21 Fandom Facts - mental_floss on YouTube - List Show (306)

Ladies and gentlemen, hello, I'm Mike, this is Mental Floss on YouTube, and did you know

that in 1969, 15 Star Trek fans called into a local Canadian television station to complain

that their favorite show was being interrupted by another program? The broadcast that they were angry about was that of the Apollo 11

They didn't want their sci-fi show interrupted by the real first people ever landing on the moon

And that is the first of many facts about fandoms that I'm going to share with you today. And I'm sorry if we don't get to your fandom

Don't hate me. Just leave it below in the comments and we'll put it in next time

Fandoms may seem like a new phenomenon, but they're older than you might think

Like in 1813, Jane Austen's niece, Fanny Knight, wrote her a letter but addressed it

to Georgina Darcy. Austen's response? I cannot pretend to answer it. Even had I more time, I should not feel at all sure of

the sort of letter that Miss D would write. Clearly she'd never make it in the fanfiction world

And Austin fans are still going strong. In 2014, 550 of them set the Guinness World Record

for the largest gathering of people dressed in Regency costume. Another very old fandom, Sherlock. Nowadays, Sherlockians can be found all over the internet

but they weren't the first fans of the detective. In fact, in 1891, Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to his mother that he was

considering killing off the character. She responded, You won't! You can't! You mustn't

Thanks, Mrs. Doyle. We don't need letter writing campaigns anymore, though. We have Twitter

The writers of Covert Affairs on USA admitted to writing scenes in the second season finale

based on the many questions they received about whether a blind character could get surgery to get his eyesight back Teen Wolf has also embraced its online fans It used music created by viewers in promos for the show plus fan art gets displayed during commercial breaks

Now if we could only get Tyler Posey to read my fanfics on camera. It's actually Pretty Little Liars that wins for most tweeted show ever

These fans even get credit for the relationship between Aria and her teacher

They pressured showrunners via Twitter into keeping that plot line, which was established in the books

PLL might be breaking records, but it's not the first show to listen to its online fans. In the 90s, Xena fans took to message boards to discuss whether Xena

and her friend Gabrielle might have a developing romance. The producers actually listened to

the feedback and started playing up the sexual innuendos in the show. In 2014, Lord of the Rings fans did something unexpected. They wrote a petition to Peter

Jackson asking him to change the plot of The Hobbit for the movie adaptation. Specifically

they wanted the character Thorin to have more time to shine than he did in the book

According to Josh Schwartz, who created Chuck, the show was on the brink of cancellation

but fans saved it by buying Subway sandwiches. Subway was a major sponsor of the show, so fans got NBC's attention by buying, quote

tens of thousands of foot-long turkeys. The show's star, Zachary Levi, even joined in, accompanying a group of fans to a store

If that is not a beautiful illustration of modern life, tens of thousands of feet of a sandwich

save a TV show from cancellation, I don't know what is. Actually, the Chuck fandom isn't the only one that gets to brag about saving their show

In 2007, Jericho fans sent 40,000 pounds of nuts to CBS to encourage them to keep the show on air

On Jericho, the main character responded, Nuts, when asked to surrender. So the fans mailed them in until CBS renewed the show

I bet they wish he said, Pizza. In 2001 Roswell fans did the same thing with their favorite character food of choice Tabasco sauce they sent around 6 bottles to the WB Although in addition to inundating them with food items it never hurts to prove to execs that shows can actually make money Good DVD sales paired with cult followings brought

back shows like Family Guy, Arrested Development, Firefly, and Futurama. And speaking of revived TV shows, when a Veronica Mars movie appeared on Kickstarter in 2013

fans quickly started raising money. In fact, the project became one of the highest grossing

Kickstarters ever with $5.7 million. Doctor Who fans managed to keep the show alive between 1989 when it was canceled and 2005

when it got rebooted. The BBC gave the fandom a lot of control, even letting them publish novels about the

series and create CDs about it featuring voiceover work by the original cast

In early 2014, a fan even found some lost tapes of early episodes of Doctor Who in Nigeria

If you want to learn more about that, there's a link in the description. Despite getting only around 3 million viewers per episode, Supernatural manages to stay

on the air thanks to its active fandom. It's the second most written-about TV show on fanfiction.net

One of those avid Supernatural fanfiction writers is none other than the novelist S.E

Hinton, who wrote The Outsiders. S.E. Hinton, if you're watching this, crossover fic, please

And speaking of fanfiction, I want to take this moment to remind you that Fifty Shades

of Grey started as a Twilight fanfiction called Masters of the Universe. It's since sold over

a hundred million copies. Author E.L. James' publisher has claimed that the fanfiction and

subsequent novel are quote, two distinctly separate pieces of work. But according to

the website Dear Author, the online plagiarism checker Turnitin found an 89% similarity between

Fifty Shades of Grey and Masters of the Universe. Harry Potter fans have turned Quidditch into

into a real sport. It's currently played on over 1,000 college campuses and three continents

One of the biggest groups of Star Wars fans is a non organization known as the 501st Legion The group has a deal with George Lucas that they can use his character likeness as long as they don get money for it So they do a lot of fundraising

and they dress up in costume for charity events. The group became so popular that

their name has been included in actual Star Wars books, toys, and video games

The readers of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire pay very close

attention to the expansive fantasy world he creates. He once told the New York

quote, people are yzing every goddamn line in these books, and if I make a mistake

they are going to nail me on it. It sounds a little paranoid, but he's not. Fans have called him out on changing the sex

of a horse between books from a mare to a stallion, and they've also given him grief

for accidentally changing the eye color of a minor character from green to blue

Man, I guess books really do belong to their readers. I miss John

Bonus fun fact, fans that were fed up with George R.R. Martin taking so long between books

have dubbed themselves Grumblers. And finally I return to the salon to tell you that in 2009 NASA let people vote on a

name for an international space station module via an online poll. Stephen Colbert asked his fans to vote for the name Colbert, which they did, and it won

by over 40,000 votes. NASA ended up naming the module Tranquility, but they did name the station Treadmill after

Colbert. It is the combined, operational, load-bearing, external resistance treadmill. Thanks so much for watching Mental Floss on YouTube, which is made with the help of all

of these very nice people. My name is Mike Rugnetta. If you like my face, you can find

more of it on YouTube at PBS Idea Channel. And if you like my voice, you can find it

on my podcast, Reasonably Sound. Links to both of those things in the doobly-doo. And

hey, DFTBA