Who Was First in Flight; Not The Wright Brothers?

Who Was First in Flight; Not The Wright Brothers?

5:42:00 PM   Amazing Fcacs, History, News, Science,

While most aviation historians credit the Wright Brothers with making the first powered, sustained and controlled heavier-than-air flight, some believe the honor rightly belongs to either Alberto Santos-Dumont or Gustave Whitehead. Read about the case for each and decide for yourself who was first in flight.

Alberto Santos-Dumont the Brazilian aeronaut aboard his record winning 14 bis tail-first biplane.

The Case for Alberto Santos-Dumont

Tens of millions of people around the world received their first introduction to Alberto Santos-Dumont when they tuned into the Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and watched as a nattily attired, mustachioed man impersonating the pioneering aviator took to the skies in a vintage biplane. The assertion by Olympic organizers that the Brazilian Santos-Dumont was the true inventor of the powered airplane may have surprised most viewers, but not those in the host country.

While living in Paris in the 1890s, Santos-Dumont poured money from his family’s coffee-planting fortune into experimenting with lighter-than-air crafts such as hot air balloons and motor-powered dirigibles. According to “Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight” by Paul Hoffman, the high-flying bon vivant even had a personal airship that he would fly from his apartment near the Arc de Triomphe to his favorite restaurant and keep tethered to a lamp-post as he dined inside.

After claiming an aviation prize in 1901 by piloting a dirigible around the Eiffel Tower, Santos-Dumont shifted his focus to heavier-than-air flight. While some remained skeptical of the reported achievements of the Wright Brothers, which were conducted in secrecy away from the public eye, the success of the flamboyant Santos-Dumont was plain for all to see on October 23, 1906, when his 14-bis biplane flew about 200 feet at a height of around 15 feet before a large Parisian crowd in the world’s first public powered flight. Less than three weeks later, the Brazilian set the first world record to be recognized by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale by flying 726 feet in his winged aircraft.

Backers of Santos-Dumont claim the 1906 public demonstrations were the first powered flights because his wheeled craft took off unassisted unlike the Wright Flyer, which was launched off a rail and aided by the strong winds at Kitty Hawk to lift it off the ground. Henrique Lins de Barros, a Brazilian physicist who has written two books on Santos-Dumont, told Reuters in 2003 that the Wright Brothers’ flight did not fulfill all the standards in place at the time, which including taking off unassisted, publicly flying a predetermined length in front of experts and landing safely. “If we understand what the criteria were at the end of the 19th century, the Wright Brothers simply do not fill any of the prerequisites,” he said.

Aviation pioneer Gustave Whitehead is pictured with his daughter Rose and plane number 21.

The Case for Gustave Whitehead

More than two years before the Wright Brothers glided over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, a night watchman at a local manufacturing plant reportedly soared over the industrial city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in his handcrafted flying machine. A full-page article on page five of the August 18, 1901, edition of the Bridgeport Sunday Herald reported that four days earlier a German immigrant named Gustave Whitehead had flown a distance of one-and-a-half miles at a height of 150 feet over Bridgeport and the neighboring town of Fairfield. An accompanying hand-drawn illustration depicted Whitehead in his bat-like contraption, known as No. 21 or “Condor.” Whitehead later reported that he returned to the skies on January 17, 1902, and flew for seven miles over Long Island Sound.

Whitehead’s claim, however, was plagued by a lack of documentation. Scientific American had noted that a single blurred photograph of the immigrant’s plane in flight had been seen at a 1906 aeronautical show in New York City, but that snapshot, if it existed, became lost to history after the report. When an attempt was made in the 1930s to interview the two eyewitnesses named in the Bridgeport Sunday Herald piece, one could not be found and the other, James Dickie, said he believed “the entire story of the Herald was imaginary.” Still, the persistent claims stuck in the craw of Orville Wright, who in 1945 wrote a rebuttal entitled “The Mythical Whitehead Flight” in U.S. Air Services magazine in which he stated that Whitehead “lacked the sufficient mechanical skill and equipment to build a successful motor” and “was given to gross exaggeration.”

The case for Whitehead’s primacy received new life in 1987 when the CBS news program “60 Minutes” aired a segment entitled “Wright Is Wrong?” after aviation buffs successfully flew a replica of his craft. The controversy reached new heights in 2013 after Australian aviation historian John Brown announced that he had found a photograph of the exhibit mentioned in Scientific American in 1906 that showed the missing snapshot of Whitehead in flight. Brown’s research led Paul Jackson, editor of the esteemed aviation publication Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, to endorse Whitehead as being first in flight in the foreword to its 100th anniversary issue that March. (Two years later the publication’s corporate owners issued a public statement that Jackson’s assessment was solely his personal opinion.) Connecticut legislators subsequently passed a bill signed into law that declared their state “first in flight.”

Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur.

The Case for the Wright Brothers

On the morning of December 17, 1903, Orville Wright took the controls of his heavier-than-air craft and signaled to his brother, Wilbur. With Wilbur running alongside to balance the fragile machine, the Wright Flyer that Orville had built with his brother slid down the guiding rail and soared into the air over a distance of 120 feet. The two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, followed up the 12-second flight that day with three others over the dunes of North Carolina’s remote Outer Banks. A handful of witnesses were present for the first flight, and a photograph taken by an employee of the U.S. Life-Saving Service proved the Wright Flyer had taken to the air.

The Wright Brothers meticulously documented their experiments, although they maintained great secrecy while they pursued patents and contracts for their flying machine. Unlike Santos-Dumont, the brothers kept a low profile and did not make a public flight until 1908, two years after the Brazilian aviator dazzled Paris.

Most aviation historians believe the Wright Brothers met the criteria to be considered the inventors of the first successful airplane before Santos-Dumont because the Wright Flyer was heavier-than-air, manned and powered, able to take off and land under its own power and controllable along three axes in order to avoid crashes. Backers of the brothers also note that by 1905, a year before Santos-Dumont’s first powered flight in Europe, the Wright Brothers had been able to take flights that lasted as long as 40 minutes.

Historian David McCullough, author of “The Wright Brothers,” swatted down the claim that Whitehead was first in flight in a 2015 interview with radio station WNPR. “There’s no evidence for it whatsoever,” he said. “Mr. Whitehead is never known to have flown anything and when he tried to demonstrate later on, it didn’t work at all in front of people. There’s something like 35 noted historians of aviation specialists who have signed statements that say it’s an interesting story but there’s nothing to support it.” Other Whitehead skeptics add that the original Bridgeport Sunday Herald story was likely an exaggeration and that the recently discovered photograph is too blurry to offer any conclusive proof that the German immigrant had ever been airborne.

Although unified in their belief that the Wright Brothers were first to fly an airplane, some of their boosters have their own ongoing historical feud, one that can be seen everyday on American highways. Ohio and North Carolina have each staked a claim to the legacy of the brothers. Both states featured the Wright Flyer on their commemorative state quarters, and while Ohio’s state license plates include the tag line “Birthplace of Aviation,” North Carolina’s boast “First in Flight.”

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50 Really Weird Facts About Your Body

50 Really Weird Facts About Your Body

10:48:00 PM   Amazing Fcacs,

The Human Body is a treasure trove of mysteries, one that still confounds doctors and scientists about the details of its working. It’s not an overstatement to say that every part of your body is a miracle. Here are fifty facts about your body that will leave you stunned.

1. It’s possible for your body to survive without a surprisingly large fraction of its internal organs. Even if you lose your stomach, your spleen, 75% of your liver, 80% of your intestines, one kidney, one lung, and virtually every organ from your pelvic and groin area, you wouldn’t be very healthy, but you  would live.
2. During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools. Actually, Saliva is more important than you realize. If your saliva cannot dissolve something, you cannot taste it.
3. The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm. The egg is actually the only cell in the body that is visible by the n*k*d eye.
4. The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue and the hardest bone is the jawbone.
5. The human  feet have 52 bones, accounting for one quarter of all the human body’s bones.
6. Feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.
7. The acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve razorblades. The reason it doesn’t eat away at your stomach is that the cells of your stomach wall renew themselves so frequently that you get a new stomach lining every three to four days.
8.  The human lungs contain approximately 2,400 kilometres (1,500 mi) of airways and 300 to 500 million hollow cavities, having a total surface area of about 70 square metres, roughly  the same area as one side of a tennis court. Furthermore, if all of the capillaries that surround the lung cavities were unwound and laid end to end, they would extend for about 992 kilometres. Also, your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart.
9.  Sneezes regularly exceed 100 mph, while coughs clock in at about 60 mph.
10. Your body gives off enough heat in 30 minutes to bring half a gallon of water to a boil.
11. Your body has enough iron in it to make a nail 3 inches long.
12. Earwax production is necessary for good ear health.  It protects the delicate inner ear from bacteria, fungus, dirt and even insects. It also cleans and lubricates the ear canal.
13. Everyone has a unique smell, except for identical twins, who smell the same.
14. Your teeth start growing 6 months before you are born. This is why one out of every 2,000 newborn infants has a tooth when they are born
15. A baby’s head is one-quarter of it’s total length, but by the age of  25 will only be one-eighth of its total length. This is because people’s heads grow at a much slower rate than the rest of their bodies.
16. Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood the number is reduced to 206. Some of the bones, like skull bones, get fused into each other, bringing down the total number.
17. It is not possible to tickle yourself. This is because when you attempt to tickle yourself you are totally aware of the exact time and manner in which the tickling will occur, unlike when someone else tickles you.
18. Less than one third of the human race has 20-20 vision. This means that two out of three people cannot see perfectly.
19. Your nose can remember 50,000 different scents. But if you are a woman, you are a better smeller than men, and will remain a better smeller throughout your life.
20. The human body is estimated to have 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
21. The three things pregnant women dream most of during their first trimester are frogs, worms and potted plants. Scientists have no idea why this is so, but attribute it to the growing imbalance of hormones in the body during pregnancy.
22. The lifespan of a human hair is 3 to 7 years on average. Every day the average person loses 60-100 strands of hair. But don’t worry, you must lose over 50% of your scalp hairs before it is apparent to anyone.
23. The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as an encyclopedia.Your brain uses 20% of the oxygen that enters your bloodstream, and is itself made up of 80% water. Though it interprets pain signals from the rest of the body, the brain itself cannot feel pain.
24.  The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.
25. Your eyes are always the same size from birth but your nose and ears never stop growing.
26. By 60 years of age, 60% of men and 40% of women will snore.
27. We are about 1 cm taller in the morning than in the evening, because during normal activities during the day, the cartilage in our knees and other areas slowly compress.
28. The brain operates on the same amount of power as 10-watt light bulb, even while you are sleeping. In fact, the brain is much more active at night than during the day.
29. Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour. Neurons continue to grow throughout human life. Information travels at different speeds within different types of neurons.
30. It is a fact that people who dream more often and more vividly, on an average have a higher Intelligence Quotient.
31. The fastest growing nail is on the middle finger.
32. Facial hair grows faster than any other hair on the body. This is true for men as well as women.
33. There are as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee.
34. A human foetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
35. By the age of 60, most people will have lost about half their taste buds.
36. About 32 million bacteria call every inch of your skin home. But don’t worry, a majority of these are harmless or even helpful bacteria.
37. The colder the room you sleep in, the higher the chances are that you’ll have a bad dream.
38. Human lips have a reddish color because of the great concentration of tiny capillaries just below the skin.
39. Three hundred million cells die in the human body every minute.
40. Like fingerprints, every individual has an unique tongue print that can be used for identification.
41. A human head remains conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it is been decapitated.
42. It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
43. Humans can make do longer without food than sleep. Provided there is water, the average human could survive a month to two months without food depending on their body fat and other factors. Sleep deprived people, however, start experiencing radical personality and psychological changes after only a few sleepless days. The longest recorded time anyone has ever gone without sleep is 11 days, at the end of which the experimenter was awake, but stumbled over words, hallucinated and frequently forgot what he was doing.
44. The most common blood type in the world is Type O.The rarest blood type, A-H or Bombay blood, due to the location of its discovery, has been found in less than hundred people since it was discovered
45. Every human spent about half an hour after being conceived, as a single cell. Shortly afterward, the cells begin rapidly dividing and begin forming the components of a tiny embryo.
46. Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do. This  is largely due to the fact that a majority of the machines and tools we use on a daily basis are designed for those who are right handed, making them somewhat dangerous for lefties to use and resulting in thousands of accidents and deaths each year.
47. Your ears secrete more earwax when you are afraid than when you aren’t.
48.  Koalas and primates are the only animals with unique fingerprints.
49. Humans are the only animals to produce emotional tears.
50. The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet in the air.

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Some Interesting Facts of Dreams You See….

Some Interesting Facts of Dreams You See….

10:40:00 PM   Amazing Fcacs,

Dreams have always Made us curious since long time. It is also said that there were specific dream interpreters in the courts of kings in early civilizations. However, in the 1800s the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and subsequently, his successor Carl Jung, revolutionized the world of dreams. Since then a lot has been studied in this field but dreams astound us with varied meanings and interpretations every time we witness them. Some of the most interesting facts about dreams in the trailing paragraphs, i am sure will surprise you.


                       

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5 Most Horrible Bugs around the Earth

5 Most Horrible Bugs around the Earth

10:19:00 PM   Amazing Fcacs,

There are estimated 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects on earth at any given moment. For everybody of us, there are 1.5 billion bugs. But some of them are so horrible, just single is too many. Here are 5 you want to keep away from at all costs.Human Bot Fly

Human Botfly

The human botfly, Dermatobia hominis is one of several species of fly the larvae of which parasitise humans. It is also known as the torsalo or American warble fly,even though the warble fly is in the genus Hypoderma and not Dermatobia and is a parasite on cattle and deer instead of humans.
Dermatobia fly eggs have been shown to be vectored by over 40 species of mosquitoes and muscoid flies, as well as one species of tick;the female captures the mosquito and attaches its eggs to its body, then releases it.
Either the eggs hatch while the mosquito is feeding and the larvae use the mosquito bite area as the entry point, or the eggs simply drop off the muscoid fly when it lands on the skin. The larvae develop inside the subcutaneous layers, and after approximately eight weeks, they drop out to pupate for at least a week, typically in the soil. The adults are small gray flies resembling a blowfly.
This species is native to the Americas from Southeastern Mexico (beginning in central Veracruz) to northern Argentina, Chile, and Costa Ricathough it is not abundant enough (nor harmful enough) ever to attain true pest status.
Since the fly larvae can survive the entire eight-week development only if the wound does not become infected, it is rare for patients to experience infections unless they kill the larva without removing it completely. It is even possible that the fly larva may itself produce antibiotic secretions that help prevent infection while it is feeding.
Army or Soldier Ant

Army or Soldier Ant

The name army ant is applied to over 200 ant species, in different lineages, due to their aggressive predatory foraging groups, known as “raids”, in which huge numbers of ants forage simultaneously over a certain area, en masse.
Another shared feature is that, unlike most ant species, army ants do not construct permanent nests; an army ant colony moves almost incessantly over the time it exists.
All species are members of the true ant family, Formicidae, but there are several groups that have independently evolved the same basic behavioral and ecological syndrome. This syndrome is often referred to as “legionary behavior”, and is an example of convergent evolution.
Most New World army ants belong to the subfamily Ecitoninae which contains the two groups, the Cheliomyrmecini and Ecitonini. The former contains only the genus Cheliomyrmex whereas the latter Ecitonini contains four genera, Neivamyrmex, Nomamyrmex, Labidus, and Eciton.
The largest genus is Neivamyrmex which contains more than 120 species. But the most predominant species is Eciton burchellii of the genus Eciton; its common name “army ant” is considered to be the archetype of the species. Old World army ants are divided between Aenictini and Dorylini.
The Aenictini contains more than 50 species of army ant in the single genus, Aenictus. However the Dorylini contains the Dorylus, these are the most aggressive species of driver ants, there are 60 species known.
Originally the Old World and New World lineages of Army Ant were thought to have evolved independently, an example of convergent evolution. However in 2003, genetic analysis of various species suggest that they all evolved from a single common ancestor which lived approximately 100 million years ago at the time of the separation of the continents of Africa and America.Army ant taxonomy remains ever-changing, and genetic analysis will continue to provide more information about the relatedness of the various species.
Africanized Honey Bee

Africanized Honey Bee

The African honey bee (Apis mellifera scutellata) is a subspecies of the Western honey bee. It is native to central and southern Africa, though at the southern extreme it is replaced by the Cape honey bee, Apis mellifera capensis.
This subspecies has been determined to constitute one part of the ancestry of the Africanized bees (also known as “killer bees”) spreading through America.
The African bee is being threatened by the introduction of the Cape honey bee into northern South Africa. If a female worker from a Cape honey bee colony enters an African bee nest, she is not attacked, partly due to her resemblance to the African bee queen.
Now independent from her own colony, she may begin laying eggs, and since A.m. capensis workers are capable of parthenogenetic reproduction, they will hatch as “clones” of herself, which will also lay eggs. As a result the parasitic A. m. capensis workers increase in number within a host colony.
This leads to the death of the host colony on which they depend. An important factor causing the death of a colony seems to be the dwindling numbers of A. m. scutellata workers that perform foraging duties owing to death of the queen, and, before queen death, competition for egg laying between A. m. capensis workers and the queen. When the colony dies, the capensis females will seek out a new host colony.
A single African bee sting is no more venomous than a single European bee sting, though African honeybees respond more quickly when disturbed than do EHBs. They send out three to four times as many workers in response to a threat. They will also pursue an intruder for a greater distance from the hive. Although people have died as a result of 100-300 stings, it has been estimated that the average lethal dose for an adult is 500-1,100 bee stings.
Bullet Ant

Bullet Ant

Paraponera is a genus of ant consisting of a single species, commonly known as the lesser giant hunting ant, conga ant, or bullet ant (Paraponera clavata), named on account of its powerful and potent sting, which is said to be as painful as being shot with a bullet.
Workers are 18–30 mm longand resemble stout, reddish-black, wingless wasps. Paraponera is predaceous, and like all primitive poneromorphs does not display polymorphism in the worker caste. The queen is not much larger than the workers. It inhabits humid lowland rainforests from Nicaragua south to Paraguay. The bullet ant is called “Hormiga Veinticuatro” or “24 (hour) ant” by the locals, referring to the 24 hours of pain that follow being stung.
Japanese Giant Hornet

Japanese Giant Hornet

The Japanese giant hornet  is a subspecies of the Asian giant hornet. It is a large insect and adults can be more than 4 centimetres (1.6 in) long, with a wingspan greater than 6 centimetres (2.4 in). It has a large yellow head with large eyes, and a dark brown thorax with an abdomen banded in brown and yellow.
Workers forage to feed their siblings. Their diet consists of a wide range of insects, including crop pests, and for this reason the hornets are regarded as beneficial. The workers dismember the bodies of their victims in order to return only the most nutrient-rich body parts, such as flight muscles, to the nest.
There, the workers chew the prey into a paste before feeding the larvae who in return produce a fluid consumed by the workers. This fluid, known as vespa amino acid mixture (VAAM), is the only sustenance workers imbibe during their adult lives, which is remarkable considering they can fly 100 kilometres (62 mi) per day and reach up to 40 kilometres per hour (25 mph).
The fluid thus enables intensive muscle activities over extended periods and is being produced artificially to increase athletic performance. In many Japanese mountain villages, the hornet is considered a delicacy when fried.
The Japanese giant hornet has three small, simple eyes on the top of the head between the two large compound eyes. As the name implies it is endemic to the Japanese islands, where it prefers rural areas where it can find trees to nest in.

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10 Facts About Women

10 Facts About Women

6:55:00 AM   Amazing Fcacs,

11

Hey lets see some nice, interesting collections of facts … today i will show you the facts about the beautiful half of humanity.

1. The word «girl» was originally meant to describe the young people of both sexes, but Only in the early 16th century the term began to be used specifically for the female sex.

2. Biological sign for female circle located at the bottom of a small cross, is also a symbol of the planet Venus, which is believed to mirror depicts the Roman goddess Venus.

3. In England, one who will offer a strange woman to have sex, face a fine or imprisonment of up to 3 months.

4. Breast in women is much greater in proportion to the body than other female mammals. The large size of the mammary glands does not affect the amount of milk produced, apparently, it happened as a result of the evolution of sexual selection.

5. In almost all countries, life expectancy in women is more than in men.

6. Depression is much more often in women than in men, and approximately 25% of all women at least once in  life will suffer severe depression.

7. International Women’s Day is celebrated on 8 March 1909.

8. Most often, women are working in education, health, industry and social care. These industries, have almost a third of all working women in the world.

9. According to ancient Sumerian legend, the universe was created woman, the goddess Tiamat, which is depicted in the form of a dragon.

10. The most expensive woman in the world – Jennifer Lopez. Her body was insured for an amount of EUR 1 billion.

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2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7 Processor Specifications

2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7 Processor Specifications

12:47:00 AM   Amazing Fcacs,

Processor Number	Cache	Clock Speed	# of Cores/ # of Threads	Max TDP	Memory Types	Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2720QM Processor (6M Cache, 2.20 GHz)	6.0 MB	2.20 GHz	4 / 8	45	DDR3-1066/1333/1600	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Processor (8M Cache, 3.40 GHz)	8.0 MB	3.40 GHz	4 / 8	95	DDR3-1066/1333	Intel® HD Graphics 2000
Intel® Core™ i7-2600K Processor (8M Cache, 3.40 GHz)	8.0 MB	3.40 GHz	4 / 8	95	DDR3-1066/1333	Intel® HD Graphics 3000
Intel® Core™ i7-2600S Processor (8M Cache, 2.80 GHz)	8.0 MB	2.80 GHz	4 / 8	65	DDR3-1066/1333	Intel® HD Graphics 2000
Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM Processor (6M Cache, 2.00 GHz)	6.0 MB	2.00 GHz	4 / 8	45	DDR3-1066/1333	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2820QM Processor (8M Cache, 2.30 GHz)	8.0 MB	2.30 GHz	4 / 8	45	DDR3-1066/1333/1600	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2620M Processor (4M Cache, 2.70 GHz)	4.0 MB	2.70 GHz	2 / 4	35	DDR3-1066/1333	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2635QM Processor (6M Cache, 2.00 GHz)	6.0 MB	2.00 GHz	4 / 8	45	DDR3-1066/1333	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2710QE Processor (6M Cache, 2.10 GHz)	6.0 MB	2.10 GHz	4 / 8	45	DDR3-1066/1333/1600	Intel® HD Graphics 3000
Intel® Core™ i7-2629M Processor (4M Cache, 2.10 GHz)	4.0 MB	2.10 GHz	2 / 4	25	DDR3-1066/1333	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2649M Processor (4M Cache, 2.30 GHz)	4.0 MB	2.30 GHz	2 / 4	25	DDR3-1066/1333	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2657M Processor (4M Cache, 1.60 GHz)	4.0 MB	1.60 GHz	2 / 4	17	DDR3-1066/1333	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2617M Processor (4M Cache, 1.50 GHz)	4.0 MB	1.50 GHz	2 / 4	17	DDR3-1066/1333	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2677M Processor (4M Cache, 1.80 GHz)	4.0 MB	1.80 GHz	2 / 4	17	DDR3-1066/1333	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2637M Processor (4M Cache, 1.70 GHz)	4.0 MB	1.70 GHz	2 / 4	17	DDR3-1066/1333	Processor Graphics
Intel® Core™ i7-2655LE Processor (4M Cache, 2.20 GHz)	4.0 MB	2.20 GHz	2 / 4	25	DDR3-1066/1333	Intel® HD Graphics 3000
Intel® Core™ i7-2715QE Processor (6M Cache, 2.10 GHz)	6.0 MB	2.10 GHz	4 / 8	45	DDR3-1066/1333/1600	Intel® HD Graphics 3000
Intel® Core™ i7-2610UE Processor (4M Cache, 1.50 GHz)	4.0 MB	1.50 GHz	2 / 4	17	DDR3-1066/1333	Intel® HD Graphics 3000

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6 Famously Terrible Movies That Were Almost Awesome

6 Famously Terrible Movies That Were Almost Awesome

2:27:00 PM   Amazing Fcacs,

At some point in the last six months, you've sat in a theater watching a terrible movie that took $200 million to make and said to yourself, "Why the hell did they ever think this would be good?"
The reason is that lots of bad movies looked like good movies in the early stages. It takes a whole bunch of people to make a movie, and often the finished product is only as good as its shittiest element. That messy process is how we wound up with ...

#6. X-Men: The Last Stand

Via Chillnmasti.blogspot.com
X-Men: The Last Stand was the unforgivable follow-up to X2. We say "unforgivable" because the second X-Men movie was widely regarded as one of the greatest superhero flicks of all time, if just for one scene.

You know, the stabbing scene.

Yet, despite coming hard on the heels of that success and boasting a larger budget than most nations' militaries, The Last Stand somehow managed to spit in the face of just about everything the X-Men franchise had going for it. Everyone's favorite characters from the first two films were either killed off, depowered, reduced to cheap gags or, in Nightcrawler's case, completely left out.

"Audiences just can't root for a blue protagonist."

If you followed the debacle that was the third X-Men movie, you probably blame Twentieth Century Fox or the departure of director Bryan Singer. But the truth is that all the film's problems can be traced to one equally bad movie that steered both franchises into a kryptonite iceberg faster than a speeding bullet.

Via Superman.wikia.com
Nice work, dickface.

Singer left The Last Stand in July 2004 to direct Superman Returns, but also brought with him two of X2's screenwriters, his longtime editor/composer John Ottman and actor James "Cyclops" Marsden. Fox had no choice but to step in and make sure their dismembered picture beat Superman to the finish line over James Marsden's dead body.

Which it did.

The Awesome Movie We Missed Out On:
This:

Via Goodcomics.comicbookresources.com

If you're not a comics geek, that is an issue from one of the greatest story lines ever: "The Dark Phoenix Saga." And, sure enough, this was precisely where Bryan Singer wanted the third movie to pick up from, as it was exactly where X2 left off.
According to X2 screenwriter Michael Dougherty, The Last Stand was supposed to come off as a goddamn monster movie: "The idea was that you open up with Alkali Lake but it's completely barren and dried up and there are these odd reports of strange phenomena going on around the world accompanied by bright lights in the sky." You know, such as ships getting torn in two ...

Via Comicbookmovie.com

... and San Francisco getting fucking destroyed:

Via Comicbookmovie.com

Via Comicbookmovie.com

Instead of being shoved into the corner like Jennifer Grey, the second coming of Jean Grey/Phoenix was supposed to be heralded as if "a very god-like force had entered their reality ... causing disruptions around the world." In nerd terms, instead of X-Men: The Last Stand, you would have gotten X-Men: The Best Movie Ever, with a three-way war for control of Phoenix between the X-Men, Magneto's Brotherhood and the same Hellfire Club that would eventually be recycled into X-Men: First Class.
And someone traded that film for Superman Returns.

At long last, Superman fans can watch his son play piano.

#5. Alien: Resurrection

Via Dethorchid.com
Coming off the disastrous Alien 3, the development of Alien: Resurrection actually started off in the most promising way possible. The studio asked the up-and-coming screenwriter Joss Whedon to resurrect the franchise from the dreary and slow third film. Whedon's then-credits included Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Speed, and he would shortly thereafter get nominated for an Academy Award for Toy Story.
However, the decision to kill Ripley off in Alien 3 and the prospects for a short-lived Alien vs. Predator franchise severely tied Whedon's hands for the project, particularly when it came to all things Ripley. The studio suggested that they just clone her back in. Whedon did what they said, at which point it was suggested that he add some more clones.

Above: The difference between "horror" and "horrible."

Things kind of went downhill from there.
The Awesome Movie We Missed Out On:
First of all, let's go back one movie in the series. Check out the original, hilariously misleading teaser trailer for Alien 3.

Yep, it promised that the aliens would be showing up on Earth. A few dozen drafts of the screenplay later, it wound up taking place on a remote asteroid prison with a lonely, dog-shaped alien.
So Whedon's original draft of the next film (which you can find on the Internet) included the climax that so many of us anticipated for the Alien series: an "epic final battle on Earth, for Earth."
Leading up to that was a huge soldiers vs. aliens battle on board a massive ship that is slowly crashing toward Earth. Then a new, much more terrifying alien is born and starts wreaking havoc ... and no, it's not the weird-ass human/alien hybrid thing that made it into the film.

Which promptly started tonguing Ripley.

Here's how Whedon described it in the screenplay:
"An alien, to be sure, but nothing we've seen so far, its forelegs arch out of its back like spiders legs, its back legs set on enormous haunches, thick and powerful. Its head is long, eyeless, like the others, but along its white expanse red veins, coming out of the skin and running like thick black hairs to the back. It has retracted pincers at the side of head that come out when its tongue does. It's much bigger than the others, nearly the size of the queen herself.
And it's bone white."

So pretty much not that.

Then we see it in action:
"It LEAPS up to the ceiling in a second, quick and effortless as a monstrous flea. [It] leaps again and lands on the screaming soldier ... pincers SWING out and pin either side of his head. His eyes go wide as:
Its tongue SHOOTS into his throat. We watch it drain the blood from his body. We can see it, see its stomach swell, red tinged, as his body goes blue and slack."

"OK, that all sounds good, but we're going to just give you this instead."

So then the ship crashes on Earth, and Ripley and Call (Winona Ryder's character) are forced to do battle with this horrific new alien before it can go on a rampage through Earth's population.
As you know if you've seen the movie, virtually all of this was cut, for budget reasons. As for what was left, as Whedon puts it:
"I don't remember writing, 'A withered, granny-lookin' Pumkinhead-kinda-thing makes out with Ripley.' Pretty sure that stage direction never existed in any of my drafts."

Not that Whedon has ever had an issue ratcheting up the creep factor.

#4. Wild Wild West

Via Impawards.com
One of the worst, most unnecessary movies of all time, Wild Wild West stars Will Smith and Kevin Kline as racist jokes in cowboy outfits. It managed to score five Razzie Awards for being the shittiest piece of shit ever filmed (more than Howard the Duck, Catwoman or The Love Guru could pull off) despite its $140 million price tag. Will Smith later publicly apologized to actor Robert Conrad from the original TV series for taking such a steaming dump on the source material.

Via Amazon
"Why does this box set smell like asshole?"

The Awesome Movie We Missed Out On:
Originally, the movie was supposed to be directed by Richard Donner, who incidentally directed three episodes of the original TV series. A pre-meltdown Mel Gibson was slated to star, and their version of the film was written by Shane Black, whose credits at the time included the often brutally violent first two Lethal Weapon movies and The Last Boy Scout. In short, Wild Wild West was damn near a clever, witty, bloody action comedy set in the Old West. But at some point Donner and Gibson left the project to make a different movie with a different writer -- Maverick.

The world will never forgive them.

So Smith was left to make the gurgling hamster fart that became Wild Wild West, which he considers to be the biggest mistake of his career if for no other reason than the role he turned down to make it: Neo from The Matrix.

Via NY Daily News
He got in 12,932 little fights, and his mom got scared ...

OK, so that might very well have ruined The Matrix (we're pretty sure the script would have gone through several rewrites to Will Smithify the role of befuddled geek Thomas Anderson). So maybe getting a shitty Wild Wild West was worth getting The Matrix in exchange.

#3. Cool World

Via Movi.ca
The Brad Pitt/Kim Basinger animated/live action feature Cool World was an utter disaster, scoring a solid 3 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. That's worse than Batman & Robin, Showgirls and Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot, which incidentally came out that same year.

Via Amazon
Seriously, take that in for a couple of minutes.

It was supposed to be the world's first animated horror film (and it is pretty damn horrifying, just not in that way), but according to director Ralph Bakshi, the only horror was his experience working on the film with Paramount.
The Awesome Movie We Missed Out On:
It was supposed to be a "hard-R, gritty, sexy, noir horror/thriller." The original storyboards for Ralph Bakshi's script look like a mix between Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Sin City.

Via Animationarchive.org

Via Animationarchive.org

Oh, and the female lead up there wasn't supposed to be Kim Basinger -- Bakshi wanted Drew Barrymore.

Getty
Which would have worked out great since she's already a cartoon.

Everything seemed to be moving forward for that version of the film until Bakshi found a "surprise" waiting for him while on location. As Bakshi puts it, "Frank Mancuso, Jr. [the film's producer] had the script rewritten in secret. I had a huge fight with the guy and punched Mancuso, Jr. in the mouth."

Getty
He punched his hairline into a comb-over.

Also not helping were some even-less-welcome screenwriting suggestions from Basinger, who, according to Bakshi, decided she wanted it to be a PG movie (it wound up PG-13). The result, in Bakshi's own words, "was a total disaster."

Via Animationarchive.org
Judging from the storyboards, we now want to fight the staff, too.

#2. Robin Hood

Via Filmdocket.com
When most of us saw the ads for the Russell Crowe Robin Hood movie last year, the only reaction was, "What's the point?" This is a character that has been brought to the screen almost 100 times, according to IMDB, and the ads made it look like the same old shit. A blandly heroic Robin Hood shoots arrows at the evil soldiers who oppress the people while he presumably robs from the rich and gives to the poor. The only saving grace of Ridley Scott's contribution was that its artistic liberties did not include crazy shit like Morgan Freeman inventing the telescope in 1194.

History!

So why did they even bother making it? Is this the best story to spend $200 million bringing to the screen?
Well, it got made because the original script was apparently freaking amazing. It turns out the production of Scott's Robin Hood is ultimately the story of two films: the movie you saw ...

Or more likely didn't see.

... and a wholly abandoned project called Nottingham.
The Awesome Movie We Missed Out On:
Nottingham would've been the single most original Robin Hood movie in history. The original script (written by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris) so excited studios when it turned up in 2007 that it became the subject of a fierce bidding war (Universal wound up paying freaking $1.5 million for it). It was a totally different take on the story -- the Sheriff of Nottingham is the main character and protagonist. Shit gets real once the sheriff investigates a string of grisly murders in the area. The sheriff then pursues an assholish Robin Hood (Russell Crowe) for the crimes only to find out that Robin, while a dickhead, was actually being framed.

It was more than "Robin Hood has a bow."

The film was to climax with an epic siege of the city of Nottingham between Prince John and King Richard, all while the Sheriff tries to discover the identity of the real killer using 12th century detective techniques (Reiff is a history buff and researched how actual killings in that era were investigated).

Cue sunglasses and an inappropriate scream.

Then, director Ridley Scott came on board and said, "What is this shit? We're making a Robin Hood movie! Get all that standard Robin Hood stuff back in there. That's what everybody wants to see." The movie was renamed Robin Hood and lots more scenes with people shooting bows and arrows were added. A few rewrites later, very little of the original screenplay remained. Today, Nottingham is a cautionary tale for every young, aspiring screenwriter out there. It doesn't matter what you write: the director and the star will decide what makes it onto the screen.

Did they mention he had a bow? Because he totally did.

#1. The Godfather: Part III

Via Geneticwriters.wordpress.com
It's the Rocky V of the Godfather trilogy, and for more reasons than just the poorly acted, painfully unwelcome supporting characters forced onto the audience at gunpoint.

She must have known someone in the film crew. But who?

All talk of Sofia Coppola's horrible acting aside, perhaps the biggest blow to The Godfather: Part III was the notable absence of Robert Duvall's consigliere Tom Hagen from the whole damn affair. The short story is that Robert Duvall's price to reprise his role was too high, but the more accurate story is that Sonny and Fredo's deaths had pretty much put Tom Hagen on equal footing with Michael for the male lead, a fact which the corresponding actors' proposed salaries didn't reflect. Duvall later said, "If they paid Pacino twice what they paid me, that's fine, but not three or four times, which is what they did."

Also, we're pretty sure Duvall looked this awesome when he said that.

Add it all up, and The Godfather: Part III was released to a chorus of boos, to the point that it's a massive understatement to say it's the worst of the Godfather films.
The Awesome Movie We Missed Out On:
The Godfather: Part III was supposed to be such an ostentatious Greek tragedy that Coppola originally wanted to title the movie The Death of Michael Corleone.

Probably at the hands of Al Pacino.

The film would have chronicled the fall of one of the greatest cinematic characters of all time, centering on a civil war between Michael Corleone and the last moral fiber left in the family, good ol' Tom Hagen. How do we know this? Because this is precisely the spectacular ending that the first two films had been hinting toward all along. Coppola would later lament in his DVD commentary that Duvall's absence "was a profound loss ... to this movie," adding that the film seemed "incomplete" without the crucial inclusion of Tom Hagen.

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