Well, there's another part too that, um, the kid who played Barney Fife's cousin, Virgil, he actually appears in this Star Trek episode.

What? Yeah. So it's full circle. Gene Roddenberry was like, I'm going to come up with a fan theory. No one knows what those are yet, but I'm going to lay it down for them decades from now. Pretty good. When the internet comes around.

I don't know what that is, but it's going to be something. I'm Gene Roddenberry. You know, the, uh, the beginning of Andy Griffith when they're, you know, walking down to the lake and he skipped the stones on the lake. Yeah. It's like right in the Hollywood Hills. Is that right? Yeah.

My brother drove me up there one time and it's like, this look familiar? Like, uh-uh. And he started whistling the theme song and I was like, no. Wow. He said, yeah. And he was like, the Batcave's like over there. Oh yeah? Yeah.

And it's sort of, you know, killed my dreams. Well, same with M.A.S.H. too. That's like the Hollywood Hills or not Hollywood Hills, it's, um, is it Malibu? Well, like the mountains behind Malibu. Right. Um, when you fly into LA, you can, and you're looking for, you're like, oh, I totally see that, that what we're talking about is the helicopter in the opening, um, montage for M.A.S.H.

Yeah. Um, was like, it's supposedly flying through Korea, but it's actually, yes, it's California where they're shooting, which is way cheaper to shoot. Yeah. We shot, I mean, I shot a TV commercial over there and I think we talked about this before. There's, you know, one of the Jeeps is still out there. Oh no, I don't remember that. It's like rusted out and overgrown with weeds and, um, but yeah, it's like an old army

and cheap. Yeah. There are a couple of little remnants. Jamie Farr's still out there like, hey, how you doing? Thanks for visiting. You need anyone today? Can I get a lift back? You need a background?

I'll be, I'm cheap. That's terrible. Is he still around? I'm supposed to know this. He's like my hometown's favorite son. Oh, was he really from there? From Toledo. Yeah.

Is that why they wrote that into the show? Yeah. And he's always talking about Tony Pacos, which is the real place. Oh yeah. I knew all that, but I didn't know if it was, uh, yeah, no, Jamie Farr is definitely from Toledo. Oh, okay. Well, he's still alive.

They never let you forget it. Yeah. He's 82. Hey, Jamie Farr. Godspeed, sir. Um, what else we got? So, um, this one's one of my favorites. This is a good one.

Garfield is dying alone in an abandoned house and everything that you've seen in all except I believe six of the Garfield strips, all of them that have been going on since 1977 is, uh, the hallucination of a dying starving cat in an abandoned house. Yeah. I was way into Garfield. Yeah. Garfield was great. About the books.

Yeah. Garfield and Bloom County were my two biggies. I was never into Bloom County. Oh man. I loved it. Um, I did love Garfield though. I mean, it was a little, Bloom County is a little more advanced, I think. Sure.

It was a lot of humor. Right. Um, which I still got, but Garfield was like kind of perfect for a 10 year old Chuck. It was perfect. So what you're talking about is in October of 1989, Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put out six strips in a row that are not funny. No, they're actually kind of unsettling.

Yeah. Very bleak. And if you go and look at these strips, you can find them online, obviously. It's Garfield alone in an abandoned house and it's really heavy and awful. Garfield wakes up in the first strip and no one's around and he's starting to get a little panicked and then it just kind of continues on and his panic continues to build over the course of the six strips. And finally in the last one, I believe he wakes up and John and Odie are there and everything's

back to normally so happy. But leading up to that point in strip like three, four, five, it's getting a little freaky. And again, like you said, there's nothing funny about it. It wasn't intended to be funny. It was intended to scare. And the idea is, is that what we're seeing in these six strips are the actual reality of Garfield and that everything else he finally manages to go back to is basically dying fever dream that featured John and Odie.

Yeah but well they disappear though in that strip too. At the end? Yeah, like they appear and then like he goes to give them food and then they like disappear and he's alone again. At the end of that sixth strip? Yeah. Oh, okay. So he's hallucinated them.

I got you. And then is alone. Okay. In abandoned. So that's why. Okay, right. So then that backs up that whole idea that they're just a hallucination because they're demonstrated as an hallucination in that six series strip, six strip series.

That was, his intent was very much to do something sad and different and I think he heard quite a bit from the fans. Sure. Like what is going on? Right. And then apparently he kind of laughed at the idea when someone said, hey, you realize what people think, that this is all a big hallucination. Like every other strip you've drawn is a hallucination of this dying cat.

Right. I don't know about it, but like what, what else were people supposed to think? Yeah. That he just got really heavy and, and weird for six strips. And I think the other thing that was so off-putting about it too was it, it resolves or there, there is no resolution. I think on that, that seventh day, the Sunday one just picks up like everything's totally normal and it never happened, which makes it even more unsettling.

Yeah. And then Chuck, there's a, there's a clear, I don't know if it was a reference to it or coincidence or whatever, but there's this animated movie called Allegro Nantropo and there's a segment in it. What's the name of the segment? Valstriest, about a cat that turns out to be a ghost cat. Have you ever seen it? No.

It's very good. Oh yeah. Haunting. But it sort of parallels this Garfield story. Very much. So whether or not it was purposeful, we don't know that part, right? Or did Jim Davis like discount that too? I've never heard whether or not he discounts that.

I don't know. Yeah. But that's definitely, go check out the Garfield strips, just look up like Garfield Dead or Dying or whatever and it'll bring them up. But also just, I'm sure it's on YouTube. Just look up Valstvallse, T-R-I-S-T-E and it will, it'll get to you. It's very sad. And you should plug your favorite thing ever, which is Garfield with that Garfield.

Oh yeah, that's great, yeah. Which in that case, it was John who was just crazy and hallucinating, right? Yeah. You could make a pretty good case that John was out of his mind when you take Garfield out at any given strip and it's just John like, yeah, shouting out loud, like he's just like, like putting his head down on the counter. Good stuff. Yeah.

I forgot about that. You want to take a break? Yeah. We'll take a break and go through another couple of quickies and then the big daddy. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. Did you see this breaking bad one?

Yeah. Um, this one has spoilers for breaking bad and a little bit of the walking dead. So if you haven't seen that, tune out. But there is a theory that's actually, I think kind of cool because I love both shows, breaking bad and walking dead, right, uh, that the, the blue meth from breaking bad is what caused the, the, the zombie, uh, outbreak in the walking dead. Yeah. And not bad.

Yeah. But I mean, it seems like they're totally unconnected until you start digging in there. That's right. When you look at season one, the character of Glenn, uh, hey, shout out to Steven Young. He's a listener of stuff. You should know. What up? Dog?

Hopefully still is. I mean, not anymore. Uh, he drives a, a red Dodge Challenger in that, uh, first season, um, which looks kind of like Walter White's car that he eventually ends up with. And then in the breaking bad, when Walter White returns that dodge, he takes it back and the managers, uh, the dealership's general manager is named Glenn. Oh, then the best one is it comes in season two. If you ask me, yeah, I agree.

You take it buddy. Uh, cause why you didn't watch either one of these shows. No, no, I did. Okay. I saw all of Breaking Bad and I've seen, uh, I can't remember how far it seemed pretty far into, um, walking dead. I'm behind them walking dead by like one season. Oh, I need to go back.

Catch up. Yeah. Uh, anyway, season two, Daryl, uh, played by Norman Reedus is, um, trying to take the fever down on T dog, who's another character. Right? Why is that funny? Is this funny? You saying T dog?

Uh, so his brother, Merle, he has, um, he is like this bag of drugs, basically. So he looks through the bag, see if there's anything that can help bring the fever down. And there is that blue crystal meth from, uh, Breaking Bad and his bag. Yeah. So that's a good little hint. Yep. And then, uh, before the zombie apocalypse, Merle, his brother, uh, was actually a drug dealer and he described in one episode, his, uh, supplier was quote, a janky little white

guy who threatened him with a handgun and said, I'm going to kill you B word. Yeah. And that very much sounds like, uh, Jesse Pinkman. Yeah. The only way you could have gotten it across more is if he'd mentioned fat stacks or something. Right. Yeah, that would have been like super on the nose though. So that's, that's a pretty fun theory.

It is. Obviously meth equals death. Everybody. That's right. Especially blue. Well, the one thing I didn't get was like, what are like all those people on meth? But then I thought, no, maybe just a certain amount and then they infected other people right with their zombie juice.

Yeah. Uh, okay, I got one. All right. This is, this is an old one, but I think it's a good one. The Flintstones and the Jetsons take place at the exact same time. It's a good one. That the Flintstones are not prehistoric. They're actually set in a post-apocalyptic future and you'd say, that doesn't make any

sense. Well, does it? The author, I think this came from mental floss points out, why would some cave people create record players with whatever they had on hand? No one in prehistoric times knew what a record player was, but if you were living in the post-apocalyptic times, you would want to be able to listen to records because they'd already been invented. Yeah.

So you would figure out how to make a bird put its beak on a record and use that instead. Why do they celebrate Christmas in prehistoric times? Good question. Why did, why does the music in the Flintstones, any popular music is always like 50s, like English-British invasion type music. Oh, I forgot about that. Twitch, Twitch. Why do they have a banking system set up that's fairly complex?

It is. Why are these animals talking? Well, that's just weird. Yeah. I don't know if you can place that at the feet of George Jetson. The thing about the Jetsons, though, is supposedly they are living up in, it's not Cloud City, it's Orbit City, which is supposedly built in the clouds above a smogline, which is where the Flintstones live below the smogline, and allegedly the thing that divides them really

more than anything is income. Yeah. That the Jetsons are wealthy and part of the ones that can survive and live up in the clean air. The Flintstones are part that have to scrape by with whatever they can find back here on Earth. There's one that George and Fred mirror one another, and that Fred labors at this, I mean, I don't even know what you call that, like a-

A quarry. A quarry, yeah. With Mr. Slate. Whereas George works at Spacely Rockets, and it says here in this article, works for a total of about nine hours a week, and then robots and computers handle everything else. That's supposedly how our life is supposed to be right now, but we're not doing it right. Oh, really? And now robots are just stealing everyone's job, but we don't have anything to show for

it, except for joblessness, but the bad kind. Right. There was a movie called The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, and in that very movie, George Jetson visits the past and has a little kind of a throwaway comment when he sees green grass and he says that it's something he remembers from ancient history. Right. So that one kind of undermines the whole idea. Oh, I don't know.

Well, if he's saying that he remembers it from ancient history, oh, I see that part. Yeah, like that was an apocalypse, and there is no grass. But if he visits the past, I don't know. Is this falling apart? Yeah. Before we talk about it? It undermines that one. All right.

Remember the Great Gazoo? What was up with that guy? Yeah. Well, this is where stuff you should know is devolved to. Remember the Great Gazoo? What was up with that guy? The whole Christmas thing is weird to me that the Flintstones would celebrate Christmas when they were clearly supposedly before the birth of Christ.

Sure. As being in prehistoric times. Right. And it doesn't make any sense. There's a lot of stuff the Flintstones didn't make sense about. How about the Scooby-Doo one? I thought this was pretty great. Yeah.

And not Scooby-Doo. You could see this is the difference between a good fan theory and a bad one. Bad one, the Scooby and Shaggy are always stoned because, look, they're bumbling and they're always hungry. For Scooby Snacks. For Scooby Snacks. Bad fan theory. Good fan theory, Scooby-Doo takes place after the world economy has shattered.

Right. That's great. Yeah. And there's a lot to it. Right? Yeah. So the idea is that these guys are driving around, and if you really look at the places that they visit, everything's abandoned and run down.

Always. Like Abandoned Amusement Park, Abandoned Ski Resort, Abandoned Everything. And not only are these places abandoned, they're populated by people who are squatting basically in these abandoned places. They live in the abandoned place. And the bad guys are. Yeah. They have no means to support themselves other than by carrying out these weird veiled crimes

that they try to dress up as something otherworldly, which suggests that they're geniuses. Right. So very, very smart people living in squalor and are jobless. Yeah. Was this correct? Yeah. So it says that out of the 27 villains in the original Scooby-Doo, where are you run, only three of the 27 are motivated by monetary gain via theft, smuggling, or land speculation.

And like you said, if these people are geniuses, why are they, you know, like, I'm going to squat in this abandoned mansion so I can gain ownership of it? Right. It's all very strange. Yeah. And they point out that the talents that these people have indicate a very wide variety of specific schooling. Right?

Yeah. Two were PhDs, two or three were PhDs, two were lawyers. One had an ability to produce forged paintings. One could repair boats. One was a magician. Right. The stuntman. So these are highly skilled, highly specialized professions that these people are trained in

or capable of doing, but yet they're out of work and they're pulling off these very elaborate schemes rather than just having a job in their profession. Yeah. And even Scooby-Doo, like when they go into a nice vacation spot, it's run down and abandoned. It's like Soviet level vacation spot. Yeah. Pretty much. So I thought this was a great one.

It was good. At the very least, they had some reason to not just have it be like normal society that they were living in and like they would, you know, like when you go back and look at them, they were weird. Yeah. Weird settings for shows. Yeah. They were really sparsely populated.

Because it's animated. There's no reason to do that. Yeah. I could see if you were like, oh, we don't have much of a budget, so we got to go shoot at this abandoned amusement park. But they, like if they are at a restaurant, they're almost invariably the only people there. Have you ever noticed that?

Yeah. It's like a really empty series. It's cool. It makes it a little more haunting. I like it. You ready for the last one? All right. I think we've waited well long enough.

This one is based on the television hospital procedural drama, St. Elsewhere. Right. Which St. Elsewhere, if you watched it or even if you didn't and you just are a fan of like famous endings of TV series, St. Elsewhere was very famous for its ending in that also famous for having a bunch of like big stars early in their careers. Oh yeah. Yeah. Howie Mandel, Denzel.

Yeah. Ed Begley. Yeah. Begs. Yeah. But it very famously ended with, at the very end, it showed a shot of the hospital with a snow falling and then you pull back and you realize that that was actually a snow globe held by a boy.

Right. And it's kind of mind blowing. It's like, oh my God. Right. Because again, this is like real. If you watched E.R. or anything, Scrubs, any normal show about hospital life and it's about hospital life. That's what St. Elsewhere was about.

Yeah. You know, it was weird and quirky, but it was about a hospital. It was the idea. TV drama. That the last scene of, I think, six seasons, yes, six years, 137 episodes about life at a hospital and the characters that inhabited and worked at this hospital. The hospital's in a snow globe. This is totally out of left field, right?

Yeah. It's even weirder in walks who had up to this point been the director of surgery, I think. Donald Westfall, he's the medical director of St. Elsewhere. He walks in. He's clearly not a doctor. He's dressed not. He's not dressed like one. He's like a construction guy.

Yeah. The way he's talking, he's super like blue collar all of a sudden and he walks into the room where the boy holding the snow globe whose name we will find out is Tommy Westfall. Tommy is Donald Westfall's son in the series St. Elsewhere. Yeah. He had been on the show, but he was never like a big character. No. He had autism and in walks Donald Westfall, who's now a construction worker and says he's

talking to his own father. He's like, I don't get it, pops. He just sits around and looks at that snow globe all day. I wonder what he's thinking in his head, which suggests pretty strongly that everything about St. Elsewhere all 137 episodes took place in the mind of Tommy Westfall, this boy with autism, who's sitting there staring at his snow globe. Yeah. I mean, in fact, it's really, it was even more on the nose than that.

He actually says, I don't understand this autism thing, pop. He's my son. I talked to him. I don't even know if he can hear me. He sits there all day long in his own world staring at that toy. What's he thinking about? Right. They didn't need to say all that.

They should have just, to me, showed that and showed him coming in as a construction guy and maybe just looked longingly at the sun. But he's kind of like, you get it, everyone? So America is sitting there like, what? At the time, this is what 1988, I think, when it went off the air. All of America. It was just like, what just happened? That's really weird.

But then in 2002, it started to get even weirder, right? Because there's a TV writer named Dwayne McDuffie and he wrote a post called Six Degrees of St. Elsewhere and he points out, wait everybody, if all of St. Elsewhere took place just in Tommy Westfall's mind, then that means that there's a significant amount of NBC shows that also are just in Tommy Westfall's mind. It's come to be called the Tommy Westfall Hypothesis or the Tommy Westfall Universe. Multiverse. Okay.

Yeah. And it just spreads and spreads and spreads and there's a really good, this paste article called Tommy's World, the TV legacy of St. Elsewhere's Tommy Westfall Universe, is pretty much the definitive outside post on it. And it lays out a pretty good thread of how shows are connected and since they're connected that means that they're all taking place in the mind of this boy with autism, Tommy Westfall. Right.

And it goes a little something like this, some of the doctors from St. Elsewhere went to Cheers one time. Okay. So that means Cheers is in Tommy Westfall's mind. Frazier was a spin off of Cheers. Check. That means Frazier isn't real. Yeah.

You getting this? We don't need to say that after each one, do we? I think it really drives the point home. The John Larraket Show, which was actually pretty good, John Larraket's great and that show was very underrated, but the lead character played by John Larraket was John Hemingway. He called in one time on Frazier's talk show on Frazier, he was one of the call ins as that character. Right.

So now John Larraket's universe is in Tommy Westfall's mind. That's right. So on the John Larraket Show itself, they mentioned Yo-Yo Dine as a company. A tech company. Right. Yeah. And in Star Trek, Yo-Yo Dine made technology used by the enterprise crew. Yo-Yo Dine.

Right? Right. Yo-Yo Dine. So that means Star Trek is in Tommy Westfall's mind. That's right. And this also appears again in Angel, the T.V. Josh Whedon's Angel. It was part of the, I think he was a client of the law firm Wolfram and Hart on Angel. Okay.

And then Wolfram and Hart was representation to another tech company called Whelan Utani, which made tech on the T.V. Show Firefly. Yeah. Things are getting deep now. Firefly is in Tommy Westfall's mind as well. Then Whelan Utani ship was in a spaceship graveyard on the series in Britain, Red Dwarf. Right.

And then bring it home. And then the TARDIS is in the Hanger Bay of the ship Red Dwarf on the show. So that means that Firefly, Red Dwarf, and then Doctor Who are all in the mind of Tommy Westfall because all of them are connected back to St. Elsewhere. And as the author of this paced article points out, this is a normal thread. Yeah. It's spread to something like more than 400 T.V. shows being implicated as being in the imagination of Tommy Westfall.

Yeah. I think the last count I saw was 419 shows, which, you know, if they just get one more than all of a sudden it's a weed theory. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty great. Tell them about John Munch, though.

He's like the all-star character from Tommy Westfall universe. Oh, right. That was Belzer's character on Homicide Life on the Street. Right. And that was apparently a spin-off from St. Elsewhere. It was related to it somehow. Yeah. I think so, officially related.

But then Munch was on a bunch of different shows. Yeah. Like his character, not just the guy who played him, but he just popped up in different shows all over the place. Not even necessarily just on NBC. Oh, yeah. He was on X-Files and that was Fox, wasn't it? Yeah.

Law and Order. He was on The Wire. Yeah. And he was on 30 Rock. Yeah. So, Munch is just sitting there since he was already connected to St. Elsewhere. Any show he pops up on, he's obviously in the same universe as St. Elsewhere, which again is in Tommy Westfall's mind.

So most of the television in the United States doesn't exist, except in the mind of a boy with autism who likes a snow globe back in 1988. I wonder how much of that was, I mean, not preplanned, but... Zero, from what I understand. Well, they clearly meant to show, though, that St. Elsewhere was a figment of his imagination. Right. But I don't think they even stopped and thought, oh, well, that means cheers, too. Right.

You know? Wow. Well, most of that stuff came after St. Elsewhere, too. So I wonder then if someone kind of ran with it, like if there's this inside cabal and the WGA where people are trying to, like, tie these things together still. It's like putting a Wilhelm scream in. Yeah. Which we did incorrectly.

We did once, tried. Double thumbs up from Jerry. Well, yeah, that was just, that was an SYSK gym. Yep. You got anything else? No, sir. Well, if you want to know more about TV fan theories, you can go find them on the internets. So go look.

Send one in, though, if you have one that we didn't talk about. Yeah. A good one, though. We defined what a fan theory is. Right. Okay? So a good one. Yeah.

Just don't bother. If you already said all that stuff, so since I said, I already said all that stuff, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Hidden Whiskey. Remember our live show in Vancouver? We talked about the Canadian club had a very special promo in the 80s where they hid cases of whiskey all over the world, like a big scavenger hunt. And not all of that whiskey was found.

Remember that? Yeah, I remember. So this guy, Chris Ortloff, writes in about that. He said one of them was hidden in Lake Placid, New York a year before the 1980 Olympics and supposedly was never found. And a few years ago, more than three decades later, my mother picked up the trail when she discovered that it was possibly still out there. Nice.

I love it. This guy's mom was like, what? Free whiskey? I think she was just like, sounds like an adventure. Sure. You know? Just kidding. Maybe she wanted the free whiskey, too.

A fan of cryptic crossword puzzles, word games, and snowshoeing, the allure was too much for her to pass up. Oh, there you have it. Yeah. Plus she really liked whiskey. She tracked down a man in Connecticut who had previously searched for it, spoke with customer service at Canadian Club even. And with a couple of other leads, she spent months turning over the clues, checking current

and historical maps, and hiking through the woods and fields around Lake Placid. Love this guy's mom. I sat down with her a few times with my thinking cap on in hopes of unraveling the mystery as did many of her friends and relatives, and we have lots of research and speculation amassed as a result. And I was really kind of nervous reading this. I was like, she found it. Right.

She didn't find it. No. Sadly, after all the effort and intrigue, we still have no idea where it is. Maybe some kids took it years ago, could be completely buried by leaves and twigs by now, or maybe it's still waiting to be found and someone else can crack the case, so to speak. Blame it on leaves and twigs. If you or any listeners want a chance of some by now vintage Canadian whiskey, though, for

the very least, an enriching walk through the pristine Northern New York wilderness, the clues as originally printed in the CC ad are as follows, and then he gave them to me. So you can just look that up on the internet. They're out there. It's really long. Can you read them to yourself? Well, I mean, I can't read them all.

It's super long. Oh, got to. Get out your decoder pins. Happy hunting, and do share one with me if you find it. That is from Chris Ortloff. Thanks, Ortloff. We appreciate that. You have the last name of a person who's only called by their last name.

And Mrs. Ortloff, or at the very least your mom, I don't know if that's her name. Madam. Madam Ortloff. Ooh, I like that. The great explorer and adventurer. That's how she shall forever be known. Yeah. Well, thanks, Ortloff and Madam Ortloff.

If you want to get in touch with us to tell us something cool that your mom's done, we want to hear that kind of thing. Nice and time for Mother's Day, too. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K Podcast or Josh Ome Clark. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com, and always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. Get a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.