Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

July 3, 1940: Clive Sinclair was born. He was a British inventor, most commonly known for his work in consumer electronics and computers. He died September 16, 2021 at age 81. The Cambridge inventor is on the cusp of releasing a new, flatscreen CRT pocket television, which may change television design for ever.




UK #1 on this day in 1969: Thunderclap Newman - Something In The Air

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTZoJ01FpD8


July 3, 1969: The UCLA puts out a press release introducing the public to the Internet...But nobody noticed. UCLA's Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock displays Internet's first router or "switch" - known as an Interface Message Processor (IMP #1), "military hardened!"





Thanks to big bucks from the Department of Defense, they were working on a new kind of computer network that would eventually become known as the ARPANET, the precursor to our modern internet.

Full PR: “UCLA TO BE FIRST STATION IN NATIONWIDE COMPUTER NETWORK”

A Brief History of the Internet by Leonard Kleinrock.


July 3, 1975: Thunderstorms west and north of Las Vegas, NV, with more than 3 inches of rain in places resulted in severe flooding in town. It is sometimes called the Caesars Palace flood because of the extent of the damage there, which included about 400 cars. Doesn't take much rain to cause heavy flooding in Vegas. A brief hydrologic appraisal of the July 3-4, 1975, flash flood in Las Vegas Valley, Nevada




July 3, 1975: The REO Motor Company, which has been producing cars in Lansing, Michigan since 1905, goes out of business.


You probably already know the band REO Speedwagon took their name from the REO Speed Wagon light delivery truck, an ancestor of pickup trucks.

Iowa 80 Trucking Museum


July 3, 1984: A chemical gas which reanimates corpses was accidentally released in The Return of the Living Dead (1985)


The Darrow Chemical Company that manufactured 2-4-5 Trioxin in the film is based on the Dow Chemical Company, which in reality manufactured a chemical defoliant in the 1960s, commonly known as 'Agent Orange' (a 50:50 mix of 24d and 245t) and used to strip jungles in the Vietnam War. To avoid being sued by the Dow Chemical Company, the makers of Return of the Living Dead created the name "Darrow," which sounds a lot like Dow when pronounced but wasn't spelled the same.

The nuclear cannon at the end of the film was actually a WWII German Howitzer.

In the office of Uneeda Medical Supply there is a topless photo of Miss America Vanessa Williams on the wall.



July 3, 1985: The movie Back to the Future is released. Among the many props, it featured a 1984 Apple Macintosh 128k computer in a store window marked as an antique. In 1984 the retail price was an astounding $2,495. About $7,719.00 today.



Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale fleshed the idea out into a story: a high school kid is thrown back in time; he meets his parents; his mother falls in love with him. They pitched the idea to Columbia Pictures president Frank Price, and he commissioned them to write a screenplay. They wrote a script and called it Back To The Future, but Columbia rejected it. Zemeckis and Gale showed the script to the Exec Producer of Used Cars – Steven Spielberg.  He said “It was unusual but based on principles like family and the generation gap. It was terrific.”

Spielberg wanted his production company, Amblin Entertainment, to make the film, but Zemeckis and Gale didn’t want to become known as the guys who only got jobs because they were friends with Steven Spielberg. Instead, they sent it round every studio in Hollywood. Columbia said it was “Too sweet.” Universal said “Time travel movies don’t make any money.”And Disney said it was “Too incestuous.” In total, the script for Back To The Future was rejected by studios 44 times.

Unable to sell the script, Zemeckis got a job directing Romancing The Stone. It was a big hit and suddenly, everybody wanted Back To The Future. Zemeckis/Gale took it back to the man who believed in it all along – Spielberg – and struck a distribution deal with Universal.

Fox worked on Family Ties and Back To The Future at the same time. He rehearsed for Family Ties from 8am to 6pm, then went to the Back to the Future set where he would rehearse and shoot until 3:30 a.m. This schedule lasted two months.

In casting the inventor of time travel, Doc Emmett Brown; John Lithgow, Dudley Moore, and Jeff Goldblum were all considered. Producer Neil Canton had worked with Christopher Lloyd on The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and suggested him. They sent Lloyd the script but, with aspirations of being a serious actor, he threw it in the trash. Zemeckis met with Lloyd and impressed him when he explained his vision for the film. Lloyd then showed the script to friends who all advised him to take it, so he did.

Lloyd told Zemeckis he wanted to base the character on Albert Einstein and a conductor named Leopold Stokowski. Zemeckis liked the idea, and said to go ahead.

Crispin Glover had a reputation for being a little odd. One evening, Lea Thompson went to practice lines. When she got there, she found that all of the rooms were painted entirely black and there was no furniture in the whole apartment except for a steel operating table.

Thomas F. Wilson is school bully Biff Tannen. He improvised lines like "make like a tree and get outta here" and "butthead." Over the years he was asked the same questions by fans so often, he wrote a song that answered them all.

There were many script changes:
- Marty’s surname was originally McDermott
- The climax took place at a nuclear test site in Nevada (storyboards)
- The script ended with George looking at a 1955 newspaper with a pic of Marty and saying "It can’t be. But it is..."

Sid Sheinberg did not like the title Back To The Future and sent a memo to Zemeckis and Gale asking to change it to "Spaceman From Pluto." Luckily, Spielberg stepped in. He replied with a memo that said: "Thanks for your humorous memo. We all got a big kick out of it."

In original drafts the time machine was a room that Marty would go into and be zapped back in time. That changed to a 1950s refrigerator that Marty would climb into to go back in time. Zemeckis scrapped the idea when he worried about children climbing into refrigerators.

Zemeckis then had the idea of using a car as it meant the time machine could be mobile. He wanted something that looked futuristic and cool, so the DeLorean was brought in. After the movie came out, John DeLorean wrote Zemeckis a letter expressing his gratitude. The DeLorean time machine was designed by the acclaimed concept artist Ron Cobb and then brought to life by the effects team, headed by Kevin Pike.

Zemeckis hired Alan Silvestri (Romancing The Stone) as composer but Spielberg wasn’t convinced. He heard the orchestra warming up playing a big dramatic and said “that’s it! that’s what it needs to be!” and Zemeckis said, “yeah, that’s the main theme Alan sent us.”

Huey Lewis was asked by Zemeckis and Gale to write a song for the film but weren’t pleased with the first song. Lewis said, “We did this too, but it’s got nothing to do with time travel.” That was The Power of Love, and became a worldwide number 1 hit. Lewis himself has a cameo in the movie as the teacher who brings Marty’s Battle of the Bands audition to an abrupt end.


Music supervisor Bones Howe put out a casting call to find a singer who sounded like Michael J. Fox. Musician Mark Chapman saw the ad, won the part, and that’s who we hear singing Johnny B. Goode. Chapman has his own band, Jack Mack and the Heart Attack. Here he is singing Johnny B. Goode

The film made Michael J. Fox a movie sensation overnight, was nominated for 3 Oscars and raked in $389 million at the box-office, the highest-grossing movie of the year. Today it is regarded as a stone-cold classic.


July 3, 1955 was apparently a hot day according to the media.




July 3, 1991: James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day was released.


This teaser ad started appearing on TV almost a year before its release.


July 3rd: With a small nuclear weapon due to be dropped on Las Vegas, killing the zombie population on July 4th, Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) and his crew arrive on the 3rd, to rescue money from a casino before it's destroyed. The names of the casino towers are Sodom & Gomorrah.



In the opening scene, two UFOs can be seen while the convoy is leaving Area 51.
The film begins and ends with Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds".

The name of the safe shown on the blueprints is Gotterdammerung. This is part of composer Richard Wagner's 'Der Ring' cycle, the music of which is used within the soundtrack. Götterdämmerung means "Twilight of the Gods" and is the German name for Ragnarok, the end of the world in Nordic mythology.

Scott Ward's (Bautista) main weapon is a Heckler & Koch HK416 with a Trijicon ACOG and Magpul D60 drum magazine and a 9x19mm SIG-Sauer P226R as his sidearm. Vanderohe uses a Knight's Armament PDW with a SIG-Sauer P226R also being his sidearm. Chambers uses a modified 5.7x28mm FN P90 with a forward triple rail system. Marianne Peter uses a 4.6x30mm Heckler & Koch MP7A1 submachine gun. Mikey Guzman uses a gold-plated AKMSU. Martin uses a 5.56x45mm NATO FN SCAR-L CQC with an ACOG sight and an FN 40GL/MK 13 MOD 0 under-barrel grenade launcher. Both Lily and "Soccer Mom" use 5.56x45mm Mk 18 Mod 0 with 4-position stock and RIS handguard and both use Glock 17's as their sidearms. Maria Cruz uses a 5.56x45 NATO Heckler & Koch HK416C ultra-compact carbon with 9" barrel and a EOTech holographic sight, Steiner DBAL laser, weapon light and a Magpul D60 drum magazine. Ludwig Dieter uses a Beretta 92FS.


A French government website officially advises people not to use air conditioning during extreme heatwaves in summer.


Maybe they're worried about an impending blackout? Like in Spain.


Red Pill of the Day: A sequestered Jury deliberates whether Australian woman served deadly mushrooms with intent to kill her in-laws.