Imponderables: Fun and Games (6 page)

BOOK: Imponderables: Fun and Games
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WHY DO HOCKEY GOALIES SOMETIMES BANG THEIR STICKS ON THE ICE WHILE THE PUCK IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE RINK?
 
 

N
o, 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?
 
 

 

W
hat 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?
 
 

W
e 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?
 
 

Y
ou 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.

BOOK: Imponderables: Fun and Games
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