Did You Know?

With the advent of Mark Burnett's "Survivor: All-Stars" edition, the reality juggernaut seems poised to takes its immortal place in television history. Some interesting trivia about the nation's favorite game show:

- While “Survivor: Thailand” was filming, serious downtime due to the climate’s monsoon season led the disheartened Sook Jai Tribe to scrawl an entire screenplay solely on discarded coconut husks...and that screenplay became the smash hit “Mona Lisa Smile!”

- While most seasons of "Survivor" feature sixteen castaways, few people realize that "Survivor: Marquesas" originally began with seventeen castaways, the seventeenth being NASA chief aeronautics designer Dr. Martin Scholssen, whose luxury item was a jet pack, which he used to escape and was edited from the show entirely during post-production.

- The scenes in which "Survivor" champion Richard Hatch appear naked were actually shot using Hatch's body double -- best-selling spy novelist Tom Clancy!

- Producer Mark Burnett was inspired to create "Survivor" after his own experience of crash-landing his plane on a small island in the Pacific ocean with a full film and editing crew and with Target, Doritos and Sierra Mist air-dropping supplies to him after he successfully performed exciting time-trial contests.

- It takes up to three hours each morning for wardrobe technicians to glue lovably gruff castaway Rupert Boneham's trademark beard to his face and another two hours to authentically integrate sand, grass and food for realism.

- During the filming "Survivor: Africa," the cast was overthrown and enslaved by the hostile guerrilla regime Nbwaba Gzani, who installed dictator Mbubu Po as the final survivor and million-dollar winner!

- The winner of the first televised "Survivor" was seventies pop disco diva Gloria Gaynor, who sang her now-famous hit "I Will Survive" during her second to last day on the island and used her million dollars to buy a record company for the sole purpose of self-publishing the album, which reached number one in 1979!

- "Survivor" has actually been played for thousands of years, on hundreds of deserted islands, although most previous contestants weren't surrounded by a film crew and usually died!