Trivia / Encyclopedia Brown

• Defictionalization: One of the recipes in Takes the Cake! is Beauford Twitty's "Tubers a la Twitty" (Oven-baked fries), a dish that served as a partial plot point in "The Case of the Secret Recipe".
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Most episodes of the HBO series saw release on VHS, except for "The Case of the Incredible Culpepper". You can likely find them at your local library, but other than those tapes, they haven't been re-released or re-aired in any form either.
• Milestone Celebration: The book Encyclopedia Brown and his Best Cases Ever was released in 2013, celebrating fifty years since the release of the first book and featuring a letter from Donald J. Sobol detailing the history of the book series and its creation, along with fifteen cases from the previous books^Chapters The Case of... 1. Natty Nat (from #1); 2. Merko's Grandson (from #1); 3. the Secret Pitch (from #2); 4. the Stolen Diamonds (from #3); 5. the Explorer's Money (from #4); 6. the Super-Secret Hold (from #5); 7. the Muscle Maker (from #5); 8. the Junk Sculptor (from #7); 9. the Champion Skier (from #8); 10. the Stolen Money (from #10); 11. the Skunk Ape (from #11); 12. the Dead Eagles (from #12); 13. the Hit-Run Car (from #13); 14. the Gym Bag (from #25); 15. Mrs. Washington's Diary (from #26).
• Recycled Script:
  • Inverted with the majority of Donald Sobol's Two-Minute Mysteries, which are just Encyclopedia Brown stories condensed to one page and with the crime in question upgraded from petty theft to first-degree murder.
  • Played straight with book 1, chapter 3 ("The Case of the Civil War Sword"), which is based on a Two-Minute Mysteries story of a man who tries to impress his date with a fake engraved saber his great-grandfather supposedly received, marked as an award for valor at the first battle of Bull Run. The challenge is to figure out why the sword is obviously fake (because it wasn't called the first battle of Bull Run until after there was a second battle of Bull Run); Encyclopedia's version of the case is essentially the same.
• Spin-Off Cookbook: Book 15 1/2, Encyclopedia Brown Takes The Cake!, follows each of its cases with a chapter of recipes.
• Technology Marches On: "The Case of the Hidden Penny" involves Bugs Meany hiding a coin inside a hot dog, which Encyclopedia Brown deduces by noticing that he put mustard on top of the sausage, and "no one who likes hot dogs does that" specifically because at the time, condiments were spread on the bun by a knife. Thanks to the widespread introduction of the squeeze bottle, virtually everybody today expects condiments to be on top of a hot dog by default.

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