23: No Such Thing As A Yawning Psychopath

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We ran it on QI a few years ago.

Yeah.

Which was there's no such thing as a fish.

There's no such thing as a fish.

No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life.

It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish.

Hello, welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chaczynski, and Alex Bell.

And once again, we've gathered around the microphone with our favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Okay, let's start with fact number one, Anna Chaczynski.

So my fact is that Alexander the Great banned beards in battle to combat beard pulling.

How long were the beards?

I'm not sure, actually.

I do know they were fashionable before that.

So he actually was a proponent of beards before one battle where he was leading the Macedonians and it was his troops versus the Persians.

And the Persians started grabbing his troops' beards and pulling them off their horses and killing them or taking them prisoner.

And there's one anecdote of one of the opposing troops grabs a guy's beard and holds it there while he decapitates him, which is quite a useful way of decapitating someone.

So, yeah, no beards in battle after that.

So, that was just one battle where half the soldiers died because of beards.

And they're like, we got shaven guys going, well, I didn't really think he was that bad.

Yeah, I thought it was a good battle, guys.

Got a lot of kills in that.

The thing about Alexander, I read somewhere else that one of the reasons he might have done it is that he was only 20 years old at the time, and all of the other soldiers were a lot older than him.

And one way that you showed authority if you were older was by having a big beard, and so he didn't want these other guys to have beards because he wanted to have the authority over them.

Yeah, he was really short as well, though, wasn't he?

So, maybe,

yeah.

So, he should have made them all sort of like stand on their knees all the time and limp around.

another time where war killed beards was world war one people stopped wearing stopped wearing beards yeah you wear a beard don't you stop wearing beards in world war one because they were prone to lice which isn't ideal in the trenches

one useful beard was the first guy who swam from jonogroats to land's end he grew a massive beard to protect his face from jellyfish stings

that's clever isn't it another useful beard um was blackbeard's beard oh yeah i said beard too much there um he apparently used to adorn his beard with slow fuses to make himself look more intimidating in battle.

So he decorated himself like a big, scary Christmas tree.

So he lit his hairy face on fire.

I know, it's quite dangerous, isn't it?

He would put fuses for dynamite and things, slow-burning ones, stick them in his hair and his beard, and light them up.

Apparently, that made him look even scarier.

Yeah, it would, I guess.

Yeah.

Slash, easy to spot and slightly ridiculous.

Slash

has a higher chance of setting your face on fire

than you look like an idiot.

Beards are really weird, though, aren't they?

They've just gone in and out of fashion so wildly since the beginning of civilization.

Like ancient Rome, I don't think people were pro-beards because it was a sign of slovenliness and you weren't looking after yourself.

And then other points in time, they've been a sign of manliness.

So I think medieval times it was a sign of virility.

Well, there was that study recently about how women find beards attractive, but only up until a certain number of people have beards.

And once you go over that number, then they don't find them attractive anymore.

And apparently, we are post that number now.

So wearing a beard is not attractive anymore.

I think Jeremy Paxman tipped the balance.

Did he?

That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Jeremy Paxman's really regretting his beard now, though, because he made a big point of the fact that you should be allowed to have a beard on TV.

And then there's the BLF.

Have you heard of the BLF?

Is it the Beard Liberation Front?

Yeah.

He likes to go down it.

What?

Do they go around cutting off people's beards?

No,

they're a...

Free that beard.

He's letting them loose on the moor.

No, they want to encourage beards.

They think it's one of the great sort of like glass ceilings of every job in the world, that if you have a beard, it stops you from getting higher in a company or getting you on TV.

Or they treat it as if it's like worse than the glass ceiling for women or race or anything.

Beards or anything else.

Yeah, they said that.

Bearded women's even worse.

Bearded women.

You don't get many bearded women on panel shows, do you?

You don't, you don't.

Well, there was the saint, Will Jafortis, wasn't there, who was an English saint who there are paintings of her that were mistaken for Jesus for a long time.

She looked exactly like Jesus.

She was crucified and she had this big long beard.

And actually, she's just a female saint who grew a beard.

Do you remember that guy who went to the darts and he looked like Jesus and he had to get kicked out?

No.

Why was he kicked out?

Just really quickly, what happened is a few years ago, you know how darts matches get quite rowdy?

No, but

they do.

And so there was a match going on and then some of the crowd who are very drunk and having a good time noticed that one of the other members of the crowd looked a bit like Jesus.

And then suddenly it spread and everyone was going, Jesus, Jesus, to this guy.

And it was putting the dance players off so much that the guy who looked like Jesus got escorted out of the venue.

Oh my god, that's really unfair.

Escort the people out who were chanting at him.

I know, but that was everyone.

So it was either just him left or he went to everyone else was left.

Speaking of Jesus in the first six centuries of Christianity, all images of him look like an angelic sort of Roman statue, look like a god with curly blonde hair and no facial hair at all.

And it was only in about, I think, the 12th century that we suddenly decided to change him into this guy with a big long beard who was scrawny and skinny.

Just back to women quickly with beards.

I found this great thing in the Squire, the QI

fact database, which did you guys read this about the 12th century Indian scripture?

The Coca, it's called.

It's in the 12th century Indian scripture.

It basically says it recommends that

a man should not marry a woman with a beard.

That was one of the main things in the scripture.

But just all of the other, you shouldn't marry redheads.

You shouldn't marry anyone who sighs, laughs, or cries at meals.

Any girl with inverted nipples, uneven breasts, flap ears, spindle legs, or who is scrawny.

Girls whose big toes are disproportionately small.

Girls who make the ground shake when they walk past.

And my favourite, any girl named after a mountain, a tree, a river, or a bird.

Someone's standards are too high, aren't they?

It's like, oh, you know what?

I really like everything about you, your non-inverted nipples, your non-spindly legs.

But I'm afraid, Mrs.

Thames, there's nothing I can do about it.

We have to talk about your girlfriend, Oak Tree.

I'm not sure about her.

There was a 16th-century

Austrian mayor, I think he was the sort of leader of a town called Hans Steiniger, who's supposedly had one of the longest beards in history.

Oh, yeah.

And he's also famous for having supposedly one of the most ironic deaths as well, which was he died by falling down the stairs and breaking his neck after tripping over his beard.

He was running to attend a fire in the city, and he forgot to pick up his beard and tuck it into his breast pocket as he uses his

shoe.

Very dangerous, dangerous things.

So I feel sorry for

Roman boys who used to have

their first little sprouting, which I imagine for men is quite an exciting event, used to be whisked up to the temple to devote it to the gods.

Which must be quite irritating.

You finally see a whisker appearing on your face after all those years, and your mum's like, all right, get it off.

We're giving it to the gods.

I imagine there's Mayans listening to this going, oh, what?

You become a man and you're taken up there and you lose a little bit of your hair.

A whisker.

Tweezed out.

Yeah, I have my bowels removed

to lob my son and daughter's head off.

First World Roman problems.

You know, they're not allowed.

The Yankees don't allow beards for their players.

Baseball team.

The baseball team in America, New York Yankees,

for a very long time now, they've not allowed any player to have a beard.

So many players who have said that they want to join the Yankees say, oh, there's no way I'm losing my beard.

That's definitely going to stay.

They're just going to have to break the rule for me.

And then they always backtrack like months later when they're finally signed and go.

When they're offered like a 10-year-old, yeah, exactly.

They go, Okay, I guess I'll just lose that beard.

Then that's kind of like, I think dreadlocks were a problem for an Australian rugby union player who had long dreadlocks, and people always used to tackle him by pulling on his dreadlocks.

And I believe the manager at one point said, You've got to get rid of those guys.

This is really jeopardising our game.

There was an Aussie Rules player.

This is going completely off topic now, but he,

so I don't really know the rules of Aussie Rules very well, but you catch the ball a lot.

You jump up and catch the ball, don't you?

Yeah.

And the ball was kept hitting his little finger, and he dislocated it so many times that every time he caught the ball, it would really give him pain on this little finger, and so he had it amputated.

Oh, just to make it easier.

Just to be a better player.

Oh, that's great.

His devotion to the game.

There was another player, but not for Aussie Rules, but for rugby league in Australia, who his trick, fingers as well, was that in a scrum, he'd put his finger up people's butts and they would drop the ball and he would always get the ball aside.

And everyone kept complaining about it, but no one really believed it.

And they finally caught him with his finger up somewhere.

And he got banned from the game for quite a while.

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Okay,

time to move on to fact number two.

That is my fact, and my fact this week is that psychopaths don't experience contagious yawning like the rest of us.

If you're not a psychopath.

Was that a real one or a fake one?

That's fake one.

They did this test with dogs where they had 29 dogs experience a yawn to see if they would yawn back, and 21 out of 29 dogs yawned back.

And they only yawned when it was a genuine yawn.

If a human just went with their mouth open, they didn't yawn back.

Yeah, it's weird.

I do think it's amazing that yawning is contagious in the human community, in the dog community, and between humans and dogs as well.

Yes.

That's ridiculous.

Although, I wonder if a dog makes a human yawn.

Yawning is so contagious that humans can yawn just by reading the word yawn or thinking about yawning sometimes.

So if you see a dog yawning and you know it's a yawn, then I bet that's contagious.

Yeah.

Basically, anyone listening to this podcast now is probably yawning, and it's not just because of your terrible facts.

Wow.

Dear off.

I think it's amazing.

Yawning is a mystery.

We don't know why we yawn.

There are over 20 scientific theories for why we yawn and none of them is agreed upon.

Yeah, I think that's fascinating.

That's amazing.

That's really weird.

Now the latest theory is that it cools your brain.

So yawning, it gets sucks in.

So you yawn more in winter because you suck in the cool air and it goes through your nasal tissue and through your throat and it's when your brain's too hot.

The ancient Greeks thought that it was your soul trying to escape.

That's where you're supposed to put your hand over your mouth.

Really?

They thought your soul would escape when you were sneezing as well.

In fact, people, that's why they say bless you, isn't it?

Yeah.

That makes more sense to me because you're pushing it out.

I would have thought, oh, yawn, you're sucking it in.

It just sounds like people thought they had this soul inside them that was just trying to get out in any way possible.

It's like, did you just fuck?

No, my soul was escaping.

But also, if you failed to put your hand in front of your mouth and you sneezed, did they just consider you someone who'd then lost their soul?

Good one, dickhead.

Your soul's gone down.

And the rest of their life was just.

The rest of your life, you're waiting for someone else to sneeze, and then you put your mouth right next to their mouth.

I got your soul.

Hey, James just yawned.

Was that?

Oh, you're yawning.

Oh my gosh.

Oh, my God.

No, it wasn't it.

That was a genuine one.

Was that a genuine yawn?

Oh, yeah.

No, it wasn't.

It was.

Really?

It can't be.

He's a psychopath.

Should we address why is it that psychopaths don't yawn contagiously?

Do we think?

Because I know autistic people and schizophrenic people are much less likely to yawn contagiously as well, but do we know why?

As far as I know, it's to do with empathy.

And I find that a weird thing because I didn't think that yawning was a way of showcasing emotion to each other.

So there's a guy, a neuroscientist called James Fallon, and he was

worked out what people's brains look like if there's certain types of people, and he worked out what psychopaths' brains look like.

And he had

a load of different brain scans next to him.

And he saw one that definitely looked like a psychopath, and it was his own brain scan.

So he worked out that he was a psychopath himself, which is quite a cool thing.

And then, did he go on a killing spree?

Well, no.

They did an interview with him, and he said, Oh, you know what?

I'd never realized I was a psychopath until then.

But then he said, I'm obnoxiously competitive.

I won't let my grandchildren win games.

I'm kind of an asshole, and I do jerky things that piss people off.

So the clues were there.

All falling into place.

Ants yawn when they wake up.

Do they?

Yeah, they do something.

It looks like they yawn.

So they wake up and they stretch all their legs and they open their mouth as if they're yawning.

How adorable is that?

So it's weird how many animals do it.

There was a study in 1994, and I haven't been able to find anything subsequent to that that's disproved it, that found that the only vertebrates that don't yawn are giraffes.

There's the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize for Physiology was won by a couple of scientists who did a study called No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.

Ah, really?

All psychopaths.

If only

be afraid.

If fetuses yawn in the first trimester, which I find amazing, because if you think how tiny a fetus is is in the first three months of pregnancy, and it's yawning already.

People don't know why, obviously.

It's probably pretty boring in there.

I guess so.

There's an antidepressant called anaphronil, one of the side effects of which is spontaneous orgasms triggered by yawning.

So you couldn't use the excuse, I'm too tired, because it would immediately be disproved.

Yeah.

They've invented a yawn-activated coffee machine, which was tried out at Johannesburg airport last year, I think, which instead of paying, you just had to go up to it and it has a facial recognition thing.

And if you genuinely yawn, then it gives you some coffee.

Oh, but then surely if the first person does a genuine yawn, everyone else in the queue would catch the yellow front.

Yeah, and they go out of business immediately.

It's weird.

Something that I've experienced for years, which until looking into this fact, I didn't realise was a thing, is that if I do a stand-up gig, I always yawn before the gig.

I always just have this massive yawn.

And I just thought that's okay, that's I don't know what that is, that must be me getting the adrenaline ready or something.

But it seems counterintuitive because it makes it seem like you're tired.

And people, if they see you yawning, they're going, oh, you're not really that bothered about this gig.

No, I think it's an anxiety thing.

Maybe it's a way of your body really wanting more oxygen.

You know, you hyperventilate when you're anxious.

Yeah, yeah.

I think maybe it's another way of your body doing that.

Yeah, they found that Olympic athletes, the majority of them, will yawn before their events.

Concert violinists will yawn before a concerto.

They even found there was a guy in the army who monitored

Army Special Forces jumping out of planes, parachuting, and they would all yawn as they would walk up to the door.

And he did a study on it to see if it was.

If it was just like a camera, though, they might have been going, oh yeah,

actually, Geronimo, his real name was Guy Affle, which means one who yawns.

Really?

That was a good link.

Wow.

As you crowbar it around to that.

I did notice online when I googled World's Longest Yawn, because I thought, I bet someone's got that record.

I don't think anyone does have that record, but all of those kind of onion wannabe websites that are trying to write satirical news stories, that seems to be the most popular choice of news story.

Longest yawn recorded as man realizes Oasis are forming again.

And they all try and, oh, it was a recorded three-minute yawn.

That's how boring the news of them reforming was.

Seems to be.

Yawn recorded as another article about the longest yawn is recorded.

Yeah, exactly.

Someone needs to write that one.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact is: the Big Bang was quieter than a motorhead concert.

So, how loud is a motorhead concert?

I don't really know what they are.

The motorhead was and is a metal band who have a very famous lead singer called Lemmy and they sung the song The Ace of Spades.

Oh, they're so strong.

Oh, they're quite loud then.

Yeah, so they apparently regularly reach around 126 decibels.

And according to an article in Focus magazine that I read the other day, the Big Bang was about 120 decibels.

Really?

Now, I don't really understand exactly what that means, but I went on the internet and had a look around, and I found this website, telescopa.wordpress.com.

It's a blog by a physicist.

And basically they've managed to, by looking at the background radiation of the universe, they've managed to work out that there were some sound waves there and they managed to work out how loud those sound waves would have been.

And according to them, it was about 120 decibels.

And, well, there's no one there to hear it.

Yes.

And these sound waves, whether they'd be able to be heard by human ears anyway, I don't know.

But, you know, I don't pretend to be able to completely 100% understand this.

So what I'm going to do is is I'm gonna post a link to this guy's blog on my Twitter feed at egg-shaped, and people can make their own minds up.

So, a blue whale, which is the loudest animal in existence, can give off a call that's 188 decibels.

So, that's much louder than the Big Bang.

And also loud enough to rupture your eardrums if you heard it, in fact, isn't it?

Yeah.

Anything a bit over 100, 110, 120, that's going to hurt your ears.

Yeah.

The subject of concerts, apparently, one of the reasons the Beatles stopped touring was because their concerts weren't loud enough.

During their 1964 tour, which was their last tour, the audience just screamed so loudly all the way through for the entire evening that no one could hear the music.

And the Beatles came to the conclusion that their concerts weren't about the music anymore.

And they tried all this different equipment, they still couldn't get it to work, so they decided to stop touring.

That was one of the reasons.

Bands now have monitors on stage that play the music back to them so they can hear their sound levels and what they sound like.

They didn't have that back then, so there was a really famous Beatles gig where they played it in a baseball stadium in America where it was so loud, the screaming of the fans, they couldn't hear themselves play.

So it wasn't even that the fans couldn't hear them, they couldn't hear themselves, and they were just completely out of tune the whole time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The world's loudest scream, that is a British record.

It's held by a lady called Jill Drake from Tentodon in Kent.

Oh, I come from there.

Do you?

Yeah.

Oh, you might have heard her.

Yeah.

She

set the record with 129 decibels in the year 2000.

Hang on, she yelled louder than the Big Bang and motor head.

To be fair, Tintedon is a pretty awful place.

And the funny thing is that she didn't know that she was good at screaming, but she was on a trip to London when the Millennium Dome was there, and they just happened to be having a shouting and screaming competition.

So she thought, well, I'm here, I'm on holiday, I might as well check.

And then she did it, and she found that she had a real skill for it, and now she's got the world record.

Skill at screaming, does it like on her C CV or something?

Yeah.

How is that a skill?

Alicia, the best in the world or something.

I seem to remember that she made the record and just beat out the other competitor who was her twin sister.

Is that right?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure her twin sister is the second loudest screamer.

Her parents must have been so sick of them.

The loudest noise recorded in modern, well, the loudest noise that we know of happening in modern history was the eruption of Krakato in 1883.

And it could be, well, it reverberated around the world seven times, I think.

It could be detected on instruments going going seven times around, but it could be heard 3,000 miles away.

Wow.

So it was in Indonesia and it could be heard in Western Australia.

Didn't it burst people's eardrums like 20 miles away?

Anyone within a 10-mile radius, their eardrums explode.

They're deaf.

That's insane.

Yeah.

I've got one motorhead fact, which is that they recently rocked so hard at a concert that one of the guys headbanging

got a blood clot in his brain as a result of the absolute just headbanging that was going on.

It was really yeah and he survived so it's now a it's now a mark of awesomeness both to the fan and the band that they rocked a guy so hard that his brain spasmed gave him an algorithm there was that thing about um was it madness who i think they did a thing at finsbury park where everyone was stumping up and down so much that they caused an earthquake a very small earthquake it might have been that that was also in a in a football stadium in america was it yeah yeah where they were stealing

at the chiefs kansas city chiefs that that happened quite recently yeah so they triggered an actual earthquake as As in it was measured.

It was measured.

Oh, it's the thing.

So everyone went down.

No, no, no, no.

It's kind of crazy.

Although,

is it the Richter scale that's not still in use anymore?

Yeah, it's the moment magnitude scale now.

Yeah.

But it's pretty much.

Yeah, yeah.

Have anyone got any last facts they want to chuck in?

So these guys called Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978 because they detected the cosmic fog that's meant to be a signature of the Big Bang.

So that's what we study to work out what we think happened in the Big Bang.

And two pigeons had to die in order for them to work this out.

So they had the horn antenna to detect it.

And it kept on showing higher temperature than expected when they were looking at this cosmic fog.

And they thought, oh, is it the pigeon poo in the horn antenna?

So they gave the pigeon to a pigeon fancier and said, take these pigeons away.

And pigeon fancier took them away, let them go.

So they returned to the horn antenna, nested in there again.

And so they shot the pigeons.

But I just think if you've got two physicists and you're a pigeon fancier, you go, my one job is to keep these two pigeons out of the horn antenna while these guys try to work out the universe.

And he cocked it up.

Yeah.

But what was interesting about that was that I thought usually these kind of things happen to be

that someone thinks they've discovered something amazing, and it turns out to be actually the pigeon shout all over the equipment and ruined it.

And that was it.

It was actually the other way around with this because they thought it was the pigeon, and it turned out to be they discovered the background cosmic radiation of the universe.

They just didn't realize it.

Who was it?

I've completely forgotten his name now, but there was a physicist who spent years studying Venus, who was looking through Venus in a telescope.

And he thought he was looking at canals on Venus.

And it turned out he'd actually had his telescope incorrectly calibrated.

He was looking at cataracts in his eyes.

And blood vessels rather, in his eyes.

Yeah.

Years and years that was studying these.

And it's really sad, actually.

Yeah, and there's maps of Venus, isn't there, that he...

He drew, and actually, it's a map of the inside of his own eyeball.

That's so cool.

Have you guys heard about the mysterious hum?

Apparently, the mysterious hum going around.

It's not true, though, is it?

Well, it's true that people think it exists.

Yeah, there's a lot of people reporting that there's this low hum that's appearing in certain bits of the planet, and a lot of people are experiencing it, and no one knows where the hum is coming from.

Is it detected on sound detecting equipment?

I don't know enough about it.

Sometimes these facts are better when you don't read into them.

The electromagnetic radiation of the sun makes a noise, a really interesting sound.

I was going to submit it for M-Series actually for music.

Check out if you go on YouTube and type in the spheres.

Yeah, music of the spheres.

The Earth does as well.

There's a note.

There's a definite note.

I think it fluctuates.

Yeah, basically

anything that's vibrating will bring a noise, a sound.

The earth emits an ear-piercing combination of shrieks and whistles, apparently.

And that's just from Tenseton.

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Okay, time to move on to our final fact, and that is Alex.

My fact is that Pixar accidentally deleted Toy Story 2 halfway through making it.

Oh, how?

How?

Yeah, so this is a really great story.

Okay, so

basically, everyone in Pixar, there were over a hundred people working on the film at the time,

and they all had access to the files at the same time.

There was no sort of protection.

And this was a while ago, so it was quite simple computer systems.

Someone literally just typed in the wrong command into the computer by accident, realized that they'd accidentally told the computer to delete the whole film and that it was doing that.

They then quickly sent emails around being like, shit, please can someone help me?

I think I've just deleted Coinstary 2.

They then rang downstairs to the place where the servers were and was they just said unplug the machine as quickly as you can.

So they did.

So they turned it off and turned it on again, which is the solution to everything.

When they turned it back on, they found that nearly all of the movie had been deleted.

Oh my god.

So they started panicking and they started asking everyone, Does anyone have any bits of the film at home?

Because apparently the whole film only took up 10 gigabytes with all the information it took to make it, which was still a large amount in that time.

But a 30-minute episode of the K-series of QI is 13 gigabytes on our server.

So

that's more than all of the information to render Toy Story 2.

Wow.

And so they thought they'd lost the entire film until they remembered that one of their employees, one of the animators, was on maternity leave and had been given a computer to work on from home, which had the entire film on and had only been backed up two weeks ago.

So they drove around to her house, they wrapped up the computer in blankets and put it in the back of a Volvo and drove it back to Pixar with the whole film on it.

And it was estimated to be worth about $100 million, that computer, because it had all of the work on it.

It was the only copy.

I like the way you specified it was a Volvo as well.

Yeah, I know.

There is something about a Volvo, isn't there?

It's just known as the $100 million Volvo because

everyone was just holding the computer and they strapped it in with a seat belt and they were incredibly worried that it was all going to be deleted.

It drove it two miles an hour.

Pretty much, yeah.

The whole story is slightly undermined by the fact that they finished the film and it was all fine.

And then Pixar decided to start again basically from scratch because the story wasn't good enough.

So they actually got deleted twice.

I love that about Pixar.

I mean, that's such a testament to their quality control because they just looked at it and said, actually, no, let's start again.

It was their second feature film, so they really wanted to get it right.

So they did redo it.

But even to the point where they were getting to the final product,

they were going to release it on VHS.

It was going to be a director VHS.

They weren't confident that it was going to.

Yeah, they certainly weren't confident.

Billy Crystal turned down the role of voicing Woody, and he says that's the biggest mistake he ever made in his career.

Which for just a voiceover role.

Bill Murray was also approached, and he turned it.

Well, he didn't turn it down.

He missed the phone call because Bill Murray has a system whereby he doesn't have an agent.

He has an answer phone message system that you can leave your requests for him to be in your movie on.

And he missed out on that phone call that day.

Maybe he accidentally deleted it halfway through.

Exactly.

And yeah, so he would have been in it, and he says that was the big regret of his career as well.

Pixar are great.

There's that, I think this might be in the next series of QI, but that lunch that the four big cheesers at Pixar had in 1994, where so it was John Lasseter, Pete Doctor, Andrew Stanton, and Joe Ranft.

They had one lunch, and at that lunch, they came up with the ideas and the rough storyline sketches for A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and Wall E.

Which does make you wonder what they did for the subsequent 10 years, if that's all covered in a lunch.

But it takes them like six years to make a single movie.

Yeah, it's very arduous.

Yeah, like Tom Hanks was doing the voiceover for it when he was filming Sleepless in Seattle.

And that feels like that was 30 years ago, even though it's something like 20.

And, you know, Forrest Gump, when he was doing Forrest Gump, he was still doing the voiceover for it.

Just doesn't feel as old as those movies.

I read this, and I don't really know enough about films to know if it's true, but he was doing Philadelphia at the same time, and he refused to do any Toy Story Bit at the same time because he didn't think he should be doing comedy voiceover while he was doing a series of videos.

Yeah, that's what I read.

And it was in the period where he was doing Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, and he felt like these aren't the appropriate movies.

So, what was he worried about?

That he was going to accidentally be funny in a really serious way.

Yeah, maybe in the middle of Philadelphia, Philadelphia might bring out his

you're my favourite deputy.

There's a snake in my book.

Buzz Lightyear was originally called Luna Larry.

Oh.

Is that a name?

Yeah.

He was called Luna Larry, and then he had a brief period as Tempus and then Morph.

They went to Buzz Lighty.

But there's a very famous Morph already.

Who's the famous Morph?

Tony Hart's little plastic

in the 70s.

Oh, really?

You're too young.

Yeah, maybe they found out about that.

Tony Hart from Heartbeat,

he's the guy who invented Morph.

And he also drew the picture for Blue Peter, you know, the little ship thing.

And he got a one-off flat fee of £50 or something like this.

But if he'd have got just one P for every time they used it on a badge or on something else like that, he would be a multi-millionaire by now.

That's like, I read the story the other day about the man who designed the McDonald's Golden Arches.

Oh, yeah.

Have you any idea what his name is?

Surely that's he created one of the most iconic

Ronald by any channel.

No, it wasn't, and I don't know his name either.

I read it, but I can't remember it now.

But he was offered by the brothers that he could get a flat fee or he could have an additional royalty for every time a new McDonald's open.

And he said, I'll do the flat fee.

I can't see this going any bigger.

Yeah.

On the opposite end of the scale, there's the guy who painted the mural at Facebook when Facebook had just started.

And he was paid in Facebook shares, I think.

So he's now a multi-billionaire or something.

Ridiculous.

Yeah.

Just heading back to Toy Story 2 quickly, what I love about this this fact is I love just hearing the behind-the-scenes stories of these kind of disasters or early stages of things that we've become to know and love.

And I love just in animation generally.

I was reading up recently about some early Disney movies and

Alice in Wonderland, the original early version scripts.

I don't know if it was the very first one, but certainly in the very early stages.

Do you know who was the author of the script for the animation?

Aldous Huxley.

Really?

Yeah.

He wrote a bunch of versions of it and then it just didn't make it through into the end.

And also,

the Lion King was originally called King of the Jungle.

It still says on all their press King of the Jungle, you know, just in the taglines, but they dropped it because they suddenly realized that there are no lions in the jungle, therefore you can't have it.

But it was pitched, the movie was pitched itself as Bambi in Africa meets Hamlet.

And it became nicknamed Bamlet when they were making it.

It is based on Hamlet, isn't it?

I haven't watched Lion King.

Yeah, you can see a lot of similarities when you watch it.

Bambi itself was going to be in the scene, spoiler alert, where his mum gets shot.

Then it was the scene was originally going to be Bambi saw his mum get shot and saw her being dragged away by hunters and leaving behind a pool of blood as the bloodied carcass was dragged away along the meadow.

And then they thought actually that's probably disturbing enough as it is.

Well, on top of that as well, the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it turned out that they were going to make the killer of Bambi's mother the evil guy in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and that was going to be revealed in the movie, and they decided to drop that at the last minute.

We just recorded the most recent series the Museum of Curiosity and one of the guests was Richard Williams who's the head animator.

Can I talk about that?

Of course yeah.

So one of the guests was Richard Williams who was the main animator, a really big animator and he was the main guy.

He basically drew Roger Rabbit and Jessica Rabbit and I was talking to him afterwards in the pub and I was asking him about all of these hidden because in Roger Rabbit especially it's a it's a family film but there are a lot of single frames where there's some really dark stuff going on and one of them is

Jessica Rabbit falls out of a cab at one point and

like her skirt goes up, and you see everything.

And there was a big controversy about this when they recently re-released the film.

And basically, what happened was Richard Williams drew her falling out, and her skirt went up a bit, but it wasn't actually explicit.

You didn't see anything.

In the 2004, I think, re-release of the film on DVD, some new animators went in and made it explicit and drew some stuff there, but I didn't tell anyone, and Richard got the blame for it.

They also put in that movie, there was some graffiti on the wall which said for a good time, this is roughly what it said, for a good time, call Allison Wonderland.

And the number that they put underneath was the phone number of Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time.

It was his actual number, and they had to subsequently take that out as well from that movie.

On the subject of pornographic broadcasting, Comcast is a massive American broadcasting company, and they're responsible for loads and loads of Americans watching television.

And

they have a really bad history of accidentally broadcasting hardcore pornography in really inappropriate times.

So one time they did it during the Super Bowl, about 30 seconds on.

Another time was on Cartoon Network, and the third one was on the Disney channel.

They just accidentally replaced programs with pornographic hardcore.

No.

Wow.

I was looking at sort of tiny technical mistakes that could have had huge repercussions.

Like the fact that last year there was a typo in a sign outside of the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, and the sign read, Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, without a D.

Right.

So just a D missing.

And a guy got so angry about this that he resolved to explode it with a pressure cooker bomb.

And so he marched in, brandishing this bomb into the Teacher Standards Commission and said, I can't believe there's a typo in this sign.

It's outrageous.

I'm exploding this bomb now.

When to explode it, the bomb didn't explode.

So then he wrote furious letters to everyone and campaigned about the fact that the bomb-making instructions on the internet were also riddled with typos, and it was for that reason his bomb hadn't worked.

So the typo caused the crisis, but then it also saved the crisis from happening.

It's hard to know whose side you're on.

Tiny Toy Story fact.

One of the working titles for Toy Story was Toys in the Hood with a Z for Toys.

Catch 22 was originally going to be called Catch 11, but it was around the same time that Oceans 11, the first Oceans 11, came out, and so there was a concern that it was going to be confused.

I remember it was called Catch 18 for a while.

Yep, they toyed with Catch 18, so after they discarded Catch 11, they went for a number of other options.

Well, so they had a meeting, Joseph Heller, could you come into the office?

We love the book.

Yeah.

Really good.

We need a new number for the title.

It's like they're working their way up.

It's like catch 11.

No, there's oceans 11.

Okay, catch 12.

Well, there's also oceans 12.

Okay, 13.

Well, actually, Apollo 13.

Hello.

Okay, that's it.

That's all our facts.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

If you want to get in contact with us about any of the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be reached on Twitter.

I'm on at Shreiberland, James.

At eggshaped.

Alex.

At Alex Bell underscore.

Chasinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Or you can go onto our page, no such thingasoffish.com, where we're going to have all the other episodes up there as well as pages on each of those episodes with links and videos and so on.

And you can just explore that.

So thanks for listening.

We'll be back again next week and see you then.

Goodbye.

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