Last year on Amoeba Hollywood's mezzanine there was a serious debate about possible new sections:
Sports movies, Christian movies, Tween movies, Women's Pictures, Edwardian Movies, Midwesterns, &c. Most were shot down as stupid, unattractive and inadvisable.  One that didn't get the official OK and yet sprang up anyway was "Dancicals."



In musicals (dancicals' aging sibling) singing and musical performance are interwoven into the plot. In backstage musicals, Dick Powell might be telling an audience about a new song he's written which soon evolves into some insane Busby Berkeley fever dream which would be impossible to stage except in outer space. In other musicals, two sane, grown-ass men might seamlessly slip from dialog into snapping, then singing, dancing and jumping off walls, grabbing mannequins and other tomfoolery that leaves some viewers scratching their heads wandering, "What the heck was that?" The age old question of whether or not musical numbers are actually occurring within the diegesis can't really be answered. You just have to not think about it. With the onslaught of rock 'n' roll, musicals slipped in popularity in the 1960s. Interestingly, with the death of rock 'n' roll musicals have grown more popular again with modern examples like Velvet Goldmine, Hedwig & the Angry Inch, Moulin Rouge! Chicago, Sweeney Todd, &c.

 Sweeney Todd is a villain who began as an urban legend sometime around 1800 and was, a few decades later, the protagonist of a penny dreadful called The People's Periodical which was published in 1846. The issue was titled The String of Pearls: A Romance written by Thomas Prest, a popular writer who also wrote Varney the Vampire which I've wanted to get a copy of ever since I was in third grade.

Another popular urban legend of Victorian London was that the unsuspecting victims ended up in meat pies.

There was no evidence of Sweeney Todd having been an actual character nor that anyone turned up in the popular takeaway dish but when the story was turned into a play in 1847 the advertising claimed that it was "founded in fact."




Remember that lady that claimed to find a finger in her chili at Wendy's? Of course she turned out to be a serial scam-artist and got sentenced to nine years. I think if I found an identifiable piece of meat in my fast food chili it would actually be sort of comforting like, "Hey- at least it's not the pig's genitals!" ... but meat-eaters are a crazy bunch with all sorts of hang-ups about what species are good (chicken, cow, fish, lobster and pig) and what are bad (cat, dog, horse, cockroach or person). So picky!