The whole idea actually goes back to Matt Groening's Life in Hell, a comic strip featuring a bunch of anthropomorphic rabbits and two gay guys wearing fez hats, because randomness equals comedy.

Matt Groening
CUSTARD DILDO! See? Hilarious.

All right, all right; I actually do like Life in Hell and wish it had its own TV series, but where I merely wished, Groening acted by trying to sneak a character from the comic into The Simpsons. That's right: Marge wasn't supposed to be just a random cartoon rabbit. She was meant to be a character straight out of Life in Hell. But then he had time to think about it and decided that the idea was just too silly for a cartoon that, while admittedly out there at times, does generally strive for semi-realistic humor. He still gave Marge rabbit ears in The Simpsons Arcade Game, because, as mentioned before, randomness equals ORANGE PORCUPINE MITTENS!

The Spriters Resource

Thankfully, that was the last time anyone would try to combine Marge Simpson and rabbits to create something truly disturbing ...

Playboy
Seriously, whose idea was this?

Prejudice against gay people is never funny, but sometimes you come across homophobia that's so misguided and unrelated to anything in the real world that you just can't get angry at it. Instead, you want to grab its face, pull it closer to you, and ask what combination of booze and locked basements has made it this way, which naturally brings me to the 1978 TV series The Incredible Hulk. You know, the one where Hulk looked as if he was in a hair metal band.

CBS/NBC

The thing that I love most about this show is that it still manages to keep your attention while mainly focusing on Bill Bixby's character, Dr. David Banner, the man behind the Hulk. They really emphasize the loneliness that he feels as he isolates himself from society out of fear that his alter ego will hurt an innocent person. Now, try to guess which part of what I just wrote has anything to do with homophobia, then immediately give up because it was actually the offhand mention that Bixby's character is named David Banner.

Some of you might have already noticed that this is not Dr. Banner's first name, which has always been Bruce, or if you want to get technical, Robert Bruce.

Paramount Pictures/20th Century Fox
Boy, wouldn't that have been a different movie ...?

The point is that Dr. Banner has never been called David, unless you're talking about Hulk's father in the 2003 movie, which we're not, so why even bring it up, me? So ... why was the name changed for the TV show? Well, rumor has it that Kenneth Johnson, the show's creator, producer, writer, director, and probably janitor, didn't want to use the name Bruce because he thought that it sounded too stereotypically gay. As in, he apparently knew so many flaming gay guys named Bruce that he opted not to call his main character that out of fear that the audience would confuse his show for an episode of The Brady Bunch Hour or something. You know, Kenneth, that's awfully judgmental for a guy fucking named Johnson.

You'd think a man who knows comics wouldn't dare to say anything negative about a name shared by Batman, but he was probably too distracted by yet another chart-topping album from a certain flamboyantly gay rock star and his E Street Band. Though, admittedly, Johnson wasn't the only person to ever look at Hulk and have his thoughts jump straight to homosexuality from a springboard shaped like an erect penis. For example, in 1980, Marvel Comics did pretty much the exact same thing, the result of which was a horrifying comic about Bruce Banner almost getting man-raped in the YMCA showers.

Marvel Comics
Boy, wouldn't that have been a different movie ...?

Despite Happy Days only pretending to take place in the '50s, ABC executives apparently decided to also adopt the moral values of those times and impose them on the show for realism's sake, I assume. It's the only explanation for why they considered a plain leather jacket to be the symbol of violence and criminal intent, and feared that if one of the stars of the show wore it, he might corrupt their impressionable audience.

So series creator Garry Marshall found himself having to convince ABC to let him keep the garment, because he understood that showing Fonzie without his leather jacket would be like serving delicious ice cream in a cone made out of dog turds and your grandmother's ashes. In the end, he sold them on the idea that the jacket was safety gear for the motorcycle. What motorcycle? The one he suddenly decided to make Fonzie ride all the freaking time, including into people's houses.

ABC
The part where he also cuddles with it in bed was thankfully vetoed by the network.

But as the character's popularity grew, so did the audience's belief that Fonzie probably wouldn't carve his initials into Richie Cunningham's ass to mark him as his bitch, and soon he was allowed to wear his "dangerous" jacket without being near a motorcycle ... right around the time Sara Jane Moore tried to assassinate President Ford! COINCIDENCE?!

Sure, on the surface he's just a bird with a severe anger-management problem, but there's this crazy optimism and pigheaded determination to him that make for some fantastic stories.

Disney
"They told me I couldn't keep burning all those orphanages, but I showed them!"

I should know, because I read all of them. Donald Duck comics are insanely huge in Europe, and I used to read them religiously as a kid. And, in all that time, I guess I convinced myself that the character could work only as a duck, because real-life ducks are very goofy animals, but they can also be vicious dicks, just like Donald. It made sense to me back then, but that's apparently not what Disney was going for when he created the character. If you believe the numerous industry rumors, Donald Duck's origin actually traces back to an Australian cricketer named Donald Bradman.

Who might also be the inspiration for Popeye.

Bradman is widely considered one of the greatest batsmen in the history of cricket, which I will now talk about as if it was baseball to speed things along, and to piss off my British and Australian readers. So, in 1932 (two years before Donald's first appearance) Bradman was playing in America, scoring plenty of home runs and getting on base, etc., until his team played against the New York West Indians. That's when Bradman got his three strikes and was inexplicably out of the game, which the news outlets reported as Bradman being out for "a duck" (a cricket term meaning he scored zero points). Legend goes that Disney read about it somewhere, and it was that proximity of the words "Donald" and "duck" that went on to inspire the creation of the original Angry Bird.

If the rumors are true, then it means that Donald Duck wouldn't exist if not for silly cricket terminology and a freak off day for one of the greatest professional athletes ever. In any case, let's just be glad that on that fateful day, Bradman wasn't out for "a Chinaman" or "a rabbit," because it's hard to say which of the two would have yielded the more racist result.

Disney/RKO Radio Pictures
The rabbit, definitely.

Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a Cracked columnist and editor. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com.

For more from Cezary, check out 4 Pop Culture Icons Who Were Originally Meant to Be Women. And then check out 15 Unexpected Origins of Famous Ideas.

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