Mr. Ed, a Zebra? (1 Viewer)

[Johnny Angell]

I'm having trouble accepting this story, even though its on Snopes.com. An article there claims that Mr. Ed was portrayed by a Zebra. Because it was filmed and broadcast in black and white, viewers could not tell the difference. Wha?

It goes on to mention that officials in early NFL black and white broadcasts caused many problems. This is do not remember.

Here's a link to the story: http://www.snopes.com/lost/mistered....n=color#toggle

 

[Linda Thompson]

If you're purposely attempting to perpetuate a fairly well-known hoax and I'm pooping the party or spoiling the joke, I apologize in advance.

That said...here's the real scoop, directly from snopes.com:

http://www.snopes.com/lost/false.htm

 

[Mark_B]

What gave it away was when it said that because the NFL was broadcast in black and white the players kept running into the refs because they couldn't see the stripes. I guess they all had little monitors. LOL

 

[Qui-Gon John]

I'm pretty sure it's true, Mr Ed was in fact a zebra.

I'll admit, the bit about the NFL games and the Johnny Cash concert seem STUPID. The people, (the players and the prison guards), were there, they were seeing the other people, (refs and prisoners), in color, unless the had color-blindness.

 

[Greg_S_H]

Another little-known fact is that Wilbur was a lesbian trapped in a man's body.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Note the section of the Snopes site this "story" resides in:


In this case, "I found it on snopes" does not indicate that the story is true.

Joe

 

[AnthonyC]

That's why I've never understood the purpose of that section. It cheapens the authority that the site otherwise has.

 

[Johnny Angell]

I certainly agree with that statement. I was not trying to perpetuate anything. I was reading that article with the understanding that the purpose of Snopes was to debunk crap like this. I didn't see the section that Joseph quoted.

I think they are diluting the value of the website. The link that leads to this article reads: "Television's Mr. Ed was a horse" and is flagged with the red circle to indicate the statement is false. They use red and green circles throughout the site to indicate true and false.

I was sort of taken in, by believing that Snopes was publishing this as fact, but I still couldn't believe it, which resulted in this posting. I guess I'm one of those "who are born every minute."

 

[Chris Lockwood]

> I certainly agree with that statement.

Me, too.

 

[Linda Thompson]

I didn't mean for what I wrote to come off sounding like it probably did...

It's just that people often post outrageous or questionable things like this (usually in the AHL) with a "wink wink nudge nudge" sensibility, intended strictly as a joke, but I couldn't tell if your post was one of those or if it was serious. It sounded serious (which you have subsequently confirmed) and that's why I treated it as such.

But, in case it was intended facetiously and I was stomping it right out of the gate, that's why I apologized upfront.

I also agree about that section of Snopes.com. It's fine for what it is, but I have very often seen things linked and referenced out of the overall context, usually because people didn't know about that section and its purpose (exactly as happened here), and that's when the misinformation starts to flow.

Too bad, since I absolutely love Snopes.com otherwise.

 

[Johnny Angell]

I didn't have any problem with what you wrote, I can understand why someone might wonder about my intentions, considering the subject.

 

[LarryDavenport]

The only thing I heard about football and black & white TV was they made one team wear a light color and the other a dark color so it would be easier to tell which team was which for those watching the game on a B&W set.

 

[Qui-Gon John]

So everyone is saying this is from a section on Snopes were they treat something not true, as though it were true? Well that is f'd up! I read that Mr. Ed thing a long time ago and I really thought it was legit, because Snopes is usually reliable and I didn't know they had a bogus section like that.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Think about it for a second.

If there's one thing black and white TV or film is good for, it's telling black from white. The old iconoscope and I/O cameras couldn't hold a black level, so large surfaces tended to wash out to the same medium grey, but edges of black-to-white and white-to-black were ultra-sharp. You might not be able to tell a brown horse from a grey one, but a zebra would be instantly recognizable.

 

[Chris Lockwood]

Can you name some B&W movies featuring zebras, so we can watch them and verify how easy they are to see?

 

[Marty M]

Mr. Ed was not a Zebra. The whole idea that a zebra would show up as white on a black and white broadcast is absurd. The only thing that is going to show as white is white. I am assuming all of you are just going along with this joke.

I found this at http://www.tvacres.com/horses_mistered.htm

 

[ChristopherDAC]

I can't imagine what kind of "verification" you could need for this, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples — the only one I can think of right now is Abbot & Costello's Africa Screams, which is bound to have some stock footage of zebras, but it's not as though they would look different than Holstein cows, or even black sign-lettering on a white background. The leopard in Bringing Up Baby was easy enough to see, and it was black on orange. There are enough monochrome films set in Africa that I'm sure you could find several examples, but the question is rather silly.

 

[Scott-S]

Black and white broadcasts can show black and white. That is why they call it Black and white. So a zebra would look exactly like a zebra. A ref would look like a ref.

Wow. I think I lost a month of time and it is still April 1.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

 

[Qui-Gon John]

Well in my case, I thought it was some kind of peculiarty in the way they filmed back then, (see more below). That, and the fact the way it was reported on Snopes, (I was not aware they had a bogus story section), is what led me to believe it was true.

*Kind of like even fairly recently, when you see a computer screen in a movie or TV it is flickering very bad, but if you were standing in the room, it would not look like it is flickering like that.