6 Shockingly Dumb Reasons People Invented Famous Characters

Amazingly, in spite of the fact his creation took less effort and imagination than putting a cape on a potato, Snake Eyes went on to become one of the most beloved characters in the Joe franchise. "He's so dark and mysterious!" Sure, kids. Oh, and look, here's his "invisible motorcycle"! Vroom!

Quinn's first appearance in the series came in the 1992 episode "Joker's Favor." The idea was that the Joker would make an attempt on Commissioner Gordon's life at his birthday party by having a girl with a gun jump out of a giant cake, effectively ruining the Commissioner's big day. Harley Quinn was created to be the person in the cake. You may recognize this as the same role Erika Eleniak played in Under Siege.

But while the episode was already in production, the writers decided that it would be funnier to have the Joker himself pop out of the cake rather than some ditzy dame, so they changed the script to make that happen. Rather than go to the trouble of removing Harley Quinn completely, since they'd already written her into the script and everything, they diminished her role to that of a background member of Joker's gang, fully intending to never use the character again.

To everyone's surprise, viewers loved Harley Quinn, so the writers brought her back for future episodes, and her popularity grew to the point that DC comics made her part of the official Batman canon. Granted, the official Batman canon also includes Batman turning into a weretiger and the Joker becoming an Iranian diplomat, but still.

The Shredder is no exception. According to Eastman, the inspiration for the character came to him one night when he was washing the dishes. There's no word on how astronomically high he probably was at the time, but while washing one of those flat cheese graters with a handle, he gripped it like a wrist guard and remarked to Laird about how cool it would be for a character to wear them as part of a costume.

"We could call him the Grater," Eastman suggested. Luckily, Laird was either less stoned or generally more level-headed, and came up with "the Shredder" instead, which sounds more like a villainous ninja and less like an irritating shift supervisor. The two then went ahead and wrote a villain into their comic who wore cheese graters all over his body, and a pop culture legend / impossible-to-find action figure was born.

Back when video games were first invented, brainstorming meetings resembled an insane game of Mescaline Libs -- which is like Mad Libs, only played with 100 percent more mescaline. "A plumber who gains strength from mushrooms and dodges barrels thrown at him by a gorilla at a construction site? Sure, why not? Kids'll buy any goddamn thing we tell them to." Any random object that a programmer saw in their day-to-day life could become the central component of a video game pitch, and Pac Man started in that exact way.

Back in the '80s, Namco employee Toru Iwatani sat down to eat a delicious pizza. Upon removing the first slice, Iwatani remarked on how much the rest of the pizza now looked like a face with an open mouth. Anyone else would brush off this casual thought with the realization that sometimes stuff kind of looks like other stuff, but Iwatani's mind started racing about the potential for a video game in which a pizza runs around a maze eating dots (see "mescaline," above).

Quickly, this spark of inspiration ran through the usual hamster wheel of increasing absurdity until it became the story of a sentient pizza man eating his way through a maze while being pursued by vengeful ghosts. Iwatani pitched the idea as "Pakkuman" -- "Pakku" being the Japanese onomatopoeia sound for eating. When the game was brought to the west, it became "Puck Man" (because "Chomp Man" would've sounded ridiculous and we are a nation of sober adults) and eventually "Pac Man." And so, one of the most iconic characters in video game history was born -- insofar as Pac Man can be called a "character."

But Haney apparently didn't actually read the comics that featured Wonder Girl. Otherwise, he would have realized that she wasn't a sidekick at all. Wonder Girl was Wonder Woman back when she was a teenager. This would be like drafting a team of Back To The Future characters and treating old Marty and young Marty as two separate people. See, in the '50s, DC put Wonder Woman in a bunch of bizarre paradoxical time-travel adventures in which she teamed up with two younger versions of herself (one as a teenager and one as a baby) and her mother, and they fought dragons and swordfish, because these are comic books and not gold-leafed tomes of literature.

Haney evidently only glanced the covers of these issues, because he couldn't be expected to read a comic about a bunch of women. Consequently, he wrote Wonder Girl into the Teen Titans as a completely separate character. Infant Wonder Woman (named Wonder Tot, because comic books excel at being comic books) missed out on a Teen Titans membership card for some reason.

However, fans of Wonder Woman quickly pointed out this bizarre blunder, and DC was forced to hastily retcon Wonder Girl's backstory. It turns out that this Wonder Girl is a different person after all -- a girl named Donna Troy who developed Amazonian powers and decided to take on the mantle. Because in comics, there's no corner out of which you cannot write yourself.

But in Sendak's original vision for the book, the titular "wild things" weren't monsters at all; they were horses. He originally pitched the idea to his editor as Where The Wild Horses Are, and was given the green light to write and illustrate it. Unfortunately, several months into the project, it became increasingly obvious that Sendak couldn't draw a fucking horse if it were the ransom of the Universe.

Eventually, his editor stopped tearing her hair out and asked "Maurice, what can you draw?" The answer was, obviously, horrific inhuman monstrosities. They decided that was going to have to do, considering the amount of money they had already pumped into the project, and Sendak was given the go-ahead to draw whatever the hell popped into his mind, changing the title to Where The Wild Things Are, because "things" could be anything.

The idea of trying to endear a platoon of nightmare creatures to children could have been a disaster, but it became one of the most enduring classics of children's literature, and one of the most successful last-minute audibles in history.

You never know where a good idea will come from. For instance, Captain America's nemesis the Red Skull came from an ice cream sundae. And McDonald's Golden Arches are around because of one dude's love of boobs. See that and more in 20 Surprising Origins Of Famous Pop Culture Ideas and 5 Shocking Backstories Of Your Favorite Foods.

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