by Patrice Downing, Contributing Writer
You know how a lot of our favorite foods have fun little jingles to help brainwash us into subconsciously favoring that product over another? Would you believe that in 2016, General Mills took that a step further and put out a five-track hip-hop album under their Hamburger Helper brand? Yes, you read that correctly! Hamburger Helper released an album under its alias, Helper,as an April Fool’s day treat (not to be confused with Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco one) following a random tweet from two years prior. Their most liked posting to date, the tweet joked about their mascot, The Helping Hand, putting out a mixtape.
So at this point you might be wondering, how in the world wide web did I come across such a specific piece of pop culture absurdity? This may actually be the most straightforward trip down the fact-finding rabbit hole yet. Thanksgiving being a day that millions of us spend trapped in the kitchen, I decided to keep my accompanying content food-centric and used the opportunity to catch up on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Weird History Food. In the midst of a playlist littered with desserts, treats, and popular dishes of days gone by, an episode played on the history of Hamburger Helper. It covered a time period when the company was suffering from a dip in sales due to the resurgence in popularity of healthy eating through the reduction of processed foods. They found the key demographic still indulging in cheesy double hamburger and beefy stroganoff convenience were basically college guys and bachelors. In an effort to bring awareness to this key, cash-spending consumer, they did the most obvious thing possible… produced an explicit lyric-laden EP. I’m not even kidding, it has the parental advisory label right on the cover (though it is warning of “delicious”content), which is amazing. By the way, I would definitely recommend a quick Google search to see good ole Lefty dripping in gold for his musical debut.
What does any of this have to do with a short Italian guy in a big hat working his way to the top of the French military in the 1800s? If it’s your first time here, welcome to Fact on Fiction, an column where we examine films, docuseries, webumentaries, mini-docs, books, podcasts, and more to find the factual content that inspires new releases. Looking for the truth behind everything that claims to be based on a true story (I recently heard on an episode of SiftPop Writers’ Room, that Gran Turismo is just such a movie… crazy). Together, in each column, we journey down the rabbit hole, examining a fresh piece of media, and the history behind what made that story come alive, because, at the risk of sounding corny and cliché, sometimes fact is stranger than fiction, and it can be quite a wild ride diving in to those true life origins.
With the recent release of Napoleon let’s take a closer look at the man his soldiers called “Le Petit Coporal.” Corsican-born, famed military leader, French Revolutionary emperor, romance novelist, lover of feathered hats, younger brother to a cryptid hunter, and flee-er from bunnies… only one of those statements is not substantiated… hint it’s not the one about the rabbits. Ok, that’s a lot to digest, so let’s unpack it piece by piece. Napoleon is such a prominent, influential historical figure that I found myself sifting through the most factual content available of any person or topic I’ve ever researched. I’m not even exaggerating. There are audiobook versions of biographies, podcasts that breakdown his military career, PBS alone has done no less than seven episodes across their many biographical and battle series, as well as several Napoleon-specific documentaries. I almost decided to recommend Napoleon, a four-part PBS limited series from 2012, and if you are just wildly interested in the minutia of his life, it’s a bit of a time commitment, clocking in at a little over three and a half hours, but very informative with lots of great visuals. After hearing that at some point we’ll likely get a four-plus-hour director’s cut of Joaquin and his impressive hat, I thought a more digestible short form documentary would be a more attractive option this time around.
After listening to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Ridiculous Crime, I learned about Clisson et Eugenie, the novella Napoleon penned in 1795 about a doomed liaison between a soldier and his lover. That show has a sister podcast, Ridiculous History, that I then searched, assuming surely they had covered something Napoleonic at some point over the years. Oh, boy, did they! Knock another off the list from earlier: He was totally chased by a minimum of 1,000 (but as many as 3,000) farm-raised rabbits during an attempted hunt gone wrong, and had to flee in a coach to escape their velvety grasps. Searching that show for the Napster, another episode caught my eye on his older brother, who as it turns out, fled to America and eventually took up the hobby of cryptid hunting after what he felt was an encounter with the Jersey Devil while walking through the New England woods. So check another off the list, and all we’re left with is “lover of hats.’’ Sadly I couldn’t find any written proof that he actually had a fondness for them, otherwise we’d be discussing a documentary on the history of military headgear, milliners, or haberdashery right now.
That left me with my go to source for bite-sized biographical content, the Biographics channel on YouTube. If you’re unfamiliar, it is part of the Simon Whistler YouTube Universe. Whistler has close to a dozen other channels where he presents content sourced through his team of writers and researchers. Some of them are straightforward presentations of the facts (Biographics, Georpgrahics, Warographics, Side Projects to name a few) while others he does a cold read and adds reactions, commentary, and some epic tangents (Brain Blaze, Decoding the Unknown, Casual Criminalist,and Into the Shadows). Now here’s where my quest for facts on the famous French emperor took an unexpected turn: I went to YouTube to rewatch the Biographics video, “Napoleon Bonaparte,” as it had easily been a year or two since I’d last seen it, and a reactionary video from another channel was in the results. It was the video “Napoleon Bonaparte- Biographics Reaction” from a channel called Vlogging Through History, hosted by genealogist Chris Mowery. This created the potential for an unconventional yet intriguing documentary viewing experience. I’ve never watched a documentary and basically had it fact checked as I watched. It was a fun and unique way to view the content. Mowery did refresher research ahead of time, and then watched the entire Biographics video, stopping to comment throughout. I got scared when he stopped basically two minutes into the 20-minute Biographics (his video is 36 minutes) runtime. Whistler mentions Bonaparte’s height being five feet, two inches tall, to which Mowery stops to state he was not before continuing. Of course, then I had to stop to verify his actual height. It turns out in the French unit of measurement used during the early 1800’s, he was five feet, two inches, but converted into 2023 that’s actually more like five feet, six inches. Fortunately, the rest of the video is mostly just Mowery adding either context or details about the information Whistler covers, with only two more minor corrections. I gotta say, it was reassuring to find out that a channel I’ve followed for almost give years did such a good job on the accuracy front, especially considering the Napoleon video was one of Biographics earliest additions.
Convoluted as the journey was, I would 100% recommend taking the time to watch Vlogging Through History’s “Napoleon Bonaparte- Biographics Reaction” on YouTube to add some context to the Ridley Scott release. It adds a fun twist to the usual documentary format, and the breezy runtime won’t take up too much of your time.
And with that, we’ve come to the end of another month’s fact finding quest. Join me again next time, when I continue on my adventures to unearth the truth, sift through the saccharine, and hopefully find the Fact on Fiction.
You can read more from Patrice Downing, and follow her on Twitter, Serializd, and Letterboxd