I use the phrase "I wish I'd thought of that" way too often. For instance, J.K. Rowling and I are the same age. She thought up Harry Potter and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and is now worth about a billion dollars. I wish I'd thought of that.
Interestingly, though, there are lots of very successful ideas that shaped our childhoods that didn't start out as very good ideas at all. No matter your age, here are some original ideas that could have made your childhood very different.
Cookie Monster was originally green and ate electronics. His name at first was "Wheel Stealer", and he had a mouth full of sharp teeth.
Spongebob Squarepants was supposed to be called Spongeboy, and the name of the series was "Spongeboy Ahoy". But the name Spongeboy was already being used for a mop.
Twinkies at first had banana cream filling, and their shelf life was about 48 hours. During World War II there was a shortage of bananas in the United States, but there was plenty of vanilla available, so Twinkies were changed.
The Three Musketeers Bar originally had a chocolate section, a vanilla section and a strawberry section. The strawberry and vanilla sections were changed to straight chocolate during World War II to save money. I don't know whether it had anything to do with the fact that the Twinkies people were using all the vanilla.
The Joker was supposed to be killed off by Batman during his second comic book appearance. But an executive at DC Comics liked the character and persuaded the writers to come up with a different story line.
Shrek was originally set to be played by Chris Farley with a Canadian accent, as in, "How's it going, eh?" But Chris Farley died, and Mike Myers took over, and Myers convinced the director that a Scottish accent could be just as funny.
Long before The Simpsons was turned into a half-hour TV show, it was a recurring short on the Tracey Ullman Show. Creator Matt Groening, assuming the idea would run its course in three or four years, envisioned a story line where Marge Simpson gets a haircut and it's discovered that all along she was a large, human-like rabbit.
Erno Rubik didn't create the Rubik's Cube as a puzzle. He thought of it as a novelty item that might be fun for small children to twist and turn as they looked at the pretty colors. It didn't occur to him that people would try to return each side to a solid color.
In the first script of "Back to the Future", Marty McFly traveled back in time in a refrigerator, not a DeLorean. Producer Steven Spielberg made the change fearing children would climb into refrigerators to immitate the movie and suffocate. Oddly, Spielberg later had Indiana Jones shut himself in a refrigerator to survive a nuclear blast.
Monopoly was designed by a Quaker to teach players a lesson about the dangers of monopolies. It was originally called "The Landlord's Game" and featured two rounds. The second round was basically a long moral lesson. When Parker Brothers bought the design for 500 dollars, they dropped round two and changed the name.
Will Smith wasn't interested in acting until he was approached to star in "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air". He accepted because he owed the IRS nearly three million dollars and needed to make some money.
The Hulk was supposed to be colored grey, but during the production of the first comic book, a problem with ink caused the finished product to look green instead. Creator Stan Lee didn't seem to care one way or the other, so the character remained green.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster intended Superman to be a villain. His first appearance was during their 1933 story "The Reign of the Super-Man", when he was bald and bent on world destruction. Nobody liked the story, so they tore it up and reinvented Superman as a moral hero.
The creator of Hawaiian Punch envisioned the product as an ice cream sundae topping. Then someone added water to the syrup.
"Beetlejuice" was written as a straight horror movie. The title character wasn't funny, and he was first described as a leather-winged demon who resembled a short Middle Eastern man.
When the Disney movie "Pocahontas" began production, there were several talking animal characters, including a turkey played by John Candy. Then Candy died, and the turkey was written out of the script. Eventually, all the other talking animals were written out as well.
When Mr. Potato Head was first available, the package was considerably smaller. And that's because it didn't include a plastic potato. It only included the plastic facial features and the feet and hands, and they were intended to be stuck onto a real potato.
It wasn't until the first Star Wars movie was finished that George Lucas decided Darth Vader should be Luke Skywalker's father. When Obi-Wan told Luke, "Darth Vader killed your father" in the first movie, he was speaking literally, not figuratively.
And E.T. wasn't supposed to be cute. In the initial script, the movie was called "Night Skies", and it featured a Kentucky farm family tormented by evil alien beings intent on dissecting them.
I once heard an inventor say "Nothing good was ever created by a committee", and I believed it. Now I'm not so sure.
