title: Flanders

text: Newspapers are grouped under three main publishers: De Persgroep with "Het Laatste Nieuws", the most popular newspaper in Flanders, "De Morgen" and "De Tijd". Then Corelio with "", the oldest extant Flemish newspaper, "Het Nieuwsblad" and "De Standaard". Lastly, Concentra publishes "Gazet van Antwerpen" and "Het Belang van Limburg".


title: Flanders

text: Association football (soccer) is one of the most popular sports in both parts of Belgium, together with cycling, tennis, swimming and judo.


title: Flanders

text: In cycling, the Tour of Flanders is considered one of the five "Monuments". Other "Flanders Classics" races include "Dwars door Vlaanderen" and Gent–Wevelgem. Eddy Merckx is widely regarded as the greatest cyclist of all time, with five victories in the Tour de France and numerous other cycling records. His hour speed record (set in 1972) stood for 12 years.


title: Flanders

text: Jean-Marie Pfaff, a former Belgian goalkeeper, is considered one of the greatest in the history of football (soccer).


title: Flanders

text: Kim Clijsters (as well as the French-speaking Belgian Justine Henin) was Player of the Year twice in the Women's Tennis Association as she was ranked the number one female tennis player.


title: Flanders

text: The 1920 Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp. Jacques Rogge has been president of the International Olympic Committee since 2001.


title: Flanders

text: Flanders is known for its music festivals, like the annual Rock Werchter, Tomorrowland and Pukkelpop. The Gentse Feesten is another very large yearly event.


title: Flanders

text: The best-selling Flemish group or artist is the (Flemish-Dutch) group 2 Unlimited, followed by (Italian-born) Rocco Granata, Technotronic, Helmut Lotti and Vaya Con Dios.


title: Flanders

text: The weekly charts of best-selling singles is the Ultratop 50. "Kvraagetaan" by the Fixkes holds the current record for longest time at No. 1 on the chart.


title: Veni, vidi, vici

text: Veni, vidi, vici (, ; "I came; I saw; I conquered") is a Latin phrase used to refer to a swift, conclusive victory. The phrase is popularly attributed to Julius Caesar who, according to Appian, used the phrase in a letter to the Roman Senate around 47 BC after he had achieved a quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela (modern-day Zile, Turkey).


title: Veni, vidi, vici

text: The phrase is attributed in Plutarch's "Life of Caesar" and Suetonius's "Lives of the Twelve Caesars: Julius". Plutarch writes that Caesar used it in a report to Amantius, a friend of his in Rome. Suetonius states that Caesar displayed the three words as an inscription during his Pontic triumph.


title: Veni, vidi, vici

text: Variations of the sentence "Veni, vidi, vici" are often quoted, and also used in music, art, literature, and entertainment.


title: Veni, vidi, vici

text: Since the time of Caesar, the phrase has been used in military contexts. King Jan III of Poland alluded to it after the 17th-century Battle of Vienna, saying "Venimus, Vidimus, Deus vicit" ("We came, we saw, God conquered"). In 2011, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to the death of Muammar Gaddafi with a similar phrase, saying "We came, we saw, he died".


title: Veni, vidi, vici

text: The sentence has also been used in music, including several well-known works over the years. The opening of Handel's 1724 opera "Giulio Cesare" contains the line: "Curio, Cesare venne, e vide e vinse" ("Curio, Caesar came, saw and conquered"). In popular music, it is expected that the audience will know the original quotation, so modified versions are frequently used. This can range from slight changes in perspective, as in the title song in the musical "Mame" ("You came, you saw, you conquered") or the 1936 song These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You) ("You came, you saw, you conquered me") to wordplay, such as in the album title "Veni Vidi Vicious" by Swedish band The Hives or Pitbull's song "Fireball" ("I saw, I came, I conquered Or should I say, I saw I conquered, I came") or Ja Rule's debut album Venni Vetti Vecci.


title: Veni, vidi, vici

text: The phrase has also been heavily referenced in literature and film. The title of French poet Victor Hugo's "Veni, vidi, vixi" ("I came, I saw, I lived"), written after the death of his daughter Leopoldine at age 19 in 1843, uses the allusion with its first verse: "J'ai bien assez vécu..."("I have lived quite long enough..."). Peter Venkman, one of the protagonists in the 1984 film "Ghostbusters", delivers a humorous variation: "We came. We saw. We kicked its ass!" This line was among the 400 nominees for the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes.


title: Veni, vidi, vici

text: "Veni", "vidi," and "vici" are first person singular perfect indicative active forms of the Latin verbs "venire", "videre", and "vincere", which mean "to come", "to see", and "to conquer", respectively. The sentence's form is classed as a tricolon and a hendiatris.


title: Veni, vidi, vici

text: The English phrase "I came, I saw, I conquered" employs what is known as a comma splice. Grammarians generally agree that using a comma to join two independent clauses should be done sparingly. Sometimes, the comma splice is avoided by using a semicolon instead: "I came; I saw; I conquered". Alternatively, "I came, I saw, I conquered" can be justified as an example of asyndeton, where the lack of the expected conjunction emphasizes the suddenness and swiftness of Caesar's victories. Similarly, this sentence also serves as a famous example of an alliteration due to the repeated use of its first consonant.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The Whigs were a political faction and then a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs merged into the new Liberal Party with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s, and other Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Liberals' rival, the modern day Conservative Party, in 1912.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The Whigs began as a political faction that opposed absolute monarchy and Catholic Emancipation, supporting constitutional monarchism with a parliamentary system. They played a central role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and were the standing enemies of the Roman Catholic Stuart kings and pretenders. The period known as the Whig Supremacy (1714–1760) was enabled by the Hanoverian succession of George I in 1714 and the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1715 by Tory rebels. The Whigs took full control of the government in 1715 and thoroughly purged the Tories from all major positions in government, the army, the Church of England, the legal profession and local political offices. The first great leader of the Whigs was Robert Walpole, who maintained control of the government from 1721 to 1742, and whose protégé, Henry Pelham, led the government from 1743 to 1754. Great Britain remained a single party state under the Whigs until King George III came to the throne in 1760 and allowed Tories back in. But the Whig Party's hold on power remained strong for many years thereafter. Thus historians have called the period from roughly 1714 to 1783 the "age of the Whig oligarchy".


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: By 1784, both the Whigs and Tories had become formal political parties, with Charles James Fox becoming the leader of a reconstituted Whig party arrayed against the new governing party of the new Tories led by William Pitt the Younger. The foundation of both parties depended more on the support of wealthy politicians than on popular votes. Although there were elections to the House of Commons, only a few men controlled most of the voters.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Both parties slowly evolved during the 18th century. In the beginning, the Whig Party generally tended to support the aristocratic families, the continued disenfranchisement of Catholics and toleration of nonconformist Protestants (dissenters such as the Presbyterians), while the Tories generally favoured the minor gentry and people who were (relatively speaking) smallholders; they also supported the legitimacy of a strongly established Church of England. (The so-called High Tories preferred high church Anglicanism, or Anglo-Catholicism. Some High Tories and Anglo-Catholics, adherents of the Non-juring schism, openly or covertly supported the exiled House of Stuart's claim to the throne—a position known as Jacobitism). Later, the Whigs came to draw support from the emerging industrial reformists and the mercantile class while the Tories came to draw support from farmers, landowners, royalists and (relatedly) those who favoured imperial military spending.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: By the first half of the 19th century, the Whig programme had come to encompass the supremacy of parliament, free trade, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise (suffrage) and an acceleration of the move toward complete equal rights for Catholics (a reversal of the party's late-17th-century position, which had been militantly anti-Catholic).


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The term "Whig" began as a short form of "whiggamore", a term originally used by people in the north of England to refer to cattle drivers from western Scotland who came to Leith to buy corn (the Scottish cattle drivers would call out "Chuig" or "Chuig an bothar"—meaning "away" or "to the road"—this sounded to the English like "Whig", and they came to use the word "Whig" or "Whiggamore" derisively to refer to these people). During the English Civil Wars, when Charles I reigned, the term "Whig" was picked up and used by the English to refer derisively to a radical faction of the Scottish Covenanters who called themselves the Kirk Party (see the Whiggamore Raid). It was later applied to Scottish Presbyterian rebels who were against the king's Episcopalian order in Scotland.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The word "Whig" entered English political discourse during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678–1681: there was controversy about whether King Charles II's brother, James, should be allowed to succeed to the throne on Charles's death, and "Whig" became a term of abuse applied to those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic. (Samuel Johnson, a fervent Tory, often joked that "the first Whig was the Devil".)


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Under Lord Shaftesbury's leadership, the Whigs in the Parliament of England wished to exclude the Duke of York (who later became King James II) from the throne due to his Roman Catholicism, his favouring of monarchical absolutism, and his connections to France. They believed the heir presumptive, if allowed to inherit the throne, would endanger the Protestant religion, liberty and property.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The first Exclusion Bill was supported by a substantial majority on its second reading in May 1679. In response, King Charles prorogued Parliament and then dissolved it, but the subsequent elections in August and September saw the Whigs' strength increase. This new parliament did not meet for thirteen months, because Charles wanted to give passions a chance to die down. When it met in October 1680, an Exclusion Bill was introduced and passed in the Commons without major resistance, but was rejected in the Lords. Charles dissolved Parliament in January 1681, but the Whigs did not suffer serious losses in the ensuing election. The next Parliament first met in March at Oxford, but Charles dissolved it after only a few days, when he made an appeal to the country against the Whigs and determined to rule without Parliament. In February, Charles had made a deal with the French King Louis XIV, who promised to support him against the Whigs. Without Parliament, the Whigs gradually crumbled, mainly due to government repression following the discovery of the Rye House Plot. The Whig peers, the Earl of Melville, the Earl of Leven, and Lord Shaftesbury, and Charles II's illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth, being implicated, fled to and regrouped in the United Provinces. Algernon Sidney, Sir Thomas Armstrong and William Russell, Lord Russell, were executed for treason. The Earl of Essex committed suicide in the Tower of London over his arrest for treason, whilst Lord Grey of Werke escaped from the Tower.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Queen Mary II and King William III governed with both Whigs and Tories, despite the fact that many of the Tories still supported the deposed Roman Catholic James II. William saw that the Tories were generally friendlier to royal authority than the Whigs and he employed both groups in his government. His early ministry was largely Tory, but gradually the government came to be dominated by the so-called Junto Whigs, a group of younger Whig politicians who led a tightly organised political grouping. The increasing dominance of the Junto led to a split among the Whigs, with the so-called Country Whigs seeing the Junto as betraying their principles for office. The Country Whigs, led by Robert Harley, gradually merged with the Tory opposition in the later 1690s.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Although William's successor Anne had considerable Tory sympathies and excluded the Junto Whigs from power, after a brief and unsuccessful experiment with an exclusively Tory government she generally continued William's policy of balancing the parties, supported by her moderate Tory ministers, the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Godolphin. However, as the War of the Spanish Succession went on and became less and less popular with the Tories, Marlborough and Godolphin were forced to rely more and more on the Junto Whigs, so that by 1708 they headed an administration of the Parliament of Great Britain dominated by the Junto. Anne herself grew increasingly uncomfortable with this dependence on the Whigs, especially as her personal relationship with the Duchess of Marlborough deteriorated. This situation also became increasingly uncomfortable to many of the non-Junto Whigs, led by the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of Shrewsbury, who began to intrigue with Robert Harley's Tories. In the spring of 1710, Anne dismissed Godolphin and the Junto ministers, replacing them with Tories.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The Whigs now moved into opposition and particularly decried the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which they attempted to block through their majority in the House of Lords. The Tory administration led by Harley and the Viscount Bolingbroke persuaded the Queen to create twelve new Tory peers to force the treaty through.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The Whigs primarily advocated the supremacy of Parliament, while calling for toleration for Protestant dissenters. They adamantly opposed a Catholic as king. They opposed the Catholic Church because they saw it as a threat to liberty, or as Pitt the Elder stated: "The errors of Rome are rank idolatry, a subversion of all civil as well as religious liberty, and the utter disgrace of reason and of human nature".


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Ashcraft and Goldsmith (1983) have traced in detail, in the period 1689 to 1710, the major influence of the liberal political ideas of John Locke on Whig political values, as expressed in widely cited manifestos such as "Political Aphorisms: or, the True Maxims of Government Displayed", an anonymous pamphlet that appeared in 1690 and was widely cited by Whigs. The 18th-century Whigs borrowed the concepts and language of universal rights employed by political theorists Locke and Algernon Sidney (1622–1682). By the 1770s the ideas of Adam Smith, a founder of classical liberalism became important. As Wilson and Reill (2004) note: "Adam Smith's theory melded nicely with the liberal political stance of the Whig Party and its middle-class constituents".


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), a leading London intellectual, repeatedly denigrated the "vile" Whigs and praised the Tories, even during times of Whig political supremacy. In his great "Dictionary" (1755), Johnson defined a Tory as "one who adheres to the ancient Constitution of the state and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a Whig". He linked 18th-century Whiggism with 17th-century revolutionary Puritanism, arguing that the Whigs of his day were similarly inimical to the established order of church and state. Johnson recommended that strict uniformity in religious externals was the best antidote to the objectionable religious traits that he linked to Whiggism.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: At their inception, the Whigs were protectionist in economic policy, with free trade policies being advocated by Tories. The Whigs were opposed to the pro-French policies of the Stuart kings Charles II and James II as they believed that such an alliance with the Catholic absolute monarchy of France endangered liberty and Protestantism. The Whigs claimed that trade with France was bad for England and developed an economic theory of overbalance, that is a deficit of trade with France was bad because it would enrich France at England's expense.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: In 1678, the Whigs passed the Prohibition of 1678 that banned certain French goods from being imported into England. The economic historian William Ashley claimed that this Act witnessed the "real starting-point in the history of Whig policy in the matter of trade". It was repealed upon the accession of James II by a Tory-dominated House of Commons but upon the accession of William III in 1688 a new Act was passed that prohibited the importation of French goods. In 1704, the Whigs passed the Trade with France Act that renewed protectionism against France. In 1710, Queen Anne appointed the predominantly Tory Harley Ministry, which favoured free trade. When the Tory minister Lord Bolingbroke proposed a commercial treaty with France in 1713 that would have led to freer trade, the Whigs were vehemently against it and it had to be abandoned.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: In 1786, Pitt's government negotiated the Eden Agreement, a commercial treaty with France which led to freer trade between the two countries. All of the Whig leaders attacked this on traditional Whig anti-French and protectionist grounds. Fox claimed that France was England's natural enemy and that it was only at Britain's expense that she could grow. Edmund Burke, Richard Sheridan, William Windham and Charles Grey all spoke out against the trade agreement on the same grounds.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Ashley claimed that "[t]he traditional policy of the Whig party from before the Revolution [of 1688] down to the time of Fox was an extreme form of Protectionism". The Whigs' protectionism of this period is today increasingly cited with approval by heterodox economists such as Ha-Joon Chang, who wish to challenge contemporary prevailing free trade orthodoxies via precedents from the past.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Later on, several members from the Whig party came to oppose the protectionism of the Corn Laws, but trade restrictions were not repealed even after the Whigs returned to power in the 1830s.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: With the succession of Elector George Louis of Hanover as king in 1714, the Whigs returned to government with the support of some Hanoverian Tories. The Jacobite rising of 1715 discredited much of the Tory party as treasonous Jacobites, and the Septennial Act ensured that the Whigs became the dominant party, establishing the Whig oligarchy. Between 1717 and 1720 the Whig Split led to a division in the party. Government Whigs led by the former soldier James Stanhope were opposed by Robert Walpole and his allies. While Stanhope was backed by George I, Walpole and his supporters were closer to the Prince of Wales. Following his success in defeating the government over the Peerage Bill in 1719, Walpole was invited back into government the following year. He was able to defend the government in the Commons when the South Sea Bubble collapsed. When Stanhope died unexpectedly in 1721, Walpole replaced him as leader of the government and became known as the first Prime Minister. In the 1722 general election the Whigs swept to a decisive victory.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Between 1714 and 1760, the Tories struggled as an active political force, but always retained a considerable presence in the House of Commons. The governments of Walpole, Henry Pelham and his older brother the Duke of Newcastle dominated between 1721 and 1757 (with a brief break during the also-Whig Carteret ministry). The leading entities in these governments consistently referred to themselves as "Whigs".


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: This arrangement changed during the reign of George III, who hoped to restore his own power by freeing himself from the great Whig magnates. Thus George promoted his old tutor Lord Bute to power and broke with the old Whig leadership surrounding the Duke of Newcastle. After a decade of factional chaos, with distinct Bedfordite, Chathamite, Grenvillite and Rockinghamite and factions successively in power and all referring to themselves as "Whigs", a new system emerged with two separate opposition groups. The Rockingham Whigs claimed the mantle of Old Whigs as the purported successors of the party of the Pelhams and the great Whig families. With such noted intellectuals as Edmund Burke behind them, the Rockingham Whigs laid out a philosophy which for the first time extolled the virtues of faction, or at least their faction. The other group were the followers of Lord Chatham, who as the great political hero of the Seven Years' War generally took a stance of opposition to party and faction.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The Whigs were opposed by the government of Lord North which they accused of being a Tory administration. While it largely consisted of individuals previously associated with the Whigs, many old Pelhamites as well as the Bedfordite Whig faction formerly led by the Duke of Bedford and elements of that which had been led by George Grenville, it also contained elements of the Kings' Men, the group formerly associated with Lord Bute and which was generally seen as Tory-leaning.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The association of Toryism with Lord North's government was also influential in the American colonies and writings of British political commentators known as the Radical Whigs did much to stimulate colonial republican sentiment. Early activists in the colonies called themselves Whigs, seeing themselves as in alliance with the political opposition in Britain, until they turned to independence and started emphasising the label Patriots. In contrast, the American Loyalists, who supported the monarchy, were consistently also referred to as Tories.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Later, the United States Whig Party was founded in 1833 on the basis of opposition to a strong presidency, initially the presidency of Andrew Jackson, analogous to the British Whig opposition to a strong monarchy. The True Whig Party, which for a century dominated Liberia, was named for the American party rather than directly for the British one.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The North administration left power in March 1782 following the American Revolution and a coalition of the Rockingham Whigs and the former Chathamites, now led by the Earl of Shelburne, took its place. After Rockingham's unexpected death in July 1782, this uneasy coalition fell apart, with Charles James Fox, Rockingham's successor as faction leader, quarrelling with Shelburne and withdrawing his supporters from the government. The following Shelburne administration was short-lived and Fox returned to power in April 1783, this time in an unexpected coalition with his old enemy Lord North. Although this pairing seemed unnatural to many at the time, it was to last beyond the demise of the coalition in December 1783. The coalition's untimely fall was brought about by George III in league with the House of Lords and the King now brought in Chatham's son William Pitt the Younger as his prime minister.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: It was only now that a genuine two-party system can be seen to emerge, with Pitt and the government on the one side, and the ousted Fox-North coalition on the other. On 17 December 1783, Fox stated in the House of Commons that "[i]f [...] a change must take place, and a new ministry is to be formed and supported, not by the confidence of this House or the public, but the sole authority of the Crown, I, for one, shall not envy that hon. gentleman his situation. From that moment I put in my claim for a monopoly of Whig principles". Although Pitt is often referred to as a Tory and Fox as a Whig, Pitt always considered himself to be an independent Whig and generally opposed the development of a strict partisan political system. Fox's supporters saw themselves as legitimate heirs of the Whig tradition and they strongly opposed Pitt in his early years in office, notably during the regency crisis revolving around the King's temporary insanity in 1788–1789, when Fox and his allies supported full powers as regent for their ally, the Prince of Wales.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The opposition Whigs were split by the onset of the French Revolution. While Fox and some younger members of the party such as Charles Grey and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were sympathetic to the French revolutionaries, others led by Edmund Burke were strongly opposed. Although Burke himself was largely alone in defecting to Pitt in 1791, much of the rest of the party, including the influential House of Lords leader the Duke of Portland, Rockingham's nephew Lord Fitzwilliam and William Windham, were increasingly uncomfortable with the flirtations of Fox and his allies with radicalism and the French Revolution. They split in early 1793 with Fox over the question of support for the war with France and by the end of the year they had openly broken with Fox. By the summer of the next year, large portions of the opposition had defected and joined Pitt's government.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Many of the Whigs who had joined with Pitt would eventually return to the fold, joining again with Fox in the Ministry of All the Talents following Pitt's death in 1806. The followers of Pitt—led until 1809 by Fox's old colleague the Duke of Portland—rejected the label of Tories and preferred to call themselves The Friends of Mr. Pitt. After the fall of the Talents ministry in 1807, the Foxite Whigs remained out of power for the better part of 25 years. The accession of Fox's old ally, the Prince of Wales, to the regency in 1811 did not change the situation, as the Prince had broken entirely with his old Foxite Whig companions. The members of the government of Lord Liverpool from 1812 to 1827 called themselves Whigs.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: By 1815, the Whigs were still far from being a "party" in the modern sense. They had no definite programme or policy and were by no means even united. Generally, they stood for reducing crown patronage, sympathy towards nonconformists, support for the interests of merchants and bankers and a leaning towards the idea of a limited reform of the voting system. Most Whig leaders, such as Lord Grey, Lord Grenville, Lord Althorp, William Lamb (later Lord Melbourne) and Lord John Russell, were still rich landowners. The most prominent exception was Henry Brougham, the talented lawyer, who had a relatively modest background.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Hay argues that Whig leaders welcomed the increasing political participation of the English middle classes in the two decades after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The fresh support strengthened their position in Parliament. Whigs rejected the Tory appeals to governmental authority and social discipline and extended political discussion beyond Parliament. Whigs used a national network of newspapers and magazines as well as local clubs to deliver their message. The press organised petitions and debates and reported to the public on government policy, while leaders such as Henry Brougham (1778–1868) built alliances with men who lacked direct representation. This new approach to the grass roots helped to define Whiggism and opened the way for later success. Whigs thereby forced the government to recognise the role of public opinion in parliamentary debate and influenced views of representation and reform throughout the 19th century.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Whigs restored their unity by supporting moral reforms, especially the abolition of slavery. They triumphed in 1830 as champions of Parliamentary reform. They made Lord Grey prime minister 1830–1834 and the Reform Act 1832 championed by Grey became their signature measure. It broadened the franchise and ended the system of "rotten and pocket boroughs" (where elections were controlled by powerful families) and instead redistributed power on the basis of population. It added 217,000 voters to an electorate of 435,000 in England and Wales. Only the upper and middle classes voted, so this shifted power away from the landed aristocracy to the urban middle classes. In 1832, the party abolished enslavement in the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. It purchased and freed the slaves, especially those in the Caribbean sugar islands. After parliamentary investigations demonstrated the horrors of child labour, limited reforms were passed in 1833. The Whigs also passed the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 that reformed the administration of relief to the poor.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: It was around this time that the great Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay began to promulgate what would later be coined the Whig view of history, in which all of English history was seen as leading up to the culminating moment of the passage of Lord Grey's reform bill. This view led to serious distortions in later portrayals of 17th-century and 18th-century history, as Macaulay and his followers attempted to fit the complex and changing factional politics of the Restoration into the neat categories of 19th-century political divisions.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: In 1836, a private gentleman's Club was constructed in Pall Mall, Piccadilly as a consequence of the successful Reform Act 1832. The Reform Club was founded by Edward Ellice Sr., MP for Coventry and Whig Whip, whose riches came from the Hudson's Bay Company but whose zeal was chiefly devoted to securing the passage of the Reform Act 1832. This new club, for members of both Houses of Parliament, was intended to be a forum for the radical ideas which the First Reform Bill represented: a bastion of liberal and progressive thought that became closely associated with the Liberal Party, who largely succeeded the Whigs in the second half of the 19th century.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: Until the decline of the Liberal Party in the early 20th century, it was "de rigueur" for Liberal MPs and peers to be members of the Reform Club, being regarded as an unofficial party headquarters. However, in 1882 the National Liberal Club was established under William Ewart Gladstone's chairmanship, designed to be more "inclusive" towards Liberal grandees and activists throughout the United Kingdom.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The Liberal Party (the term was first used officially in 1868, but had been used colloquially for decades beforehand) arose from a coalition of Whigs, free trade Tory followers of Robert Peel and free trade Radicals, first created, tenuously under the Peelite Earl of Aberdeen in 1852 and put together more permanently under the former Canningite Tory Lord Palmerston in 1859. Although the Whigs at first formed the most important part of the coalition, the Whiggish elements of the new party progressively lost influence during the long leadership of former Peelite William Ewart Gladstone. Subsequently the majority of the old Whig aristocracy broke from the party over the issue of Irish home rule in 1886 to help form the Liberal Unionist Party, which in turn would merge with the Conservative Party by 1912. However, the Unionist support for trade protection in the early twentieth century under Joseph Chamberlain (probably the least Whiggish character in the Liberal Unionist party) further alienated the more orthodox Whigs. By the early twentieth century "Whiggery" was largely irrelevant and without a natural political home. One of the last active politicians to celebrate his Whiggish roots was the Liberal Unionist statesman Henry James.


title: Whigs (British political party)

text: The colours of the Whig party (blue and buff, a yellow-brown colour named after buff leather) were particularly associated with Charles James Fox.


title: Epcot

text: Epcot, stylized in all uppercase as EPCOT, is a theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort in Bay Lake, Florida. It is owned and operated by The Walt Disney Company through its Parks, Experiences and Products division. Inspired by an unrealized concept developed by Walt Disney, the park opened on October 1, 1982, as EPCOT Center, and was the second of four theme parks built at Walt Disney World, after Magic Kingdom Park. Spanning , more than twice the size of Magic Kingdom Park, Epcot is dedicated to the celebration of human achievement, namely technological innovation and international culture, and is often referred to as a "permanent world's fair".


title: Epcot

text: Epcot was originally conceived by Walt Disney during the early development of Walt Disney World, as an experimental planned community that would serve as a center for American enterprise and urban living. Known as "EPCOT", an acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, the idea included an urban city center, residential areas, industrial areas, schools, and a series of mass transportation systems that would connect the community. After Disney's death in 1966, the "EPCOT" concept was abandoned as the company was uncertain about the feasibility of operating a city. In the 1970s, WED Enterprises began developing a second theme park for the resort to supplement Magic Kingdom, as that park's popularity grew. The new park reprised the idea of showcasing modern innovation through avant-garde edutainment attractions, as well as the addition of a world nations exposition. The newly designed park, featuring two sections—Future World and World Showcase—opened as EPCOT Center in 1982. In 1994, the park was renamed to "Epcot", dropping the acronym and "Center" from the name. In the late 2010s, the park began a major ongoing multi-year overhaul including several new and replaced attractions as well as the revision of the existing two sections of the park into four: World Celebration, World Discovery, World Nature and World Showcase.


title: Epcot

text: In 2019, Epcot hosted 12.444 million guests, ranking it as the fourth-most-visited theme park in North America and the seventh-most-visited theme park in the world. The park is represented by Spaceship Earth, a geodesic sphere.


title: Epcot

text: The genesis for Epcot was originally conceived as a utopian city of the future by Walt Disney in the 1960s. The concept was an acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, often interchanging "city" and "community." In Walt Disney's words in 1966: "EPCOT will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed but will always be introducing and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise."


title: Epcot

text: Walt Disney's original vision was for a model community that would have been home to twenty thousand residents and a test bed for city planning as well as organization. It was to have been built in the shape of a circle with businesses and commercial areas at its center with community buildings, schools, and recreational complexes around it while residential neighborhoods would line the perimeter. This radial plan concept is strongly influenced by British planner Ebenezer Howard and his Garden Cities of To-morrow. Transportation would have been provided by monorails and PeopleMovers (like those in Tomorrowland). Automobile traffic would be kept underground, leaving pedestrians safe above ground. Walt Disney was not able to obtain funding and permission to start work on his Florida property until he agreed to first build Magic Kingdom. He died nearly five years before Magic Kingdom opened.


title: Epcot

text: After Walt Disney's death, Walt Disney Productions decided that it did not want to be in the business of running a city without Walt's guidance. The model community of Celebration, Florida has been mentioned as a realization of Disney's original vision, but Celebration is based on concepts of new urbanism which is radically different from Disney's modernist and futurist visions. However, the idea of EPCOT was instrumental in prompting the state of Florida to create the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID) and the cities of Bay Lake and Reedy Creek (now Lake Buena Vista), a legislative mechanism, enshrined in laws like the Reedy Creek Improvement Act, allowing Disney to exercise governmental powers over Walt Disney World. Control over the RCID is vested in the landowners of the district, and the promise of an actual city in the district would have meant that the powers of the RCID would have been distributed among the landowners in EPCOT. Because the idea of EPCOT was never implemented, Disney remained almost the sole landowner in the district allowing it to maintain control of the RCID and the cities of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista; Disney further cemented this control by deannexing Celebration from the RCID.


title: Epcot

text: The original plans for the park showed indecision over the park's purpose. Some Imagineers wanted it to represent the cutting edge of emerging technologies, while others wanted it to showcase international cultures and customs. At one point, a model of the futuristic park was pushed together against a model of a World's Fair international theme, and the two were combined. The park was originally named EPCOT Center to reflect the ideals and values of the city. It was constructed for an estimated $800 million to $1.4 billion and took three years to build, at the time the largest construction project on Earth. The parking lot serving the park is (including bus area) and can accommodate 11,211 vehicles (grass areas hold additional 500+ vehicles). Before it opened on October 1, 1982, Walt Disney World Ambassador Genie Field introduced E. Cardon Walker, Disney's chairman and CEO, who dedicated EPCOT Center. Walker also presented a family with lifetime passes for the two Walt Disney World theme parks. His remarks were followed by Florida Governor Bob Graham and William Ellinghaus, president of AT&T.


title: Epcot

text: As part of the opening-day ceremony, dancers and band members performed "We've Just Begun to Dream". The Sherman Brothers wrote a song especially for the occasion entitled "The World Showcase March". During the finale, doves and many sets of balloons were released. Performing groups representing countries from all over the world performed in World Showcase. Water was gathered from major rivers across the globe and emptied into the park's Fountain of Nations with ceremonial containers to mark the opening.


title: Epcot

text: The theme park opened on October 1, 1982. Located at the front of the park is a plaque bearing Walker's opening-day dedication:


title: Epcot

text: Despite its initial success, Epcot was constantly faced with the challenges of evolving with worldwide progress, an issue that caused the park to lose relevance and become outdated in the 1990s. To maintain attendance levels, Disney introduced seasonal events such as the International Flower & Garden Festival and the International Food & Wine Festival in 1994 and 1995, respectively. In the mid-1990s, Disney also began to gradually phase out the park's edutainment attractions in favor of more modern and thrilling attractions. As a result, many of the attractions within the Future World pavilions, were either overhauled or replaced entirely; Universe of Energy was reconfigured as Ellen's Energy Adventure in 1996, World of Motion was replaced with Test Track, and Horizons was demolished in 1999 and replaced with . Walt Disney World held the Millennium Celebration with the central focus of the event at Epcot. The Living Seas was closed in 2005, and rethemed with the introduction of characters from "Finding Nemo", as The Seas with Nemo & Friends. That same year, Soarin', a flight simulator ride originally developed for Disney's California Adventure (DCA) theme park in Anaheim, was added to The Land following its massive popularity at DCA. Wonders of Life closed in 2007, with the pavilion being occasionally used for the park's annual festivals until permanent closure.


title: Epcot

text: In November 2016, Disney revealed that Epcot would be receiving “a major transformation” that would help transition the park into being “more Disney, timeless, relevant, family-friendly”, while keeping the original vision alive. No further details were mentioned. In July 2017, The Walt Disney Company formally announced that Epcot would undergo a multi-year, redesign and expansion plan that would introduce "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Ratatouille" attractions to Future World and World Showcase, respectively, as well as maintaining the original vision and spirit for the park. As part of the announcement, Ellen's Energy Adventure closed the following month, and the pavilion's show building was reused for . That same year, the park reported the first drop in overall attendance ranking among the four Walt Disney World Resort parks, dropping from second to third place, the first in its history.


title: Epcot

text: On August 25, 2019, at the 2019 D23 Expo, Disney expanded on the plans for the improvements to Epcot. One of the most significant changes announced was the creation of four distinct "neighborhoods", with the subdivision of Future World into three areas (World Celebration, World Discovery, and World Nature) and World Showcase remaining as the fourth one. Journey of Water - Inspired by Moana, a walkthrough attraction, was also announced. The Walt Disney Company began to stylize the name as "EPCOT" as an homage to both the park's original name and Walt Disney's original concept, although the name is no longer an acronym.


title: Epcot

text: The park was closed from March 16 to July 15, 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida. Modified operations, including a pause on concerts and fireworks followed, in order to promote sufficient physical distancing.


title: Epcot

text: On September 29, 2021, the new nighttime spectacular, Harmonious, made its debut as part of the "World's Most Magical Celebration". The show is slated to close on March 31, 2023 in preparation for a new nighttime spectacular celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Walt Disney Company.


title: Epcot

text: Remy's Ratatouille Adventure opened in the France pavilion on October 1, 2021 as part of the 50th celebrations. The attraction is a copy of the Disneyland Paris version. Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, part of the Wonders of Xandar Pavilion, would open on May 27, 2022 in the World Discovery section of the park. The opening of this attraction was also an addition for the 50th anniversary.


title: Epcot

text: Epcot is divided into four main themed areas, known as "neighborhoods": World Celebration, World Discovery, World Nature and World Showcase. A secondary park gate is located between the France and United Kingdom pavilions of World Showcase and is known as the International Gateway. The International Gateway is directly accessible to guests arriving from the Disney Skyliner, watercraft transport, and by walkways from the nearby Epcot Area Resorts and Disney's Hollywood Studios.


title: Epcot

text: World Celebration, Discovery, and Nature consist of a variety of avant-garde pavilions that explore innovative aspects and applications including technology and science, with each pavilion featuring self-contained attractions and distinct architecture in its design. They were originally grouped as one area called Future World, which debuted with six pavilions: Spaceship Earth, CommuniCore, Imagination!, The Land, Universe of Energy, and World of Motion. The Horizons pavilion opened the following year, and The Living Seas and Wonders of Life pavilions were added in 1986 and 1989, respectively, bringing the lineup to nine. CommuniCore, World of Motion, Horizons, Wonders of Life, Universe of Energy, and Innoventions closed in 1994, 1996, 1999, 2007, 2017, and 2019, respectively. The Fountain of Nations, a large circular musical fountain which debuted with the park, was removed in 2019 as well. Each pavilion was initially sponsored by a corporation which helped fund its construction and maintenance in return for the corporation's logos and some marketing elements appearing throughout the pavilion.


title: Epcot

text: Additionally, each pavilion of Future World featured a unique circular logo designed by Norm Inouye, which was featured on park signage and throughout the attractions themselves. The pavilion logos were gradually phased out in the early 2000s, as the pavilions instead were identified by name and recognized by the main attraction(s) housed inside. Several homages remained scattered throughout the park, including merchandising. However, in 2019, Disney revealed that the concept of the circular pavilion logos would be revived as part of Epcot's transformation, with both classic logos revived and new logos introduced.


title: Epcot

text: World Celebration serves as the park's main entrance and as the home of "new experiences that connect us to one another and the world around us". The neighborhood honors global human interaction and connection, including communication, imagination, and the visual and culinary arts.


title: Epcot

text: Future additions will include Dreamer's Point, which will include a new statue of Walt Disney, and CommuniCore Hall which will act as a multi-use festival pavilion which will be used for exhibitions, gallery space, live music, demonstration kitchen and more. CommuniCore Plaza will be able to host large-scale concerts as well as smaller musical performances.


title: Epcot

text: World Discovery centers on "stories about space, science, technology and intergalactic adventure comes to life". Future attractions will include the Play! Pavilion.


title: Epcot

text: World Nature focuses on "understanding and preserving the beauty, awe and balance of the natural world". Journey of Water will be a future attraction depicting the Earth's water cycle, inspired by the 2016 animated feature film "Moana".


title: Epcot

text: World Showcase is the park's largest neighborhood, reminiscent of a permanent world's fair dedicated to represent the culture, cuisine, architecture, and traditions of 11 nations. The nation pavilions surround the World Showcase Lagoon, a man-made lake located in the center of World Showcase with a perimeter of , which is the site of "Harmonious", the park's nighttime spectacular that features Disney music interpreted by various global cultures. In counter-clockwise order, the 11 pavilions are:


title: Epcot

text: There is a small pavilion between China and Germany called the African Outpost, not included as one of the official World Showcase pavilions.


title: Epcot

text: Of the 11 pavilions, only Morocco and Norway were not present at the park's opening, as they were added in 1984 and 1988, respectively. Each pavilion contains themed architecture, landscapes, streetscapes, attractions, shops and restaurants representing the respective country's culture and cuisine. In an effort to maintain the authenticity of the represented countries, the pavilions are primarily staffed by citizens of the respective countries as part of the Cultural Representative Program through Q1 visa agreements. Some pavilions also contain themed rides, shows, and live entertainment representative of the respective country. The Morocco pavilion was directly sponsored by the Moroccan government until 2020, when Disney took ownership of the pavillion. The remaining pavilions are primarily sponsored by private companies with affiliations to the represented countries.


title: Epcot

text: Originally, the showcase was to include partnerships with the governments of the different countries. According to Disney's 1975 Annual Report, the Showcase would:


title: Epcot

text: Pavilions for Brazil, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, Denmark, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Spain, Venezuela, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel have occasionally been rumored as potential future pavilions but have never made it past the planning phases to date. However, Disney did go as far as announcing three of the pavilions in the 1980s with signage throughout the park.


title: Epcot

text: The Israeli, Spanish, and an Equatorial Africa pavilion (blending elements of the cultures of countries such as Kenya and Zaire) were even announced as coming soon in 1982, and a model of the last was shown on the opening day telecast, but never took off. Instead, a small African themed refreshment shop known as the Outpost currently resides where Equatorial Africa was to be. More than 50 nations, among them Israel, Brazil, Chile, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and 5 African countries (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa), took part in the Millennium Village, a project that took place in Epcot during Millennium Celebration (1999-2001) to pay homage to the cultural achievements of these nations.


title: Epcot

text: There are currently eight undeveloped spots for countries around the World Showcase—including the space occupied by the Outpost—in between the locations of the current countries. Two of the potential locations, on either side of the United Kingdom, are currently occupied by World ShowPlace (successor of Millennium Village). Two more lie on either side of the American Adventure, though this pavilion's use of reversed forced perspective may preclude the construction of additional buildings as they would ruin the illusion.


title: Epcot

text: Unlike Magic Kingdom, which up until 2012 did not serve alcohol and now only serves it in all table service locations, most stores and restaurants at Epcot, especially in the World Showcase, serve and/or sell a variety of alcoholic beverages including specialty drinks, craft beers, wines, and spirits reflective of the respective countries. The park also hosts the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival, an annual event featuring food and drink samplings from all over the world, along with live entertainment and special exhibits.


title: Epcot

text: Originally based on the Disney Channel animated series "Kim Possible", the World Showcase Adventure is an interactive mobile attraction taking place in several pavilions throughout the World Showcase. The attraction is an electronic scavenger hunt that has guests using special "Kimmunicators" (in actuality, customized cell phones) to help teenage crime-fighters Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable solve a "crime" or disrupt an evil-doer's "plans for global domination." The "Kimmunicator" is able to trigger specific events within the pavilion grounds that provide clues to completing the adventure. Launched in January 2009 and presented by Verizon Wireless, the Adventure is included in park admission. It was succeeded by Agent P's World Showcase Adventure, based on Disney's "Phineas and Ferb", on June 23, 2012. Agent P's World Showcase Adventure was later closed on February 17, 2020, and was replaced by the DuckTales World Showcase Adventure, based on the 2017 reboot of DuckTales on December 16, 2022, as part of Walt Disney World's 50th Anniversary celebration.


title: Epcot

text: "The Official Album of Walt Disney World EPCOT Center" was the official album for EPCOT Center in 1983. It was originally released by Disneyland Vista Records on LP and audio cassette and is no longer being produced.


title: George Burns

text: George Burns (born Nathan Birnbaum; January 20, 1896March 9, 1996) was an American comedian, actor, writer, and singer, and one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, radio, film and television. His arched eyebrow and cigar-smoke punctuation became familiar trademarks for over three-quarters of a century. He and his wife Gracie Allen appeared on radio, television and film as the comedy duo Burns and Allen.


title: George Burns

text: At the age of 79, Burns experienced a sudden career revival as an amiable, beloved and unusually active comedy elder statesman in the 1975 film "The Sunshine Boys", for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Burns was only a Tony Award shy of being one of the few EGOT award recipients in the American entertainment industry, winning an Emmy, a Grammy, and an Oscar. Burns became a centenarian in 1996, continuing to work until just weeks before his death of cardiac arrest at his home in Beverly Hills, shortly after his hundredth birthday.


title: George Burns

text: George Burns was born Nathan Birnbaum on January 20, 1896, in New York City, the ninth of 12 children born to Hadassah "Dorah" (née Bluth; 1857–1927) and Eliezer Birnbaum (1855–1903), known as Louis or Lippa, Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from Ropczyce, Galicia, now Poland. Burns was a member of the First Roumanian-American Congregation.


title: George Burns

text: His father was a substitute cantor at the local synagogue but usually worked as a coat presser. During the influenza epidemic of 1903, Lippe Birnbaum contracted the flu and died at the age of 47. Burns, called Nattie or Nate at the time, went to work to help support the family, shining shoes, running errands and selling newspapers.


title: George Burns

text: When he landed a job as a syrup maker in a local candy shop at age seven, Burns was "discovered", as he recalled long after:


title: George Burns

text: One of the Burns brothers' first regular gigs was operating the curtains at the vaudeville and nickelodeon theatre of Frank Seiden, father of Joseph Seiden, who would later become a Yiddish film producer. Burns started smoking cigars when he was 14.


title: George Burns

text: Burns was drafted into the United States Army when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, but he failed the physical examination because he was extremely nearsighted. To hide his Jewish heritage, he adopted the stage name by which he would be known for the rest of his life. He later claimed that he selected the name of George Burns because there were two active star professional baseball players with the name (George H. Burns and George J. Burns, unrelated), each of whom would accumulate more than 2,000 hits and hold some major-league records. Burns also was reported to have taken George from his brother Izzy (who had first adopted the name because he hated his own) and Burns from the Burns Brothers Coal Company, from whose trucks he would steal coal as a youth.


title: George Burns

text: His first wife was Hannah Siegel (stage name Hermosa Jose), one of his dance partners. The marriage lasted 26 weeks and only occurred because Siegel's family would not permit her to tour with Burns unless they were married. They divorced at the end of the tour.


title: George Burns

text: Burns normally partnered with a girl, sometimes in an adagio dance routine, sometimes in comic patter. Though he had an apparent flair for comedy, he never quite clicked with any of his partners until he met Gracie Allen, a young Irish Catholic woman, in 1923. "And all of a sudden," he said in later years, "the audience realized I had a talent. They were right. I did have a talent—and I was married to her for 38 years." Burns wed Allen in 1926.


title: George Burns

text: Burns and Allen began their career in motion pictures with a series of comic short films in the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as "The Big Broadcast" (1932) with Bing Crosby, both "International House" (1933) and "Six of a Kind" (1934) with W.C. Fields, "The Big Broadcast of 1936" with Crosby again, "The Big Broadcast of 1937" with Jack Benny, "A Damsel in Distress" (1937) with Fred Astaire and Joan Fontaine, and "College Swing" (1938) with Bob Hope and Martha Raye. "Honolulu" (1939) with Eleanor Powell and Robert Young would be Burns' last film for nearly 40 years although Gracie Allen starred in two more pictures without Burns.


title: George Burns

text: In 1938, Paramount producer and managing director William LeBaron was planning a vehicle for Burns and Allen to team with established star Bing Crosby, with a script written by Don Hartman and Frank Butler. However, the story didn't fit Burns and Allen's style, so LeBaron ordered script rewrites to fit two male co-stars: Crosby and Bob Hope. The project became "Road to Singapore" (1940), the first in a long-running and popular series of "Road" films.


title: George Burns

text: Burns and Allen first appeared on radio as the comedy relief for bandleader Guy Lombardo. In his memoir "The Third Time Around", Burns shared a letter from a college fraternity complaining that its weekly dance parties were interrupted by Burns and Allen routines.


title: George Burns

text: Burns and Allen found their own show and radio audience, first airing on February 15, 1932. Their show was based on their classic stage routines and sketch comedy in which their style was woven into multiple smaller scenes, in a manner similar to that of the short films that they had made in Hollywood. They were also known for clever publicity stunts, such as Gracie's hunt for her missing brother that carried over into guest spots on other radio shows.


title: George Burns

text: The couple was portrayed at first as unmarried, with Allen the object of Burns' affections as well as those of other cast members. Bandleaders Ray Noble (known for his phrase "Gracie, this is the first time we've ever been alone") and Artie Shaw played love interests for Gracie. Singer Tony Martin also played Gracie's unwilling love interest whom she comically threatened to fire if he would not reciprocate her romantic interest.


title: George Burns

text: Over time, as ratings declined and with their audience's close familiarity with their real-life marriage, Burns and Allen adapted their radio show in the fall of 1941 to present them as a married couple. Artie Shaw, who also appeared as a character in some of the show's sketches, was the show's bandleader at one time. Allen's character also changed slightly during this era, as she would often now be mean to Burns.


title: George Burns

text: As this format grew stale over the years, Burns and his fellow writers redeveloped the show as a situation comedy in the fall of 1941. The reformat focused on the couple's married life and their friends and neighbors, including Elvia Allman as Tootsie Sagwell, a man-hungry spinster in love with Bill Goodwin. The characters of Harry and Blanche Morton became a mainstay of the program.


title: George Burns

text: As with "The Jack Benny Program", the new "George Burns & Gracie Allen Show" portrayed Burns and Allen as entertainers with their own weekly radio show. Goodwin remained, and the music was now led by Meredith Willson (later to be better known for composing the Broadway musical "The Music Man"). Willson also played himself on the show as naïve, friendly and shy with women. The new format's success made it one of the few classic radio comedies to completely reinvent itself and regain great success.


title: George Burns

text: The supporting cast during this phase included Mel Blanc as the melancholy, ironically named "Happy Postman" (his catchphrase was "Remember, keep smiling!"); Bea Benaderet (later Cousin Pearl in "The Beverly Hillbillies", Kate Bradley in "Petticoat Junction" and the voice of Betty Rubble in "The Flintstones") and Hal March (later more famous as the host of "The $64,000 Question") as neighbors Blanche and Harry Morton; and the various members of Gracie's ladies' club, the Beverly Hills Uplift Society. One running gag during this period, stretching into the television era, was Burns' questionable singing voice, as Gracie lovingly referred to her husband as "Sugar Throat." The show received and maintained a Top 10 rating for the rest of its radio life.


title: George Burns

text: In the fall of 1949, after 12 years at NBC, the couple took the show back to its original network CBS, where they had risen to fame from 1932 to 1937. Their good friend Jack Benny reached a negotiating impasse with NBC over the corporation he set up ("Amusement Enterprises") to package his show, the better to put more of his earnings on a capital-gains basis and avoid the 80 percent taxes slapped on very high earners in the World War II period. When CBS executive William S. Paley convinced Benny to move to CBS (Paley, among other things, impressed Benny with his attitude that the performers make the network, not the other way around, as NBC chief David Sarnoff reputedly believed); Benny in turn convinced several NBC stars to join him, including Burns and Allen. Thus, CBS reaped the benefits when Burns and Allen moved to television in 1950.


title: George Burns

text: On television, "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" put faces to some of the radio characters audiences had come to love although they were already familiar with Burns and Allen's faces from their films. A number of significant changes were seen in the show:


title: George Burns

text: Burns and Allen also took a cue from Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's Desilu Productions and formed a company of their own, McCadden Corporation (named after the street on which Burns' brother lived), headquartered on the General Service Studio lot in the heart of Hollywood, and set up to film television shows and commercials. Besides their own hit show (which made the transition from a bi-weekly live series to a weekly filmed version in the fall of 1952), the couple's company produced such television series as "The Bob Cummings Show" (subsequently syndicated and rerun as "Love That Bob"); "The People's Choice", starring Jackie Cooper; "Mona McCluskey", starring Juliet Prowse; and "Mister Ed", starring Alan Young and a talented "talking" horse. Several of their good friend Jack Benny's 1953–55 filmed episodes were also produced by McCadden for CBS as well.


title: George Burns

text: "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" ran on CBS Television from 1950 to 1958, when Burns at last consented to Allen's retirement. The onset of heart trouble in the early 1950s had left her exhausted from full-time work and she had been anxious to stop, but could not say "no" to Burns.


title: George Burns

text: Burns attempted to continue the show (for new sponsor Colgate-Palmolive on NBC), but without Allen to provide the classic Gracie-isms, the show expired after a year.


title: George Burns

text: Burns subsequently created "Wendy and Me", a sitcom in which he co-starred with Connie Stevens, Ron Harper, and J. Pat O'Malley. He acted primarily as the narrator, and secondarily as the adviser to Stevens' Gracie-like character. The first episode involved the nearly 69-year-old Burns watching his younger neighbor's activities with amusement, just as he would watch the Burns and Allen television show while it was unfolding to get a jump on what Gracie was up to in its final two seasons. Again as in the Burns and Allen television show, George frequently broke the fourth wall by commenting directly to viewers. The series only lasted a year. In a promotion, Burns had joked that "Connie Stevens plays Wendy, and I play 'me'."


title: George Burns

text: After Gracie's death in 1964, George immersed himself in work. McCadden Productions co-produced the television series "No Time for Sergeants", based on the hit Broadway play; George also produced Juliet Prowse's 1965–66 NBC situation comedy, "Mona McCluskey". At the same time, he toured the U.S. playing nightclub and theater engagements with such diverse partners as Carol Channing, Dorothy Provine, Jane Russell, Connie Haines, and Berle Davis. He also performed a series of solo concerts, playing university campuses, New York's Philharmonic Hall and winding up a successful season at Carnegie Hall, where he wowed a capacity audience with his show-stopping songs, dances, and jokes.


title: George Burns

text: In 1974, Jack Benny signed to play one of the lead roles in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film version of Neil Simon's "The Sunshine Boys" (Red Skelton was originally the other, but he objected to some of the script's language). Benny's health had begun to fail, however, and he advised his manager Irving Fein to let longtime friend Burns fill in for him on a series of nightclub dates to which Benny had committed around the U.S.


title: George Burns

text: Burns, who enjoyed working, accepted the job for what would be his first feature film appearance for 36 years. As he recalled years later:


title: George Burns

text: Ill health had prevented Benny from working on "The Sunshine Boys"; he died of pancreatic cancer on December 26, 1974. Burns, heartbroken, said that the only time he ever wept in his life other than Gracie's death was when Benny died. He was chosen to give one of the eulogies at the funeral and said, "Jack was someone special to all of you, but he was so special to me ... I cannot imagine my life without Jack Benny, and I will miss him so very much." Burns then broke down and had to be helped to his seat. People who knew George said that he never could really come to terms with his beloved friend's death.


title: George Burns

text: Burns replaced Benny in the film as well as the club tour, a move that turned out to be one of the biggest breaks of his career; his wise performance as faded vaudevillian Al Lewis won him the 1975 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and permanently secured his career resurgence. At the age of 80, Burns was the oldest Oscar winner in the history of the Academy Awards, a record that would remain until Jessica Tandy won an Oscar for "Driving Miss Daisy" in 1989.


title: George Burns

text: In 1977, Burns made another hit film, "Oh, God!", playing the omnipotent title role opposite singer John Denver as an earnest but befuddled supermarket manager, whom God picks at random to revive his message. The image of Burns in a sailor's cap and light springtime jacket as the droll Almighty influenced his subsequent comedic work, as well as that of other comedians. At a celebrity roast in his honor, Dean Martin adapted a Burns crack: "When George was growing up, the Top 10 were the Ten Commandments".


title: George Burns

text: Burns appeared in this character along with Vanessa Williams on the September 1984 cover of "Penthouse" magazine, the issue which contained the notorious nude photos of Williams, as well as the first appearance of underage pornographic film star Traci Lords. A blurb on the cover even announced "Oh God, she's nude!"


title: George Burns

text: "Oh, God!" inspired two sequels "Oh, God! Book II" (in which the Almighty engages a precocious schoolgirl played by Louanne Sirota to spread the word) and "Oh, God! You Devil"—in which Burns played a dual role as God and the devil, with the soul of a would-be songwriter (played by Ted Wass) at stake.


title: George Burns

text: After guest-starring on "The Muppet Show" and "Alice", Burns appeared in 1978's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", the film based on The Beatles' album of the same name. In 1979, at the age of 83, Burns starred in two feature films, "Just You and Me, Kid" and "Going in Style". Burns remained active in films and TV past his 90th birthday. One of his last films was 1988's "18 Again!", based on his half-novelty, half-country music-based hit single, "I Wish I Was 18 Again". In this film, Burns played an 81-year-old self-made millionaire industrialist who switched bodies with his awkward, artistic, 18-year-old grandson (played by Charlie Schlatter).


title: George Burns

text: Burns also did regular nightclub stand-up acts in his later years, usually portraying himself as a lecherous old man. He always smoked a cigar onstage and reputedly timed his monologues by the amount the cigar had burned down. For this reason, he preferred cheap El Producto cigars as the loosely wrapped tobacco burned longer. Burns once quipped "In my youth, they called me a rebel. When I was middle-aged, they called me eccentric. Now that I'm old, I'm doing the same thing I've always done and they're calling me senile."


title: George Burns

text: Arthur Marx estimated that Burns smoked around 300,000 cigars during his lifetime, starting at the age of 14. In his final years, he smoked no more than four a day and he never used cigarettes or marijuana, claiming "Look, I can't get any more kicks than I'm getting. What can marijuana do for me that show business hasn't done?" His last feature film role was the cameo role of Milt Lackey, a 100-year-old stand-up comedian, in the 1994 comedy mystery "Radioland Murders".


title: George Burns

text: Burns was still appearing at major hotel/casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe during the early 1980s. When Burns turned 90 in 1986, the city of Los Angeles renamed the northern end of Hamel Road "George Burns Road." City regulations prohibited naming a city street after a living person, but an exception was made for Burns. In celebration of Burns' 99th birthday in January 1995, Los Angeles renamed the eastern end of Alden Drive "Gracie Allen Drive." Burns was present at the unveiling ceremony (one of his last public appearances), where he quipped, "It's good to be here at the corner of Burns & Allen. At my age, it's good to be anywhere!" George Burns Road and Gracie Allen Drive cross just a few blocks west of the Beverly Center mall in the heart of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Burns served as honorary chairman of the Center's endowment drive.


title: George Burns

text: Burns remained in good health for most of his life, in part thanks to a daily exercise regimen of swimming, walks, sit-ups, and push-ups. He bought new Cadillacs every year and drove until the age of 93. After that, Burns had chauffeurs drive him around. In his later years, he also had difficulty reading fine print.


title: George Burns

text: Burns suffered a head injury after falling in his bathtub in July 1994 and underwent surgery to remove fluid in his skull. Burns never fully recovered and his performing career came to an end. In February 1995, Burns, in what would be his final television appearance, was presented with the very first SAG Lifetime Achievement Award by the Screen Actors Guild. In December of that year, a month before his 100th birthday, Burns was well enough to attend a Christmas party hosted by Frank Sinatra (who turned 80 that month), where he reportedly caught the flu, which weakened him further. When Burns was 96, he had signed a lifetime contract with Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to perform stand-up comedy there, which included the guarantee of a show on his centenary, January 20, 1996. When that day actually came, however, he was too weak to deliver the planned performance. He released a statement joking how he would love for his 100th birthday to have "a night with Sharon Stone."


title: George Burns

text: On March 9, 1996, 49 days after his centenary, Burns died in his Beverly Hills home. His funeral was held three days later at the Wee Kirk o' the Heather church in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendale. As much as he looked forward to reaching the age of 100, Burns also stated, about a year before he died, that he also looked forward to death, saying that on the day he would die, he would be with Gracie again in Heaven. Upon being interred with Gracie, the crypt's marker was changed from, "Grace Allen Burns—Beloved Wife And Mother (1902–1964)" to "Gracie Allen (1902–1964) & George Burns (1896–1996)—Together Again". George had always said that he wanted Gracie to have top billing.


title: George Burns

text: George Burns has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: a motion pictures star at 1639 Vine Street, a television star at 6510 Hollywood Boulevard, and a live performance star at 6672 Hollywood Boulevard. The first two stars were placed during the initial installations of 1960, while the third star ceremony was held in 1984, in the new category of live performance, or live theatre, established that year. Burns is also a member of the Television Hall of Fame, where he and Gracie Allen were both inducted in 1988.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: Step Brothers is a 2008 American comedy film directed by Adam McKay, produced by Jimmy Miller and Judd Apatow, and written by Will Ferrell and McKay from a story by Ferrell, McKay, and John C. Reilly. It follows Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (Reilly), two grown men who are forced to live together as brothers after their single parents, with whom they still live, marry each other. Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen, Adam Scott, and Kathryn Hahn also star.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: The film was released by Sony Pictures Releasing on July 25, 2008, two years after "". Both films feature the same main actors, as well as the same producing and writing team. It grossed $128.1 million and received mixed reviews.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: 39-year-old Brennan Huff and 40-year-old Dale Doback are immature adults still living at home. Brennan lives with his divorced mother, Nancy, and Dale lives with his widowed father, Robert. Robert and Nancy meet, fall in love, and marry, forcing Brennan and Dale to live together as step brothers. Brennan and Dale initially despise each other, and after Brennan defies Dale and touches Dale's drum set (once with his testicles), a violent brawl erupts between them. They are grounded with no television for a week, and are ordered to find jobs within a month or be evicted.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: When Brennan's obnoxious younger brother Derek, a successful helicopter leasing agent, visits with his family, he openly ridicules Dale and Brennan, and Dale punches him in the face. Brennan is awed that Dale stood up to Derek, while Derek's wife Alice finds Dale's courage attractive, and begins a sexual affair with him. Brennan and Dale bond over their shared interests. Robert, meanwhile, schedules several job interviews for them, but they perform poorly and then are bullied on their way home by school children. Robert and Nancy reveal that with Derek's help they plan to sell the house, retire and travel the world on Robert's sailboat. They also demand that Brennan and Dale attend therapy and find other living arrangements. Brennan is attracted to his therapist, Denise.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: At Derek's birthday party, Dale and Brennan present a pitch video for their entertainment company, "Prestige Worldwide", that includes a music video, "Boats 'N Hoes", which they filmed on Robert's boat without his knowledge or permission. The presentation backfires when the video shows the boat crashing, shattering Robert and Nancy's sailing dreams. On Christmas, Robert and Nancy announce they are getting divorced, upsetting Brennan and Dale, who blame each other. Brennan and Dale go their separate ways, live independently and gradually become functioning adults.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: Brennan gets a job at Derek's helicopter leasing firm and Dale works for a catering company. Brennan volunteers to oversee a prestigious event, the Catalina Wine Mixer, for the company. He hires the catering company that employs Dale and invites Robert and Nancy to attend. The party goes well until the lead singer of the hired cover band loses his temper and is hustled away. Derek blames Brennan for the fiasco and fires him. Robert encourages Brennan and Dale to be their eccentric child-at-heart selves again and perform to save the party. The pair take the stage and Brennan sings "Por Ti Volaré" while Dale accompanies him on drums. Derek is so moved by Brennan's performance that he and Brennan make amends and Dale breaks off his relationship with Alice, to her dismay.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: Six months later, Robert and Nancy are back together living in their old house, while Brennan and Dale have turned "Prestige Worldwide" into a successful entertainment company that hosts karaoke events. Robert has turned his boat into a tree house and Denise confesses her attraction for Brennan. During the ending credits, Dale and Brennan exact their revenge on the school children who previously beat them up.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: The film was released for home video on December 2, 2008 in a single-disc rated edition, a single-disc unrated edition and a 2-disc unrated edition. The film generated sales of an estimated 3.87 million units in DVD and Blu-ray, totaling $63.7 million. For the home video release, Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and Adam McKay recorded a commentary track mostly in song, accompanied by Jon Brion; the track covers "the movie-making process [and] their characters' offscreen lives" in remarks that range "from the inspired to the irritatingly prolonged, but when Ferrell and Reilly really get into a good groove, they're actually funnier than the main feature". Step Brothers was released on 4K Blu-Ray on October 2, 2018.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: "Step Brothers" opened in 3,094 theaters and grossed $30.9 million. It went on to gross $100,468,793 domestically and $27,638,849 internationally for a total of $128,107,642.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: "Step Brothers" received mixed or average reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 55% based on 205 reviews, with an average rating of 5.60/10. The site's critical consensus reads, ""Step Brothers" indulges in a cheerfully relentless immaturity that will quickly turn off viewers unamused by Ferrell and Reilly -- and delight those who find their antics hilarious." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 33 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "B" on scale of A to F.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: Roger Ebert gave the film 1.5 out of 4 stars and stated, "When did comedies get so mean? "Step Brothers" has a premise that might have produced a good time at the movies, but when I left, I felt a little unclean".


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: Ty Burr in the "Boston Globe" wrote, "'Step Brothers' is crudely funny, which means that sometimes it's crudely hilarious and more often it's just crude." "Variety" critic John Anderson wrote, "the film is funny at times but lapses into the reflexive vulgarity that seems to be the default mechanism of the Apatow machinery."


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: In the British Film Institute's 2012 "Sight & Sound" polls of the greatest movies ever made, "The Snowtown Murders" and "Macbeth" director Justin Kurzel, named "Step Brothers" one of his 10 favorite films.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: In the movie, Dale and Brennan make a video to pitch both Robert and Derek about investing in Prestige Worldwide, with a music video for a song titled "Boats 'N' Hoes". Since the release of the film, "Boats 'N' Hoes" has contributed to the success of the movie with over a million hits on YouTube and merchandise that references the song.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: A political action committee (PAC) known as the "Boats 'N' Hoes PAC" was registered by Shaun Nowacki with the Texas Ethics Commission in 2014. Nowacki's firm was hired by multiple Republicans in Texas including 48th Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick (who was running for Lieutenant Governor), and Donna Campbell (who was campaigning for State Senator). The purpose of the PAC was never shared and was criticized by Lisa Paul, who served as the Texas Democratic Party Deputy Communications Director. Paul said, "Texas Republicans say they want to reach out to women, to be more inclusive, but actions like this reinforce a pattern of disrespect... Their contempt towards women is simply unforgivable."


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: The Catalina Wine Mixer event depicted in the film was not a real event that existed before or during the creation of the film. The event has since been created and hosted on Catalina Island on Descanso Beach.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: McKay announced on Twitter in 2011 that production of a "Step Brothers" rap album featuring Ferrell and Reilly had begun, but later said that the rap album fell apart and will not be released.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: Ferrell and Reilly have talked about a sequel. Reilly had the idea. McKay was also interviewed about the possible sequel: He added that Ferrell and Reilly's characters would be mature and have jobs. "One of them's married and has a kid. They're still kind of goofballs but they've taken three or four steps. Then we have an idea for something happens that knocks him back to square one, and one of the brothers, John C. Reilly sort of instigates it, like 'we can't take this anymore.' And things go really bad, their lives kind of fall apart. They have to pull it back together is sort of the basic structure." McKay has also said that ideas that were not used in the first film may be used in the sequel.


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: McKay spoke to "Empire" in February 2014 and appeared to rule out a sequel to "" or "Step Brothers" saying, "No, that's the last sequel we're gonna do. There's nothing more fun to me than new characters and a new world. And now we're releasing this alt version, we're totally satisfied. No "Anchorman 3"."


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: In a 2014 interview with Collider, McKay indicated the door was still open for a "Step Brothers" sequel at some point, while making clear it wasn't a short term development priority, stating:


title: Step Brothers (film)

text: In February 2017, Ferrell said in an interview with "Rolling Stone" that there are currently no plans for a sequel to "Step Brothers".


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Antichrist (stylized as ANTICHRIS♀) is a 2009 horror art film written and directed by Lars von Trier and starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. It tells the story of a couple who, after the accidental death of their son, retreat to a cabin in the woods where the man experiences strange visions and the woman manifests increasingly violent sexual behavior and sadomasochism. The narrative is divided into a prologue, four chapters and an epilogue.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Written in 2006 while von Trier had been hospitalized due to a significant depressive episode, the film was largely influenced by his own struggles with depression and anxiety. Filming began in the late summer of 2008, primarily in Germany, and was a Danish production co-produced by several other film production companies from six different European countries.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: After its premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, where von Trier won the Silver Lion and Gainsbourg won the festival's award for Best Actress, the film immediately received polarizing feedback, with critics generally praising its artistic execution but remaining strongly divided regarding its substantive merit, although both explicit sex and violence cause controversy. Other awards won by the film include the Bodil Award for Best Danish Film, the Robert Award for Best Danish Film, The Nordic Council Film Prize for best Nordic film and the European Film Award for best cinematography. The film is dedicated to the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–86).


title: Antichrist (film)

text: "Antichrist" is the first film in von Trier's unofficially titled "Depression Trilogy". It was followed in 2011 by "Melancholia" and then by "Nymphomaniac" in 2013.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: An unnamed couple has sex in their Seattle apartment while their toddler son, Nic, climbs up to the bedroom window and falls to his death. The mother collapses at the funeral, and spends the next month in the hospital crippled with atypical grief. The father, a therapist, is skeptical of the psychiatric care she is receiving and takes it upon himself to treat her personally with psychotherapy. She reveals that her second greatest fear is nature, prompting him to try exposure therapy. They hike to their isolated cabin in a woods called Eden, where she spent time with Nic the previous summer while writing a thesis criticizing gynocide. During the hike, he encounters a doe that shows no fear of him and has a stillborn fawn hanging halfway out of her.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: During sessions of psychotherapy, the woman becomes increasingly grief-stricken and manic, often demanding forceful sex. The area becomes increasingly sinister to the man; acorns rapidly pelt the metal roof, he wakes up with a hand covered in swollen ticks, and finds a self-disemboweling red fox that tells him, "Chaos reigns!" In the dark attic the man finds the woman's thesis studies, which includes violent portraits of witch-hunts, and a scrapbook in which her writing becomes increasingly frantic and illegible. She reveals that while writing, she came to believe that all women are inherently evil. The man reprimands her for this, and in a frenzied moment, they have violent intercourse at the base of an ominous dead tree, where bodies are intertwined within the exposed roots. He suspects that Satan is her greatest hidden fear.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Upon viewing Nic's autopsy and photos she took of him while they stayed at Eden, the man becomes aware that she had been systematically putting Nic's shoes on the wrong feet, resulting in a foot deformity. While in the woodshed, she attacks him, accuses him of planning to leave her, mounts him, and then smashes a large block of wood onto his groin, causing him to lose consciousness. She then masturbates him, ejaculating blood. She drills a hole through his leg, bolting a heavy grindstone through the wound, and tosses the wrench she used under the cabin. The man awakens alone; unable to loosen the bolt, he hides by dragging himself into a deep foxhole at the base of the dead tree. Following the sound of a crow he has found buried alive in the hole, the woman locates, attacks, then partially buries him.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Night falls; now remorseful, the woman unburies the man but cannot remember where the wrench is. She helps him back to the cabin, where she tells him that only "when the Three Beggars arrive" he can die. The woman recounts that she saw Nic climbing up to the window on the night of his death, but did not act, displaying her perceived essential evil. In the cabin, she cuts off her clitoris. The two are then visited by the crow (symbol of despair), the deer (symbol of grief), and the fox (symbol of pain), referred to as the Three Beggars. A hailstorm begins; earlier it was revealed that women accused of witchcraft had been known to have the power to summon hailstorms. When he finds the wrench under the cabin's floorboards, she attacks him with scissors, but he manages to unbolt the grindstone. Finally free, he strangles her to death, then burns her body on a funeral pyre.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: The man limps from the cabin, eating wild berries, as the Three Beggars look on, now translucent and glowing. Reaching the top of a hill, under a brilliant light he watches in awe as hundreds of women in antiquated clothes come towards him, their faces blurred.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Film scholar Magdalena Zolkos interprets "Antichrist" as an "origins story," citing its unnamed characters and setting—a woods called Eden—as primary reasons. Zolkos's interpretation of the film aligns with that of scholar Joanne Bourke, who cites the film as a retelling of Abrahamic origins "framed as a question." The couple's entrance into the woods and arrival at Eden "initiates a cinematic restaging of the myths of origins." The woman's statement made to her husbandthat nature is "Satan's church"suggests a "triadic nexus of nature, demonic force and the death of the child." Zolkos characterizes this nexus as being made of three "separate, psychic events: the inscrutable and threatening surroundings of the forest; her readings in the history of religious misogyny; and an accident when she loses the child in the woods a year before his death."


title: Antichrist (film)

text: While the film interweaves multiple themes in Zolkos's reading, she suggests that the film is fundamentally a "very personal and revealing filminterwoven with idioms and images that document von Trier's struggle with serious psychiatric disorder, and highly informed by his experience of cognitive behaviour and exposure therapy, shamanism and Jungian psychoanalysis." Von Trier himself commented on the experience of making the film as being a "fun" way of working through his own depression. Von Trier considers the film the first of his "Depression Trilogy," followed by "Melancholia" (2011) and "Nymphomaniac" (2013).


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Scholar Amy Simmons notes that the film's aesthetic components "transcend categories, and as such, his work cannot be reduced to any one message." She considers the film a "genuinely radical and unflinching account of human relationships." Robert Sinnerbrink interprets the film (along with "Melancholia" and "Nymphomaniac") as engaging with human responses to psychological trauma. He explains: "In each case, there is a central female protagonist whose melancholic responses to this central trauma open up a space of subjective but also aesthetic-expressive engagement...  In "Antichrist", it is evident in the woman's intense anxiety and depressive withdrawal expressed through the neo-romantic landscape and supernaturalist elements of the forest to which she and her partner have retreated."


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Von Trier began writing "Antichrist" in 2006 while being hospitalized for depression. Von Trier conceived the film as a horror film, as he felt it allowed for "a lot of very, very strange images." He had recently seen several contemporary Japanese horror films such as "Ring" and "Dark Water", from which he drew inspiration. Another basic idea came from a documentary von Trier saw about the original forests of Europe. In the documentary the forests were portrayed as a place of great pain and suffering as the different species tried to kill and eat each other. Von Trier was fascinated by the contrast between this and the view of nature as a romantic and peaceful place. Von Trier said: "At the same time that we hang it on our walls over the fireplace or whatever, it represents pure Hell." In retrospect he said that he had become unsure whether "Antichrist" really could be classified as a horror film, because "it's not so horrific ... we didn't try so hard to do shocks, and that is maybe why it is not a horror film. I took [the horror genre] more as an inspiration, and then this strange story came out of it."


title: Antichrist (film)

text: The title was the first thing that was written for the film. "Antichrist" was originally scheduled for production in 2005, but its executive producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen accidentally revealed the film's planned revelation: that earth was created by Satan and not by God. Von Trier was furious and decided to delay the shoot so he could rewrite the script.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: In 2007, von Trier announced that he was suffering from depression, and that it was possible that he never would be able to make another film. "I assume that "Antichrist" will be my next film. But right now I don't know," he told the Danish newspaper "Politiken". During an early casting attempt, English actors who had come to Copenhagen had to be sent home, while von Trier was crying because his poor condition did not allow him to meet them.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: The post-depression version of the script was to some extent written as an exercise for von Trier, to see if he had recovered enough to be able to work again. Von Trier has also made references to August Strindberg and his "Inferno" Crisis in the 1890s, comparing it to his own writing under difficult mental circumstances: "was "Antichrist" my Inferno Crisis?" Several notable names appear in the credits as having assisted von Trier in the writing. Danish writer and directors Per Fly and Nikolaj Arcel are listed as script consultants, and Anders Thomas Jensen as story supervisor. Also credited are researchers dedicated to fields including "misogyny", "anxiety", "horror films" and "theology." Von Trier himself is a Catholic convert and intensely interested in Christian symbolism and theology.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Production was led by von Trier's Copenhagen-based company Zentropa. Co-producers were Sweden's Film i Väst, Italy's Lucky Red and France's Liberator Productions, Slot Machine and Arte France. The Danish Film Institute contributed with a financial support of $1.5 million and Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany with $1.3 million. The total budget was around $11 million.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Props for the more violent scenes were provided by the company Soda ApS, and made in their workshop in Nørrebro, Copenhagen. Plaster casts were made of Willem Dafoe's leg and the female "porno double's" vulva. A plastic baby with authentic weight was made for the opening sequence. Pictures found using Google Image Search had to serve as models for the stillborn deer, and a nylon stocking was used as caul. The vulva prop was constructed with its inner parts detachable for easy preparation if several takes would be needed. Czech animal trainer Ota Bares, who had collaborated with parts of the crew in the 2005 film "Adam's Apples", was hired early on and given instructions about what tasks the animals must be able to perform. The fox, for example, was taught to open its mouth on a given command to simulate speaking movements.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: To get into the right mood before filming started, both Dafoe and Gainsbourg were shown Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror" from 1975. Dafoe was also shown Von Trier's own 1998 film "The Idiots", and Gainsbourg "The Night Porter" to study Charlotte Rampling's character. Dafoe also met therapists working with cognitive behavioral therapy as well as being present at actual sessions of exposure therapy and studying material on the topic.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Willem Dafoe, who had previously worked with Lars von Trier in "Manderlay" (2005), was cast as "He" after contacting von Trier and asking what he was working on at the moment. He received the script for "Antichrist", although he was told that von Trier's wife was skeptical about asking a renowned actor like Dafoe to do such an extreme role. Dafoe accepted the part, later explaining its appeal to him: "I think the dark stuff, the unspoken stuff is more potent for an actor. It's the stuff we don't talk about, so if you have the opportunity to apply yourself to that stuff in a playful, creative way, yes I'm attracted to it." The voice of the talking fox was also supplied by Dafoe, although the recording was heavily manipulated.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: In casting the role of "She", actress Eva Green had been initially approached for the female lead. According to von Trier, Green was determined to appear in the film, but her agents refused to allow her. The unsuccessful casting attempt took two months of the pre-production process. Eventually, Charlotte Gainsbourg expressed interest in the role, and by von Trier's words she was very eager to get cast: "Charlotte came in and said, 'I'm dying to get the part no matter what.' So I think it was a decision she made very early and she stuck to it. We had no problems whatsoever." Gainsbourg recalled upon first meeting von Trier that she had "known his films," but knew "very little about the man himself," and noted his presence as being "filled with anxiety" upon their first meeting. She also initially expressed worry over the film's more emotional sequences, particularly surrounding her character's panic attacks and anxiety, as they were not things she had experienced in her own life.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Filming took 40 days to finish, from 20 August to the end of September 2008. The film was shot in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Locations were used in Rhein-Sieg-Kreis, part of the Cologne region (including rural areas in Nutscheid) and Wuppertal. It was the first film by Von Trier to be entirely filmed in Germany. The fictional setting of the film however is near Seattle, USA. The film was shot on digital video, primarily using Red One cameras in 4K resolution. The slow motion sequences were shot with a Phantom V4 in 1,000 frames per second. Filming techniques involved dollys, hand-held camerawork and computer-programmed "motion control", of which the team had previous experience from Von Trier's 2006 film "The Boss of It All". One shot, where the couple is having sex under a tree, was particularly difficult since the camera would switch from being hand-held to motion controlled in the middle of the take.


title: Antichrist (film)

text: Von Trier had not recovered completely from his depression when filming started. He repeatedly excused himself to the actors for being in the mental condition he was, and was not able to operate the camera as he usually does, which made him very frustrated. "The script was filmed and finished without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity," the director said in an interview. Gainsbourg recalled that Von Trier provided little direction during the shoot, but characterized the filming process as freeing and allowing room for both herself and Dafoe to experiment with varying performance styles.