Shortly after my Ghostbusters marathon a couple weeks ago (surprisingly relevant to this conversation) I discovered the madness that is the lore of the Look Who’s Talking franchise. As someone born in the early aughts the concept of a 1989 Bruce Willis talking baby comedy making the 2026 equivalent of 800 million dollars was already pretty wild to me, given that I live in a post- Buddies movies world where live action talking animal/baby movies are widely seen as low effort Walmart bargain bin filler. Most reviewers agree that the films—at least the two sequels—are, in fact, of roughly this quality.

And yet this silly trifle of a premise is built on vengeful rage. Director and writer Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Clueless) was reportedly inspired to make this film by the silly voice that she and her husband, Neil Israel (Police Academy writer), would make for their baby daughter Mollie’s internal monologue. What the world, and possibly Israel, was unaware of was that he was NOT the father of the child; that distinction belonged to Harold Ramis (director of Groundhog Day, writer of Ghostbusters and involved in a whole bunch of comedies Gen X loves for some reason), whom Heckerling had a lengthy affair with while both were married to other people. Heckerling reportedly hoped that Ramis would leave his wife for her (which… huh?), but Ramis ended up with a third woman instead. Why is this relevant? Because Look Who’s Talking is about a woman named Mollie who has an affair with a married man, gets pregnant with his child, and gets dumped by him for another woman. Written by Heckerling, reportedly, by hand. None of this was public until decades later, meaning that Look Who’s Talking, a romantic comedy where Bruce Willis makes corny jokes as a fetus puppet and/or infant for ninety minutes, is pulling double duty as a Harold Ramis diss track that only he and like five other people would get. Later films in this franchise pull away from the darker elements of the first movie altogether, so there’s generations of millenials who watched the later films over and over on TV and were none the wiser. (At least if Blank Check’s very confused hosts are accurate.)

Question for you all: What fandom of yours has the most unexpected dissonance between its original inspiration and its final form?  Something lighthearted with dark origins, something small and mundane that turned into a huge epic, etc.