23 December: The Keystone Kops

On this date in 1912, Keystone released its first "Kop" film, Hoffmeyer's Legacy. 10 things you might not know about the Keystone Kops:

1. The Keystone Kops are a famously incompetent fictional police force, stars of silent slapstick comedy films produced by Mack Sennett for his Keystone Film Company between 1912 and 1917.

2. While the Kops made their first appearance in Hoffmeyer's Legacy, many would argue that the first Kop film was The Bangville Police, which was released the following year.

3. Mack Sennet was a former actor who’d got into writing and directing, and in due course was hired by The New York Motion Picture Company to run his own comedy brand, known as Keystone. He was a devoted theatregoer with a fondness for Broadway and Opera, although he preferred to foster an image of himself as a loud, easily bored, crude man conducting the affairs of his company from his Bathtub and spitting Tobacco.

4. When Sennett opened his studio in 1912, one of his comedians, Hank Mann, pitched him the idea of a bunch of bumbling cops. Sennett liked the idea, possibly because he knew that most of the people who went to see movies at the time were working class people and immigrants, and figured they would enjoy seeing authority figures getting the mickey taken out of them.

5. Some of the actors who played the Kops had led interesting lives that could make interesting movie plots in themselves. Hank Mann was born in Russia and came to the US with his family when he was 9. He’d worked as a Vaudeville acrobat and a steeplejack, and served in the first world war. Edgar Kennedy was a former boxer, who’d once fought Jack Dempsey. He had a good singing voice, which led to an acting career. Slim Summerville was orphaned at the age of 5, brought up by his grandparents until he was 10, when he ran away from home. He roamed the country doing odd jobs including working in a coffin factory before he was discovered by Edgar Kennedy while working in a pool room and offered a job. He was 6 feet 2 inches tall. Bobby Dunn had been doing daredevil stunts since the age of 9, his jobs including working with Dr. Carver’s Diving Horses. His stunts resulted in him losing several teeth and an eye (through jumping into a barrel which had a matchstick floating in it, which hit him in the eye). He wore a glass eye which made him look cross-eyed.

6. It was rumoured for a long time that Charlie Chaplin had once been a Kop, but nobody could prove it until 2010, when a Kop film which had been presumed lost, A Thief Catcher (1914), was found at an antique sale in Michigan. In it, Charlie Caplin could be clearly seen in the role of a Kop.

7. The unofficial theme music was Bag o' Rags, composed in 1912 by William "Mac" McKanless.

8. When talking pictures came along, the popularity of the Kops waned, although there was a bit of a revival in 1935 when director Ralph Staub, who’d inherited much of Sennett’s material, made a film called Keystone Hotel, featuring the Kops.

9. According to Dave Filoni, supervising director of the animated television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the look of the police droid is based on the appearance of the Keystone Kops.

10. The term “Keystone Kops” has become a synonym for bumbling incompetence in modern times and has been applied to political parties and football teams among others.

Character birthday

Hornet, a human genetic variant who is insane and believes himself to be a hornet deity who has taken on a human shape in order to pave the way for insect supremacy. He has joined forces with the band of villains known as The Swarm.

He has several hives and hornets nests in his room at Swarm HQ. They never sting him, and he can command them to swarm, attack his enemies or any other activity he wishes.