The first incarnation of Superman in motion pictures was in animation, specifically Max Fleischer’s cartoon series that began in 1941. And it was this cartoon, even more than the comic books, that shaped how we think of the superhero.

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You can see the first of the cartoon series here. There are compilations available at YouTube in which you can see all 17 episodes. Modern Superman stories are often more interesting and complicated, but for the sheer quality of the animation, you can’t beat those old ‘toons. -via reddit

Actors will sometimes go through months of preparation for a role, which can involve dramatically changing one’s appearance. Months of preparation doesn’t earn them any extra money, but it can pay off with an Oscar or bigger and better roles down the line. When you think about actress transformations, the first one that comes to mind is Linda Hamilton the Terminator series. In the 1984 film, Sarah Conner was a simple damsel in distress. But we were all impressed when we saw her in Terminator 2.        

While Linda Hamilton’s career may have been based on her relationship with Terminator direction James Cameron, make no mistake about it.  She was an absolute star when she got ready for her role in Terminator 2. Let’s face it. The real machine in this movie was in fact Linda Hamilton.  Remember the first Terminator?  She was just a poor ol’ diner waitress who you kind of felt bad for. But remember how famous she was during the promotions of T2?  Clearly years of sitting in a mental hospital got to her character. Hamilton was by far the most famous female on the planet for having gotten ripped for this role. Funny, she’s not really famous anymore. Should have stayed married to James Cameron.

Um, let me tell you a little secret. When Linda Hamilton divorced James Cameron, she got a $50 million settlement. She doesn’t need to work, or be famous. But now that we’ve reminded you of the most obvious actress transformation, read about five more at TVOM. One actress even made the list twice.

Did you attend an Easter egg hunt this year? If not, we’ve got all the thrills and spills for you from a typical kid’s Easter. It’s a compilation of the more typical activities surrounding the holiday.

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So nothing has changed since we were kids. Easter bunnies are terrifying, eggs are fragile, baskets spill, and then there’s the egg dye, which does not mix with new dress clothes. Also, gravity is not your friend.  -via Tastefully Offensive

dinner with papaw tonight... he made 12 burgers for all 6 grandkids and I'm the only one who showed. love him pic.twitter.com/0z0DkPtUiR

— kelsey (@kelssseyharmon) March 17, 2016

This is Kenneth Harmon from Purcell, Oklahoma. A couple of weeks ago, he invited all six of his grandchildren to dinner. Only one showed up. Kelsey took a picture and told the world about it on Twitter, and Papaw went viral. Everyone felt heartbroken for him, making 12 hamburgers for only one grandchild. Papaw got messages of support from all over, and thought it was pretty cool.

It didn’t take long for Papaw to come up with an idea to thank all his supporters- a cookout! He and grandson Brock invited everyone. Literally. On Twitter. They expected maybe 500 people at the most on Saturday, and 1500 showed up! People came from as far away as St. Louis, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Florida. They came, they ate burgers, they took pictures, and they bought t-shirts. A good time was had by all. See more pictures from Papaw’s cookout at Buzzfeed.

(Image credit: Tamerra Griffin/Buzzfeed News)

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Ever hear of an actress named Mae Murray? Probably not. Only real die-hard movie fans, experts and aficionados know Mae. Mae was a very popular and successful actress in the silent movie days of the 1920s. She was actually majorly hot, very pretty, a great sex symbol of her time.

Mae was known as "the girl with the bee-stung lips,” for her trademark "bee-stung" lips with bee-sting lipstick on them. She did a movie with Rudolph Valentino, but her biggest hit was the 1925 silent film The Merry Widow. Mae played the title role and co-starred with the legendary silent film actor, John Gilbert.

It was sometime in the 1920's that Mae began a national craze. It probably happened at New York's famous deli “Lindy's" (although one book says it occurred at New York's Roseland Ballroom). Mae was having coffee and a doughnut, when she happened to drop her doughnut in her coffee. She tried the coffee-infested doughnut, loved it, and started raving to all of her friends about her marvelous new and tasty discovery.

Movie stars, being popular, powerful, and very influential, the doughnut-dunking craze swept the nation. And Mae Murray had her little bit of dining immortality.

Warner Bros. is taking the next step in the Batman franchise …or maybe the next step in the LEGO Movie franchise, by bringing us Lego Batman! Check out the first teaser trailer, filled with action, except that part where Batman reheats his lobster thermidor in the microwave.

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With Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice now in theaters, it was a good enough time to unveil this one. The LEGO Batman Movie will be in theaters in 2017. -via Metafilter

Glastonbury Abbey is the traditional burial site of King Arthur. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been told for hundreds of years. Never mind that King Arthur is fictional, although possibly based on several real people we know very little about. When Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote History of the Kings of Britain in the 12th century, people took it as historical fact, since the later kings were rather well known. And it was in this era that the monks of Glastonbury Abbey really needed a kick to get the tourist trade revived.

Indeed, the abbey was already famous abroad when the Norman Conquest brought England under French control in 1066. The Norman invaders happily claimed the abbey as their own, adding sumptuous new buildings and enriching it further. The monastery continued to grow and thrive for over a century when tragedy struck. A massive fire in 1184 destroyed nearly all the buildings and treasures that the monks had amassed, converting a famous attraction into a smoking ruin overnight.

As they struggled to get funds to rebuild, the monks needed something to make the abbey seem significant again. It was now competing with Westminster Abbey, which had been established in 1065 and whose soaring architecture was already a marvel. But there was one thing Glastonbury could have that Westminster didn't. In the 1190s, Glastonbury monks let it be known that they had discovered the skeletons of King Arthur and Guinevere in a tree trunk, buried deep underground; they relocated the grave onto the grounds of the Abbey's new church.

As with many later hoaxes, the scheme worked for some time. The abbey was rebuilt, although it never again caught up with Westminster Abbey. And people still go to Glastonbury to see King Arthur’s grave. Recent studies of Glastonbury excavations give more insight into the abbey’s hoax, which you can read about at Ars Technica. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Tom Ordelman)

Food artist and photographer Henry Hargreaves teamed up with set designer and installation artist Nicole Heffron for a year-long birthday project. And not just any birthday, either. Each month is about the birthday of a Hollywood filmmaker with an avid fanbase. The idea is that when obsessive fans stage a celebration for their favorite director, they incorporate themes and motifs from that director’s films. So each celebration includes a birthday cake or other dessert in a tableau that illustrates the filmmaker’s style and accomplishments.

Veterinarians are trained doctors who treat multiple species for a range illnesses and injuries that a general practitioner would send a patient to a specialist for. Their patients come in a variety of sizes, temperaments, and physiologies, and they can’t tell the doctor where it hurts. And sometimes the best they can do is put a patient out of its misery. Yet veterinary medicine is a satisfying career for those who do it.

7. EVEN VETS HAVE THEIR FAVORITE ANIMALS.

[Dr. Eleanor] Acworth says that her favorite animals to work with are cows, which is probably good since she sees so many of them. She cautions, however, that “de-horning them is the worst.” She is not a big fan of llamas, however, because of their tendency to spit, sometimes on the vet caring for them.

11. THEY DON’T MAKE A LOT OF MONEY.

Many vets graduate with high amounts of debt, often upward of $100,000, but often don’t make that much money, particularly when compared with their human doctor counterparts. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2014 median pay for a veterinarian was $87,590, compared to $187,200 for physicians and surgeons.) But for many veterinarians, the profession is a lifelong passion. “I pretty much wanted to be a veterinarian my whole life, like most of us,” Acworth says.

Read more about the work of a veterinarian, in which you’ll learn some tips for taking care of your pets, at mental_floss.

(Image credit: Maj. Guy Hayes, Army Medicine)

Aerie, American Eagle’s underwear division, made a small splash last year with an ad campaign that featured woman who weren’t Photoshopped. They were still young and beautiful models, so the response was not exactly overwhelming. Now they’ve released a similar ad for men’s underwear, which is spoof of how women’s underwear is marketed.

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Besides parodying ads aimed at women, it highlights how “body-positivity” isn’t much of a struggle for men. You can see more of the models Devon, Kelvin, Matt, and Doug at the Aerie website. -via reddit

(Image credit: Flickr user Gilly Walker)

For more than 200 years, a peculiar delusion swept wealthier European households: People were convinced they were made of glass. The “glass delusion” remains a medical mystery, but it illustrates how the symptoms of mental illness change as new technologies appear.

14TH CENTURY
French glassblowers develop “crown glass,” a new way of making windows. The wealthy eat it up. Lower-class windows remain made of cloth, parchment, animal hide, and even flattened animal horn.

1422
King Charles VI of France dies after years spent convinced he is made of glass. Certain a wrong move would shatter him, Charles wore special clothes to avoid breaking into pieces.

1440s
The printing press sends literacy rates rocketing, leading to a boom in eyeglass production. Glass tableware and urinals also become more common among the well-to-do

1607
Thomas Walkington writes of a Venetian man who’s also afraid of “crackling hinder-parts.” The delusion spreads and becomes literary fodder. In Thomas Tomkis’s play Lingua, the character Tactus says, “I am an urinal, I dare not stir for fear of cracking in the bottom.”

Have you ever seen a “page turner” for sale? New Zealand professor Ian Spellerberg collects office antiques. A few years ago, he bought a blade that was purported to be a “Victorian page turner,” which brought up an image of readers turning pages with a knife. That’s just weird, so Spellerberg did some research on page turners and ended up writing a book: Reading & Writing Accessories: A Study of Paper-Knives, Paper Folders, Letter Openers and Mythical Page Turners. As you might be able to tell from the title, he found that “page turners” do not really exist. But he found some wonderful things that did exist, namely paper knives, which were actually used to facilitate book reading.  

Uncut pages were common to Victorian Era and earlier books, artifacts of the bookbinding practices of the day. As Spellerberg explains in Reading & Writing Accessories, long sheets of paper were folded numerous times to form a “signature” of pages or “leaves,” which would be printed on both sides. Signatures would be printed, collated, and then bound (which usually meant “sewn”) to create a book. “Most of the leaves were cut during the binding process,” he writes. “However, since all books were bound by hand at that time, leaves were sometimes left uncut and could not be opened unless they were cut.” Paper-knives made such books readable.

Victorians also used letter openers and paper folders in addition to paper knives, and they are all different, although it can be hard to distinguish them in an antique store. Spellerberg shares what you need to know about these obsolete but often beautiful accessories at Collectors Weekly.

As we enjoy the last of the cold weather candy holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Valentines Day, Easter), let’s look at the ubiquitous chocolate egg. You may get one chocolate rabbit in your Easter basket, but you’ll probably see lots of eggs. Americans eat them by the bagful, while Europeans treat them like art. And while eggs have always been a sign of spring renewal and rebirth, where did the chocolate egg come from?

The history of the chocolate egg is murkier. The sixteenth-century introduction of Mesoamerican cacao to Europe created, at first, an imitative hot chocolate-drinking culture. At Versailles, chocolate was whipped with sweet almonds or orange flower water and—wait for it—an egg yolk. According to Élisabeth de Contenson’s Chocolat et son histoire, it was the eighteenth-century chocolate-drinkers who first blew out a chicken eggshell to fill with drinking chocolate: thus, the chocolate egg may predate the invention of solid eating chocolate.

An article at Lucky Peach traces the history of the chocolate Easter egg, but focuses more on Paris chocolatiers and their artistic eggs, which is a delight.

(Image credit: Flickr user Steve Mohundro)

When you saw The Force Awakens, you were reminded of the first Star Wars movie, admit it. But you don’t know how close they really are until you’ve seen this shot-for-shot comparison.

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But when you put two wide-screen movies side-by-side, they are way too small on an internet video, so you’ll want to make this full-screen to really see the similarities. Yes, this contains spoilers. I think. -via Digg

A surprising number of comics these days start with “I’m you from the future! No time to explain!” which opens up a lot of possibilities. This one from Thor’s Thundershack takes a bit of a left turn, though. I had to laugh, because it really highlights the difference between millennials and their Gen X or Baby Boomer parents. -via reddit