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They had the best of intentions, but certain public service campaigns ended up making something really bad for you appear awesome. The bad experiences were tempered to keep from frightening children, which only undermined the message. And some downright pushed the bad stuff, like a 1997 physical fitness campaign featuring children gorging themselves on chocolate cake.
Look back at those screencaps! You’ve never enjoyed anything as much as those children did those chocolate cakes. They make fudge smoothies (which, we’re sorry, is a bad idea how? That’s the entire business model of Cold Stone Creamery) and even build whole fortresses out of chocolate; that’s like the most fun afternoon of anybody’s childhood. Have you guys never seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? It’s like all the best parts of that movie come to life, and without all the child murder.
Other campaigns managed to make drugs and venereal disease look attractive. Read about them all at Cracked. Link
Everyone wants to come up with the Wii, which means everyone wants to come up with a new video game idea that so out-of-the-box that everyone will want to buy it. Which leads us to some strange and frankly dumb innovations. Like Biotic games, developed by Stanford researchers to teach children about biology.
Biotic games look just like old school video games, only instead of pixels, they are made out of living organisms (paramecia) … which you control by zapping them with electricity. For example, in the game Enlightenment you guide a bunch of shrimps across a small box in order to light up all the squares:
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What you’re watching is a fluid chamber charged up with an electrical field — a charge that the player can shift from positive to negative by pressing the buttons in a small NES-like controller. The tiny paramecia inside the chamber react to the electricity by fleeing in the direction that you command them to. The chamber is also hooked to a small webcam that transmits the images to a computer in real time, instantly transforming them into video game screens for our perverse amusement.
That one won’t be available soon at your local game store. See the rest of seven strange game innovations at Cracked. Link -via Unreality
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Jewel thieves decide to steal a load of diamonds at the behest of an older criminal boss. While robbing the jewelry store, an alarm goes off and one of the thieves kills the employees. Blah blah blah … Mexican standoff ends in a massacre, aaaand scene.
It sounds just like Reservoir Dogs right? It’s not. The author is actually describing the plot of City on Fire, which is a Hong Kong action film that Quentin Tarantino pretty much ripped off to make his classic film.
Cracked has more about movies that are actually blatant rip offs in this great article.
Los Angeles is a gorgeous city filled with movie stars and sunny beaches, right? As it turns out, the city is also loaded with oil rigs. You’d never know it though because the city carefully and cleverly conceals the rigs so you’d never notice them unless you were specifically looking for them. For more cool secret operations that are hidden in plain sight, be sure to check out this cool Cracked article.
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If you have a baby and want to know how successful he will be in certain sports or how popular he will be with the ladies, it turns out, you can actually gauge these pretty well even before he starts learning how to throw a baseball. Learn how and read more about weird physical indicators over on Cracked.
Have you ever been told that you need to let your anger out or it will explode? As it turns out, that’s completely wrong. Cracked has a great list of psychology myths everyone believes that are utterly and completely wrong. Be warned, some of the language is NSFW.
Have you ever been told that eating carrots will improve your eye sight? Then congratulations, you’ve just been fed propaganda from a very successful, but very silly British propaganda campaign.
During the Battle of Britain, the Germans started noticing that a bunch of their planes were getting shot down in instances where the British shouldn’t have seen them coming. It was almost like they had some sort of radio device that could detect the presence of incoming objects — actually, it was exactly that: Britain had perfected the radar and didn’t tell anyone about it. Obviously the Brits couldn’t let the Germans know they had access to this new technology…British papers published a story about a RAF pilot called John “Cat Eyes” Cunningham who had shot down 20 enemy planes thanks to his superhuman night vision, an ability he achieved by eating lots of carrots.
While carrots are good for your eyes, they can’t actually improve your eyesight and they certainly can’t give you night vision. Even so, many people still believe that munching them down like Bugs Bunny will help them get rid of their glasses all because of a propaganda campaign.
While governments across the globe have been trying to figure out how to control the minds of their enemies for centuries, this practice is already possible in the animal kingdom. In fact, Cracked has a list of 5 incredibly creepy methods of animal mind control that are going on right now.
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We’ve all heard a marketing campaign at some point and thought, “that is just stupid,” but most bad advertising strategies just result in a few less sales than a successful campaign would have brought in. Sometimes though, a company will run a campaign that’s so idiotic that the company ends up losing thousands, if not millions of dollars. Take, for example, the Silo marketing campaign that said customers could get a new stereo for only “299 bananas.” When customers started actually showing up with bundles of bananas, the store had no choice but to give them stereos in exchange for fruit.
The saddest part? Silo couldn’t even get rid of the bananas (they had thousands of them sitting there, presumably attracting fruit flies), as the local zoos stopped taking them and the food bank didn’t take perishables.
You know, I can understand why Coca Cola would only let two people in the world know their secret formula, but there are some secrets that are just plain silly…like how to do the Hapsburg napkin fold. Yes, one of Austria’s greatest secrets is how to fold a napkin. Read about more weird well-gaurded secrets over at Cracked.
It’s recently come out that they won’t be making a Lone Ranger movie staring Johnny Depp, but we all know that’s not the only potentially awesome movie that Hollywood canned prematurely. Cracked has a great list of 10 others that were cancelled for a variety of movies. Of course, I’m sure I’m not the only one here who desperately wishes the Ghostbusters 3 movie actually went forward at some point. They also have a few unrelated but fun trivia facts like this one:
Before the original Ghostbusters came around, Ivan Reitman, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd were in talks to make Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was scrapped when Aykroyd came up with the idea for Ghostbusters.
When you think about it, Edward Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was just trying to do his job to ensure a high school delinquent didn’t get away with ditching school while everyone else had to go. He’s not the only movie villain who actually wasn’t that bad of a guy in the long run. Cracked has 8 more and they have some really valid points.
Sure Pirates of the Caribbean made millions and millions of dollars, but before it came out, no pirate movie up until that point had ever made a decent profit. It’s one of the many great movies that were serious risks when they were made, Cracked has more.
It seems like everything you hear on the news is bad, but over on Cracked, you can finally read some good news. While there are seven things listed there, the one that makes me the most excited is the fact that traffic fatalities are the lowest they’ve been since 1949. Go safety!
I’m sure you guys all are familiar with the Scope’s Monkey Trial, but did you know that the whole thing was actually just an overblown publicity stunt to help attract travelers to visit the town of Dayton, Tennessee? Learn more about the trial as well as other irresponsible publicity stunts in this great Cracked article.
It sounds strange, but it’s true. One of the vulgar humor site’s recent article dives in to five simple ways to make our kids smarter, which involve surprising simple things like starting school later, adding more windows to classrooms and taking kids out for a walk before they take a test. While the article is filled with typical Cracked humorous quips, it is surprisingly free of curse words, making me wonder what the site is up to these days.
Anthony Jurado and Nessa B. Wilson of Cracked wrote an article about five scientists who are respected today, but were considered fools in their own time. These include the physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who suggested that doctors should wash their hands after handling dead bodies in order to resist spreading infections:
Semmelweis didn’t just have the disregard of his contemporaries, he had their flat-out scorn. Maybe it was because he didn’t get around to explaining himself on paper right away, so no one understood what hand-washing had to do with keeping people alive. Some doctors were actually insulted that he was accusing Viennese medical students being dirty enough to kill people.
Within 14 years of his groundbreaking discovery, Semmelweis just stopped giving a [redacted -- ed.]. He got drunk all the time and called all his detractors “ignoramuses” and “murderers.” He started chilling with prostitutes and lashing out at family. That last part proved to be a bad move, because in 1865 they had him committed to an insane asylum, where he was promptly beat up and stuck in a dark cellar.
He died two weeks later. It took another 20 years and Louis Pasteur’s germ theory for the rest of the world to come around to the concept of washing your hands to keep from getting sick.
Link | Image: Prince George’s Community College
Cracked devised a great infographic to help you navigate the labyrinth that is online dating. Featuring the most commonly used interests and phrases, this guide will help you avoid a lot of pain.
Obviously, people exercise plenty of factual calisthenics in their online profiles. And just because Denny’s menus may show you a more appetizing photograph doesn’t mean you should stop eating there.
The same goes for online dating. Just look through those menus with a healthy dose of skepticism, and maybe your next Grand Slam will be everything that you expected.
Image and story via Cracked
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This article highlights seven interesting things you can see if you look closely at masterpieces. It includes paintings with a baby flipping off the pope, UFO’s in the sky, and the shape of a brain that surrounds God as painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
While some might dismiss this as a coincidence, experts suggest that it would be harder to explain that this was not Michelangelo’s intention. Even complex components within the brain, such as the cerebellum, optic chiasm and pituitary gland can all be found in the picture. As for that sassy green sash running down the pons/spinal column/dude-holding-God-up, it follows the path of the vertebral artery perfectly.
Along with drawing, painting, sculpting, St. Peter’s Basilica building and generally being among the universe’s top bananas, Michelangelo counted cadaver dissecting as a favorite way to pass the time. He was so mad about corpse-cutting, in fact, that a friend once presented him with a perfectly formed dead Moor as a gift.
NSFW. Link
From the Upcoming 
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I have to say, Cracked.com nailed this one. I grew up loving Corey Feldman. My cousins and I used to fight over who would get to marry him someday (thank God I lost that one, I guess). But even I have to admit his career is less than stellar at the moment. However, the “anonymous” person who wrote this section of his Wikipedia entry begs to differ:
“In November of 2008 he released his most ambitious musical project to date, a new album with his band Truth Movement entitled Technology Analogy. This high concept album has been met with tremendous reviews, and features an all-star line up, including Jon Carin (Pink Floyd), Mark Karan (Rat Dog, Grateful Dead) Scotty Page (Pink Floyd), and artwork by the legendary artist Storm Thorgerson. To order his album check out his website at www.coreyfeldman.net”
Aw… yeah. Cracked has also outed Bruce Willis, Hulk Hogan, Paul Stanley and William Shatner as the authors of their own Wikipedia entries. And maybe the entries were written by lackeys or overzealous fans, but the article is funny either way.
