5

Batman's Harley Quinn Was Created For A Throwaway Joke That Was Never Used

Warner Bros. Animation

Most fans know that Harley Quinn, one of the most popular characters in the Batman universe, did not originate in the comics. Her first appearance was in Batman: The Animated Series, in one of the rare examples of an adaptation that donates a character to the source material, sort of like how Norman Reedus was created for The Walking Dead TV show and gradually began to appear in other movies.

4

Shredder From Ninja Turtles Was Inspired By A Cheese Grater

IDW Publishing

The Shredder, the eternal nemesis of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is a scowling Japanese man dressed in spiked metal armor like Road Warrior Hawk and/or Animal. As best we can tell, he never takes this armor off, even when he's just hanging around the Technodrome in between battles. When you think about it, there's nothing about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that doesn't sound like it was inspired by a late night of pizza and beer. Every aspect of the original comic created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird can be boiled down to a conversation that begins with "Hey man, wouldn't it be funny if ..."

IDW PublishingLots of beer.

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.

moodboard/moodboard/Getty Images, IDW PublishingConsidering how much pizza cheese that suit could generate, it's a better design for an ally of the turtles.

3

Pac Man's Inspiration Came From A Pizza

Namco

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).

via pacmanmuseum.comDon't let anyone ever tell you that all life's problems can't be solved with pizza.

2

Teen Titans' Wonder Girl Came About Because The Writer Never Bothered To Read Wonder Woman

DC Comics

Back in the 1960s, DC writer Bob Haney noticed that basically every major superhero on the company's roster had a teenage sidekick, and thought it would be interesting to have them all team up. The idea became Teen Titans, and it initially starred Robin, Kid Flash, and Aqualad, who somehow had neither drowned nor been swallowed by a whale at this point. However, Haney eventually decided to rope in the rest of the Justice League's abandoned plus-ones, including Wonder Woman's lesser-known sidekick Wonder Girl.

DC ComicsIt's in Robin's contract that he always gets to be the most scantily-dressed team member.

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.

DC ComicsRemember what we said about the early video game industry? Double that for Silver Age comics.

1

Where The Wild Things Are Was Created Because The Author Had Trouble Drawing Horses

Harper & Row

Ordinarily, if you pitch a children's book about a little boy getting stranded on an island filled with gigantic, grotesque monsters, international law requires you to phone Roald Dahl and ask for his permission first. Also, your mind's eye will probably conjure up an image that is more H.P. Lovecraft than Richard Scarry. Author Maurice Sendak turned this concept into the beloved children's book Where The Wild Things Are -- which, incidentally, is full of illustrations that look like H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Scarry got into a fierce doodling war on the same cocktail napkin.

Harper & RowLovecraft won.

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.

Harper & RowIncluding repressed family trauma.

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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