7 Secret Jokes You Never Noticed In The Background Of Movies

Her presence in the original films was silly enough, but her cameo in Fantastic Beasts (which takes place about 70 years before Harry Potter) takes it to a new level. Now we know that there is some 80- or 90-year-old witch out there on a rampage, not even doing any major crimes, just stirring up shit at sports games and blowing shit up. If this character can't get her own spin-off film but a 128-page fake textbook can, then there is no justice in this world.

Warner Bros.

Anyway, starting in the third season, someone added a Magna Doodle to the wall in Joey and Chandler's apartment, and as anyone who's ever lived in a college dorm knows, nobody can resist drawing on one of those. Instead of a parade of crudely drawn penises, however, the Magna Doodle had a different in-joke, cast member shout-out, or plot spoiler with basically every episode, like a friend watching next to you who loves the show a little too much and can't stop spouting trivia.

Here's the board giving a birthday shout-out to a crew member:

Warner Bros. Television

Here's a drawing of police surrounding a house, reflecting the characters' fear that they would get caught for stealing cheesecake:

Warner Bros. Television

And for a jarring tonal shift, here's the show saluting the FDNY after 9/11:

Warner Bros. Television

Who was doing these drawings, exactly? Did the show have its own designated, union-certified Magna Doodler with a fully insured drawing hand? Well, the answer is "sort of, but not really." A lot of different people on the crew, and even some on the cast, are responsible for some of the doodles on the board, but the majority of them were done by a man on the electrical crew named Paul Swaim. And now we can all die unperturbed and serene, knowing this important mystery has been put to rest.

Warner Bros. Television

Note that Diesel doesn't really have any tattoos; these were made for the movie. Meaning that while they were drawing up the art for xXx, Diesel leaned in and said to the makeup director, "Dude, I know a totally badass word we can put on my abs, for no particular reason."

And then he went and topped that by getting an entire movie written about Melkor. The Last Witch Hunter, released in 2015, was written after Diesel met up with writer Cory Goodman at a party and started nerding out about D&D. Goodman was apparently so moved by the lore of the witch hunter Melkor that he went back home and wrote an entire movie based on it, renaming the character with the equally '90s comic-book-esque name "Kaulder." Here's a bad Photoshop of Diesel as Melkor that he shared on Facebook before the movie:

Vin Diesel

Anyway, did you know Han Solo is in a whole bunch of episodes? Here he is:

20th Television

Okay, so it's not exactly Harrison Ford so much as a custom-made replica of Han frozen in carbonite, but still, the figure's probably had more screentime on Firefly than some of the secondary characters. The little guy ends up popping up all over the place, appearing in random places in and outside of the protagonists' spaceship:

20th Television

20th Television

20th Television

The prop was reportedly made for star Nathan Fillion, who is a huge Star Wars fan -- but just like Christmas, other people got to play with his toy more than he did. Apparently, the prop department had a good laugh placing this guy all over the place for fun while the show was being made, giving Firefly a sudden case of cross-universe anachronisms. Or maybe it was foreshadowing about the future of the one-season series, as fans tearfully confessed their love for Firefly just before the show was frozen in place forever (at least until Serenity came out).

That is a 100 percent real sign from the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and there are plenty more like it. These are now known as Okudagrams, as the signs were chiefly made by lead graphic designer Michael Okuda. He never expected that the fine print would be legible on a television screen, so he had free reign to write any dumb thing that popped into his head, which is exactly what he did.

CBS Television Distribution

But that's far from the only thing that was snuck onto the show. The various data screens from the Enterprise are packed with silly crap as well. Here's a map of the iconic spaceship that's been filled with random objects, like the world's easiest Hidden Picture:

CBS Television Distribution

They also paid tribute to series creator Gene Roddenberry, lovingly/bizarrely nicknamed "The Great Bird," by creating this horrifying Gene/parrot monstrosity:

CBS Television Distribution

This continued in later shows, as well. Here's a still from Voyager, where what should be a bio of Ensign Phil Wallace instead has a self-aware rant from a crew member facing the mundanity of his own existence:

CBS Television Distribution

Partly transcribed: "Unreadable biographical text goes here. It would be telling us vital information about the handsome fellow pictured to the right. But let's face it. Writing all that up for every single person would take more time than I care to spend. In the end, it would be so small. No one will be able to read it. Instead, I will write sentences of sufficiently different lengths so that it looks like regular English usage ... I wonder if this will be readable in Hi-def?"

Our theory? This absurd text is actually part of the show, and the crew members of the Enterprise and the Voyager have just started going crazy after surviving so many crises week after week. The entire crew was later killed when they tried to fix the main reactor, but all the instructions were replaced with the lyrics for "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Seinfeld isn't the only one to do this, though; plenty of filmmakers use their characters to try and insult or exact revenge on real-life people. Sometimes they become the villains; after The New Yorker's Pauline Kael gave a bad review to Return Of The Jedi, George Lucas responded by borrowing her name for the giant General Kael in Willow. This would have been more effective if anyone had seen that movie.

Time Magazine, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

We've mentioned that Roland Emmerich made Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel the incompetent heads of New York City in his attempt at Godzilla. Likewise, Kevin Smith does this all the time, though not necessarily as an insult. Producer Bryan Johnson has worked on most of Smith's films, and to show his appreciation, Smith had him pee on a girl and then die of leukemia in Dogma.

But the gold medal has to go to David Wain, the writer of films like Role Models and Wet Hot American Summer, who has included someone named Jim Stansel in every movie he's written -- once as a newscaster, once as a lawyer, once as a shady guy holding a paintbrush, and so on. According to Wain's Reddit AMA, Stansel was a co-worker of his dad's and they had a Super 8 film of him going up on a hot air balloon. For some reason, the name stuck with Wain. Now the real Jim Stansel can point to Wet Hot American Summer and say "You know that fake person Beth made up to get out of an awkward conversation? That's me!"