Culture & entertainment
Discover facts about culture & entertainment. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Culture & entertainment
Koffing and Weezing were nearly named NY and LA
Nintendo's localization team really went out of their way to roast American infrastructure in the 90s. Before finally settling on Koffing and Weezing, the…
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Voldemort's awkward hug was improvised
If you thought Lord Voldemort hugging a teenager was the most intensely uncomfortable moment in cinematic history, you are not alone—the actors felt it too.…
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How The Lion King found Hakuna Matata
Imagine convincing your corporate overlords to fund a luxury safari under the guise of 'artistic research' for a cartoon about singing lions. The team behind…
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Why Elvis was filmed only from the waist up
In the 1950s, a vibrating pelvis was basically considered a weapon of mass destruction. When Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, the network censors were…
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George Clooney keeps a reminder of his Batman role
Bat-nipples leave permanent emotional scars. George Clooney famously keeps a photograph of himself dressed in the disastrous Batman & Robin suit prominently…
Discover moreSnoop Dogg's surprising reported IQ
Underneath the thick clouds of recreational haze lies a hyper-intelligent mastermind. While average IQ hovers around 100, the rap legend reportedly scores a…
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Daniel Craig's gloves had to be digitally erased
Vanity literally ruined continuity. Daniel Craig thought leather gloves made him look cool in a casino scene and convinced the director to let him wear them.…
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Twitter records broke when Beyoncé announced her pregnancy
Celebrity worship is a measurable metric. When Beyoncé dramatically unbuttoned her blazer to reveal her baby bump at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, it…
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Bill Murray improvised much of Ghostbusters
Scriptwriters are merely a suggestion if you're funny enough. Bill Murray showed up on the set of Ghostbusters, completely ignored his written dialogue, and…
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One actor played every Oompa Loompa
Because CGI is for the weak, Tim Burton forced actor Deep Roy to manually perform the choreography for all 165 Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate…
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When radio sports needed fake crowd noise
Decades ago, remote broadcasting was far too expensive for local stations. Announcers would sit in quiet studios reading ticker tape updates, aggressively…
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How cliffhangers got their name
Thomas Hardy heavily popularized ending weekly published chapters with characters literally hanging off literal cliffs. He brilliantly tortured his Victorian…
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Reality broadcasts completely fake conversations
Producers notoriously splice together totally unrelated sentences from vastly different days to beautifully fabricate dramatic conflicts. The intense argument…
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Hollywood movie ratings are set by anonymous parents
The strict system deciding if a film is appropriate for youth is secretly run by a hidden panel of average, untrained parents in Los Angeles. Hollywood lets…
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Why CDs were made thicker than necessary
The actual data layer on a disc is incredibly microscopic and highly flimsy. Manufacturers deliberately added thick polycarbonate layers simply because…
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Longest published novel features over ten thousand pages
A sprawling piece of French fiction takes the crown for the most ridiculous page count in publishing existence. It proves that sometimes a writer completely…
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Reading floating text in colorful panels
Flipping through sequential paper grids filled with highly muscular heroes shouting in bolded letters remains an incredibly dominant form of storytelling.…
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Harry Potter was rejected before becoming a hit
The wildly popular story about a scarred boy wizard was furiously thrown in the trash by numerous major publishing houses before someone finally realized its…
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How a teenager helped invent modern horror
Stuck indoors due to terrible weather, a group of writers challenged each other to draft a scary story, leading a literal teenager to invent the modern horror…
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Shakespeare made up the word swagger
Before hip hop artists popularized the term, a famous Elizabethan playwright casually made up the word just to make his fictional characters sound slightly…
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Watching strangers open cardboard boxes
A massive genre of digital video consists entirely of watching someone else remove the plastic wrap from an expensive consumer product. Viewers vicariously…
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Internet memes possess an exact lifespan of a few days
Digital jokes now cycle through their entire cultural relevance faster than a carton of milk spoils. Analysts can precisely track a meme from niche creation…
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Why old books had wide margins for rats
Before modern storage, literal rats frequently decimated valuable library collections by aggressively gnawing on the exterior edges of bound paper. Printers…
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Printing crossword puzzles to sell more papers
Grids of intersecting letters were introduced entirely as a cheap Sunday gimmick to boost readership and distract people from awful headlines.
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