Many children watching this TV show in the early 1960s thought it was just a harmless and zany romp about a man with a gorgeous wife and a talking horse that only he can hear. The horse, Ed, was always getting Wilbur into trouble by phoning the neighbors, ordering take-out, and showing up in inappropriate places. In one particularly memorable episode, Wilbur and Carol Post go on a beach vacation and Wilbur spies Ed surfing on a surfboard.

Some twenty years later, fundamentalist investigators determined that by playing the Mister Ed theme song backwards while sticking your fingers in your ears and squinting, you can clearly hear the words “source of the devil” and “the source is so hot”.

Armed with that revelation, contemporary viewers now understand that Mister Ed was not a show about a man with a talking horse. Rather, it was about a man who thought he had a talking horse. Suddenly, all those devilish plots by Ed to get Wilbur into trouble make sense. The horse was merely a manifestation of Wilbur’s sub-conscious, which can clearly be seen by his name: “Mister Ed” … or rather, “Mister Id“!

Wilbur was an architect, a job which allowed him to stay home and talk to his horse, but internally he was busy deconstructing the lives of everyone around him. The show was cancelled after six seasons, but the astute viewer must ponder what fate would later befall the winsome Carol Post. And no one has successfully explained what happened to Wilburs’ neighbors, the Addisons, who disappeared in 1963.