If you feel like a lifeless shadow every morning before you fill your veins with caffeine, you might identify with this Disney-themed mug. When empty, its exterior is covered with dark silhouettes of more than 40 classic Disney characters—but as soon as you fill the mug with a hot beverage, the design comes alive in full color.
As Simplemost reports, all the animated characters come from movies that Disney released between the 1930s and 1960s, so you probably wouldn’t locate any of Frozen or even The Lion King. That said, there are still dozens of beloved princesses, talking animals and vile villains to get excited about. Peter Pan is pictured in mid-flight (keeping an eye on time for Captain Hook, of course), and Sleeping Beauty sings as her three fairy guardians watch from some other piece of porcelain. You can see many of Disney’s most productive dogs, adding Pongo and Perdita from the 101 Dalmatians and Dama and the Tramp Lady and Clochard; and the collection of characters wouldn’t be whole without the mouse, the myth, the legend itself – yes, Mickey Mouse is in that glass.
The ceramic cup measures 4.5 inches tall with a diameter of 3.75 inches and can contain about 16 ounces of liquid. It will replace the color while this liquid is hot, the Online Page of the Disney Shop does not specify at what temperature the magic is beginning to appear. He notes, however, that the cup does not pass into the microwave or dishwasher, so you deserve to get hooked to wash it with your hands.
You can use the cup on the Disney Shop website.
[h/t Simplemost]
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If you’re already in diy houses for birds and dogs, maybe it’s time to build one for yourself.
As Simplemost reports, there are a number of house kits that you can order on Amazon, and the Allwood Avalon Cabin Kit is one of the quaintest—and, at $32,990, most affordable—options. The 540-square-foot structure has enough space for a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, and a sitting room—and there’s an additional 218-square-foot loft with the potential to be the coziest reading nook of all time.
The structure procedure would possibly not be a smart concept for someone who has never picked a hammer, but you don’t want an architecture degree to deal with it. Step-by-step commands and all fabrics are included, so it’s a bit like a high-end design from IKEA. According to Amazon’s list, it takes about a week for two adults. As the northern wooden walls are reinforced with metal rods, the space can face winds of up to 120 mph, and you can pay an additional $1,000 to move from double-glazed windows and doors to triple glazing for more fortification.
Although everything you want for the hull of the space is in the kit, you will have to buy everything: bathroom, shower, sink, stove, insulation and all other furniture. You can also customize the plan to be compatible with your own space plans; perhaps, for example, use the space as a small place for occasions, and you prefer to have two or three giant spacious rooms with no kitchen or bedroom.
Intrigued? find out here.
[h/t Simplemost]
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In 2000, Eddie Clontz, longtime editor of the Weekly World News, discussed with The Philadelphia Inquirer the popular tabloid of journalistic ethics: “We don’t sit here making up [stories],” Clontz said, “but if we have a tale about a guy who thinks he’s a vampire, we’ll take his word for it.”
From 1979 to 2007, Weekly World News caught the attention of supermarket consumers with its headlines about a global that seemed to reflect, but not exactly, ours. In this reality, Elvis was alive, foreign visitors were common, science reigned, and a half-human, half-bat boy named Bat Boy became a folk hero.
At the height of its popularity in the 1980s, the stream reached 1.2 million copies consistent with the week. Titles such as “Bigfoot Kept Lumberjack as Love Slave” reigned over their covers. A team of committed newcomers filled their pages with satirical fiction. If a fact stumbles inside, it would be adjusted to fit the document’s design statement. An entrepreneur arrested for promoting frame portions has “My brain is missing!” A Wall Street Journal tale about a small Australian city sporting giant earthworms has a histrionic, breathless tale of giant earthworms digging under the floor and creating breaks in the ground that have swallowed the total cattle.
While the media is debatable about what some call “fake news,” the Weekly World News can legitimately claim to have invented the genre. More than 40 years after its debut, Mental Floss spoke to more than a dozen former editors, writers and attendees about the newspaper’s origins, its procedure and how it continued to influence the satire of existing events today, from The Onion to the Daily Show. Or, to use a newspaper trail: “The bad guys reveal how they cheated the global for decades!
Generoso Pope Jr. could be considered the father of the modern supermarket tabloid newspaper. With the aid of a $25,000 down payment reportedly borrowed from the mob, Pope purchased The New York Evening Enquirer (which later became The National Enquirer) in 1952. The lurid paper specialized in tawdry headlines like “Starving Mom Eats Own Child” before softening its content to gain retail space at grocery stores in the 1970s.
When rival tabloid The Star switched to a colorful format, the Pope was forced to do the same, which left him with an unused black-and-white printer, which he saw as an opportunity to revisit the news from the beginning of the Enquirer. In the summer of 1979, a small team overseen by editor-in-chief Phil Bunton, founded in the Enquirer office in Lantana, Florida, began working on what would become the Weekly World News.
Paul Kupperberg (editor, 2004-2007): I, the Enquirer, since its terrible beginnings as a child, was a kind of rag of the 50s and early 60s. Things like “A boy trapped in an old fridge eats his foot to stay alive.”
Sal Ivone (editor, 1981-1988): Pope trapped in this black-and-white printing space near Montana. He essentially said, “OK, let me just publish some other magazine.”
Barbara Grover (editorial assistant, 1981-1985): They had moved the color printing to New York and told others in the publishing space that he would create a new black-and-white newspaper so they could simply stay in their jobs.
Iain Calder (Editor-in-Chief, The National Enquirer, 1973-1997): He may have just gotten rid of him, but Gene was friends with the circle of relatives who ran him. He felt that he might not have unemployed them, along with many others who published him. So he and I sat down and kicked in all sorts of other things to do on black and white paper. Finally, he said, “Why don’t we do what Reader’s Digest did?” Reader’s Digest, in its early days, took the most productive stories in the world and republished them. He said, “Why don’t we just do the most productive stories, the crazy stories?” So that’s what we did.
Joe Berger (editor, 1981-2001): I went to paintings there in 1981, so almaximum from the beginning. I was a reporter for the Newhouse News Service in Washington and I covered the White House. Washington not as it is now, not so exciting. So every day, like the most journalists, I went through the tasks given and the Weekly World News, which I had never heard of, had an announcement. Gene Pope paid a lot of money, at least twice what I made at the time in Washington.
Bob Lind (writer, 1990-1998): We had brilliant newcomers like Joe Berger and Jack Alexander. One came here from the Washington Post, the other from the New York Times. Berger, White House correspondent.
Calder: What we had as an advantage was that we pretty much owned the front end of supermarkets. The National Enquirer was one of the first to get into supermarkets, after TV Guide and a couple of [food] magazines. It cost a fortune, but that was one reason the Enquirer surged in circulation in the early 1970s to mid-1980s. Hundreds of millions of people would see it.
Berger: Pope was like the Godfather to the staff. He ruled with an iron fist. One day we wrote a story about Albuquerque and Pope insisted we spelled it wrong. We looked it up a number of times and were all sure we were right, but he insisted you spelled it another way, so we changed Albuquerque to the way he wanted it. No one argued with him. People were afraid to challenge him, so we ran the story with the name of the city spelled wrong.
Grover: Pope was a tough, no-nonsense guy, but he would do anything he could for people he liked. He got my neighbor a job at the Enquirer, and the neighbor later died from an infection. Pope gave his family $85,000 in cash to help out.
Calder: We received newspapers and magazines from all over the English-speaking world and brought other people to read newspapers, 8-foot-tall piles, and lawn mowers. We were rewriting stories.
Berger: About 80% of the articles were extracted from newspapers and magazines. We had 3 or 4 lawn mowers surrounded by mountains of newspapers and magazines. We spent the day hunting in newspapers and magazines all over the world, cutting stories. About 50, consistent with pennies, were other people who narrowly escaped death; someone fell off a cliff or was hung on a tree branch for 4 days until he was rescued. We were writing history [and] putting up a brilliant title. Most of the stories were very true and accurate.
Ivone: In 1981 and 1982, before Google, you entered the newsroom and stacks of mailboxes full of newspapers were there. You’d take a break over and over and out and cut stories from all over the world. We thought that if we were fascinated, readers would be fascinated, and that turned out to be true.
The first factor of the Weekly World News was published in October 1979 and sold 120,000 respectable copies. In the following years, however, it became transparent that strangely recycled news articles had only a limited appeal to readers. To capture the attention of shoppers in the supermarket’s competitive retail area, Weekly World News finds another rhythm, in addition to the kind of celebrity gossip pertaining to its sister publication, The National Enquirer.
Berger: At first, we were very careful with the facts, and several years later we wrote about the aliens, Bigfoot and Bat Boy.
Calder: Gradually it was turning into this, which did not replace overnight.
Ivone: We kept a thorough sales record and found that when we moved away from celebrity stories and differentiated ourselves – we moved on to the boldest headlines and stories – it worked.
Berger: Everything was factual, but boring, and other people didn’t buy it. So Pope continued to hit the editors hard to make it increasingly exciting. No matter how they lit him up, he wasn’t happy. They didn’t have to lose their jobs, and he was the kind of guy that if I didn’t like you, you were out. They were running for their lives and gradually had to locate more and more wild things to please him. The only way to do this was to gradually upload stories that weren’t true. That’s when stories came up about alien beings and weirder things, “Bigfoot tried to eat my little boy.” It was a request from the boss for more exciting things. There was no way to adhere to the fact and give him what he needed.
Ivone: We got here on tiptoe in fiction. We exaggerate from time to time, and then exaggerate more through newspapers and surf magazines: “It’s a clever story, it’s already covered, but what would make it more convincing? What would give the maximum title of convincing? This is how we get the idea of this global imagery with recurring characters like Bat Boy, Big Foot, extraterrestrial beings and everything.
Lind: We wrote these things correctly, for other people who were looking for these things. We write it like a story. We write a lede with a sprint on it, filled in and then we get a silver quote.
Ivone: It’s a slow process. We don’t fight it. We were rewarded through the readers.
Lind: We didn’t make it all up. Many of them were true stories.
Ivone: We use “borrowed credibility.” On the left side, there were stories that other people recognized, and then there were the craziest and most mythical urban legends on the right. Everything was juxtaposed with recognizable and valid stories to make readers think about it. “That’s right, this farmer from Idaho saying his wife ran off with Bigfoot.”
C. Michael Forsyth (writer, 1996-2005): I used to read it at university and enjoy it. Sometimes I’ve been taken to the stories.
According to maximum accounting, Weekly World News evolved its voice when Eddie Clontz was appointed editor-in-chief in 1981. Clontz took the people to the delirious heights.
Ivone: Eddie a certifiable genius. What Eddie did created an environment where we can simply explore these stories.
Lind: Eddie had an uncanny feel for what worked, what readers were looking for.
Dick Kulpa (artist, 1987-2003): I arrived with an ultrasound of my daughter. He said, “It’s a galaxy shaped like a human fetus.” He was a twisted genius, but a genius. Joe West was editor-in-chief, Eddie was editor-in-chief, but Eddie had a big mouth and was very influential.
Calder: Eddie the genuine key to all this.
Berger: Eddie made Weekly World News what she is, with a lot of help, but that his vision, his idea.
Lind: Eddie liked it and hated it. I like that.
Ivone: We were friends, but we had disagreements. I liked the concept of how he ran the essay. There were no meetings, just pitching. The proof is in the pudding. The product has been very successful.
Lind: Eddie had a local intelligence, a wonderful concept of what other people were trying to read. He knew a balanced report was monotonous.
Ivone: There’s the tension. I’m the city rat and he’s the field mouse. I grew up in New York.
Lind: It’s attractive between him and Sal. Sal was highly educated, cared about the arts, knew literature, knew art, knew classical music. Eddie’s ultimate memorable night at the theatre to see Rodney Dangerfield at Back to School. Eddie had a fifth or sixth grade education. Sal communicated about wonderful art, Eddie said, “You don’t know wonderful art.” Eddie said, “I see a security guard with a red rope, that’s wonderful art.”
Ivone: Eddie had a great voice. He’d stand up on his desk. He had a big squirt gun. It was unlike any office in the country. It was regimented and run like a business, but it was relaxed. There were no meetings or suits or ties.
Charlie Neuschafer (Editor-in-Chief, 1986-2002): I had a wise courtship with Eddie, a little bumpy. He was a wise guy. We were a very lively organization of other people having lots of laughs and occasional disagreements. Nothing that would cause any damage.
Ivone: I considered him a tough guy, but he appreciated the staff so much. He was a difficult guy to paint in many ways; not for me, but for the other staff members.
Berger: I probably wouldn’t speak ill of Eddie. He was very mercurial. Eddie can be great and have tantrums. He can just smile and laugh for a minute and fly away about anything the next minute, like the Pope. If he liked you, that’s fine. If he didn’t like it, you were given the nuisance and you never had a minute of peace.
Grover: Eddie was a complicated human being. But Weekly World News needed someoneArray A genuine journalist couldn’t do that.
Berger: Joe West appointed editor-in-chief and stayed there for a while until he got tired of the Pope. He couldn’t stand it. He left, resigned, was fired in a hurry. Eddie Clontz, then deputy editor, became editor-in-chief. Eddie, the editor at the most of the time, the Weekly World News had its best luck in the 80s and 90s.
Calder: Eddie worked for West but it was clear [Eddie] was the driving force. When West left, Eddie took over as editor and Sal became managing editor. He was a smart journalist and a good organizer. Eddie was a terrible organizer, but he came up with front page ideas.
Before long, Weekly World News immersed itself in fantasy. While some readers were annoyed – a police branch in Mobile, Alabama complained that they had not captured a werewolf, as was reported – almost everyone had fun.
Derrik Lang (writer, 2004): I think they were hunting things to get the attention of other people who had a funny element. And maybe they’re a little shocking.
Neuschafer: I made one about a renegade chicken in a riot. The track “Cock-A-Doodle-Doom”.
Lind: My favorite tale I wrote was about Siamese twins where one was a smart cop and the other a bad cop. And there was a clumsy thug, a guy who writes a word “give me money” on his own check receipts. Anything that was bizarre enough to get people’s attention. They need to do it in ghosts, in aliens.
Neuschafer: A baby born with a wooden leg. We have made many diversifications on this topic. Babies born with a tattoo, a mustache.
Kulpa: As soon as we read about Photoshop, we got it. Before that, the photos were brushed in the air. We had images, but it’s the stories that have weight.
Neuschafer: We would do anything for the heaviest cat in the world, and then another heavier cat would arrive, which we would spin. We’d brush it to make him a big cat. Everything can be a spinning kitten.
Forsyth: We’d have stories going through. The serials of some stories is excellent. We made one about a darker sea monster, the Monster of Lake Champlain in one of the Great Lakes. We said the creature crossed the Atlantic in a project to pass at the feet with Nessie. We built it: it’s on its way, it’s coming, and it turns out he went there to mate with Nessie. Then we follow that they had a baby. Then we organize a contest to call the baby.
Lind: Leskie Pinson did a column, “Around the World with Leskie Pinson,” that was really a short story. One was about Leskie getting badly injured in Samoa when he was attacked by a boa constrictor. His ribs were broken. Now he’s recovering. He’s getting thousands of get-well cards. Not a word of it was true.
Forsyth: Sometimes newcomers played a role in the story. We had a character named George Sanford who broke into Area 51. It was a serial story. He disappeared and some other journalist escaped, disappeared, was rescued one way or another.
Lind: We said we had a Weekly World News plane that flew all over the world to get stories. There is no such jet.
Neuschafer: I went on a rafting trip to Colorado, took pictures of old hieroglyphics in the canyon, brought them back and wrote a short story about how they were made through aliens. That’s all you can find.
Forsyth: As a reader at university, I’m a tale about the birth of a baby who was talking as soon as he came out of the womb. He said “not yet” and never spoke again. It was written with credibility and therefore it puts it shaking in the spine, but it is also dark and funny.
Ideas were not just the fruit of imagination. Weekly World News would listen to readers and even call valid resources to help them validate their fables.
Berger: I don’t forget to tell the story of a guy who was in a nutrition and was so hungry that he saw a little user on the street, idea that it was a bird and left with a hatchet in the street behind him. I had to bring in a psychiatrist and explain how it was imaginable for someone to starve to the point that he became delusional. We had to ask someone to explain how this was imaginable.
Neuschafer: There were times when we had resources and newbies who worked on the phone or who were on a project somewhere. For crime stories, someone calls a law enforcement agency about a case. Some things were bizarre enough in life to be reported directly.
Forsyth: We would bring these stories back like any other journalist. For crime stories, get a citation from the district attorney, the sheriff. There was some genuine reporting.
Berger: If something was too difficult to believe, we’d come up with a quote from a baffled scientist who would provide a reason it might be true. We used to joke about the Academy of Baffled Scientists.
Lind: People called or wrote with ideas. Someone claimed to have discovered a dinosaur somewhere and wrote an article about it. I treated them with respect. I’d call them and say, “Tell me about it.” We accepted other people’s words, even though we knew it was.
Forsyth: We’d say we’re from Weekly World News, but as much as other people, even if they’ve been noticed, don’t register. Turns out it’s generic. If you approached in a serious way, other people would communicate with you. I communicated with scientists, university professors. People are very anxious, especially scientists, to tell you anything they need global to understand.
Berger: Our mantra was, “Never communicate about an intelligent story.” If a girl calls and says alien beings are dining on her clothes, the New York Times says, “Do you have any proof?” We say, “Oh, do you know if he liked denim or frills?”
Neuschafer: The National Enquirer would be prosecuted and would have very important processes, but we didn’t deal with celebrities. Alien beings didn’t carry anyone’s clothes, but there were still lawyers who read it. Everything had to be approved through a giant law firm in Washington, D.C. We had to comply if they told them to do something.
Forsyth: There were only a few times when the newspaper had legal problems, but this was avoided. If we made up a story, we’d be sure that no one in the city or in the whole world with that call. We’d make calls. The first component of the call would be Anglo-Saxon and the component of the moment would be Italian. The call wouldn’t even exist.
By experimenting with other stories, from alien abductions to prophecies, Weekly World News temporarily learned what from stories in the canopy would move copies.
Berger: Sometimes there was a bright headline, then some compass heads. If we didn’t catch them, anything else would catch them. It was vital for traffic. You held your breath when the draw numbers arrived. On a big day, you’d pass it on to the boss and say, “Look how many copies we sell.” If you sold some of them, you probably wouldn’t be here next week. There was no genuine method, just to keep what was promoting and have a concept of what it would sell next time. If a tale ran out, we’d check to find a way to revive it in a matter of weeks. We knew bigfoot stories would sell if they were done right.
Kulpa: Sometimes we made 3 versions. Three blankets entered a concentrated area of organization. We got numbers on that, and the winner won next week.
Ivone: We chose Roanoke, Virginia. It’s a smart indicator. It’s essentially marketing, very data-driven.
Kulpa: One thing that worked well for the Enquirer and for us are the predictions. In the ’80s, it was World War Ill. People were worried and made predictions about what the long term had in store for them. They were optimistic. Forecasts mean there will be other people within a year.
Forsyth: For a time, prophecies were sold. Who can only provide a prophecy? We made the prophecy of Unabomber, the prophecy of the Donner party.
Ivone: We had blankets with miraculous remedies with garlic, apple cider vinegar, but we were also looking for stories of extraterrestrial kidnappings. We never give up on stories of self-help. We were perplexed, but they did well. They were intelligent interpreters.
Kupperberg: Heaven and hell were strong. The things discovered on the Titanic were also very good. And the bolts coming, some kind of apocalypse. Gigantic monsters.
Forsyth: I’ve ever made gay skeletons discovered on a Titanic lifeline, which… What the hell is that? It doesn’t make any sense. But I wrote and other people said it was quite touching. The sailors died in the arms of everyone else.
Calder: There were things you couldn’t do. Nothing like sex. If supermarkets say no, you’re out of business.
Ivone: We found that other people who bought tabloids bought two or three, like The Star or The Sun.
Departing from fact to create fiction, the staff of Weekly World News developed a kind of bullpen in their offices.
Neuschafer: It’s an old essay, cigarettes in ashtrays, typewriters beating tables, like an essay you saw in the ’40s movies, but it worked.
Forsyth: You went into building the Enquirer and it looked a bit like a real writing of old movies. It was just workplace after workplace, a gigantic open space. We were in Hawaii after work, a local motel/bar on the beach. It was a dream job, waking up in the morning, writing two long made-up stories and 3 to 5 filling stories, and then going to the beach after work.
Neuschafer: After work, there was the possibility of getting together, having a beer and getting more concepts for articles.
Berger: I don’t forget [a colleague] Jack Alexander complaining that he would come home at night and laugh so much the day his face hurt. That’s the kind of environment we had. People laughed all day, threw up ideas. People made headlines for a story.
Forsyth: There was definitely a circle sense of relatives with a small team. We had affection for the paper and what we were doing.
Berger: It’s like the ambience of a 5th grade elegance when the student leaves the room. All screaming, screaming, throwing items at each, shouting names in a funny way. People with their feet on the table.
Calder: The office was a big, big area, and one little corner was Weekly World News with very few employees. The Enquirer attitude was they thought it was entertaining. “What will they come up with next week?” The Enquirer offices were a very high-powered editorial space and had a blank front page to sell 4.5 million copies every single week.
Berger: The pope called us all in the convention room the day after we had cabins and replaced the environment. He said, “I don’t like the way things are in the newsroom. When I faint with my head, I need to hear him scream, scream and laugh. If you don’t laugh by publishing the newspaper, readers probably wouldn’t laugh. The cabins went and we returned to the laughter and atmosphere of the 5th grade. He was right about that.
Neuschafer: We sell a lot of newspapers and cross out our classified ads. The news was fake, or mostly, but the classified ads were very real. Advertisers paid a lot of money to promote them in the newspaper.
Kulpa: Every once in a while, I would go to schools and make speeches. I’d ask how many other people read the Weekly World News, and some of the kids would raise their hands. They were 12. I was shocked. We also had a school that followed.
Berger: It became satirical. We were playing with two other readers. There were other people who read The Weekly World News and liked it as a funny publication and satire, and there were other people who read the Weekly World News and looked for one and both words. In both stories, we gave the reader a chance at what he was looking for for the Array We were walking in a fine line. People were walking on ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot. If they were looking for this, an alien ate someone’s lawnmower, let itArray
Kulpa: Who was the reader is something we never understood. A guy once asked me, “Where do you get these stories from?” I showed him my head and his jaw fell off. Many other people searched for these stories.
Neil McGinness (Editor-in-Chief, 2008-2018): I grew up with him at university. I liked it, I read it all the time. I would like to review all the main points of the publication, the presentation, the titles, the intelligence of it. It’s a laugh as a portal to reality, like ours, but depicting a more smiley world, with aliens, zombies, Bigfoot and sea creatures.
Kulpa: The philosophy of Weekly World News likes what Stan Lee likes for the original Marvel Comics. Both were well founded, both were credible. You’ve read an ebook of comedians and you think Hulk may have existed just because of radioactivity. This gave him plausibility. The Weekly World News did the same thing: you run a story, you have an ability to demystify the story, print it with the story, and it gave you credibility.
Berger: With the weird stuff, we went from selling 100,000 copies to 1 million a week. There was no looking back. No one thought about sticking to the facts after that.
Under the gleefully demented leadership of Eddie Clontz, Weekly World News came into its own in the late 1980s. In order to keep readers coming back for more, it developed a number of stories that were serialized in nature. One of their biggest recurring hits began with a May 1988 headline that declared Elvis Presley, who had died of a heart attack on August 16, 1977, was still alive. In 2004, The Los Angeles Times declared that Clontz “gave birth to the Elvis-is-alive phenomenon.”
Ivone: The biggest retailer of all with Elvis. “Elvis is alive,” an all-time best dealer.
Calder: The National Enquirer used to get it for him.
Ivone: All credits to Elvis go to Eddie. We used to get eebooks all the time. An eebook talked about the idea. Elvis faked his own death. We call the author, write an eebook review, put it on the front page and present it as a short story.
Berger: A girl in England had written an eebook stating that Elvis had faked his own death and still alive and hiding somewhere. Thus, the original name “Elvis Is Alive” on this girl’s eebook, which claimed that he was hiding, may simply not support the exposure and walked in secret.
Ivone: The other people who liked Elvis, it gave them a little hope that it was true. Some other people said, “I saw Elvis.”
Berger: People write. There have been observations across the country. Real observations.
Lind: Elvis seems to be in all sorts of places.
Berger: Whenever we have a “Elvis is alive” tale on the cover, we had to do it. A woman wrote and claimed to have seen Elvis at a McDonald’s in Kalamazoo. You’re smart enough for us.
Calder: We would say that Elvis is still alive and we would make an image of what Elvis would have been like back then. We’ve received dozens of phone calls. If someone calls and says, “I saw Elvis,” you didn’t try to refute the title. If you’re an Elvis fan and see something about the fact that Elvis is still alive, how can he not get your attention?
Forsyth: It began to age. You’d have a waitress to see him. I don’t forget a story, but she played on the fact that Elvis had a double brother. After a while, things became self-parodic. Elvis became “Ha-ha, it’s a joke.” We try to give other people the possibility of in history.
Berger: There’s a girl somewhere in the South who claims to have an emotionless face who lived with Elvis for 3 or 4 years. He’s your boyfriend. She told us the whole story of life with Elvis. She was very honest.
Neuschafer: We use substitutes for Elvis with a bit of airbrush. I’ve never been Elvis, however, I’m used to some stories.
McGinness: In many cases, the stories contained hand tricks or journalistic twists that highlighted the thematic details of the story. It’s not only that Elvis was seen at a Burger King, but also that the user at the counter was surprised to have ordered a Double Whopper, or two Double Whoppers.
Weekly World News published at least 57 articles on “Elvis Is Alive” between 1988 and 1992. At one point, national humor columnist Dave Barry informed Clontz that the newspaper reported that Elvis had just died. “Elvis Dead at 58” published a while later.
As Elvis headlines began to wane, editors found a new protagonist. And unlike the King, he was birthed inside of the company’s offices. “Bat Child Found in West Virginia Cave,” which ran on June 23, 1992, introduced the world to Bat Boy, a 2-foot tall, 19-pound hybrid beast-child highly sought after by government officials.
Kulpa: Bat Boy created by accident. I asked to make an alien bathing area and I did. The editor saw him and saved him to save him. I did several versions and six weeks later the bat boy was born. It went to the front page and sold 975,000 copies – a certain dealer for us.
Lind: Dick Kulpa a brilliant artist. He made an alien with big ears and an unpleasant air. Sal Ivone said, “Maybe he’s not an alien. Maybe he’s half-human, half-bat.”
Kulpa: I see Bat Boy as the baby It’s Alive. He’s vicious, but adorable.
Ivone: Dick Kulpa made a drawing with large ears, big eyes, and sought to make it as a foreign baby. I said, “I’m in bad health with extraterrestrial stories. Can we do something different? I outlined a concept for an underground civilization, and that becomes a foreigner in a foreign country. The concept being, it would be a tale that had legs. We can just make it episodic. These stories seemed to sell well.
Berger: Bat Boy makes illustrations, trying to locate a symbol of a foreign area. He came here with a drawing of a guy with giant, pointed ears and big teeth. He looked and said, “Oh, we have to do something with that,” and passed it on to a reporter. Maybe it’s Eddie’s brother Derek Clontz. Derek arrived here with the tale of bat boy discovered in a cave in West Virginia.
Calder: “Bat Boy Found in West Virginia Cave”. Who would do it?
Ivone: After seeing the look, I sketched 4 or 5 talking points, but Derek Clontz gave it life. Like the idea, he consumes three hundred pounds of insects a day, which made him convincing.
Kulpa: See the portrait of The Scream and see a connection.
Lind: We had to be careful. Anything that smelled like bestiality was excluded from the paper, but we didn’t do it the way it was designed. We just said it was discovered in a cave and built on the board.
Ivone: It had nothing to do with the interspecific mixture. It’s representative of another civilization.
Kulpa: The comedian aspect of me said, “We have to expand the character,” but the newcomers didn’t realize what it meant.
Ivone: Bat Boy’s first story worked very well, so we repeated it.
Kulpa: Kids love monsters, especially friendly monsters, hero monsters that will save them the situation. I see him as a staunch defender of the innocent, but he can also be a hell hole. You’re not offering Bat Boy candy. There would possibly be more than just chewing candy.
McGinness: Bat Boy is unique in being a heroic figure. He’s more of an anti-hero. You can draw parallels with Don Quixote in the sense that you have a protagonist who is a hero yet fallible and prone to errors of judgment. Like the time he stole a Mini-cooper and led the police on a chase.
Lind: He found out in a cave, escaped, the FBI picked him up and arrested him in an undisclosed location.
Berger: An FBI agent called the newspaper and asked us to remove him. They got so many calls that it wasn’t easy to release the Bat Boy that their telephone exchange flooded. I think Eddie took the call.
Lind: One day, Eddie gets a call from the FBl: “Hey, we got all those calls, stop.” Eddie said, “Let’s do it again.” As soon as the receiver touched the hook, he turned around and said, “OK, Bat Boy runs away from the FBI…”
Ivone: The FBI called me once, hysterical. It was because of a story about a Civil War orphan or a child who suddenly showed up on a battlefield, and I think the FBI felt that we gave them a malicious role in asking them to take the child into custody. They said we gave them a bad name and they don’t do that kind of thing. They didn’t seem to realize they were calling a party house. It had nothing to do with reality.
Forsyth: The characters assume a safe reality. Bat Boy has our mascot.
Kulpa: People fell in love with the symbol. It has the iconic symbol of The Weekly World News.
Lang: They said, “Don’t pitch us Bat Boy stories. We take care of Bat Boy.” It was the crown jewel of Weekly World News.
Lind: We always featured him on the cover. We tried to put some time between stories. Every once in a while, we’d decide it was time for Bat Boy or time for Elvis.
Kupperberg: Most of us, who have come this far from comics, understand how to use the characters, how to distribute them over a series. You don’t play characters in every challenge or get bored. Someone would say, “It’s bat boy time” or “It’s time for another devil’s stop.” You have a concept of things, analyze them and not ruin them for readers.
Berger: We knew bat boy attracted readers, and we continued to use it over and over again. If we could locate a Bat Boy story that put Bat Boy on the cover, he seemed to sell.
McGinness: The appearance was somewhat masked. All eyewitness accounts of the Bat Boy were obscured. He got caught up in fleeting glimpses, which allows readers to fill in the details.
Kulpa: Bat Boy’s call is his face, eyes and mouth. There’s a thrill in that face. She connects. It’s a kind of “What am I doing here” emotion, not an emotion of terror or horror. That’s the thrill of “What f-ck going on?” I think a lot of other people have that emotion.
Joe Garden (feature film editor, The Onion, 1993-2012): It’s such a striking graphic. It’s a convincing symbol of anything like Nosferatu as a child. I still don’t forget the canopy speckled in the kiosk. Every time they put him in the canopy, this baby Nosferatu revealed his prey, it was engaging.
Forsyth: During World War II, fictional characters like Superman and Donald Duck were recruited into the war effort, so we made one in which the Bat Boy was recruited into the Marines. He can just use his incredible sense of hearing. Eventually, he left the Marines to capture Saddam Hussein.
Bat Boy’s good fortune led to merchandising, an off-Broadway musical in 1997 and even a feature film.
Neuschafer: There were Bat Boy t-shirts. We made Elvis Is Alive t-shirts.
Kulpa: We had an America Online site in the mid-1990s for which I would create images. One day I drew the Bat Boy in a beer bottle. It was a Photoshop. I published it, and be it that someone paid a royalty of $10,000 for Bat Boy Beer.
Ivone: There were other people who had developed film scripts, but no one was completing them.
Kulpa: I discussed a Bat Boy movie with several other people, but I didn’t find anything in terms of the other people who run the series in the newspaper.
Lang: Everybody loves Bat Boy. It’s necessarily an opera tale. It’s generally turned into an off-Broadway musical.
Kulpa: I posted a Bat Boy theme that I wrote. It’s just an amateur thing. I posted it on the website and in the area of 4 months we heard from a company that was looking to make a bat boy musical. I’ve never noticed that before.
Lind: All out of my hands. Merchandising from another department. I’m happy when it becomes a musical, but I don’t think Kulpa could afford it. None of us did.
Kulpa: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created Spider-Man, but you didn’t see that Dick Kulpa created the Bat Boy because he intended to be a genuine character. Only in a 2007 Washington Post article did he reveal it. For years I’ve been warning people that we’re running anonymously, unless we do something about it. Of course that never happened.
Forsyth: It’s the ultimate laugh when you were clinging to the truth we had established. He’s a wild boy raised in a cave. Then someone became stupid. Bat Boy runs for president. No, I don’t think so.
Kulpa: I Bat Boy shaking hands with politicians. What a piece of.
McGinness: I think the core appeal of Bat Boy is the notion that someday, somewhere, someone is going to find something. Something is going to appear that will shake everyone’s foundation and what we hold to be true.
Bob Greenberger (Writer, 2006-2007): This equates to a fascination for show-attractions as P.T. Barnum celebrated. Maybe Bat Boy is real. Being discovered in one cave is just the other of the plausible. Being from West Virginia, he’s one of us, like Bigfoot.
Lind: I don’t know if the tale is over. You took him out of the way.
Berger: I don’t know why we didn’t find Bat Boy with Elvis. Maybe i’m too stupid.
Even with Elvis and Bat Boy dominating the headlines, Weekly World News followed the latest news in a poorly attended field: politicians fraternizing with aliens, adding P’lod, an alien with an interest in human politics. Finally, the genuine Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush were photographed reading the newspaper.
Lind: Obviously, extraterrestrials were the favorites for us.
Lang: All the extraterrestrial stories fascinated me as a reader. Strangers in the Senate. Hillary Clinton is having an affair with a foreigner.
Forsyth: Some of them have attracted a lot of attention, like Bill Clinton who caught Hillary with an alien. P’lod endorsed Clinton.
Berger: We had a story about Hillary adopting an alien baby. We drove Hillary in the blanket with an alien baby. It’s old. We had an image of bill’s montage, an alien named P’lod, who was hanging in Washington. From time to time, we photograph them shaking hands. These blankets are sold.
Garden: Clinton’s extraterrestrial blankets are the covers I use most after the Bat Boy. There were those pale extraterrestrial beings reaching out to Bill Clinton and him with a warm face.
Berger: We received a really angry letter from a woman who insisted that Hillary wasn’t holding the baby, that Hillary wasn’t a nice, warm woman who would adopt a foreign baby. The reader was perfectly willing to make it a foreign baby, but not that Hillary was holding it.
Calder: Eddie we wanted to say that several senators were extraterrestrial beings from space. So they went up to seven senators and asked if everything was okay. Six of the seven accepted and even gave interviews. They clearly knew it was ironic.
Berger: Senators like area extraterrestrial beings have required a lot of work. The first story that five senators were extraterrestrials, and we discovered some later, and became 12. I had worked in Washington, and things were much less contentious at the time, much more relaxed. We called the senators, talked to their press officers, made sure they knew who we were. We said, “We realized that Senator Nunn and his colleagues are extraterrestrial beings, extraterrestrial beings who came here to Earth to help us, and we tried to find out if he was in a position to admit it.” Some hit the phone, yet we called them enough, and very temporarily we made the assistants laugh. “Yes, Senator Nunn admits that he is an alien. They even gave us quotes. Once we had a couple who admitted it, it’s quite simple to call the others.
Kulpa: The senators played the game. George H.W. Bush, we are told, hung an image of himself with extraterrestrial beings in the Oval Office.
Berger: It’s not hard to get George H.W. Bush to cooperate to take a picture with an alien. We even asked Janet Reno to cooperate. If other people knew what Weekly World News liked and liked it, they wouldn’t be afraid of it.
The Clintons’ assembly with extraterrestrial beings was not the newspaper’s only contribution to politics. From 1979 to 1987, Rafael Klinger wrote a column as a conservative scholar “Ed Anger”, an ego of adjustment that was later followed by others after Klinger’s departure (Klinger filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement and unfair commercial practices in 1989, arguing that the newspaper had no right to continue the column without him. A jury ruled in favor of the newspaper in 1994).
Forsyth: Ed Anger’s voice so loud. He is so ahead of his time, ahead of Rush Limbaugh, in terms of the brand of the right fireplace.
Berger: Ed Anger a weekly column written through Rafe Klinger, who worked on the team. Rafe began to write, from a liberal point of view, as a mad conservative. He started his column by telling how crazy he is, crazy about pig bites, crazier than Batman with a run in his socks. We had other columnists, but Ed Anger the award, the columnist who received the most responses.
Kulpa: People would ask, ‘Do you know Ed Anger?’ I looked at it, though it was a bit rough, and I was not that impressed. Ed Anger was more like an internet rant, but he was highly popular. I heard he got boxes of mail.
Calder: Rafe is quite brilliant at what he’s done. Put it this way: it’s so scandalous that it made other new comers in the workplace laugh.
Garden: I took the diary and read it with my friend Jeff. What we liked most was Ed Anger, the absurd right-wing columnist. I think I have one of your books called Let’s Pave the Rainforests. He only made absurd statements, adopted absurd positions and led them to their logical end. He started with how crazy he was, crazier than Daniel Boone with a musket, crazier than a computer nerd with a damaged mouse. He probably had a big influence on a column I did for The Onion, Jim Anchower. He wasn’t a political figure, but I stayed true to the idea. The column had more or less the same pattern: “Hola Amigos, it’s been a long time since I hit you,” blah blah, and then an explanation for him not having written a column for so long.
McGinness: If you look at a character like Ed Anger, in terms of cultural point of contact, Ed is significant. It was the prototype style of the narrow, right-wing and sectarian commentator. It was almost like a playbook. He hated vegetarians, hated the French, approved capital punishment. He sought to turn the stands of the best schools into mass electric chairs. Part of what he did was make the traffic very real.
While The Weekly World News gained a foothold in popular culture in the 1980s with fictitious names – there was even a 1986 film directed by singer David Byrne, True Stories, loosely encouraged through the newspaper – there were very genuine forays into the controversy. In February 1989, the newspaper published three photos of the corpse of serial killer Ted Bundy after his execution. It is infrequent to start with genuine morbidity. It also sold a record of 1.5 million copies, surpassing the mythical name “Elvis Is Alive”.
Ivone: Eddie directed the envelope. I don’t know why. There were some stories we shouldn’t have told. Many of the enthusiasts were children.
Kulpa: Bundy came from the top. Iain Calder wanted to run it. Someone took a photo and sold it. I remember the discussions we had. I heard Eddie and others discussing it, that the paper met with so-and-so. It was not Eddie’s decision. It was above him.
Lind: I’m not sure if the photos were real or Photoshopped.
Neuschafer: We’ve worked in the past because we put this in the paper. They were very genuine images. The other people who took the photos introduced them to the National Enquirer, but the Enquirer was very difficult for them, so Weekly World News bought them.
Calder: I can’t do that. The Enquirer would never have made it work. We would have been kicked out of the Bible Belt supermarkets. I doubt that’s what happened. You didn’t succeed on my level. I would have laughed at that.
Berger: I’m surprised I don’t remember. One way or another, I don’t know how, Weekly World News able to smuggle photos, photos taken through someone from the criminal system, at a time after Bundy’s autopsy. There’s a full-page picture of the body. It’s a little shocking to us. People were holding their breath on the controversy over it. We didn’t know if it was a smart concept or not.
Kulpa: We put it on a double page and posted it on the cover, but we split the edit. On the east coast, we put ted’s image on a slab, and on the west coast, we put human footprints on the moon. The sale of human footprints more vital than the Bundy on the slab, which surprised us.
Berger: It’s a time when Bundy made headlines and a very bad and cold user who murdered many women. There’s a lot of hatred for Ted Bundy. It’s like a monster image. At the time, few other people were opposed to the concept that Bundy died. There weren’t many protests against ted bundy’s execution.
Bundy’s tale was not the newspaper’s only major landmark in 1989. Generous Pope Jr. died in 1988, and his biggest assets – The National Enquirer and Weekly World News – were sold for a total of $413 million to Boston Ventures and Macfadden Holdings, which later became American Media. That would be the start of several shifts for the newspaper.
A 1996 us network short-lived television series, presented through radio host Edwin Newman, failed to locate an audience; Paper changed a time in 1999 when Evercore Capital Partners bought American Media and appointed David Pecker as president. Eddie Clontz left the following year (Clontz died in 2004). For many employees, his departure was the end of The Weekly World News as they had known him.
Forsyth: At first, it was good. We were told pecker was a big fan and liked to publish. Then Eddie promoted to anything else, and from that moment on, there were a lot of publishers. They all did their best, but the newspaper went through seven publishers in a few years.
Calder: Eddie was the genius behind it, and when the newcomers arrived, around 1999, 2000, he was then retired. Without Clontz, the flow decreased considerably.
Kulpa: In 1995, 1996, we began embarking on wilder stories, such as “Woman Gives Birth to The Human Eye.”
Calder: When Eddie died, the center and soul came this far.
Neuschafer: By that point, the paper had changed. It was not as much fun. After Pope died, the paper got sold, got sold again, and with each sale, the emphasis on making money became paramount.
Berger: When Peter Callahan and his team took control, the owner after the Pope and before Pecker, they told us, pound for pound, that we were the most successful publication in its history.
Forsyth: For some reason someone decided we should only do true stories, and it killed circulation. Then it swung the other way, where the higher-ups decided they wanted completely silly stories that no one would think were real. That’s not a good formula, either. We were torn between two directions that took it off the essential formula, and the circulation really went down catastrophically.
Berger: They hired comedy writers to come, and it became ridiculous. There’s a comedy book. The total of the newspaper is ridiculous, and went from a stream of 1 million to less than 100,000 copies.
Kupperberg: We were hunting to sell about 100,000 copies a week when we started, and during the time they turned off the plug, it was well under 65,000 copies a week. We were just hunting to hold on to that point. Part of the strategy, which I didn’t find very effective, of spending the budget component on the online equivalent, of creating videos. But the online page didn’t paint well.
Forsyth: I think around 1999 I started doing telework, which was new to them. They’ve never tried before. It seemed like at the time. I was in North Dakota making up these stories and sending them over the Internet. It worked so well that they hired freelancers, and then the newspaper started to become more dependent on freelancers. At some point, they fired other people. I was fired in 2005 and they closed in 2007.
Berger: That’s when you became too stupid to believe. For some reason, it was tricky for other people to master the tone of what we were doing.
Kulpa: All well founded. But over the years, he’s lost ground. After 2003, it necessarily turned into a comedy book.
Kupperberg: The onion already had a strong online presence and was beginning to identify itself.
Greenberger: The festival suddenly arrived in the form of The Onion. We didn’t have the equipment or the company to grow. They had the most productive online presence.
Berger: There are only a limited number of vacancies available. The Enquirer came here with the concept of promoting it there, and it worked so well that other publications like People, Cosmopolitan and a million others also sought to sell theirs in the box. The Weekly World News was expelled somehow. The stores would use the ones that would pay them the most. Cosmopolitan can just give them more than Weekly World News can just.
Kulpa: Humor has got to resonate with the reader. There has to be a reason behind it. Something like Mad magazine touched a nerve. It was anti-establishment. It was what kids wanted to read in school and couldn’t. Trying to replicate that is not easy. In the 1990s, in the Clinton years before 9/11, nothing was going on. There were no wars, no controversy. People were profiting. People were happy.
In 2008, the logo acquired through investors, adding Neil McGinness, a former National Lampoon executive who occupied the Bat Boy online and maintained a sense of malice (in 2010, a story about acquiring 10,000 jetpacks through the Los Angeles Police Department thought of as a valid report through Fox and Frifinishs.) In 2018, McGinness resigned as editor-in-chief; Weekly World News editor Greg D’Alessandro spoke. The online page is active and D’Alessandro has designs for the logo in other media bureaucracies. And as readers and journalists struggle with the concept of “fake news,” Weekly World News alumni see his legacy as something else.
Lind: We invented fake news. But ours are harmless.
Ivone: Actually, we didn’t need to be a parody of existing issues. We strived to be faithful to ourselves, creating this universe of choice, a position for the incredible. Humor was a secondary thing. We started with wild headlines and the humor came this far with the package.
Kulpa: With fake news, we show the world how, and we’re sorry to say, other people have learned from it. People that fact is not as vital as what they need to be the fact.
Ivone: Something like “baby born with angel wings”, in a sense is funny, but a baby born with angel wings, is also inspiring, which confirms anything readers would possibly believe.
Lang: In the days we live in, it’s almost a bit to look back on and the main means of fake news was the Weekly World News, which was obviously bizarre and crazy. Now the line is much more confusing between what is genuine and what is wrong.
Garden: They treated everything seriously. There were some intimations, [but] it was bullsh*t. They wouldn’t outright tip their hand. That’s what The Onion did, which was write incredulous things with a serious tone of voice with a serious news angle. It’s a lot funnier that way.
Lind: I The Onion is the most brilliant American satire of all time, and they liked us. Some of our writers were in touch with theirs.
Neuschafer: Around 1988, a young couple from Madison, Wisconsin, came here and tried to see how they ran the newspaper. Then they went and The Onion.
Garden: He did what The Onion did, which is play it all right. Ed Anger a satire of right-wing conservative thinking. “Dear Dottie” a bit of it, a satire of recommendation columnists without spells like Ann Landers. They laughed at all the other media conventions of the time. Maybe they have political ideals that they were looking to move on, but, more than anything else, they were looking to have a laugh.
Kulpa: People think The Weekly World News is funny. In a way, but it’s not meant to be funny.
Lind: When I think of The Weekly World News, I don’t think it has a lasting effect on culture. The effect at the time was minimal. Most other people treated it as fiction. He made other people laugh. Unfortunately, some other people were afraid of death. If the story was that the global would end on April 14, other people believed, and it scared them, but still, they kind of liked fear. Television has kind of taken over. Basically, Unsolved Mysteries took over what the paper was doing.
Forsyth: I think it invented the format of made-up news before it was popular. I think it’s something that has influenced a lot of people; people put references to it into shows like The X-Files and Supernatural. It was kind of how it was for people who grew up with The Twilight Zone, Mad magazine, or National Lampoon. I think it was an influence on creative people. I hope that’s how it’s remembered and not just as fake news as it’s brought up today.
McGinness: I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of The have an effect on Weekly World News in a generation of Americans. It was like a radio of choice, anything counter-culture.
Berger: I met some of the most talented people I’ve ever known there. We tried to be as harmless and as entertaining as possible. We were very dedicated to doing our job and doing it the right way.
Kupperberg: It was pretty ridiculous if you were in that state of mind, you could believe a lot in what we printed. I had a neighbor at the time whose parents arrived to make a stopover on me. Your father wasn’t the brightest lamp in the chandelier, but he was a great guy. When he found out I was running for The Weekly World News, he was very excited because he and his wife went to 7-Eleven and took all the publications. The National Enquirer, Weekly World News, The Globe. He asked me, “Where do you get these stories from?” The unofficial thing in the paper was to always stay in fiction, so I said we had sources. Then my wife gave me a push and I said, “We made it all up.” He was disappointed.
McGinness: My vision in 2008 to create The Huffington Post for news from some other world and continue what we can do only with the American media. We did publications, compiled e-books, created an entire online site, and made virtual files to be taken to the public.
Greg D’Alessandro (CEO, Editor-in-Chief, 2018 to Today): Never left. We’re running a 30-minute sitcom, a podcast and a Bat Boy movie. The sitcom would be more about journalists like The Office.
Calder: I still remember the front covers. I’m 80 years old now, and it still brings a smile, and so does Eddie Clontz.
Kupperberg: The fact that we were able to sit down and invent a new global every week was one thing. And they paid us for it.
Berger: People called us a gloomy supermarket tabloid and we were, but we didn’t bother with what we were doing. We spend the time of our lives, we make a lot of money and have fun.
Ivone: A girl called us once and said, “Put the toaster on the phone.” We take it seriously,
Kupperberg: That’s what Weekly World News is all about. Put the toaster on the phone.