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The internet has sparked so many of these useless investigations, same with all those lost media forums, how many man hours were spent trying to find some obscure 1999 failed pilot for some Nickelodeon show no one’s watched. They stitched Jack Nicholson’s face over a photo of some guy from 1921. Who cares who the guy is? Are these people that bored? Is it some OCD tendency that every trivial detail in history should be logged and archived?

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In a world of 8 billion people you will surely find someone interested in almost anything you can think up.

This is a distinctly western internet phenomenon. It’s decadence. There was a tweet or something that said these people 100 years ago would be chronicling every species of beetle in their local area or designing intricate alternate history about how roads would work in an anarcho-capitalist society. Now that’s autistic, but this is like on another level. Would this guy’s mom be proud he found the identity of the guy at some random party from 1921 who’s photo got stitched over with a picture of Jack Nicholson and included for a few frames at the end of the shining?

The Shining is one of the most heavily analyzed films of all time, for good reason. It's not just some random Michael Bay flick. It's really almost unbelievable how deep the rabbit hole goes, so no, it's not surprising in the very least that people would spend time on a detail like this. If people 100 years ago weren't doing this kind of thing with films, it's because they didn't have access to films the way we do today, if The Shining was around 100 years ago and people had home computers they could play it on and could download it easily over the internet, you can be sure people would be analyzing it like crazy back then too.

Yes, she would actually. And my partner is too. Next time you do anything original, do let me know.

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