McCurdy was subsequently hawked around the States, being displayed in various contexts with numerous fictitious backstories, and he was rediscovered by accident in the late 1970s, when a film crew broke what they believed to be a mannequin and got an unpleasant shock upon seeing bone. Unfortunately, this was so successful that unscrupulous carnival owners acquired the corpse by deception, having posed as his next of kin to get hold of McCurdy’s mortal remains. When this didn’t happen, however, the enterprising, if somewhat callous, funeral director decided to recoup his investment by exhibiting the body. A local undertaker embalmed the body, hoping that next of kin would appear to claim it and pay him for his services. Digging into the background, it seems that McCurdy was killed in a shoot out with law enforcement officials in 1911. Upon learning this, we naturally were left with the question of how on earth this could have happened. In truth, it was a real human body, having once been an American outlaw called Elmer McCurdy. He did not know at the time that there was a good, and disturbing, reason for the remarkably authentic appearance of the carnival exhibit. Not surprisingly, the image of the skeletal visage was burned into his brain, and years later he drew on the memory when imagining a suitably sinister villain for the barbarian hero. As a child, toy-designer Mark Taylor had visited a haunted house in an amusement park, and came face to face with a horribly realistic corpse. Firstly, it turns out that Twinkie Bars are in fact a species of cake rather than chocolate bar, and secondly, that He-Man’s evil nemesis Skeletor was inspired by a real human being. During our time in lockdown, we have watched unprecedented amounts of television in the evenings, in the process discovering a variety of unexpected features of US culture.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |