15 Baffling Inspirations Behind Iconic Pop Culture Franchises

Sometimes, the muses work in deeply strange ways.
15 Baffling Inspirations Behind Iconic Pop Culture Franchises
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Ideas for art come from strange and unexpected places. Look, we're writers, and we're not above admitting that we've been carrying around grudges from elementary school, scary images of unwieldy trees we saw whilst hiking in a forest in Norway, and maybe the memory of seeing a drawing of a terrifying, bipedal and be-fanged mythical creature in a book when we weren't quite old enough, and turning all of that into a revenge horror movie screenplay. Everyone does that. Right guys? (looks around staffroom) WE ALL DO THIS, RIGHT GUYS?

So we're very interested in the where inspiration for some of our favorite movies and TV shows comes from. These are people who took their weird hangups and actually got the greenlight to make a movie. Multimillion dollar franchises are sometimes launched by, say, a bad dice roll in a D&D game, or the creator’s house burning down. Just check out these 15 examples of that kind of thing happening:

E.B. White got the idea for Charlotte's Web from a really gross experiment. He saw an intricate web in his barn, and, weeks later, an egg sac but no spider. So he took the sac to his NYC apartment in a box that he cut air holes in, and put

Source: NPR

Pac-Man

Pac-Man gobbles up stuff because its creator thought women were totally into eating. Arcades at the time were filled with violent sci-fi games that mostly attracted boys, and Toru lwatani wanted to attract more women, so he began designing a game for them. First he thought fashion or romance themes

She was right; as a woman, I can confirm that we are really into eating. 

Source: CNN

Dune

Dune grew out of an article Frank Herbert was assigned to write. It was about the largest swathe of coastal dunes in the U.S., the Oregon Dunes but he never finished it. He just kept researching the topic, and wrote a science fiction novel inspired by it years later.

Source: TIME

The Dark Crystal

The Dark Crystal was hugely influenced by a Scientology -esque spiritual text. A SETH BOOK SETH SPEAKS DESK Serhdictates hiks hHe startling of the universe through channeler lane Roberts RKX KSTGAL JANE ROBERTS Creator Jim Henson was really into Seth Speaks, a book by sci-fi writer Jane Jacobs who claimed that Seth,

Honestly, I get it. This is what good fantasy does to people. Kinda reminds me of Snape Wives. 

Source: Gizmodo

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