I find this hard to believe. In Creature From the Black Lagoon, there’s a scene in which the creature attacks Whit Bissell and he hits it with a lantern. Wreathed in flames, it dives into the water. Ben Chapman, who played the creature, says that he was never set afire for the scene: “It was just going through the motions where he hits me and I start patting myself like I’m on fire and dive off. Then they bring a stunt double in. He would watch the film and the way I’m moving. When he did it he had an asbestos suit on. When it was time, they lit [the suit] and he went through the motions putting out the flames and dive off. They took that and superimposed it over me.”

John Johnson confirms this in Cheap Tricks and Class Acts, his history of the special effects of 1950s monster movies: “Chapman was never actually set on fire … either onboard the ship or as he jumped into the water. What the effects team did was to superimpose footage of Al Wyatt, a specialist in fire stunts, directly over Chapman. Wyatt, wearing an asbestos suit, roughly imitated the movements of Chapman. Only the fire on Wyatt’s suit was superimposed over the Chapman footage.”

Chapman says, “Next time you watch the movie, when you get to that scene, hit the remote button to make it slow, you can see that the flames are superimposed on top of me. The burning comes from inside out. When it is superimposed they lay it on top of you and if you look very closely you can see I’m not on fire and that it’s superimposed. Rock Hudson’s double did that because Rock and I were good friends. As a matter of fact, Rock and I were the same identical size.”

Johnson calls this “[p]erhaps the most undetectable example of superimposure seen during the fifties monster craze.”

On Aug. 7, 1905, magician David Devant premiered an effect that had occurred to him in a dream: A woman appears to vanish instantaneously from a bare stage.

Devant left behind a description of only 310 words explaining how he’d accomplished the illusion. He called it “the best I have ever done.” The lady descends into the floor, leaving behind the dress, supported by a tube covered with black velvet. The dress is pumped full of oil fog, and at the critical instant it’s whisked down through the tube, leaving (apparently) nothing but smoke hanging in the air.

The brief, blurry advertisement above, for Doug Henning’s 1983 Broadway musical Merlin, appears to be the only video online of this illusion. That’s a shame; it would be wonderful to see it more clearly. Devant’s partner John Nevil Maskelyne called it the “trickiest trick he had ever seen.”

We never did stop ad libbing. No two performances were ever quite the same. One matinee, during the second month in New York, I cooked up a little surprise for Groucho. During one of his quieter scenes, while I was offstage, I selected a blond cutie from the chorus, and asked her if she’d like a bigger part in the show. She was willing and eager. I told her all she had to do was run screaming across the stage. She did, and I tore after her in full pursuit, leaping and bounding and honking my horn. It broke up Groucho’s scene, but when the laughs subsided, Groucho was ready to top it. ‘First time I ever saw a taxi hail a passenger,’ he said.

— Harpo Marx, Harpo Speaks!, 1961

For a cocktail party scene in the 1966 Star Trek episode “The Conscience of the King,” composer Joseph Mullendore wrote a subdued version of the series’ main title … which means that the Star Trek theme music exists in the Star Trek universe.