"Five Minutes of Fire": Studebaker, Television, North Korea/South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

<v Speaker 1>Hey, guys, this is Shawnee Hoff and you're listening to
<v Speaker 1>the Shirley You Can't Be Serious Podcast.
<v Speaker 2>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Shirley You Can't
<v Speaker 2>Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We're
<v Speaker 2>here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start the
<v Speaker 2>Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes at
<v Speaker 2>a time, which is about to link the song, so
<v Speaker 2>it works out kind of nicely. So please join us
<v Speaker 2>as we dive into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 1>All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 1>going to be covering today. We're gonna be talking about
<v Speaker 1>Student Baker, television, North Korea, South Korea, and Marilyn Monroe.
<v Speaker 2>Now this one is interesting because you texted me a
<v Speaker 2>little bit earlier dividing up our list, and you said,
<v Speaker 2>I combined North and South Korea, and I said that's
<v Speaker 2>appropriate since they couldn't do it on their own. We'll
<v Speaker 2>get there, Jason, what can you tell me about the Studebaker?
<v Speaker 1>Studebaker was an American car company founded in eighteen fifty two,
<v Speaker 1>based in South End, Indiana. They actually started with wagons, buggies,
<v Speaker 1>and carriages. They made their first electric car, yes, I
<v Speaker 1>said electric nineteen oh two, first gas powered car in
<v Speaker 1>nineteen twelve. They were the first people to kind of
<v Speaker 1>come out of World War Two with a great slogan
<v Speaker 1>that said first by far with a post war car.
<v Speaker 1>But Studebaker soon found itself in trouble battling Ford in
<v Speaker 1>GM because they had come out with these massive price
<v Speaker 1>decreases in order to capture this audience of soldiers coming
<v Speaker 1>back from war. But Studebaker couldn't keep its cost down.
<v Speaker 1>Their labor was high, and so they began losing money
<v Speaker 1>by as early as nineteen fifty four and had made
<v Speaker 1>its last vehicle in late December nineteen sixty three. You
<v Speaker 1>probably know it best because Fozzy's driving in at the
<v Speaker 1>end of the Muppet movie Studibaker, I love a bear's
<v Speaker 1>natural habitat ah. A bearon is natural habitats good to Banker?
<v Speaker 2>All right, what's television, Jason, I've never heard of it.
<v Speaker 1>Otherwise known as the boob tube, we call it the
<v Speaker 1>idiot box at our house. First became like crudely available
<v Speaker 1>in the nineteen twenties, but really made its first public
<v Speaker 1>appearance at the nineteen thirty nine World's Fair broadcasting FDR.
<v Speaker 1>After World War Two, a better version came out and
<v Speaker 1>soon became wildly popular in the nineteen fifties. From nineteen
<v Speaker 1>forty nine to nineteen sixty nine, TV sets went from
<v Speaker 1>less than a million to over forty four million, huge
<v Speaker 1>boom in television sales at that time, and it soon
<v Speaker 1>became the primary medium for influencing public opinion. Disney is
<v Speaker 1>widely considered responsible for the people upgrading their sets from
<v Speaker 1>black and white to color because of their nineteen sixty
<v Speaker 1>one program The Wonderful World of Color. By twenty thirteen,
<v Speaker 1>seventy nine percent of households in the world had a
<v Speaker 1>television set, and by twenty eighteen, TV was making more
<v Speaker 1>money than farming was. The most watched program in the
<v Speaker 1>history of the United States is Super Bowl fifty nine,
<v Speaker 1>when the Patriots and Seahawks played each other. I actually last
<v Speaker 1>five hundred dollar night talking about that. But the Funeral
<v Speaker 1>of Princess D had two billion viewers worldwide. We all
<v Speaker 1>know and love television. D What can you tell us
<v Speaker 1>about North Korea and South Korea?
<v Speaker 2>I can tell you that Billy Joel was like, what
<v Speaker 2>the what do you mean? Nothing happened in the fifties,
<v Speaker 2>so Korea was split into a North and South portion.
<v Speaker 2>After World War Two, after Japan was defeated, North Korea
<v Speaker 2>became established as a communist dictatorship by the Soviet Union
<v Speaker 2>in Red China. In nineteen fifty, North Korea attacked South Korea,
<v Speaker 2>which started the Korean War. The United Nations entered the
<v Speaker 2>war to defend South Korea, and the Soviet Union made
<v Speaker 2>the mistake of walking out on the UN vote, which
<v Speaker 2>allowed the measure to pass. Since the declaring of war
<v Speaker 2>was not acceptable without the approval of Congress, President Harry
<v Speaker 2>Truman declared the fighting a quote unquote police action, and
<v Speaker 2>this allowed the entry of American troops. The war resulted
<v Speaker 2>in what we would call a stalemate, and Korea is
<v Speaker 2>still divided to this day. One more left in the verse.
<v Speaker 2>Marilyn Monroe.
<v Speaker 1>What do you got? My Goodness? She is one of
<v Speaker 1>the most popular sex symbols of all time. We all
<v Speaker 1>know her the blonde Bombshell. Herself born Norma Jene Baker
<v Speaker 1>in nineteen twenty six. She died August fourth, nineteen sixty three,
<v Speaker 1>at the very young age of thirty six years old.
<v Speaker 1>Born and raised in la she got married at sixteen
<v Speaker 1>to a guy so she wouldn't have to go back
<v Speaker 1>to the orphanage. It was either marry him or go
<v Speaker 1>back to an orphanage. Didn't really work out. She got
<v Speaker 1>a job in a factory. She was discovered by a
<v Speaker 1>photographer and became a pin up girl from there. That
<v Speaker 1>led to her appearing in some movies. People noticed her.
<v Speaker 1>That got her bigger and better roles, and by nineteen
<v Speaker 1>fifty three she had become one of Hollywood's most marketable actors. Also,
<v Speaker 1>in nineteen fifty three, nude pictures of her appeared in
<v Speaker 1>the very first Playboy magazine. In order to improve her
<v Speaker 1>acting roles, she actually studied acting under Lee Strasburg, which
<v Speaker 1>we talked about in The Godfather. She appeared in movies
<v Speaker 1>like Some Like It Hot in nineteen fifty nine, the
<v Speaker 1>last completed film that she was ever in was called
<v Speaker 1>The Misfit. She was married to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller.
<v Speaker 1>She died of a barbituate overdose in nineteen sixty three.
<v Speaker 1>Some people think it may have been a suicide.
<v Speaker 2>She was involved with JFK allegedly, and she was also
<v Speaker 2>involved with a mafia guy, Joe Giancano.
<v Speaker 1>So She and Shirley Winter, who were roommates, used to
<v Speaker 1>sit around and make a list of people that they
<v Speaker 1>wanted to sleep with for fun. JFK was definitely on
<v Speaker 1>that list. Sure, And then in nineteen eighty three, def
<v Speaker 1>Leppard released a song called Photograph totally about Marilyn Monroe.
<v Speaker 2>Ready to bring it all back? Okay, guys, that does
<v Speaker 2>it for today's episode. Join us next time for five
<v Speaker 2>minutes of fire.