"Five Minutes of Fire": Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, Heavy Metal Suicide

<v Speaker 1>Hey, this is Chris Webber and you're listening to the
<v Speaker 1>Shirley You Can't Be Serious Podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome
<v Speaker 1>back to the Shirley you Can't Be Serious Podcast Special
<v Speaker 1>Edition five Minutes of Fire. We are here talking about
<v Speaker 1>the lyrics of We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel.
<v Speaker 1>We're covering only five minutes at a time, which is
<v Speaker 1>about to length of the song, so it works out
<v Speaker 1>kind of nicely. So please join us as we dive
<v Speaker 1>into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 2>All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 2>going to be covering today.
<v Speaker 1>Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy Metal, suicide. We're at.
<v Speaker 2>Heyde tell me about Wheel of Fortune?
<v Speaker 1>All right now. The Wheel of Fortune actually started in
<v Speaker 1>nineteen seventy five. It was a MERV Griffin game show.
<v Speaker 1>The original hosts were Query we all know because he's
<v Speaker 1>a game show icon, right, and Susan Stafford was our
<v Speaker 1>letter turner. Okay, but they left the show. Chuck left
<v Speaker 1>in nineteen eighty one, replaced by Pat Sajak. In eighty two,
<v Speaker 1>Stafford left, replaced by and White still looking good, majors, yep.
<v Speaker 1>And in nineteen eighty three, September of eighty three, the
<v Speaker 1>show went to a nighttime position Because of its popularity,
<v Speaker 1>It is at this point considered one of, if not
<v Speaker 1>the most popular game shows of all time. Over seven
<v Speaker 1>thousand episodes and you still have Pat and Vanna helming
<v Speaker 1>the ship. Wow. I can't tell you how many episodes
<v Speaker 1>of the show that I have watched with my grandmother,
<v Speaker 1>with my family, with my kids. It is evergreen if
<v Speaker 1>you will. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Side note, I saw a comedian talking about how he
<v Speaker 2>watches Wheel of Fortune, then Jeopardy. He goes from genius to.
<v Speaker 1>Moron in an hour. Jason Who's Sally Ride.
<v Speaker 2>Sally Ride was an American astronaut and physicist and was
<v Speaker 2>actually the first American woman in space. After high school,
<v Speaker 2>Sally earned a grief in physics from Stanford. Nineteen seventy seven,
<v Speaker 2>she saw an article fighting women to apply to NASA.
<v Speaker 2>She applied and was one of six women chosen over
<v Speaker 2>eight thousand people had applied. After a series of tests,
<v Speaker 2>on January sixteenth, nineteen seventy eight, she was informed that
<v Speaker 2>she was selected to be a part of the NASA
<v Speaker 2>Astronaut Group eight. Georgia Abbey, who was a big wig
<v Speaker 2>at NASA wanted a woman in space for their next mission,
<v Speaker 2>and Sally was selected. The media began asking her super
<v Speaker 2>dumb questions like will spaceflight affect your reproductive organs? Do
<v Speaker 2>you weep when things go badly on the job?
<v Speaker 1>Oh? My god?
<v Speaker 2>NASA even famously worked on a space makeup kit for her.
<v Speaker 2>On June eighteenth, nineteen eighty three, she became the first
<v Speaker 2>American woman in space. Two Soviet women actually preceded her.
<v Speaker 2>Her job was to work the robotic arm. She flew
<v Speaker 2>in the Space Shuttle again in nineteen eighty four, and
<v Speaker 2>she died of pancreatic cancer in twenty twelve. Pioneer iconkay
<v Speaker 2>Do tell us about heavy metal suicide Okay.
<v Speaker 1>On the evening of December twenty third, nineteen eighty five,
<v Speaker 1>twenty year old James Vance an eighteen year old Raymond
<v Speaker 1>Belknap shot themselves with a shotgun in the playground of
<v Speaker 1>a church with the purpose of committing suicide. They had
<v Speaker 1>been drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana earlier that evening. What
<v Speaker 1>their parents ultimately alleged was that they had committed suicide.
<v Speaker 1>Had formed this suicide pack based upon the lyrics and
<v Speaker 1>music and subliminal messages contained in Judas priests nineteen seventy
<v Speaker 1>eight album Stained Class. Belknap was the first one to
<v Speaker 1>put the shotgun under his chin. He died instantly. Some
<v Speaker 1>time later, Vance shot himself, but he only disfigured himself
<v Speaker 1>by blowing the lower half of his face off. He
<v Speaker 1>ended up dying three years later, probably from a drug overdose. Now,
<v Speaker 1>what Billy Joel didn't know in nineteen eighty nine was
<v Speaker 1>that the next year there would be a lawsuit. Lawyers
<v Speaker 1>representing the two families said that subliminal messages had urged
<v Speaker 1>these two young men to do it. Embedded in the
<v Speaker 1>song better by You, Better than Me, which is actually
<v Speaker 1>a cover of a nineteen sixty nine Spookytooth song. Judas
<v Speaker 1>Priest had actually only recorded the cover at the urging
<v Speaker 1>of their record company because the rest of Stained Glass
<v Speaker 1>had already been completed. During the trial, they tried playing
<v Speaker 1>at different speeds and playing it backwards, saying the backmasking
<v Speaker 1>that there were these messages to the youth, but the
<v Speaker 1>judge ultimately found that it was just a combination of
<v Speaker 1>guitar chords and exhaling that made these kind of coincidental noises. Ultimately,
<v Speaker 1>Amongst a big protest by the heavy metal fans, the
<v Speaker 1>members of judas priests were ultimately exonerated.
<v Speaker 2>Remember those days.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, guys, that does it for today's episode. Join us
<v Speaker 1>next time for five minutes of fire.