The real story behind the stories you love is often not only stranger than fiction—it's also sometimes funnier or scarier!
You might be surprised to learn that some of your all-time favorite movies and TV shows—from Star Trek to The Simpsons to A Nightmare on Elm Street—were actually inspired by real-life events.
Yep, you read that right. Behind the laughs, thrills and sci-fi adventures are stories rooted in truth. Some of these inspirations are downright spooky, while others are unexpectedly hilarious. As they say, sometimes the truth is a whole lot stranger than fiction.
Curious about what really happened? Keep reading as we uncover the true events that sparked the ideas behind some of Hollywood’s biggest hits.
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Star Trek (1966–1969)
The USS Enterprise was not the first vessel to embark on a five-year mission to explore new worlds, seek out new life and “boldly go where no man has gone before.” The voyage of the Enterprise and its captain James Kirk, closely resembles the real-life adventures of Capt. James Cook, the 18th-century British explorer. Both Kirk and Cook were raised on farms but ultimately explored the farthest edges of their horizons: Kirk in space aboard the Enterprise and Cook in the Pacific and Southern oceans aboard the Endeavour. Mr. Spock served as an equivalent to Cook’s science officer Joseph Banks, and Kirk’s stated mission before every show closely mirrors Cook’s stated ambition to go “farther than any other man has been before me.”
Even some of the more fantastic aspects to Star Trek have antecedents in Cook’s voyages. According to D.K. Abbass of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, some of the technologies employed aboard the Enterprise dramatize how some of Cook’s own equipment was “state of the art in the 18th century,” like the Harrison chronometer, a mechanical timepiece. Another key component to Star Trek lore draws inspiration from Cook’s famous circumnavigation of New Zealand and encountering the indigenous people there. “Cook met the Maoris,” Abbass says, “and Kirk met the Klingons.”
John E. Fahey of the Naval History and Heritage Command writes that these and other adventures on Star Trek “hearken back to the Golden Age of Sail and turn-of-the-century naval voyages of exploration, contact and colonization.” However, as demonstrated both in history and on the series, these ventures are not without consequence. Historian Alice L. George points out that Star Trek makes Kirk both the “virtuous explorer and the unwanted intruder,” as viewers are frequently reminded through the Starfleet’s “prime directive” to not interfere with the natural development of alien life. Cook clearly didn’t get that memo, since a dispute with native tribes in what is now Hawaii resulted in his being stabbed to death.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
On Aug. 22, 1972, a man named John Wojtowicz, along with two accomplices, tried to rob a Brooklyn branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank. The robbery was unsuccessful and resulted in an all-day standoff with law enforcement to negotiate the release of the hostages inside.
The situation quickly deteriorated into something more like a sitcom. For starters, Wojtowicz, the leader of the operation—sometimes described as looking a lot like Al Pacino, who played him in the film—was a hilariously inept robber. In addition to there being less money at the bank than he expected, when the bank’s air conditioner switched off, he nearly shot himself in the foot after trying and failing to get it working.
But, perhaps importantly, Wojtowicz spoke with reporters throughout the standoff in a somewhat successful effort to gain public support. When asked why he was robbing the bank, he said it was to finance “a sex operation” for his partner. And he wasn’t above theatrics. When police delivered pizza for the hostages, Wojtowicz insisted that he would pay for it and threw a wad of cash outside the building. As word of the carnival-like atmosphere at the bank spread, a large crowd gathered outside to witness Wojtowicz’s antics and to cheer him on. Even the hostages couldn’t help but be amused by what was happening.
“We cried, we laughed and joked. We took it as it came,” one told the New York Times. Another added, “We never really thought we’d be harmed, because the gunmen treated us so nicely.”
As with the film, the 14-hour siege only ended when the bandits were promised a flight abroad. An FBI agent drove them and their hostages to the airport. But on arrival at the John F. Kennedy International Airport, one of the gunmen was shot and killed, and Wojtowicz was arrested. The hostages were freed, unharmed.
The Simpsons (1987–present)
America’s longest-running scripted prime-time TV show might be the closest thing the country has to a national epic. Animated and a tad dysfunctional though they may be, the Simpsons and their neighbors are relatable to many Americans. And there’s a good reason for that.
While the state that Springfield is located in remains a running gag, much of the show was modeled after cartoonist Matt Groening’s hometown of Portland, Oregon. He, too, grew up on a street called Evergreen Terrace, to parents named Homer and Marge. His sisters were also named Lisa and Maggie, and Bart—an anagram for “brat”—was a stand-in for Matt himself. Portland is dotted with locations that served as character names: Northwest Quimby Street (Mayor Quimby), Northwest Lovejoy Street (the Reverend Lovejoy), Montgomery Park (Montgomery Burns, the town billionaire), North Van Houten Avenue (Milhouse Van Houten, Bart’s best friend), Northwest Flanders Street (Ned Flanders, the Simpsons’s neighbor), etc.
While Groening insists his real family is not as quarrelsome as the tumultuous animated brood, he understands the show’s vast appeal. “There’s a universal trait in humans to feel misunderstood,” he said on Radio Times, “and one of the messages in The Simpsons is ‘You are not alone.’ Others are as messed up as you, so laugh at it.”
Rocky (1976)
On March 24, 1975, a street-taught brawler from New Jersey stepped into the ring with Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxing champion fresh from defeating George Foreman in the legendary Rumble in the Jungle, an epic bout staged in Zaire and watched by a worldwide audience. Ali’s opponent, Chuck Wepner, had a recent string of victories to his name. But he was also older than Ali and had the unfortunate nickname of the Bayonne Bleeder, for a good reason: He had a habit of absorbing punches to the face while he ponderously came after his opponents.
Many considered Wepner a joke. But he stepped into that ring to make a statement. “Even if I don’t win,” he told his wife before the fight, “I just want to prove I belong there.” What followed was one of the most surprising boxing matches in history. The fight became a slugfest, with both men throwing haymakers and dirty punches across 15 rounds. Wepner ultimately lost the battle by a technical knockout, but he earned his place in boxing lore in the fight’s ninth round, when he knocked down Ali. It was only the fourth time the champ had ever hit the canvas.
The fight’s many twists and turns enthralled its viewers, among them a 28-year-old struggling actor named Sylvester Stallone. “That night I went home, and I had the beginning of my character,” Stallone later wrote. “I was going to make a creation called Rocky Balboa, a man from the streets, a walking cliche of sorts, the all-American tragedy, a man who didn’t have much mentality but had incredible emotion and patriotism and spirituality and good nature, even though nature had not been good to him.”
Stallone finished his screenplay in three and a half days and lobbied tirelessly to star as its main character. Like Wepner, the film overcame the odds, winning three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, beating out such heavyweights as All the President’s Men, Network and Taxi Driver.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Here’s a cheerful thought: Freddy Krueger, the fedora-wearing villain of A Nightmare on Elm Street, who kills teenagers in their dreams—which, in turn, kills them in reality—was based on two people who haunted director Wes Craven in his youth. One was a schoolyard bully who “frequently” beat up the future filmmaker. The other was a stranger in a fedora who lurked outside young Craven’s window until his older brother chased him off.
Knowing two creeps like that in a lifetime is bad enough, but Craven didn’t stop there when it came to borrowing horror stories from real life. In the 2006 documentary Never Sleep Again: The Making of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven revealed that the plot was loosely based on a series of articles that appeared in the Los Angeles Times beginning in the 1970s. The reports covered a “mysterious fatal malady” that killed dozens of otherwise healthy young men and at least one woman. The victims were living in the United States as refugees from Southeast Asia and died “in agony” late at night, apparently while having nightmares. The strange malady that killed these victims, which is now dubbed sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome, baffled researchers and made Craven realize, “I gotta do a movie about that.”
Moby Dick (1851)
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick boasts epic drama, thrilling chases and a character that spawned a multibillion-dollar coffee chain: the first mate aboard the Pequod, Mr. Starbuck. But as strange as this may sound, the titular “white whale” in Moby Dick was based on not one but two real-life whales. The first was an albino sperm whale that had encounters with more than 100 ships off the coast of Chile in the early 19th century. According to Smithsonian magazine, this huge whale, nicknamed Mocha Dick, was the primary inspiration for Moby Dick. The whale had white skin and a fierce temper, and an account published in 1839 described the beast as covered with “not less than 20 harpoons … the rusted mementos of many a desperate encounter.”
Another inspiration for the novel was the sinking of the whaling ship Essex in 1820. After repairing some damage to their vessel, the Essex crew noticed an unusually large sperm whale circling their ship. According to first mate Owen Chase, the creature “was enveloped in the foam of the sea, that his continual and violent thrashing about in the water had created around him, and I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury.” The huge whale rammed the Essex twice, shattering its timbers. The vessel sank, and its crew members were forced onto three lifeboats roughly 2,000 miles west of South America.
Only eight of the ship’s 20-person crew survived what happened next. The men endured a three-month buffet of starvation, exposure, sickness and, once the food ran out, cannibalism.
The horror influenced Melville so heavily that in Chapter 45 of Moby Dick, the book’s narrator, Ishmael, claims he interviewed the very first mate aboard that doomed ship.
The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is a sweeping epic about a young man named Edmond Dantès, who is betrayed by jealous rivals and imprisoned on the day before his wedding. In prison, Dantès learns of a massive treasure hidden on the Italian island of Monte Cristo. After escaping, he seeks the treasure at Monte Cristo, which he uses to establish several new identities for one purpose: vengeance.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a thrilling tale about transformation and injustice. It also happens to be based on the betrayal that Alexandre Dumas’s own father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, suffered under Napoleon Bonaparte. According to the biography The Black Count, Thomas-Alexandre was a French general who served in Europe during the French Revolutionary Wars and later in Egypt. Although born into slavery in Haiti, Thomas-Alexandre was educated in Paris and earned praise after joining a unit of interracial swordsmen known as the Légion Saint-Georges, where he soon rose to second in command. He was made a general at age 31 for what’s described on pulitzer.org as “triumphs that many regarded as impossible,” such as his “raid up a frozen cliff face that secured the Alps for France.”
Unfortunately, Thomas-Alexandre soon made a powerful enemy in Napoleon. As explained by Constance Grady on Vox, “Alex was more handsome and charismatic, and he was truly devoted to the idea of the republic.” After the two clashed in 1798 over Napoleon’s unsuccessful campaign in Egypt, the future emperor decided to take drastic measures against his critic after Thomas-Alexandre was taken prisoner of war in Naples. “Rather than negotiate for the release of a valuable member of the military,” Grady writes, “Napoleon left him there to rot.”
Napoleon’s treachery took a massive toll on Thomas-Alexandre’s health and contributed to his death just five years after his release. This left his son, the future author, without a father when he was only 3. He “grew up on his mother’s memories of his heroic and betrayed father,” writes Grady. The book, and its success, was the revenge the Dumas family deserved.
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Sources:
- Britannica: “James Cook”
- Inside Edition: “How the Bungled Brooklyn Bank Robbery That Inspired ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ Made 1 Man a Household Name”
- Smithsonian magazine: “Matt Groening Reveals the Location of the Real Springfield”
- History: “How a Terrifying Wave of Unexplained Deaths Led to ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’”
Originally Published in Reader's Digest
