Documenting Urban Legends
The Internet makes it easier to spread urban legends, and also to debunk them. Discussing, tracking, and analyzing urban legends is the topic of the Usenet newsgroup, alt.folklore.urban, and several web sites, most notably snopes.com. The United States Department of Energy had a service, now discontinued, called Hoaxbusters that dealt with computer-distributed hoaxes and legends.
Television shows such as Urban Legends, Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, and later Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed feature re-enactments of urban legends detailing the accounts of the tales and (typically) later in the show, these programs reveal any factual basis they may have. Since 2004 the Discovery Channel TV show MythBusters tries to prove or disprove urban legends by attempting to reproduce them using the scientific method. The 1998 film Urban Legend featured students extensively discussing popular urban legends while at the same time falling victim to them.
The British writer Tony Barrell is a collector of modern urban legends, many of which he has explored in a long-running column in The Sunday Times. These include the story that Orson Welles began work on a Batman movie in the 1940s, which was to feature James Cagney as The Riddler and Marlene Dietrich as Catwoman; the persistent rumour that the rock singer Courtney Love is the granddaughter of Marlon Brando; and the idea that in a famous 1970s poster of Farrah Fawcett, there is a subliminal sexual message concealed in the actress's hair.
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Famous quotes containing the words urban and/or legends:
“The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City.... It is not supposed to have existed.”
—George Chauncey, U.S. educator, author. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, p. 1, Basic Books (1994)
“Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)