Imponderables: Fun and Games Read online

  Many smaller music labels are quite content to have retailers stock the shelves as soon as product is delivered. For every CD that is launched with radio advertising, an in-person plug on “Total Request Live” on MTV, and a concert tour, there are many more independent label releases with no marketing budget and no prayer of ever making the Billboard charts.

  There is little doubt that uniform laydowns work. Even if a Tuesday release loses one day of tracking by SoundScan, Geoff Mayfield observes that at the date he last wrote to us, July 9, 2003,

  We’ve already had fifteen albums debut at number one this year [in about six months], so albums obviously don’t need a whole week to enter at number one.

  By pointing all the marketing and advertising toward one day, free publicity can often be generated—the best recent example of this is not in music, but the book industry. When Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released at midnight on June 21, 2003, the publisher, Scholastic, attempted with great success to make the launch a media event: five million books were sold on the first day, numbers that exceeded the opening day’s dollar grosses for the first two Harry Potter movies.

  Most books are put on the shelves as soon as they are processed at the bookstore, as probably more than 95 percent of all book releases receive no marketing or advertising worth coordinating, but publishers will try to orchestrate the laydown of big books. We spoke to Mark Kohut, the national accounts manager at St. Martin’s Press, who said his publisher’s strategy is typical. St. Martin’s generally will try a uniform release date with titles that have a chance to hit one of the major best-seller lists (particularly the New York Times, but also Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today lists), generally titles with first printings of at least 100,000 copies. St. Martin’s releases its big titles on Tuesdays for exactly the same reason as the music labels. But the New York Times measures sales from Sunday to Saturday, so a Tuesday launch provides only five days of sales for the best-seller lists the first week. This might be the reason why Simon & Schuster chose a Monday laydown for Hillary Clinton’s memoirs, which reportedly sold more than half a million copies on its first day of release.

  The big specialty chains (e.g., Barnes & Noble, FYE) and megastores (e.g., Wal-Mart, Costco) are scooping up a greater share of music and book sales. Many of these retailers provide gigantic discounts and much better store placement for best-sellers. As a result, the pressure on record labels and book publishers to create instant best-sellers is more intense than ever. Although the day of release is a small part of the equation, it’s a critical part.

  Submitted by Allen Helm of Louisville, Kentucky.

  Thanks also to Scott Padulsky of Roselle Park, New Jersey;

  Christine Killius of Oakville, Ontario;

  Dave Frederick of Newark, Delaware; and

  Sam Bonham of Tellico Plains, Tennessee.

  WHY DO HOCKEY GOALIES SOMETIMES BANG THEIR STICKS ON THE ICE WHILE THE PUCK IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE RINK?

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  No, they are not practicing how to bang on an opponent’s head—the answer is far more benign.

  In most sports, such as baseball, football, and basketball, play is stopped when substitutions are made. But ice hockey allows unlimited substitution while the game is in progress, one of the features that makes hockey such a fast-paced game.

  It is the goalie’s job to be a dispatcher, announcing to his teammates when traffic patterns are changing on the ice. For example, a minor penalty involves the offender serving two minutes in the penalty box. Some goalies bang the ice to signal to teammates that they are now at even strength.

  But according to Herb Hammond, eastern regional scout for the New York Rangers, the banging is most commonly used by goalies whose teams are on a power play (a one-man advantage):

  It is his way of signaling to his teammates on the ice that the penalty is over and that they are no longer on the power play. Because the players are working hard and cannot see the scoreboard, the goalie is instructed by his coach to bang the stick on the ice to give them a signal they can hear.

  Submitted by Daniell Bull of Alexandria, Virginia.

  WHY DOES MONOPOLY HAVE SUCH UNUSUAL PLAYING TOKENS?

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  What do a thimble, a sack of money, a dog, a battleship, and a top hat have in common? Not much, other than that they are among the eleven playing tokens you receive in a standard Monopoly set. And don’t forget the wheelbarrow, which you’ll need to carry all that cash you are going to appropriate from your hapless opponents.

  The history of Monopoly is fraught with contention and controversy, for it seems that its “inventor,” Charles Darrow, at the very least borrowed liberally from two existing games when he first marketed Monopoly in the early 1930s. After Darrow self-published the game to great success, Parker Brothers bought the rights to Monopoly in 1934.

  On one thing all Monopoly historians can agree. When Parker Brothers introduced the game in 1935, Monopoly included no tokens, and the rules instructed players to use such items as buttons or pennies as markers. Soon thereafter, in the 1935–1936 sets, Parker Brothers included wooden tokens shaped like chess pawns: boring.

  The first significant development in customizing the playing pieces came in 1937, when Parker Brothers introduced these die-cast metal tokens: a car, purse, flatiron, lantern, thimble, shoe, top hat, and rocking horse. Later in the same year, a battleship and cannon were added, to raise the number of tokens to ten.

  All was quiet on the token front until 1942, when metal shortages during World War II resulted in a comeback of wooden tokens. But the same mix of tokens remained until the early 1950s, when the lantern, purse, and rocking horse were kicked out in favor of the dog, the horse and rider, and the wheelbarrow. Parker Brothers conducted a poll to determine what Monopoly aficionados would prefer for the eleventh token, and true to the spirit of the game, the winner was a sack of money.

  Parker Brothers wasn’t able to tell us why, within a couple of years, Monopoly went from having no tokens, to boring wooden ones to idiosyncratic metal figures. Ken Koury, a lawyer in Los Angeles who has been a Monopoly champion and coach of the official United States team in worldwide competition, replied to our query:

  Monopoly’s game pieces are certainly unique and a charming part of the play. I have heard a story that the original pieces were actually struck from the models used for Cracker Jack prizes. Any chance this is correct?

  We wouldn’t stake a wheelbarrow of cash on it, but we think the theory is a good one. We contacted author and game expert John Chaneski, who used to work at Game Show, a terrific game and toy emporium in Greenwich Village, who heard a similar story from the owner of the shop:

  When Monopoly was first created in the early 1930s, there were no pieces like we know them, so they went to Cracker Jack, which at that time was offering tiny metal tchotchkes, like cars. They used the same molds to make the Monopoly pieces. Game Show sells some antique Cracker Jack prizes and, sure enough, the toy car is exactly the same as the Monopoly car. In fact, there’s also a candlestick, which seems to be the model for the one in Clue.

  John even has a theory for why the particular tokens were chosen:

  I think they chose Cracker Jack prizes that symbolize wealth and poverty. The car, top hat, and dog [especially a little terrier like Asta, then famous from the “Thin Man” series] were possessions of the wealthy. The thimble, wheelbarrow, old shoe, and iron were possessions or tools of the poor.

  Submitted by Kate McNieve of Phoenix, Arizona.

  Thanks also to Mindy Sue Berks of Huntington Valley,

  Pennsylvania; Flynn Rowan of Eugene, Oregon; and

  Sue Rosner of Bronx, New York.

  WHY IS THERE A TWO-MINUTE WARNING IN AMERICAN FOOTBALL?

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  We almost didn’t research this Imponderable because we assumed that the two-minute warning was instituted at the behest of the television networks, who wanted to make sure there were plenty of opportunities
to plaster a block of commercials at critical points in the game—right before the climax of the first half and the end of the game. But we were wrong.

  We regret ever thinking that the fine executives of professional football and broadcasting might ever be motivated by anything as crass as the mighty dollar. The two-minute warning debuted in 1942, and was created to remedy a nagging problem that threatened the fairness of the game. Until 1942, the official time was kept on the field, and scoreboard clocks often bore little resemblance to the official time. According to Faleem Choudhry, a researcher at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, before the two-minute warning, scorekeepers had to notify each team when there was somewhere between ten and two minutes left in the game.

  The looseness of the rules constrained coaches. Bob Carroll, executive director of the Pro Football Researchers Association, e-mailed us about the implications:

  Obviously, it was important for a team in the closing minutes to know exactly how much time was left so it could make critical substitutions, stall, try to run out the remaining time, etc. Although the players on the field could ask the official, it took time to notify the bench.

  On the other hand, taking time after each play to go over to each coach would have required stopping the clock after each play—possibly to the detriment of one team. I think the two-minute warning was a compromise that allowed the coaches to know exactly how much time was left and then keep a relatively accurate record on the bench.

  These days, teams spend a part of most practices running their “hurry-up” offenses (sometimes known as a “two-minute offense”), a prearranged sequence of plays that require no huddle and are designed to burn off as little time as possible. Often the hurry-up offense will commence with the first play following the two-minute warning—after the more than two minutes of TV commercials, of course.

  Submitted by Jim Welke of Streamwood, Illinois.

  WHO WAS CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST BEFORE HE DIED?

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  You can’t blame someone for wanting to know more about the backstory of Casper. Restless ghosts are a dime a dozen. Poltergeists are scary. But you don’t run into many friendly ghosts, and none so relentlessly affable as Casper.

  We thought the billowy puff of friendliness originated in comic books, but we were wrong. Casper first appeared in a Paramount Pictures short cartoon in 1945, although at that point he didn’t have a name. Casper might have been friendly, but his co-creators, Seymour V. Reit and Joe Oriolo, fought over who thought of the story of the “Friendly Ghost.” Reit insisted he did, since Casper was based on an unpublished short story of his, and Oriolo was “only” the illustrator (Oriolo later went on to illustrate and produce 260 Felix the Cat cartoons for television).

  By all accounts, the first cartoon didn’t set the world on fire, but the second, “There’s Good Boos Tonight,” was released in 1948, and several more were created in subsequent years. Although Casper never gave Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny a run for their money, the chummy spook was Paramount’s second favorite cartoon character after Popeye in the 1940s and 1950s. In these early cartoons, nothing whatsoever was said or implied about how Casper became a ghost at such a young age. As Mark Arnold, publisher of the Harveyville Fun Times, puts it: “They introduce Casper as a friendly ghost who doesn’t want to scare people.” Arnold adds that in the children’s book that was a prototype for the cartoon, Casper’s origins are undisclosed.

  In 1949, Paramount sold the comic book rights to all of its cartoon characters, Popeye excepted, to St. John Publishing, which issued five Casper titles with a resounding lack of success. In 1952, Harvey Comics picked up the license. Harvey became Casper’s comic book home for more than three decades. It was at Harvey where Casper was given a cast of sidekicks—his trusty ghost horse, Nightmare, and his antagonist, Spooky, the “Tough Little Ghost.” Casper also became pals with Wendy, the “Good Little Witch,” who spun off her own titles. The success of the Harvey comic books goosed the interest in made-for-television cartoons—more than 100 episodes were syndicated.

  But despite the need for storylines for all these outlets, Casper’s origins remained shrouded in mystery, and as it turns out, this was no accident. Sid Jacobson, who has been associated with Casper for more than fifty years, told Imponderables that when the company bought the rights to the Paramount characters, Harvey was more interested in the then more popular Little Audrey (a not-too-subtle “homage” to Little Lulu). Casper was thrown in as part of the deal, and he and other editors at Harvey went to work “rethinking him.” Why the need to rethink? It turns out that Jacobson was less than thrilled with the original animated cartoon: “It was so ugly, and so stupid, I never forgot it. If we used the original premise for our books, it would have been a failure.”

  Ever mindful that Casper was meant to appeal to a younger segment of the audience, the editors at Harvey wanted to banish elements that would frighten children or give parents an excuse to ban their kids from reading about even a friendly apparition. Jacobson says:

  Since the dawn of the Harvey Casper character, truly the Casper everyone knows and loves, Casper’s origin is definite but flies in the face of conventional definition: he was born a ghost. Like elves and fairies, he was born the way he was. We consciously made the decision as to his creation. It stopped the grotesqueries, and fits in better with the fairyland situation. It allows Casper to take his place with the other characters in the Enchanted Forest. It doesn’t deal in any sense with a kid wanting to die and become a ghost. That was our main concern.

  Considering the treacly nature of the comic book, inevitably a few impure types have speculated about the secret origins of Casper. Mark Arnold reveals a particularly startling one:

  The most notorious origin story appeared in Marvel Comics’ Crazy Magazine #8, in December 1974, in a story called, “Kasper, the Dead Baby.” In it, they show that small boy Kasper was killed by his alcoholic, abusive father. It’s pretty gruesome, but bizarrely funny in a kind of strange way. Marvel has disowned the story, as they have tried to acquire the Harvey license.

  In 1991, during The Simpsons’ second season, the episode “Three Men and a Comic Book” speculates that Casper was actually Richie Rich (another bland comic book star of Harvey’s stable) before he died. As Arnold puts it, “Richie’s realization of the emptiness that vast wealth brings caused his demise.”

  Most recently, in the feature film Casper, there are allusions to the ghost’s past (his father dabbled in scientific spiritualism), but no real explanation for what makes Casper so damned friendly and why he was snuffed out before his prime. Maybe the best theory comes from comic book writer and author of Toonpedia (http://www.toonpedia.com), Don Markstein:

  Personally, I always thought it was his friendly, open nature that did him in. His family apparently didn’t do a very good job of teaching him about “stranger danger.”

  Submitted by Steve, a caller on the Glenn Mitchell Show,

  KERA-AM, Dallas, Texas.

  Thanks also to Fred Beeman of Las Vegas, Nevada.

  WHY DO RINKS USE HOT WATER TO RESURFACE THE ICE?

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  Here’s the problem. Skaters, even elegant flyweights like Michelle Kwan, leave gouges that get dirty and lead to uneven residue on the ice. The more skaters there are on the ice, the more defects appear.

  Our hero, of course, is Frank Zamboni, an Italian immigrant, who invented the Zamboni Ice Resurfacer to solve a problem of his own. He owned a rink, the Icehouse in Paramount, California, and realized how much time and labor was wasted with his maintenance men manually hosing and sweeping the ice—a process that took three to five men an average of an hour and a half. During hockey games, six to eight employees were required to scrape the ice between periods.

  In 1942, the uneducated but mechanically gifted Zamboni took a Jeep and fashioned a riding resurfacer that could automate the process. After seven years of experimentation, he crafted an early version of the Zamboni Ice Resurfacer and used it
at his rink. In 1950, the most famous ice skater in the world, Sonja Henie, who won gold medals at the 1928, 1932, and 1936 Olympics, saw Zamboni’s machine and wanted one for her tour. Zamboni hand-built it and Henie showed it off on her tour—rink managers clamored for the labor-saving device, and Zamboni found himself with a new business.

  The genius of the Zamboni resurfacer is that the entire operation is handled with one pass over the ice, even though four separate operations are performed:

  1. A planar blade scrapes off a layer of the existing ice.

  2. Scraped ice that is left on the surface is collected and put into a holding tank, about 100 cubic feet, which is the bulk of the machine.

  3. Water is fed from a wash-water tank over the newly cut ice. A squeegee-like conditioner then smoothes this water over the ice and a vacuum reclaims the water back into the tank. This does not create a new surface, but conditions the newly cut ice.