Beech Tree News Network

Have you ever wondered how the name Corleone came to be in The Godfather movies? Al Pacino’s father was born in Corleone, Italy.  (LSUG.  For my fellow Yellowstone fans, the actress who plays Teeter, Jen Landon, is the daughter of the late Michael Landon from his second marriage. 

These next two tidbits I learned on AXSTV.  The first one comes from their show Top Ten Revealed.  This episode was about sampling.  That is, Rap songs sampling from older songs.  For example, and this was one that I didn’t know, the late Biggie Smalls’ 1997 hit “Hypnotize” was sampled from Herb Alpert’s 1979 hit “Rise”.  Herb said he was approached by about 10 different rappers to use “Rise” in their song.  He said “no” each time until he heard “Hypnotize”.  I’d love to have known the reason why.  Maybe he liked the lyric.  Who knows?

This final one also comes from AXS, specifically their show Top 10 Shows of the ‘70’s.  The television show The Six Million Dollar Man was based on a novel called Cyborg by Martin Caidin.  It’s a 1972 science fiction/secret agent novel.  The novel also includes elements of speculative fiction and was adapted to the Six Million Dollar Man movie, which was followed by the weekly television series of the same name. 

Cyborg is the story of astronaut and test pilot Steve Austin, who experiences a catastrophic crash during a flight, leaving him with all but one limb destroyed, blind in one eye, and with other major injuries.  The tv show The Six Million Dollar Man, ran from 1974-’78.  During 1976, a spin-off, The Bionic Woman, began, and ran until 1978.  Between 1987, ’89 and ’94, three made for tv movies reunited the casts of both movies.  Due to his licensing agreement with Universal Studios, Caidin received credit on all these productions, though the Bionic Woman didn’t originate from these books.  The Bionic Woman was remade in 2007 as Bionic Woman, though few elements from the ’76-’78 series were retained-elements from Cyborg, however, were incorporated, such as the imagined Jaime Sommers possessing a bionic eye-a feature invented by Caidin for Austin-and organizational similarities between the OSO (Office of Scientific Operations) of Caidin’s novel and movie, and the Berkut Group organization featured in the remake.  Only nine episodes of the remake were produced.  (www.wikipedia.org)