YOU’RE MY INSPIRATION

Here are some more surprising inspirations behind pop culture icons.

THE GAME OF THRONES DRAGONS: The HBO show’s visual effects team wanted to base the baby dragons on some kind of bird, but which one? After looking at bats and eagles, they ended up buying a chicken from Trader Joe’s and cutting it up “to see how it works.” When the dragons got big, the artists took inspiration from elephants, especially the way “their skin stretches and rolls over the bones.”

1984: A big inspiration for George Orwell’s 1948 dystopian novel was Halford Mackinder’s 1919 geopolitics book, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction. One passage in particular caught Orwell’s eye: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.” In this oft-quoted line from 1984, Orwell kept Mackinder’s structure but altered the nouns: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

WIND TURBINES: One problem with wind turbines: they’re loud. Another problem: if winds come from different directions, the turbines can stall. Solution to both problems: add little bumps to the blades, which distributes the air in such a way that makes the blades quieter and less likely to stall. The inspiration: humpback whales. Unlike most whales that feed on krill, humpbacks must maneuver to catch prey. They can do this in part because of little bumps on their flippers called tubercles. And now wind turbines have tubercles, too. (But they still can’t catch fish.)

DANIEL RADCLIFFE: After finishing up Harry Potter, Radcliffe bucked expectations by taking on one quirky role after another—including a talking corpse and the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. He didn’t want to be “just another leading man,” he said, so he modeled his career path after quirky character actor Steve Buscemi: “He’s been in everything from Fargo to almost every movie Adam Sandler has ever made, and big action movies like Armageddon and Con Air.” (In 2018 Radcliffe and Buscemi finally got to work with each other on the TBS sitcom Miracle Workers.)

“MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”: This political campaign slogan was in use long before Donald Trump adopted it in 2016. In 1980 Ronald Reagan’s slogan was “Let’s Make America Great Again.” And in 1991, in Bill Clinton’s presidential announcement speech, he said, “I believe that together we can make America great again.” (When Senator Ted Cruz uttered the phrase in one of his own campaign speeches, Trump accused Cruz of “ripping me off.”)

The write stuff: A. A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh) had H. G. Wells (War of the Worlds) for a teacher,…