Five Important Ideas That Started on Napkins
The concept of “Shark Week” sounds like something a drunk businessman would yell in the 1980s — and for good reason.
Pixar’s Hall of Fame
Toy Story was Pixar’s first movie, and it loomed so large, they didn’t necessarily think there would be a second, let alone a 28th. It wasn’t until the final stages of production that writer Andrew Stanton said, “Well, geez, if we're going to make another movie we have to get started now!”
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John Lasseter took Stanton, along with fellow writers Joe Ranft and Pete Docter, to lunch near their office. The Hidden City Cafe would wind up being the site of possibly the most lucrative brainstorming session of all time. The basic concepts for A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and Wall-E all came pouring out of their brains and onto the paper napkins littering their lunch table. The Hidden City Cafe closed in 2012, possibly sealing up a major rift in the membrane between the zeitgeist and the physical world. Actually, that sounds like a pretty cool idea for a Pixar movie.
So Many Logos
Salvador Dali was hired to design the Chupa Chups logo, which he sketched up on a napkin (and then reportedly demanded be displayed only on the top of the lollipop, so as not to distort its elegant curves).
When New York City needed a rebrand in the ‘70s, it hired designer Milton Glaser to round out their expensive ad campaign. He sketched up a quick “I <3 New York” on a napkin that tied the whole thing together, creating an iconic identity for the city and one of the most-parodied designs of all time.
Around the same time, Virgin realized it needed to break from their original logo, which was pretty naked lady-centric. Richard Branson invited a young, still-uncredited designer to his houseboat to talk shop, and that person sketched up the logo we know today.
Designer Paula Scher sat in on a corporate merger between Citicorp and Traveler’s Group, and conjured up the new CitiGroup logo before the meeting was over. She handed them a napkin and said, “This is your logo.”
Shark Week
In 1988, The Discovery Channel was just a couple of years old and still finding its footing. It had aired some dry documentaries like Iceberg Alley, which were capable of entertaining a certain demographic of drooling stoner. But they needed something to appeal to the sativa-types, and maybe expand into hooting and hollering drunkards. Clark Bunting, one of the OG bigwigs of the Discovery Channel, said in an interview that the idea for Shark Week was born “in a discussion about programming strategies.”
Others who were at this “discussion” have painted a more colorful picture: three bosses took out some underlings for an ‘80s work lunch. You’re not making your 4 p.m. meeting after an ‘80s work lunch. You’d be lucky if your marriage was still intact after an ‘80s work lunch. At some point in this drunken brainstorm bacchanal, someone slurred, “You know what would be awesome? Shark Week!” And the magic words were scribbled on a booze-soaked cocktail napkin.
‘A Few Good Men’
What people didn’t know about A Few Good Men when it came out in 1992 was that it was based on a real legal drama that played out in Guantanamo Bay. Aaron Sorkin’s sister was assigned to represent a group of Marines there, and told her baby brother about it in one fateful phone call. As the story unfolded over the phone, Sorkin saw it play out as a goofy little stage play in his head, writing a letter to Lewis Black’s theater at the time: “I got a funny idea for a one-act play.” Black picked it up, and it was later turned into the movie we all know today.
Now, Sorkin is no stranger to hard work and toil. He had to wait nearly a decade after he graduated college to produce his breakout hit. In that time, he had some weird jobs: at a discount ticket booth in Times Square, folding Cats T-shirts near Broadway and bartending at the Palace Theater. He would jot down ideas at the latter, and indeed, “I wrote A Few Good Men on cocktail napkins during the first act of La Cage aux Folles.” He turned a part-time job into a wad of napkins worth untold millions of dollars.
Trickle-Down Economics
It’s tempting to assume Ronald Reagan cooked up his signature economic policy all on his own, inside that Swiss cheese-looking, disease-addled meat computer of his. But it was a disaster a long time in the making — the idea that the working class benefits from a benevolent ruling class is as old as time itself, and a specific economic philosophy emerged in politics in the 1920s.
By 1974, the idea was ripe enough to be harvested by a couple of all-time scheming henchmen, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. These two heinous dorks had a dinner with economist Arthur Laffer, who grabbed a napkin and drew up a chart to illustrate the idea that constantly raising taxes would ultimately lead to less money for the government. Known from then on as the Laffer Curve, the idea was perverted into the concept that taxing billionaires is bad for everyone.