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

A "lost film" is one for which there is no known print in existence- anywhere. A great majority of the lost films are the early silents, but films were lost up until around the 1950's.

Why did films become "lost"? Early film stock was highly flammable and film warehouse fires were not that unusual. Incredibly, sometimes studios would deliberately destroy their own films. (These films would nowadays, of course, be classified as "priceless"- both literally and figuratively.)

The deliberate destruction of these gems is on a par, although not with the same evil intention, with the Nazi book burnings of the 1930's. Actually the book burnings were better, in a way, because the books the Nazis tried to destroy still had copies in other locations and complete destruction was much harder to achieve.

Sometimes the loss was caused by simple neglect, as early cheap film stock was just left sitting around for decades and simply turned to goo. Luckily, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel & Hardy, each only have one or two lost films. Happily, sometimes lost films turn up in basements, attics, closets or motion picture theaters.

Let's take a look- sadly and regretfully- at some of the greatest-ever "lost films.”

* Saved From the Titanic (1912)

The first-ever film made about the sinking of the Titanic. Incredibly, this film was made in the same year the Titanic sank. Doubly incredibly, one of the cast members was Dorothy Gibson, who was an actual passenger and survivor of the Titanic's ill-fated voyage.

* The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908)

The first film ever made about The Wizard of Oz. The film actually features an appearance by Oz author L. Frank Baum. The film was only shown in road shows as part of a theater presentation. The paint decomposed and it was discarded.

* We Must Do Our Best (1909)

Moe Howard, later the leader of the Three Stooges, did this silent Vitagraph film. He was 12 years old at the time. Billed as “Harry Moses Horwitz" (his real name), Moe plays "a bully.” Talk about prophetic!

* The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1914)

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What’s better than a happy baby laughing? TWO happy babies laughing! So here we have two minutes that are guaranteed to ease the stress of your long day. Ann D’s 9-month-old twins have learned to play peek-a-boo with each other. They’re having a great time. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

It takes a lot of guts for a man (or boy) to declare his feelings to a woman (or girl) with whom he does not have a relationship already. After a long time planning and building up the nerve, it can be devastating when things don’t turn out like they do in the movies. The Concourse collected tales of grand romantic gestures gone wrong -or that were rejected- from readers. I just had to share this story from Scott:

   I was in high school and was courting a girl that I was enamored with. Her birthday was coming up, and I had the best idea: I would set up a picnic at a nearby lake with a very nice home-cooked meal, and have my friends go out and set it up while I picked her up and took her out. I had balloons, flowers, and a delicious Italian meal, and my friends were all set to take it out to set it up. As they were leaving my house with all of the stuff, I had to run to a physical-therapy appointment, and then I was off to pick her up.

    As we were both leaving, I was following behind my friend when I saw the balloons fly out the window. Fortunately, they were attached to the flowers, so I knew they weren't going anywhere, and I thought my friend was just fucking with me. Turns out, my buddy rolled his window down and the balloons flew out; he tried to reach out and grab them at the same time the window was automatically rolling up. To prevent his hand from getting messed up, he reached with his right hand to stop the window from rolling up ... thus leaving no hands on the wheel. My buddy wrecked his brand-new SUV into a tree at about 40 miles per hour with all of the stuff for my date inside.

    I called and cancelled my PT appointment, called the cops, and made sure everybody was alright. My mom came and took all the stuff out to the lake for me while I got my friend home. I eventually went to pick up the girl and was pretty freaking shaken up about the whole thing. We finally got to the park right about sunset. Only problem was that the park closed at dark, so a park ranger came and made us leave after about 20 minutes. It was not a good day.

That one was a comedy of errors, but there are also stories of romantic declarations that are mortifying, funny, creepy, pathetic, tragic, and downright depressing -and they may remind you of something you once experienced on one side or the other when you were too young to know better.
-via Metafilter

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It couldn’t have been easy for John Green to come up with such tantalizing tidbits about our Founding Fathers that we haven’t heard before. Who knew Samuel Adams was ugly? That John Jay got a new job every time he left home? That Paul Revere was drunk during his famous ride? Of course, Benjamin Franklin gets the biggest share of trivia,because that man was a never-ending font of awesomeness. We also get to witness Green growing a beard. Learn all that and more in the latest episode of the mental_floss List Show.

Sarah Andersen of the webcomic Sarah’s Scribbles created a multi-part post on caffeine addiction, a syndrome that she and other comic artists are all too familiar with. You can see the whole sequence at College Humor. I can relate, except the part about trying to quit. I've never tried to quit caffeine.

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It’s about time that Screen Junkies gave the Honest Trailer treatment to Pirates of the Caribbean. The first silly but enjoyable film came out almost 12 years ago, but since it was a hit, they had to go and produce several increasingly lame sequels. That’s the main focus of this trailer, because if Disney had left well enough alone, we probably would have watched that first movie a few more times instead of being somewhat more disappointed as each of the sequels followed. -via Viral Viral Videos 

An elderly bell ringer at All Saints Church in Brailsford, Derbyshire, UK, was injured while performing her duties on Sunday. She was caught in the rope and lifted off the floor, and then she landed hard, injuring her hip and arm. The spiral stairs leading to the 11th-century bell tower are too narrow for an ambulance crew to carry out the injured woman. So they called out the experts: the Derby Mountain Rescue Team, composed of unpaid volunteer mountain climbers trained in rescue operations. A spokesman for the team said,

"A local team member was first on scene and provided medical attention whilst other team members arrived to evacuate the casualty.

"She was placed in a vacuum mattress - effectively an all-body splint - and carried down the stairs to be handed over to an EMAS ambulance crew.

"As we say these days, mountain rescue - more than just mountains."

BBC News has a video report. -via Arbroath

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An 1872 editorial in the New York Times begins with the premise that only insane people surround themselves with cats. It is taken as fact that cats are “treacherous, selfish, and cunning,” while a dog is a “respectable and upright animal.”  

There is evidently a bond of union between the lunatic and the cat which does not exist between sane persons and that undesirable animal. Possibly this bond consists in the fact that in most cases the lunatic develops a stealthy, tortuous cunning which assimilates him in some degree to the cat.

It’s a curious article, going into detail about a rich man who bequeathed his wealth to the care of his many cats. Now, 140 years later, there’s little to disagree with in the article, except for the use of the word “lunatic.” We now prefer the term “crazy cat person,” and since there are so many of us, there isn’t much of a stigma to being one these days. -via mental_floss

(Image credit: Hery Zo Rakotondramanana)

Mark Methot (Image credit: Flickr user 5of7)

Something I never knew, or even thought about: hockey teams have their own dentists. Hockey arenas have dental chairs, ready for emergency work. And a dentist who takes the job is liable to see things he’d never see otherwise.

No other sport has a job quite like a dentist in the NHL. In some games, these dentists simply sit and watch, usually using season tickets provided by the team, waiting for a problem that never happens. In other games, they leave those seats and jump right into medical emergencies the likes of which they would never see anywhere else.

Some team dentists enjoy the game and turn back into dentists when they’re needed. Others watch with trepidation, always worrying about a pending dental disaster. One hit looks brutal and it’s nothing. Another hit looks like nothing, and it breaks a jaw. In the wild nights of NHL dentists, nobody ever knows what’s coming next.

Bleacher Report talked to several NHL dentists about their jobs and some of the emergencies they’ve seen. Some have attended injuries way beyond teeth, because they were there and ready when other medical personnel weren’t. The article is fascinating, but not for the faint of heart. (via Digg)

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Prepare a coelacanth? Surely people don’t eat the most ancient of all fish species -they are so rare that we once thought they were extinct! No, that’s not what this preparation means. The American Museum of Natural History’s series Shelf Life shows us how science labs and museums prepare specimens of coelacanth to preserve them for scientific study. Ichthyology Curator Melanie L. J. Stiassny takes us through the process as it has been done for various purposes. -Thanks, Julia Kramer!

Avid Star Wars fans Tony Giordano and his wife Stefaney are expecting a baby soon. They got artist Nick Wolfe to paint Stefaney’s expanding belly with R2D2’s dome! They surprised the obstetrician with the artwork, then visited fellow fan Daniel Deutsch (previously at Neatorama) and his personal office droid.

It was a great opportunity for photographs! You can see there’s a distinct likeness between the two. -Thanks, Daniel!

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Kate Beaton at Hark! A Vagrant has introduced me to another new historical figure. Born in 1886, Tom Longboat was an Onandagan from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. He was an outstanding athlete, winning, among many other races, the Boston Marathon in 1907. He collapsed during the Olympic marathon in 1908, then turned professional and was crowned the World Professional Champion. Longboat received many accolades during his career, but sports writers could never get past his identity as a Canadian Indian, and treated him an anomaly, calling him "obstinate" and “unmanageable,” and falling on racist tropes to describe him at every turn.

Beaton has a half-dozen strips illustrating events in Longboat’s life, taken from an account in the book Canadian Folk: Portraits of Remarkable Lives, where you can read about Tom Longboat.

While movies are filled with situations in which a bystander, played by one of our favorite action heroes, must rise to the occasion and take out the bad guys single-handed, we often look at those stories as if they’d never happen in real life. But they do. Cracked has six stories of extraordinary events and the ordinary people who performed in a manner you wouldn’t even believe in a movie. Tom Bennett was one of them.

Tom R. Bennett was the copilot on Trans Australian Airways flight 408 in 1960 when his flight faced the first midair hijacking in Australian history. The hijacker, Alex Hildebrandt, methodically checked off pretty much all of the villainous movie hijacker boxes by being a disgruntled Russian with a sawed-off rifle and a bomb that he had assembled in the bathroom, presumably after disabling the smoke alarm, which is also strictly against air safety regulations. He whipped out his lethal gun-and-bomb combination and began threatening everyone on board.

First Officer Bennett, rather than instantly cave in to Hildebrandt's demands, calmly approached the man and asked him to knock it off, which, while brave, is not a tactic that generally works on hijackers. Hildebrandt responded by firing a warning shot into the ceiling, to show Bennett he meant business. Bennett responded to that by punching Hildebrandt directly in the face with one hand while simultaneously ripping wires out of Hildebrandt's bomb with the other, disarming it.

There’s more to that story of bravery, and five others that will make you believe in ordinary heroes.

In the small town of Wolhusen, Switzerland, a funeral home chapel sits as it has since the 17th century. Its walls are decorated with a wraparound mural depicting the Dance of Death, in which corpse-like death figures come to claim the living. What makes this particular mortuary chapel different is that, from the entryway to the murals, real human skulls are part of the decor.

Inside, the mural is comprised of a series of figures in the classic Dance of Death motif, showing people from all walks of life (kings, bishops, musicians, and peasants) being led away by dancing skeletal figures, each of which has a real human skull set in the plaster where its head should be. The skulls are even situated to match the angle of the skeletons' poses, with one set in the plaster face first to show the skeleton with its back turned to the viewer.

Take a mini-tour of the Wolhusen Totentanz in text and pictures at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Michael Bukowski & Jeanne D'Angelo)

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Which TV dog is your favorite? This supercut tries to cover the most beloved of them, whether they talk, daydream, do tricks, wreak havoc, or just get made fun of. You have to admit that any show is improved with the addition of a dog to the cast. -via Tastefully Offensive