Oh, and Dr. John Watson was originally called Dr. Ormond Sacker, which would have made the "Elementary, my dear ..." phrase sound rather awkward.

BBC

Obviously, it didn't take that long for Doyle to realize there was something wrong with the Sherrinford Hope name -- namely, the "Hope" part. So he changed it to "Holmes," in honor of a famous doctor and writer. It was only later on that he banished "Sherrinford" and replaced it with "Sherlock," inspired by a 19th century cricket player, which could have gone worse.

This isn't limited to Doyle, either -- even Charles Dickens struggled with names while writing A Christmas Carol. Before landing on the most adorable combination of words ever with Tiny Tim, Dickens considered Small Sam, Little Larry, and Puny Pete. No drafts have been found confirming Diminutive Dan, Feeble Fergus, or Undernourished Uther, but it's only a matter of time.

Fred Barnard

Meanwhile, Gone with the Wind's resilient and fiery Scarlett O'Hara was nearly christened ... Pansy O'Hara, which sounds like an extremely lazy Mad Magazine parody name for the character. Vivien Leigh wouldn't have been physically capable of playing a woman called Pansy: that's more "Shemp from The Three Stooges in a wig" material.

Whether you've read each Harry Potter book 17 times or experienced this franchise exclusively through animated GIFs on Tumblr, you're probably aware of the fact that they started out pretty innocently and got darker with each installment. The first book opens with the wizarding world cheering the downfall of the evil Voldemort (also a spoiler for the last book) and a baby Harry Potter being sent to live with his aunt and uncle, since his parents got Voldermort'd off camera. The movie just shortened the above crap to "baby Harry gets dropped off on a doorstep," because that's all you really need to know at this point.

Then fast forward to Harry as a 10-year-old kid, and the magical adventure begins. A big part of the series' success is due to how accessible J.K. Rowling made this first book -- better save all the depressing stuff for later, when the characters are older and the readers have lost part their souls by Googling "Hermione fan art."

What Was Scrapped:

Originally, however, Rowling wanted to dive right into the horror: her first drafts of the book started with an unsuspecting civilian called Mr. Puckle seeing an explosion out at sea and sailing out in the middle of a storm to check it out. He's not a wizard or anything. He's just a guy who sees something ominous and decides to investigate. He then stumbles across two charred bodies in the ruins of a house with a screaming baby somewhere in there. And that's how we're introduced to Harry Potter and his parents.

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Would Mr. Puckle have raised Harry in this version? We don't know, but in that case, that would have turned Harry into Hermione's stepbrother (yep, the original name for Emma Watson's character was Hermione Puckle), thus turning a significant section of the Harry Potter fan base into people pushing for incest.

But more importantly, focusing on the Potters' deaths instead of Harry's survival would have changed the whole tone of the series. The latter has us rooting for Harry to overcome his tragic beginnings; the former has us asking "who are these people and why should I care?"

Warner Bros. Pictures

What Was Scrapped:

This wasn't J.R.R. Tolkien's original intention, though: overly eager to give Bilbo the opportunity to prove himself a hero, Tolkien planned an uncharacteristically epic death scene for the dragon Smaug that would have left Bilbo with blood all over his sword. And his coat. And his everything.

In a scene strangely reminiscent of certain types of hardcore porn movies, Tolkien described Bilbo crawling on to Smaug's belly and driving his sword so far into the dragon's stomach that the sword disappears completely. The wound results in a gushing river of blood that threatens to drown Bilbo, so he grabs a giant golden cup from the pile of treasure nearby and surfs through and out of the mountain ... in blood. That's not a Tolkien book; that's a damned Slayer video.

New Line Cinema

Meanwhile, the dragon thrashes in pain and destroys the great hall inside the mountain until he dies, leaving the dwarves with a giant corpse to dispose of before they can spend their guts-stained money.

New Line Cinema

While the original draft has a certain "Hell yeah, Bilbo, we knew you had it in ya!" quality, having Bilbo slay the dragon is a little like having Rudy not just win the game but impregnate the girlfriends of all of the other team's players, too. Tolkien ultimately realized this (perhaps not through that exact same analogy) and toned down the scene to the point where Bilbo just lets out a much more in-character "Getting rid of dragons is not at all in my line."

Then again, considering how The Hobbit movies ended up, whoever remakes them in 2050 shouldn't completely discard this ending.

It's one of those rare novels that young high schoolers are forced to read but actually enjoy, with enough subtle symbolism packed in to keep teachers happy (and warrant a Nobel Prize for its author William Golding) and enough blood to amuse the young'uns. This Maze Runner prequel follows a group of teenage boys trapped on an island as they eventually descend into savagery and ultimately murder the dreamy do-gooder of the group, a boy named Simon.

So why the hell is it called Lord of the Flies? Because at one point Simon comes across a severed pig head infested by flies, and imagines that it talks to him about the darkness of the human soul. Ha, those wacky kids and their imaginations!

Faber & Faber

What Was Scrapped:

Except that, no, it apparently wasn't Simon's imagination as far as Golding was concerned ... because in his original version, the kid pretty much had superpowers.

Despite people's love for stories about rowdy kids, desert islands, and depressing dystopias, Lord of the Flies was an extremely tough sell: one publishing house's reader called it, "absurd & uninteresting fantasy. ... Rubbish & dull. Pointless." But then again, the reason for calling the novel a lame fantasy might have been because, at that point, Simon was such a ridiculously mystical Christ metaphor that it's a wonder he didn't walk on water to carry them all off the island. In one scene, he was supposed to just know, somehow, that it's forbidden to eat the fruit on the island, and that the one who forbids it is a mysterious person in the forest. So he meets this strange "person," and then, of course, they dance.

William Golding

But the biggest difference is that, instead of being murdered because fuck you, that's life, in the early drafts, Simon has a sort of premonition about his death and accepts it to save the others. Even the guys who directed the last two Superman movies would think the Jesus metaphor is too on the nose there.

When a young editor finally accepted the manuscript, he told Golding that all the magical shit needed to be "toned down." Golding was staunchly opposed to the suggestion ... but he was even more opposed to starving to death because no one would publish his freaking novel, so he made the changes and got a Nobel.

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Besides that gem, Fitzgerald seriously considered other titles like Gold-Hatted Gatsby, Trimalchio, On the Road to West Egg and Trimalchio in West Egg -- dude was determined to get either Trimalchio in there (a character from the Satyricon who hosted literal Roman orgies), or the word "egg." Less than a month before The Great Gatsby came out, Fitzgerald tried to change the title to the Toby Keith-esque Under the Red, White and Blue, but they informed him that, shucks, it was too late.

Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Other respected writers who struggled with titles were George Orwell (1984 was almost 1980, 1982 and The Last Man in Europe) and Joseph Heller of Catch-22 fame. Heller had serious trouble deciding which catch-number would enter our lexicon because of this novel: Catch-18 was rejected by his editor because of another book called Mila 18, Catch-11 because of Ocean's 11 (the non-"Clooney's Vegas vacation" version) and Catch-14 because the editor decided it's just not a funny number. We're pretty sure the guy was just messing with Heller, but Heller couldn't do anything since he needed an editor.

Dave Buresh/Denver Post/Getty Images

Eventually the editor himself suggested 22, because everyone knows "it's funnier than 18." Just wait until the inevitable Ocean's Eighteen proves him wrong.