How Well Do You Know Movie and TV Best Friends?

Remember that sing-song catchphrase that the two pals sang while dancing arm in arm down the street in the classic show intro: “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated”? In her 2012 memoir, Laverne actress Penny Marshall revealed that it was a nonsense song that she used to sing with her friends on the way to school. (Schlemiel is a Yiddish word for a clumsy person, while schlimazel refers to an unlucky person; Hasenpfeffer is a seasoned stew in German cuisine.)

Dr. John Watson, the detective’s flatmate at 221B Baker Street, narrates 56 of the 60 Sherlock Holmes stories. Although Holmes frequently says “Elementary” and calls his pal “my dear Watson,” he doesn’t put the two phrases together until the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes starring Clive Brook.

Lemmon recalled that the studio “wanted us to select off-the-rack stuff from the costume department,” but he and Curtis insisted that top designer Orry-Kelly make their dresses, just as he was doing for costar Marilyn Monroe.

In real life, Butch and Sundance’s gang was called the Wild Bunch, which William Goldman used in his original script. The studio changed it to avoid confusion with director Sam Peckinpah’s Western of the same name — which hit theaters three months before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch actor Paul Newman later founded a summer camp for kids with serious illnesses called the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp.

Vance was an accomplished stage actress who understudied for Ethel Merman in the original Broadway production of the hit Cole Porter musical Anything Goes when she was tapped to play the Ricardos landlady, Ethel Mertz.

The hit series’ pilot episode, in which Rue McClanahan’s Blanche nearly gets married to a bigamist, included a wedding cake from a Safeway grocery store near Paramount Studios in Hollywood. According to chef George Geary, who managed the store’s bakery department and was later called on to make hundreds of cheesecakes for the show, he sent over seven cheesecakes per episode — in case they were needed for reshoots. “We always wanted the cakes to look like something one of the girls had picked up from a local bakery,” he told the Oak Park, Illinois, Wednesday Journal.