The abandoned Istvántelek Train Yard (Istvántelki főműhely), otherwise known as the "Red Star Train Graveyard," occupies a vast area of land outside Budapest. More than 100 locomotives and train cars rot away, some in deteriorating depots, others out in the field. Among these are some very rare train engines, and a few cars that are said to have transported prisoners to Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
Built at the beginning of the 20th century as a repair yard for the national railway, only a few southern parts of the train yard are still in use, while most of it is abandoned.
Two large depots, a few smaller sheds and open-air areas are scattered with locomotives and railcars, some of them very ancient, others more recent, from Hungary's time as part of the Soviet Regime. Some of the trains were brought here to be repaired and exhibited in the Budapest Railway Museum but never made it to the display and were instead left behind in the train yard.
There are a few gems rusting away in the graveyard that are sure to make any train enthusiast's heart beat faster. A few Hungarian MAV 424 steam engines weigh in at 137 tons and bear a red star on their fronts, which earned the train yard its nickname. There is also an engine of the MAV 301 series, used from 1911 to 1914, which is one of only a few still in existence.
Linked to this engine are several German freight cars, which may be the very ones that transported hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to their death in Auschwitz during Nazi occupation in World War II. Standing in front of the freight cars, one can only imagine the horror, tragedy, and despair that went on inside of them.
Among the more recent items in the train graveyard are some engines and cars from the Soviet era, inside of which rail tickets from the 1960s can still be found. Altogether the train graveyard offers a great alternative to the usual Budapest tourism sites, not only for train lovers, but for anyone with an eye for history. The engines and cars are slowly losing their battle against nature, and before long the trains may be entirely obscured by overgrown plant life.
A strange little shop located in North Orlando, the Carmine Boutique caters to those with a special taste for the odd. Two-headed mummies, strange taxidermy, century-old occult books, if you have a penchant for the unusual and sometimes frightening, Carmine has something for you.
This location also hosts live events, including bizarre film nights, magic and sideshow acts, and classes on taxidermy and kinky leather-working.
The Heald Square Monument is a Chicago landmark, an 11-foot tall bronze sculpture by Larado Taft showing General George Washington standing between the two principal financiers of the American Revolution, Robert Morris and Haym Salomon.
What makes this beautiful sculpture particularly interesting is the little-known bronze plaque on the back side of the granite base, showing a seated Statue of Liberty. In this depiction, Lady Liberty is "stretching out her arms to welcome all persons of whatever race and belief."
Built in the 17th century, this golden temple has amazed its visitors so much that since its earliest days it has been called the "eighth wonder of the world."
Found inside the Church of Santo Domingo in the city of Puebla, not far from Mexico City, the Rosary Chapel could be arguably the best example of the New Spanish Baroque style, its purpose was to honor the Virgin Mary as well as to teach the locals the practice of the rosary, of which, the Dominicans, (the order in charge of the temple) were ardent promoters.
Built between 1650 and 1690, the Rosary Chapel features an astonishing artisanal work, mixing the traditional Catholic symbols with those of the region under a prominent gold-plated leaf that makes the place shine with ethereal-like light from the windows right under its dome.
The chapel features on its walls six paintings telling the biblical story of Jesus since his birth to his debate with the doctors at the temple, all of which feature the Virgin Mary and are called Gozos de la Virgen, also underneath the paintings there is a succession of blue and white ceramic tiles known as Talaveras de Puebla, that actually form a gigantic rosary itself, with each bead being represented as an angel's head. Right under the dome there is an altar and a baldachin (also called Ciprés in Mexican spanish), the latter made in marble but covered in gold of course, with a representation of Our Lady of the Rosary in the first level, a statue of Saint Dominic in the second, and a figure of Archangel Gabriel atop.
Although there are several works of art trying to match the splendor and grandiosity of this temple, the Rosary Chapel stands out not only for being located in a place where gold was scarce, but also because its 23-carat gold-plated leaf has remained attached to the decorations for more than 300 years, partially due to the composition of the glue used, that some local guides claim was composed of aloe, honey, bull's blood and egg whites (although a restoration made in the 1970s might have helped too). While in Puebla, do not hesitate to visit this fantastic work of religious architecture to appreciate all of its details and works.
Argleton is a small English town which does not actually exist. It appears on Google Maps and Google Earth, but in reality, nothing is there.
The supposed location of Argleton, according to Google, was just off the A59 road within the civil parish of Aughton in West Lancashire, England, which in reality is nothing more than empty fields. Since data from Google is used by other online information services, Argleton was consequently treated as a real settlement and appeared in numerous listings for things such as real estate and letting agents, employment agencies and weather.
But although the people, businesses and services in those listings are all in fact real, they are actually based elsewhere in the same postcode district. The town was later marked as "closed" on Google Maps.
One possible explanation is that cartographers have often inserted fake places to catch copyright violators trying to copy the map, a trick that goes back to paper maps. There are also some stranger, more far-fetched theories. It has been noted that "Argle" seems to echo the word "Google", while the name is also an anagram of "Not Large" and "Not Real G", with the letter G perhaps representing Google. Alternatively, it has been suggested that "Argleton" is merely a misspelling of "Aughton", although both names appear on the map.
The otter S. melilutra would have weighed 110 pounds—about the size of a large dog or a small woman. It had the teeth of a badger and could smash or pry open even the most resistant clams and other shellfish with its brute strength. It’s not the sort of creature you’d want to run into the swampy places where it lived.
Lucky for us humans, it lived 6.2 million years ago.
The newly described species of otter was discovered after a nearly complete skull was found in southwestern China. The skull was crushed in a “pancake-like shape,” LiveScience reports, but by using CT scans, a team of researchers was able to reconstruct it. Teeth, jawbones, and limb bones from the same species were also found at the site.
This ancient species of otter would have been larger than any living otter, and scientists are trying to understand why it was so giant, how it swam, and how it moved on the ground, LiveScience reports.
We have one additional question: Was it cute, like modern-day otters? Or, at this size, did it switch over to straight-up terrifying?
Most people are familiar with that most clichéd of old cinema tropes: the damsel-in-distress, tied to the railroad tracks by a dastardly villain, only to be saved at the last moment by the dashing hero.
As a method of murder, this seems so melodramatic and old-timey that it must have originated back in the days of the silent film. But that scene rarely ever occurred, and probably not in the way you think it did.
“It's really a tricky subject because people have this incredibly specific trope in mind (villain in top hat and mustache, screaming female victim, said villain tying or chaining said victim to tracks),” says Fritzi Kramer, creator of the silent film blog, Movies Silently. “But then when they are told that it was not actually common in silent film, they quickly grab for something, anything to prove that it happened.”
On her site Kramer identifies the first occurrence of this type of scene in an 1867 Victorian stage melodrama called Under The Gaslight. The play's stage directions call for one of the characters (named Snorkey) to be tied to the train tracks by the villain. It's close to the scene we're familiar with save for the fact that the person on the tracks is a man, and he's saved by the leading lady.
This sort of train-based peril became a regular element of the melodramas as a cheap and easy way to create suspense. Moving into the early-20th century, and the silent film era, many films took their cues from those same 19th-century stage dramas. One of the more famous examples of this type of story was the serial The Perils of Pauline, which saw the titular heroine encounter all kinds of scoundrels and villains each week, who would put her in life-threatening danger—although it is important to note that she was never tied to the railroad tracks. This sort of overblown adventure tale became a well-known story type in its time, but that melodramatic style also inspired some comedies, which spoofed some of the more overused elements of the genre.
At the time, trains were a major form of transportation, and consequently showed up as set pieces in many silent films. There were often instances wherein a character would end up on the train tracks, either from falling or being knocked out, such as in the movie, The Fatal Ring. In many cases, like with that first instance, it would be the male hero who would end up on the tracks, having to be saved by the woman.
Many of the elements of the trope most people are familiar with are there, but the mustachioed villain cackling while they tied a helpless woman to the tracks was just not something that happened in dramatic silent films. Not that that has stopped people from assuming that it did.
“This is an incredibly specific trope but people trying to prove it was a common event in silent films will use comedies and any railroad peril to try to prove their point," says Kramer. As trains were the form of public transit during the silent era, it's hardly surprising they were included in the action. But since the trope has such specific ingredients, I think it is reasonable to demand that all those ingredients be present.”
The specific scene as we know it didn’t come into its own until after the heyday of the melodrama, once the genre became less popular and people started to spoof the overblown stories. Some of the most oft-cited examples of the woman-tied-to-the-tracks trope are from a pair of silent comedies Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life and Teddy at the Throttle. Both of these films were send-ups of the cartoonish lack of subtlety presented in melodramas, and featured scenes in which damsels were tied (or chained) to the tracks.
It is comedies like this that most often get referenced when people look into the history of damsels on the tracks. “This is like taking the Saturday Night Fever spoof scene from Madagascar and using it to 'prove' that disco was the number-one music of the 2000s,” says Kramer.
Despite being a sort of half-remembered tribute to a scene that had never actually existed, the damsel on the tracks quickly became the kind of recurring trope that everyone is familiar with, even if they’re not sure where they first saw it. When The Perils of Pauline was remade with sound in 1947, sure enough, Pauline ended up tied to the tracks.
Tying women to the train tracks pretty much became the signature move of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon character Snidely Whiplash, a caricature of a scheming melodrama villain. And in the modern day, the scene has morphed into a kind of visual shorthand for cartoonish villainy, even if it isn’t found in nearly as many films and TV shows as it once was.
Kramer attributes the continued connection of the trope to the history of silent film to a number of factors, including the gulf of time that exists between the era of the silent film and the modern age, and the relative accessibility of silent comedies that featured the trope as opposed to the dramas they were inspired by. The much more prominent peril in silent films was the threat of sexual assault—having someone tied to the tracks was a much less offensive threat in later representations and homages to the old silent films.
Correct or not, the image of the damsel on the tracks seems like it’s here to stay, and in Kramer’s experience people don’t want to know the truth. “A pretty decent chunk of the population is convinced that screaming damsels were constantly lashed to tracks by mustachioed villains," she says. "The fact that this trope was incredibly rare even in serials does not dissuade them.”
Around 8 a.m. this past Saturday, a tram driver on the 60 line in Vienna stopped in Rodaun for a bathroom break. He locked up his tram, and went off to take care of business. But when he returned shortly after, he was surprised to find an empty set of tracks: While relieving himself, the driver had also been relieved of his tram.
The culprit? A 36-year-old former tram driver who really, really missed his job, the Local reports. The man had been let go several years earlier, and had supposedly turned in his activation key. Police are still investigating how he managed to get into the driver's seat and get the tram started.
When they heard what had happened, tram company Wiener Linien quickly shut off power to the tracks, stranding the tram thief, who quickly ran off again. But before that, he drove the tram several stops, announcing each time that no passengers should get on board, "as the tram was not part of the normal service," the Local reports.
He was arrested this morning, and is being charged with "theft of a public vehicle." The tram probably misses him already.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
While driving through the outskirts of Wuppertal in the Rhine-Rhur metropolitan region of Germany, drivers are wont to stare in disbelief as a giant multicolored cluster of Legos hovers from a bridge overhead.
Though it may not be visually apparent, these Legos are actually the product of more than a century of locomotive history.
The Wuppertal Northern Railway was constructed in 1879 to compete with the adjacent BME line for train passengers crossing through Wuppertal, Germany. But the BME line, built three decades earlier, had already claimed the easiest and most centrally located route, forcing the Wuppertal Northern Railway to take a complex detour through tunnels and atop viaducts.
Needless to say, the Wuppertal Northern Railway was vastly outcompeted by the BME, and by the late 1990s the track became abandoned.
In the coming years, the former railway was converted into a bike path, but the concrete bridges remained dull when viewed from ground level. To revitalize one of the bridges, the city of Wuppertal hired street artist Megx, who was inspired by his two daughters’ enjoyment of playing with Legos. After getting permission from The Lego Group, Megx and a team of painters spent two weeks painting the 2700 square foot Schwesterstraße Bridge in Lego form, a design that still clings to the bridge today.
The Government Printing Office is perhaps the largest publisher of reading materials that nobody is ever likely to read, featuring arcane tomes like the Congressional Record and hardcopies of the 2,000-page Federal Budget.
The hardcopy printing operation has become an anachronism in the age of PDF, but a century ago the huge brick GPO building played a key role in the U.S. democracy’s office supply operations.
Before Congress established its own print shop, it relied on local newspapers to fulfill piecemeal contracts. That arrangement worked fine in the early years of the United States, when the Federal Government had only five departments. The Treasury office staff was by far the largest in the year 1800, with 75 employees. The State Department only had five.
According to a history of the office titled 100 GPO Years, all that changed during the Civil War, when “Government printing orders mushroomed. Presses jammed every corner. Machines in private shops were rented. Paper doubled, trebled in cost, and became almost unobtainable.”
On March 4, 1861 the Government Printing Office was established to put an end to the “free enterprise” system and impose some regularity. 100 GPO Years recalls the words of Congressman John A. Gurley, who took to the House floor that same day to speak on the importance of the occasion:
“It is unlike any other department of Government service. For ships you can wait; for guns you can generally wait; and, ordinarily, you are in no special hurry for the various munitions of war; but you cannot be deprived of your printing for a single day without serious embarrassment and loss of time.”
“In the sense, therefore, of a leading element of the law-making power, the public printing underlies your armies, it underlies your navies, and every other arm of the national service; and in this important particular, therefore, bears no analogy to the other departments of the Government.”
Government printing needs have declined significantly in recent decades and the GPO has been reducing hardcopy production in favor of online publication. In 2013 it printed only 25,000 copies of the 2,000-page Federal Budget (5,000 fewer than in 2011), and in 2014 the GPO’s name was updated from “Printing” to “Government Publishing Office.”
The GPO’s hardcopy operation isn’t likely to ever disappear completely. Print copies of all congressional documents are mandated by law, and repeal of the obscure provision probably ranks near the bottom of lawmakers’ legislative agenda.
When planning a trip, it's easy to feel torn between wanting to experience a city's must-see iconic landmarks and discovering something unknown to the most passersby. As it happens, there's a third category that checks off both of these things at once: unknown spaces hiding in extremely well-known places.
These secret gems can add an extra layer of exploration to checklist destinations like Times Square or the Eiffel Tower—if you know where to find them. We combed through the Atlas to pull out 11 of the least obvious spaces lurking in the most obvious places.
You can find London’s smallest police station tucked away in the southeast corner of Trafalgar Square. But you can also be forgiven for missing it: It looks more like a neoclassical TARDIS than a police station, and there won’t be a crowd of tourists gathered around it, merrily snapping away on their cameras. The Lilliputian Police Station was built in the 1930s to serve as a watch-post, an eye on Trafalgar Square, which is a magnet for London’s protesters, rioters, marchers, and pigeons. Inside, there is only room for a single person.
When the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889 to universal wonder and acclaim, designer Gustave Eiffel soaked up the praise. If that wasn’t enough, it was soon revealed that he had built himself a small apartment near the top of the world wonder, garnering him the envy of the Paris elite in addition to his new fame.
Eiffel’s private apartment was not large, but it was cozy. In contrast to the steely industrial girders of the rest of the tower, the apartment was “furnished in the simple style dear to scientists,” according to reporter Henri Girard. The walls were covered in warm wallpaper and the furniture included soft chintzes, wooden cabinets, and even a grand piano, creating a comfortable atmosphere perched nearly 1,000 feet in the air.
Little known to the throngs of commuters that pass through Grand Central Terminal each day, there have been posh, exclusive tennis courts hidden on the upper levels of train station since the 1960s.
The Vanderbilt Tennis Club is the current purveyor of the courts, which are located behind the the top portion of the terminal’s famous facade window. So next time you look at that iconic architectural spot, remember that someone up there is getting a few rounds in.
Every day over 300,000 people pass through the Stazione Centrale, Milan’s main railway station. Most have no idea that the series of closed doors they are walking past give access to the most luxurious and exclusive room in the building, the Padiglione Reale, or Royal Pavilion, an exclusive waiting room built for Italy’s royal family in the 1920s.
Even though the monarchy was dismantled in Italy right after World War II, the royal waiting room is still there. The ground level has a couple of bare rooms and serves as an anteroom to the upper level. A sumptuous room is on the first floor, at the same level as the railway tracks. There are marble interiors in different architectural styles, sculptures of the royal emblems, elegant furnitures provided by the best interior designers of the time, and a balcony with a view on the public square below.
Unveiled on August 19, 1960, the giant statue of Leonardo da Vinci at Rome’s Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci Airport has greeted visitors ever since. Millions of people have passed it over the decades, but it was not until 2006 that a secret hidden inside the statue was discovered.
That year, the statue underwent renovation, and one of the workers made a strange discovery: a small hatch, located at a height of about 30 feet, approximately in the middle of the statue. The hatch was carefully opened and inside were found two parchments, still in perfect condition. Even if the secret of the statue is not widely known, sometimes people can be seen looking the statue up and down with binoculars, much to the amusement of passersby.
Radio City Music Hall is one of the jewels in New York’s Art Deco crown. Since it opened in 1932, over 300 million visitors to the “show place of the nation” have marveled at its breathtaking elegance. According to legend, to show their appreciation for his talents, the architects of the great performance space decided to give a present to the theatre's impresario, Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel. High up inside Radio City, they built him an apartment, as lavishly detailed in the art deco style as the theatre downstairs.
After Roxy died in 1936 the apartment lay unused and forgotten, hidden away far above the audiences he used to entertain. No one lives there now, but it remains in pristine condition.
Flinders Street Station, the busiest railway hub in all of Australia, is home to a decaying beauty of a ballroom, an abandoned leftover from the bygone era of railroad romance. While the station serves nearly 100,000 travelers a day, the old third-floor ballroom, closed off from the public since 1985, rarely opens it doors to visitors. Viewing the space has been so coveted in recent years that, for the Open House Melbourne weekend in 2015, special entry was granted by a “Golden Ticket” tucked into a lucky few visitors’ programs.
Despite its location in one of the most expensive and photographed places in the world, the building at One Times Square is nearly completely empty. Walgreens occupies the first floor, and leases everything up through the 21st floor, but has chosen to leave the building vacant because the advertising on its sides brings in enough money to sustain it.
The building does have one other tenant, however, and that is Jeff Straus, who runs the famous New Year's Eve celebration from his 22nd-floor office. Above him is the New Year's ball itself, located year-round on a metal roof deck, waiting for its annual moment of glory.
An anonymous-looking traffic island in the middle of London’s busy Charing Cross Road holds a mysterious secret. It's a forgotten remnant of the old London, hidden beneath one of its busiest streets.
If you look down at the metal grate covering the island you will see two tiled, Victorian street names set into the wall below ground level. Bearing the faded name of Little Compton Street, it is a beguiling glimpse into a long lost road buried underneath the modern day streets of London. Today all traces of this secret London street have long gone, apart from two perfectly preserved road signs.
When New York City’s branch libraries were first built, about a century ago, they needed people to take care of them. Andrew Carnegie had given New York $5.2 million to create a city-wide system of library branches, and these buildings were heated by coal. Each had a custodian, who was tasked with keeping those fires burning and who lived in the library, often with their family.
But since the ’70s and ’80s, when the coal furnaces started being upgraded and library custodians began retiring, those apartments have been emptying out, and the idyll of living in a library has disappeared. Today there are just 13 library apartments left in the New York Public Library system. Some have spent decades empty and neglected.
The New Yorker hotel’s giant red sign is often photographed as a city landmark, mostly on account of its name. Yet the history of the building is largely unknown. The New Yorker is filled with untold secrets and forgotten stories, including (though by no means limited to) the beautiful Art Deco tunnel that ran from the lobby to Penn Station, which is still hidden underneath 34th Street. Thousands of tourists and New Yorkers walk by the bustling corner of Eighth Avenue and 34 Street not knowing this remarkable tunnels runs underneath the historic hotel, filled with excess old hotel fittings, chairs, carpets, and beautiful Art Deco tiling.
When Ned Kelly, Australia’s most infamous outlaw, went to the gallows at the ripe old age of 25, he had already spent 10 years leading a life of crime and notoriety. Local newspapers reported obsessively on the events of his capture and trial, and recounted his final words: “Such is life.”
The makeshift armour worn by Ned Kelly, fashioned from repurposed metal plow blades, is now part of the collection at the State Library of Victoria, along with his death mask and an 800-word manifesto that helped seal his fate as an unlikely folk hero.
Kelly was born in June of 1855 in Beveridge, Victoria, and was a “Robin Hood” figure to some, a vicious punk to others. One of eight children born to a convict father and a soon-to-be widowed Irish immigrant mother, when his father died after a prison sentence Ned was head of the house at age 12. By age 14, he was a convict himself. Left destitute, the Kelly family were soon well-known outlaws, robbing banks, with Ned eventually killing two policemen.
1880 was the year of the Kelly family's undoing, at the siege at Glenrowan, which led to Ned's capture, trial, conviction, and execution. The armour was taken as souvenirs by the police officers, and as a result it took many years for the Library to re-collect and assemble all the missing parts. The full suit can now be seen on display in the Dome Galleries.
Kelly was hanged on the 11th of November, at the gallows in Melbourne Gaol, across the road on Russell Street from the State library that now holds these very artifacts.
Nothing against that show or its now-richer stars, but on a purely creative level, more ideas are thrown out in the television world than perhaps in any other industry.
That’s because most new shows don’t make it past the pilot, and television pilots are, at their core, just giant, costly bets.
And I’m not kidding when I say costly: The average major network spends roughly $100 million a year on development, according to the Los Angeles Times, with a big chunk of this being made up of unsold pilots.
The problem is that creating pilots is really expensive, because you basically need to put together all of the elements for the show, from plot, to script, to cast, all for the benefit of a handful of executives.
Which means that the cost of a pilot—estimated at $8 million in the case of dramas—is four times the cost of a regular episode. The issues with the process have led networks in recent years to order shows that go directly to series.
That means that there are often winners and losers—along with a great desire to recoup some form of investment from the lost bet.
A good example of this aired on July 3, 1987—a Friday night, the day before the Fourth of July. It was a new show created by Jim Henson, and it debuted on CBS.
Considering Henson’s track record at the time—having played a direct role in creating at least threelegitimatelyclassic television shows by this point, and while he was coming off the commercial failure of the cult classic Labyrinth, he was still doing very bankable stuff—it was a weird way to treat a major star.
But Puppetman, which can be seen here in full, didn’t make it past the pilot stage, so it was dumped into the CBS rotation as part of its anthology series CBS Summer Playhouse. It’s where pilots go to die.
The idea behind Puppetman was slightly ahead of its time—essentially a comedy about a puppet show, breaking the fourth wall in a way slightly closer to NewsRadio than The Muppet Show—but it wasn’t picked up, and CBS Summer Playhouse was something of a last ditch effort to see if audiences would really care. (Alas, audiences weren’t won over by puppeteer Richard Hunt’s considerable charms as a human actor.)
Another show of this vein, a small-screen adaptation of Coming to America, showed up on CBS Summer Playhouse in 1989. The passage of time hasn’t made the show any better as an idea.
“The pilot didn’t sell, and for good reason: It is bad. The movie is to the television show as McDonald’s is to McDowell’s,” recalled Fusion’s Molly Fitzpatrick, in a critique of the TV adaptation of Eddie Murphy’s career pinnacle.
The show, which featured In Living Color actor Tommy Davidson doing his best Prince Tariq impression, flopped hard, in part because (according to Fitzpatrick) it “mostly functions as a disjointed vehicle for Davidson’s Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson impressions.”
(A year later, CBS actually went to series with a similarly not-great idea for a movie-turned show, Uncle Buck.)
It makes sense that a show like CBS Summer Playhouse existed. During the early years of television, there was a long legacy of anthology shows like Love, American Style airing segments that were intended as backdoor pilots, a strategy that gave us a lot of junk, but also one of the most popular TV shows of all time, Happy Days.
But CBS Summer Playhouse, and equivalent shows for ABC (Vacation Playhouse, which aired between 1963 and 1967) and NBC (under various names during the late 1970s, including Comedy Theatre, Comedy Time, and Comedy Theater) were essentially created to fill up space during a time of the year when people would rather be outside than watching TV.
(As Television Obscurities notes, many attempts were made to repackage these pilots during the first 30 years or so of television’s mainstream success.)
It was a little less obvious at first, because anthology series were common in the ‘70s. But by the 1980s, cable had taken the wind out the concept.
This phenomenon was eventually seen for what it was—filler—but it nonetheless brought some interesting ideas for shows to the small screen. In CBS’s case, it was relatively transparent about the purpose of its anthology show: The network was clearly litmus testing. It gave viewers the opportunity to call into one of two 1-900 numbers—1-900-220-2311 if they liked the show, 1-900-220-2322 if they didn’t.
As it turns out, having people vote on failed pilots creates two problems: First, people who vote like everything—the pilots, on average, received 90 percent approval ratings from people who willingly dialed a pay number and told CBS their opinion on a TV show.
Second, the conceit of the show eventually made the idea untenable.
“I think this’ll probably be the last year of Summer Playhouse,” then-CBS President Howard Stringer told Gannett News Service in 1989. “The audience has got the word that these are failed or busted pilots. [That] worked really well for a time, but now the word was out.”
And they never did it again. CBS Summer Playhouse was the last time that a major network blatantly aired unaired pilots in weekly series form.
Of course, the thing about pilots is this: The layer of television executive meddling only goes so far.
Quite often, really terrible stuff gets to air anyway. And good shows die on the vine before they even hit the air. (Fortunately, so do bad shows. Usually.)
In August of 1992, BBC2 decided to make that point in a totally hilarious way, by airing a dedicated theme night to terrible television in the BBC archives they called “TV Hell.”
The night, hosted by Angus Deayton and Paul Merton—with Deayton playing the role of The Devil—is effectively like watching the BBC run roughshod across British television’s long legacy of horrible music performances, bad ideas for shows, and terrible interviews. Of which there were a bunch of all three.
While the concept borrowed somewhat liberally from Mystery Science Theater 3000, it can be said that the endeavor predicted a lot of American trends that hit cable television soon after—including VH1’s nostalgia trip and the controlled mayhem of the Adult Swim block. For a one-time event, its legacy is fairly long.
But the most interesting/disturbing program of the night was a pilot that hadn’t seen light in BBC’s archives in more than 25 years. Mainly for Men, as the unaired pilot was called, appeared to be an attempt to create a TV-show version of a “lad mag.”
“As the title implies, this is a program, fellas, just for you,” host Don Moss states at the start of the program, before analyzing the attractiveness of the Venus de Milo statue.
Everything about the idea (viewable here, though NSFW) was plainly questionable—featuring some nudity, a whole bunch of casual sexism, some apparent shark fishing, and a song about “the ideal woman” playing over scenes of a woman doing housework and dancing around.
(The pilot also spent time talking cars, which emphasizes the vague parallels the show has with the modern-day Top Gear. When Jeremy Clarkson was infamously booted from that show, the Mirrorfirmed up the comparison between the two shows, because of course they did.)
Mainly for Men was relegated to the graveyard slot for an entire night about terrible programming, so you can tell BBC was just looking to get it out of the archive so they could burn it. (Considering that the U.K. actually brought us a quickly cancelled series called Heil Honey I’m Home!, things certainly could have been worse.)
On the plus side, Mainly for Men probably didn’t cost $8 million to produce.
The modern TV pilot game has shifted quite a bit in recent years, due to all the additional options for watching content. With Netflix basically giving money to anyone with a halfway-decent idea, networks seem to be obsessed with either sure things or minimizing the risks of their giant investments.
That means that it’s rare for an unsold pilot to make it to the airwaves in the 21st century, though it still happens. The Munsters has been the subject of multiple failed TV pilots over the years, including before its initial pickup in the 1960s, when a pilot for the show, titled “My Fair Munster,” was created (notably, the unaired pilot, which uses some of the same actors, was in color, though the show it inspired was black-and-white).
But more recently, NBC aired a remake of the show developed by Bryan Fuller, Mockingbird Lane, as a one-hour special. It wasn’t picked up, but is one of the few recent examples of a pilot making it to air.
It’s understandable why the pilot process is in decline. Beyond being costly, the pilot process often—especially in the case of failures—turns out to not be so great for viewers.
But sometimes, the process is the best thing for everyone involved. Two notable examples of this, both of which are somewhat famous:
Lookwell, the Adam West vehicle that played off of the Batman star’s public image to hilarious effect, didn’t get picked up by NBC despite being amazing. However, it’s a good thing it didn’t, because the series’ two creators—Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel—would go on to create some amazing late-night comedy together.
The Jake Effect, a Jason Bateman vehicle that nearly went to air in 2002, is said to be a pretty good show, and was picked up by Bravo as part of its “Brilliant But Cancelled” series. But because NBC decided to drop the show after seven episodes were shot, Bateman was made a free agent, allowing him to redefine both his career and comedy in general with the immortal Arrested Development.
Maybe it’s the luck of the draw. What if these shows actually went to series? Would we see Jason Bateman as a dependable comedic actor, or still trying to shake off his teen image? Would Conan O’Brien still be writing for The Simpsons? It’s hard to tell.
But it makes me wonder about the actors, writers, and producers who didn’t get quite so lucky in the pilot lottery.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
At the bizarre Window of the World “global village” you will find a life-size Mount Rushmore, London’s Tower Bridge, the Great Pyramids of Giza, a miniature version of Myanmar’s Shwedagon Pagoda, and a scaled-down Taj Mahal replica—all without leaving China.
The Window of the World theme park packs 130 world wonders into just 118-acres in western Shenzhen, located in China's Pearl River Delta, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. Visitors can walk under the Arc de Triomphe, take a gondola down the canals of Venice, navigate the Colorado River down the Grand Canyon, and explore St. Basil’s Cathedral in just one day, so long as their feet can handle it.
True to its name, Window of the World features replicas of major attractions from every continent (save Antarctica), from Easter Island to Kenya to Italy. An oversized, disproportionately wide globe sits at the entrance, and visible from all directions is one of the largest Eiffel Tower replicas in the world, at one-third scale.
The park also brings different environments to the subtropical climate of southeastern China, including a reproduction of Niagara falls and a massive, climate-controlled indoor ski center, reminiscent of that of Dubai. It also hosts a variety of festivals throughout the year, with a diverse range of themes such as India, Japan, beer, and Santa Claus.
Perhaps the most petrifying attraction at Window of the World is the “Experience of Death” 4D ride, which has been described as the “world’s most disturbing ride." The experience includes an excruciating 105-degree simulation of being cremated, followed by the passenger emerging in a womb-like room to mimic rebirth.
Two hours into the 1985 James Bond classic A View to a Kill, antagonist Maximilian Zorin has already pulled out most of the bad-guy stops. He's pushed one of his henchmen through a razor-sharp ventilation fan. He's gunned down hundreds of his own employees with an Uzi. He's plotted to flood Silicon Valley, killing millions and destroying the U.S. economy.
But as the plot crescendos and his plans fall to pieces around him, Zorin has one more trick up his sleeve. Sitting in what appears to be an ordinary shed, facing a control panel, he pushes a button marked "inflate," and the whole room begins to rise off the ground. The camera pans out to show a giant airship, puffy and portentous and emblazoned with "Zorin Industries." He's a supervillain—of course he's got a blimp.
Across decades, genres, and media—from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's Baron Bomburst to Batman's Colonel Blimp —if you've got an over-the-top bad guy on the move, odds are good that he's motoring along in an airship. By choosing to have their villains soar through the sky, writers, illustrators and designers aren't just leaning on a stereotype. They're choosing a powerfully inflated symbol, held aloft by decades of historical, aesthetic, and instinctive associations.
"The heart of this association lies in the first World War," says Dr. Giles Camplin, airship historian and editor of the magazine Dirigible. During World War I, the Germany army outfitted Zeppelins with bombs and machine guns and sent them over Great Britain. Although they were supposed to target military sites, the pilots often got lost, and ended up bombing small villages.
"They were flying at night, and navigation was primitive in those days," says Camplin. "There's a lot of evidence that they simply threw their bombs out because the didn't know where the heck they were." Airship raids on Britain caused 557 deaths, and thousands more injuries.
For most people, this was a brand-new war horror. "Until the first World War, civilians were not involved," says Camplin. "It was a thing that the professional soldiers did on the battlefield. And the dastardly Germans produced those Zeppelins, and then they just bombed civilians."
Soon, the sight of an airship struck terror into the hearts of British citizens, who called them "baby-killers." In a letter to a friend, poet D.H. Lawrence wrote that standing under an attack was akin to watching the birth of "a new order, a new heaven above us," with the Zeppelin "having taken over the sky." They were effective enough enemies that the government began putting them on recruitment posters.
In later decades, Nazis were easy cinematic villains, and films like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade saw American heroes commandeering various German transport blimps in order to fight them. As other countries vaulted to the forefront of American villainy, they were afforded their own fictional fleets. Maximilian Zorin’s blond German countenance and collusion with the KGB allowed A View to a Kill to mine residual anti-German and burgeoning anti-Communist sentiment simultaneously, while Baron Bomburst hailed from a thinly disguised analogue of the formerly socialist Bulgaria, called Vulgaria.
Blimps, lacking a crew and filled with hot air, were fitting transport for the inflated aspirations of many of these villains. Their buoyant frames, able to rock to and fro, be pierced or punctured, or deflate, afforded many possibilities for onscreen drama, especially post-war and post-Hindenberg, when they were already seen as inherently dangerous.
"You mention a modern airship, and the media brings up the Hindenberg, which everyone has seen crashing in flames," says Camplin. This even though, as he points out, two-thirds of those involved in the Hindenburg accident survived, as opposed to other accidents like the Concorde which took the lives of all onboard. It's unfair, he says: "If you've got a new ship, they don't show pictures of the Titanic."
If airships have been typecast, it helps that they often look the part. As with all once-new technologies, the airship has been through many incarnations on the way to its current form, giving designers a number of shapes to choose from. Camplin, who helped build Baron Bomburst's pointy-ended airship for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, says it was based on a real blimp made by the Lebaudy Brothers. "The art director saw a picture, and he said 'I must have that shape,'" remembers Camplin. The movie blimp was plagued by steering problems—"we couldn't get the damn thing to come down again," he says—but its sinister appearance was just right.
Modern-day blimps are generally used for advertising, another visual association easily mined by supervillains, who are often obsessed with their own brands. Ratigan's blimp, from 1986's The Great Mouse Detective, is outfitted in the rodent's signature purple and boasts a golden "R." In the 2019 Blade Runner envisions, a blimp appears momentarily, trying to entice passerby into participating in its society’s plan for space domination: “A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities.....absolutely free.”
Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, the over-the-top antagonist of popular animated TV show Phineas and Ferb, has an airship emblazoned with his company name, "Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc." Every time it comes onscreen, a sunny jingle blares: "Doofenshmirtz Evil Dirigible!" This tendency has real-life analogues: Shady entrepreneur and boy-band-manager Lou Pearlman got his start at Ponzi-scheming with a fraudulent IPO for a business called Airship International which, as Billboard once noted, used the stock exchange ticker abbreviation “BLMP.”
Leaving aside these historical and current associations, a huge thing overhead is just unnerving, says Camplin, who remembers a hot air balloon safari he took in the 1970s. "The animals behaved really strangely," he says. "They were frightened of this shape in the sky." For mammals, a shadow passing overhead might mean a storm, or worse, a predator. Vervet monkeys even have a specific alarm call that means "here comes an eagle," which spurs their peers to look straight up and then take cover.
When Camplin helped to pilot a large "flying sculpture" over the United States 15 years later, humans behaved similarly. "We went out without any pre-publicity," he says. "And everybody went nuts because it looked like aliens were coming. It caused a huge sensation." The response struck him as primal: "It's going right back to the monkey heritage."
Today, those like Camplin who see a bright future for the airship have to overcome all of these associations, both instinctual and learned. Airship enthusiasts believe the technology has the potential to transform everything from sea patrolling to low-fuel, long-distance transport—but when laypeople think of dirigibles, they usually picture them aflame, or looming scarily overhead, piloted by a movie rogue. "It's really difficult, because when you start talking to people seriously about the future use of airships, you've got to unpack all that," he says. "You've got a toxic brand."
The sandbags of the past make it hard for good-guy blimps to get taken seriously. But some modern-day airships have bypassed public doubt by embracing their heritage—Hendrick's Gin, for instance, flies a mean-looking blimp every summer, and Amazon recently won a patent for an "airborne fulfillment center," filled with a warehouse's worth of products and aided by thousands of "delivery drones." As the future approaches, our airship overlords at the vanguard, it may be time for Lawrence's "new order" after all.
A simple stone marker on a Southern California golf course marks the spot where a Japanese submarine tried to take out an oil field at the beginning of World War II. It didn’t succeed, but the attack tragically hastened the government’s plan to round up more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans and place them in internment camps.
It was a little after 7 p.m. on February 23, 1942, in the small town of Goleta, about 10 miles up the coast from Santa Barbara. Ten-year-old J.J. Hollister and his family had just settled in to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio, when the boy thought he heard thunder. There was a thump, and J.J. and his family ran outside to find bright flashes lighting up the Ellwood Oil Field, just off shore.
A Japanese submarine was shelling Goleta, in the hope of destroying the oil installations. Unlike other oil fields on the California coast, Ellwood had no military protection, making it an easy target. In all, a dozen or two shells landed on Goleta, but little physical damage was done. Instead, the toll of the attack fell on the national psyche, with headlines crying “Submarine Shells Southland Oilfield,” and “First Attack of War on Continental U.S.”
The panic created by the attack at Ellwood sparked what became known as the “Battle of Los Angeles,” when the following night saw a barrage of defensive anti-aircraft fire by the U.S. military, an overreaction to the spotting of an innocent weather balloon.
Today two markers along the Santa Barbara Channel commemorate this rare attack on the continental United States: a stone in the middle of the Sandpiper Golf Course, and a small wooden sign a quarter mile away at Haskell’s Beach.
Cats are no strangers to urban agglomeration, especially in a warm climate, and the felines of Valencia are no exception. Feral cats roam the streets, looking for a place to rest their bones before being shooed away. The cat house offers them respite.
At the foot of a blue wall on Carrer del Museu, the facade of a tiny house attracts the attention of passersby. The house is only a foot or two tall but it is designed in a classically Valencian style. It has a Spanish tiled roof, a little fountain, and a "garden" to the side (actually just one potted plant).
The house's entrance is dark and does not appear to lead to the other side of the wall, but perhaps that's just a ruse for human intruders. Legend has it that the old woman who previously owned the house behind the gate left it for the feral cats of Valencia to inhabit. Whether or not this is true and whether or not there are any cats behind the wall will have to remain a mystery—to the humans of Valencia at least.
As for the driver, neither he nor anyone else was injured in the incident. An inevitable lane closure, however, no doubt inconvenienced many motorists who may or may not have been aware that they were driving by an almost completely perfect dad joke.
In the world of organized crime, Al Capone had few equals. For seven years in the 1920s, as the boss of the Chicago Mafia during Prohibition, Capone shocked the city with bombings, heists, gambling, prostitution, and other sundry criminal activities.
One of his greatest methods of escaping was via a "killer" car—an armored, bullet-proof vehicle weighing over three-and-a-half-tons, and capable of speeding off at 110 mph. In the 1933 film above, archived by British Pathé, a small group gathers as a man shows the many inconspicuous features of Capone's car that enabled him a quick get-away in dicey situations.
The 1928 Cadillac Model 341A Town Sedan was equipped with a regulation police siren to fool other drivers. It also had bullet-proof glass installed throughout, causing the doors to weigh a hefty 10 stone (or approximately 140 pounds). The thick glass even required special strings and gears to raise and lower the windows. In order to see if the coast was clear, Capone could also snoop in on police activity with the "first regulation police pick-up radio" that had ever been installed on an automobile.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
For 22 years, from 1979 until his arrest in 2001, FBI agent Robert Phillip Hanssen sold government information to the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation in exchange for cash and diamonds, totaling over $1.4 million. His standard method of conveying information to the Russians was to “dead drop” documents or disks beneath a footbridge near his home.
To indicate the dead drop was ready for pickup, Hanssen he would attach a piece of tape to the entrance sign of the park. It was inconspicuous enough that anyone who wasn't looking for it probably wouldn't notice.
For many years, Hanssen worked within the FBI's Soviet Analytical Unit, the department responsible for capturing Soviet spies in the United States. He used his placement in this unit to report back to the Soviet Union the names of KGB agents who had defected or were acting as double agents. Hanssen also informed the Russians of a secret tunnel the FBI had dug under the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Despite all this, the Russians only knew him by his codename, "Ramon Garcia."
At one point, Hanssen and his team were assigned with investigating Hanssen's own espionage. The investigation concluded that another FBI agent was leaking information, and Hanssen's activities went on. Another time, Hanssen was able to warn Russia of an ongoing investigation, and as a result the FBI was unable to prove any spying.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Hanssen refrained from selling information to the Russians, but resumed again in 1999, unaware that an FBI-CIA investigation was circling closer to him. In exchange for witness protection in the United States, a former KGB agent stole the relevant files from Russia and U.S. intelligence agencies were able to identify Hanssen as the source of the leaks.
Finally on February 18, 2001, Hanssen was arrested while hiding a bag stuffed with documents under the bridge in Foxstone Park, near his home. He plead guilty to 15 counts of espionage. Although suspicions were raised on occasion about Hanssen in the FBI, he was seen by most as a caring father and devout Catholic who frequently disparaged the “godless” Russians. The Department of Justice deemed Hanssen's espionage and the length he went undetected as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.”
If you go to Foxstone Park today you can still see the bridge where Hanssen funneled covert information to the Soviet Union. The only indicator that the quiet, suburban park has links to the Cold War and espionage is a small trail side marker with a QR code labeled “History,” which directs you to a website about Hanssen and his arrest.
