Did Mr. Ed, the famous talking horse, actually turn out to be a zebra?

[Ivan Seeking]

Claim: Mister Ed, the talking equine of television fame, was a horse.
Status: False.

...During the filming of the pilot episode, production costs mounted as the recalcitrant horse cast as Mister Ed refused to perform on cue (if it performed at all), resulting in large expenditures to cover the costs of additional training fees and wasted footage.

The producers of the show were ready to throw in the towel and write off the venture when one of the putative Mister Ed's trainers came up with a solution: the nearby Jungleland animal park in Thousand Oaks, California, had a trained Grevy's zebra that was being used in live shows for the park's daily tour visitors. The zebra (a female, called "Amelia" by its Jungleland handlers) was trained to perform many of the same actions (e.g., opening and closing its mouth, stamping its feet on cue) required in the Mr. Ed role, and Jungleland consented to lend her out for a few days' filming.

Amelia worked out fantastically well, exceeding everyone's expectations, and the pilot was quickly wrapped up and sold to the syndication market. The producers made a generous donation to Jungleland in exchange for continued use of Amelia, and she appeared in all the syndicated episodes as well as all the shows comprising the series' entire five-year run on CBS. Amelia retired to Jungleland when Mr. Ed was canceled after the 1965-66 season, where she lived for three years before being sold at auction when Jungleland closed in 1969.[continued]

http://www.snopes.com/lost/mistered.asp?version=color#toggle

Or

A zebra was briefly used in several scenes in the series when Ed was unable to some difficult stunts, but there's no truth to the myth that a zebra was used the whole time. Ed was definitely a horse! [continued]

http://users.aol.com/mwn3/page1.html

Or

In the 1990s, a parody of typical urban legends, created on purpose by the specialized site Snopes.com, said Mr. Ed was actually a zebra, not a horse, and was either painted a solid color for the series or else looked like a horse because of shortcomings of early black-and-white television.[3] The story frequently pops up as a "little-known fact," but is not true. Snopes had created the story as part of an exercise meant to encourage skepticism of "respected" sources.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Ed#.22Mister_Ed_was_a_zebra.22_hoax

 

[Moonbear]

Okay, this is an easy one to address.
A picture of a group of Grevy's zebras at this site:
http://www.yptenc.org.uk/docs/factsheets/animal_facts/grevys_zebra.html
Look at the shape of the ears and the mane.

And pictures of Mr. Ed here:
http://members.tripod.com/~horsefame/MrEdS.htm
No makeup artist on the planet is that good.

I didn't click on the links yet...does the snopes article 'fess up at the end or anything to admit they've done it as a parody?

Edit: Aha, there is a subtle link at the end of the snopes story (perhaps a bit too subtle though) to this page: http://www.snopes.com/lost/false.htm

 

[Evo]

I heard he was a llama.

 

[turbo]

I heard he was a llama.

No, but the llama dubbed his voice for the Spanish-language version of the show.

 

[Math Is Hard]

No, but the llama dubbed his voice for the Spanish-language version of the show.

Good one!

Hola, Senor Wilburrr!

 

[neutrino]

http://xkcd.com/250/

 

[Chi Meson]

Who snopes the Snopes?

 

[Moonbear]

http://xkcd.com/250/

At last, a funny xkcd!

Who snopes the Snopes?

That's usually my question.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Everything in this section is a spoof. Mister Ed was no more a zebra than the origin of the nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence had anything to do with pirates on a recruiting drive. As for Mississippi's doing away with teaching fractions and decimals in its school systems because kids find them too hard to master, that's no more true than Kentucky's imposing a licensing fee on uses of its name, Edgar Rice Burroughs naming his celebrated apeman after the city he lived in (other way around, actually), George Bernard Shaw penning a poorly-attended play called Closed For Remodeling, passengers on the Titanic viewing a 1912 silent version of The Poseidon Adventure while their doomed ship was sinking out from under them, the design of California's flag being the result of "pear" being taken for "bear," or mobile homes having gained their name from the city in which they were first manufactured.

What is the point of the Lost Legends section, you say? Is it merely an exercise in creative writing, perhaps a way to blow off steam when the pressure of having to be mindnumbingly factual about everything gets to us? Does it provide us with a gratuitous opportunity to guffaw at how easily folks are duped into believing outrageous things? Or are we suicidally intent upon giving our valued readers good reason to doubt the credibility of everything else on the site?[continued]

http://www.snopes.com/lost/false.htm

I never did trust Snopes, but the original link in the op had me going for a minute there. I probably did mumble wtf a few times, but I did have to check other sites to see that it was a ruse, which I find to be very annoying.

Or are we suicidally intent upon giving our valued readers good reason to doubt the credibility of everything else on the site?

Yes.

 

[Evo]

I can't tell from the original link that it's intended as a joke. How are people supposed to know?

 

[Astronuc]

I can't tell from the original link that it's intended as a joke. How are people supposed to know?

Wikipedia?

Ivan, how could you mess with one of my favorite shows from childhood?

 

[Moonbear]

I can't tell from the original link that it's intended as a joke. How are people supposed to know?

The concept that a zebra doesn't look like a zebra on a black and white TV didn't strike you at all odd? They ARE black and white!

 

[Evo]

The concept that a zebra doesn't look like a zebra on a black and white TV didn't strike you at all odd? They ARE black and white!

No, no, that was ridiculous. I'm saying what Ivan did, that the page itself on snopes does not seem to have any disclaimer.

 

[Chi Meson]

It's clearly a joke. It just doesn't appear that way if you go directly to that page. If you looked at the index for "The Repository Of Lost Legends (TROLL)," the rest of the topics are utterly, wonderfully Onionesque spoofs of themselves.

Then they say, at the bottom of each of these pages: for more information on this page {click}

I, for one, think that the Brbara and David Mikkelson are the real deal. I have not seen any other example of straightforward, objective fact-checking that has been so consistent for so long. The fact that they have created a section that invites folks to view with scepticism is a further credit to them.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The concept that a zebra doesn't look like a zebra on a black and white TV didn't strike you at all odd? They ARE black and white!

Funny thing is that I came across this while searching for certain optical effects that were tested on B&W TVs.
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=178624

Snopes goes into this bit

(The difficulty in resolving closely integrated black and white images on non-color television receivers was one of the primary reasons NFL games were not regularly televised until the mid-1960s, when sales of color TV sets started to outstrip those of black-and-white models. When black-and-white television predominated in the nation's living rooms, football games were too often disrupted when players ran into the referees, whose black-and-white striped uniform tops made them nearly invisible to onlookers. Likewise, Johnny Cash's famous televised live concert performance at California's Folsom Prison in January 1968 proved disastrous when several inmates wearing the traditional black and white prisoner's garb slipped unnoticed past guards, who had been provided only black and white monitors with which to view the proceedings.)

But yes, the first thought was that I remember seeing zebras in B&W, and they always looked fine. The next thought was that this is not an optical effect that made any sense. And then Mr. Ed chiming in saying "maybe I didn't go to college, but I'm not stupid", was a bit of a warning flag.

But, they do make it appear that the story is true. The link explaining the ruse is marked "More information about this page" and is located down at the bottom with stuff that most people ignore.

 

[Evo]

It's clearly a joke. It just doesn't appear that way if you go directly to that page.

I believe that was Ivan's point.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It just doesn't appear that way if you go directly to that page.

And therein lies the problem. I got the page as the second hit by searching google "color on black and white Television".

From the thread that I linked about B&W TVs,

It's a similair principle to the moire fringes from presenter's checked jackets producing an illusion of colour on b+w TVs.

Now that does happen, so they were dancing around real effects and creating nonsense out of it.

 

[Chi Meson]

And therein lies the problem. I got the page as the second hit by searching google "color on black and white Television".

From the thread that I linked about B&W TVs,


Now that does happen, so they were dancing around real effects and creating nonsense out of it.

I guess you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.

Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck!

 

[turbo]

I guess you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.

NO! If I read it, it must be true, or at least it must be publicly disproven before I stop believing in it, right? The Internet is a wonderful source of true information that should be passed on with no checking (that wastes time!).

 

[Evo]

NO! If I read it, it must be true, or at least it must be publicly disproven before I stop believing in it, right? The Internet is a wonderful source of true information that should be passed on with no checking (that wastes time!).

But Snopes is a site that you go to to check things out.

 

[Moonbear]

I can't tell from the original link that it's intended as a joke. How are people supposed to know?

The concept that a zebra doesn't look like a zebra on a black and white TV didn't strike you at all odd? They ARE black and white!

No, no, that was ridiculous. I'm saying what Ivan did, that the page itself on snopes does not seem to have any disclaimer.

Oh, okay. Yes, like the others have mentioned, it was really not very obvious that the link at the bottom for more information was a disclaimer. I think they should have made it a little more obvious...who knows how many people may have found it and believed it because it was snopes. On the other hand, it's an important point, that even the fact-checkers can get things wrong at times, and one should never rely on a single source.

I've also heard of people who do the "but it wasn't on snopes, so it must be true" thing. When they're that bad, it's just hopeless, and I just stick them in my email filter to have all their weird emails dumped directly into the junk mail folder.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Ivan, how could you mess with one of my favorite shows from childhood?

The really bad news is that allegedly [and again this is one of those Snopes deals] Mr. Ed couldn't really talk!

 

[Evo]

The really bad news is that allegedly [and again this is one of those Snopes deals] Mr. Ed couldn't really talk!

That's because his mouth was always full of peanut butter.