Page 286 - Celebrity Facts

The movie Tangled was originally supposed to be called Rapunzel.

This is not that surprising, considering that Rapunzel is both the name of the original fairy tale and its main character. The reason the name change is interesting. Disney wanted the movie to appeal more to young boys! The studio believes that the word "princess" in its last film, The Princess and the Frog, dissuaded many young boys from seeing the movie. They hoped to regain more of the male half of their target audience with this name change and increased exposure of the film's bad-boy bandit, Flynn Rider.
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Jennifer Aniston nearly passed up on Friends to join the cast of Saturday Night Live.

Jennifer Aniston nearly passed up on Friends to join the cast of Saturday Night Live.

She met with Lorne Michaels about being a cast member on SNL prior to accepting the Friends gig. She was offered the job, but turned it down. She felt like the show was too much of a "boy's club".

On the other hand, Janeane Garofalo, an SNL cast member from the 1994-95 season turned down a part on Friends that same year. She was the producers' first choice to play Monica. Imagine how different both of these shows would have been!
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Adam Sandler's first acting appearance was on The Cosby Show.

Adam Sandler appeared on the show for 4 episodes as "Smitty" when he was 18 years old. His friend, comedian Chris Rock, used to hang around on the set. Getting to meet Bill Cosby didn't turn out to be Rock's big break though. Bill Cosby wasn't a fan of his stand-up routine ("What's with this Bill Cosby? Mushmouth - the most racist character...") and asked him to not return to the set.
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Goofy used to be a smoker.

The Disney cartoon "No Smoking" features a chain-smoking nicotine-addicted Goofy (named "George" in this cartoon) trying to break the habit and suffering from bizarre withdrawal symptoms. Because of its content, this cartoon has been kept off the air, and was even re-released with a more uplifting ending. To its credit, it's a much more negative depiction of smoking than the Flintstones. Here's the whole unedited cartoon:

Abraham Lincoln got the idea to grow a beard from an 11-year-old girl.

In late October 1860, at the tail end of the crucial 1860 presidential election, Grace Bedell offered sage advice to then Congressman Lincoln on how to win the presidency. In a letter to Lincoln she suggested that, with such a thin face, he would be better off "letting his whiskers grow". This way he would be guaranteed to win the votes of her 4 brothers and would inspire American women to convince their husbands to vote for him (1860s American women couldn't vote, but they loved beards).

Later, in February 1861, President-Elect Lincoln visited Bedell during his inaugural trip from Illinois to the White House to show off his beard. Bedell contacted Lincoln again in 1864, asking for a job in the Treasury Department to support her family that had fallen on hard times. It's not known if Lincoln ever read or responded to this one, though. Her original letter has since become a piece of folk legend. Both of her letters, as well as Lincoln's 1860 letter in response have been copied and can be read at the Grace Bedell Foundation's website.