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