Culture & entertainment
Discover facts about culture & entertainment. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Culture & entertainment
Gareth Edwards created the massive alien behemoths for his critically acclaimed independent film Monsters by digitally painting over raw video footage using off-the-shelf Adobe…
Before Hollywood handed him the keys to the Godzilla franchise, Gareth Edwards was basically pulling off digital miracles in a messy bedroom. Instead of…
Discover morePaul Verhoeven masterfully weaponized fictional news broadcasts throughout his science fiction satire Starship Troopers to aggressively spoon-feed fascist military propaganda…
Nothing sets the mood for an intergalactic bloodbath quite like a cheerful television anchor brightly asking if you would like to know more. Verhoeven hid a…
Discover moreGhost Stories anime licensor ADV Films gave their voice actors total creative freedom to completely rewrite the script because the original show bombed in Japan resulting in an…
Usually, translating a Japanese cartoon is a serious linguistic endeavor meant to preserve cultural accuracy. But when ADV Films acquired a ghost-hunting…
Discover morePixar animation studios spent millions of dollars and hundreds of rendering hours deliberately animating fake outtakes for A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2 just to parody the…
Only an animation studio with way too much rendering power would spend actual, real-world money to painstakingly animate fake mistakes. Back when 3D animation…
Discover moreVoice actresses for Japanese idol juggernaut Love Live School Idol Project endure grueling physical training to perform live Tokyo Dome concerts where their real-world…
The Japanese idol industry is an absolutely ruthless machine, and adding 2D anime girls to the mix just makes it twice as punishing. Voice actors are…
Discover moreShane Carruth engineered his famously complicated 2004 time travel film Primer for exactly seven thousand dollars by writing his own musical score and ruthlessly limiting his…
Time travel is confusing enough without making a movie about it using pocket change and garage equipment. Microbudget sci-fi is usually just code for…
Discover more
STACKY FOR IPHONEA bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.
Keep discovering with Stacky. Interesting facts in an app that is always within reach.
John Lennon became so utterly obsessed with Alejandro Jodorowsky surreal 1970 acid western El Topo that he personally convinced Beatles manager Allen Klein to buy the…
When a Beatle decides your weird art film is the greatest thing ever made, you get an absolute monopoly on late-night cinema. Midnight movies thrive on…
Discover moreRock band OK Go filmed their Upside Down and Inside Out music video aboard a diving Russian parabolic airplane forcing the musicians to flawlessly execute complex acrobatics…
Making a good music video is hard; making one while violently plummeting toward the Earth is just masochistic. Experimental music videos constantly push the…
Discover moreChantal Akerman famously forced art house festival audiences to endure a grueling three hour runtime of real time chores in her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman to make viewers…
Nothing screams high cinematic art quite like watching a woman aggressively peel potatoes in absolute silence. Slow cinema operates on the sadistic premise…
Discover moreBenedict Cumberbatch spent weeks studying the movements of Komodo dragons at the London Zoo before crawling around a carpeted studio floor in a skin tight gray tracking suit to…
Hollywood will gladly pay an Oscar-nominated British actor millions to squirm around on a dirty carpet pretending to be a giant reptile. The unsung absurdity…
Discover moreChristopher Guest and Rob Reiner intentionally degraded the audio quality of their 1984 heavy metal masterpiece This Is Spinal Tap by adding deliberate microphone bumps and messy…
If your parody sounds too pristine, nobody buys the illusion. The genius of the mockumentary format relies entirely on audio that genuinely sucks. By…
Discover moreDirector Georges Melies hired dozens of female artists to painstakingly hand paint individual film frames of his 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon using tiny brushes to achieve an…
Before Instagram filters, coloring a movie required a literal sweatshop of artists squinting through magnifying glasses. Silent film tinting wasn't just an…
Discover moreOrson Welles and his genius Foley artists terrified millions of Americans during the infamous 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast by dragging a heavy jar across a wet toilet…
The greatest mass panic in American broadcast history was partially triggered by plumbing fixtures. Radio drama relies purely on the theater of the mind,…
Discover moreLos Angeles robotics startup Brud orchestrated an elaborate digital kidnapping of their own CGI Instagram model Lil Miquela by fabricating a corporate rivalry where another…
Why pay for real celebrity drama when you can just program it in Maya? The virtual influencer economy realized early on that perfection is incredibly boring.…
Discover moreDirector Seth Gordon heavily manipulated hours of interview footage in his legendary 2007 Donkey Kong documentary The King of Kong to artificially frame hot sauce mogul Billy…
Reality is notoriously bad at giving us clear-cut villains, so documentary editors simply invent them in post-production. Retro arcade culture is mostly just…
Discover moreWarner Bros secretly hid ringing burner phones inside bakery cakes across multiple major cities to promote The Dark Knight forcing rabid fans to run down public streets wearing…
Viral marketing hits its absolute peak when major studio executives trick innocent citizens into committing mild public disturbances. Alternate reality games…
Discover moreJim Henson completely abandoned his family-friendly Muppet empire to create The Dark Crystal using terrifying foam-latex Mystics that required puppeteers to maintain agonizing…
Jim Henson was exhausted from being known solely as the cheerful frog guy, so he decided to traumatize an entire generation with a grim fantasy epic. The Dark…
Discover moreNational Film Board of Canada masterpiece Bear 71 forces viewers to become complicit voyeurs by letting them track a real grizzly bear through interactive surveillance grids…
Most documentaries want you to passively absorb nature, but Bear 71 wants you to feel terribly guilty about it. This groundbreaking interactive experience…
Discover moreNetflix engineers ruthlessly weaponize behavioral psychology by generating dozens of highly personalized thumbnail variations for Stranger Things based entirely on whether your…
You and your neighbor are not looking at the same Netflix interface, and that is very much by sinister design. The streaming giant's algorithm runs continuous…
Discover morePortal 2 makes its interactive soundtrack entirely diegetic by hiding invisible laser grids across the puzzle test chambers that dynamically generate electronic music beats and…
Valve didn't just want you to listen to the soundtrack in Portal 2; they wanted you to literally play it with your body. Composer Mike Morasky designed an…
Discover moreHatsune Miku fans literally single-handedly fund stadium-sized holographic concerts by purchasing millions of dollars in vocal synthesizer software and premium glowing leeks just…
It takes a special kind of dedication to scream your lungs out for a Yamaha software voicebank, but the Hatsune Miku economy is a financial juggernaut. Unlike…
Discover moreLocal 58 creator Kris Straub literally hijacked the soothing aesthetic of 1980s public access television to trigger deep psychological terror by exploiting our inherent trust in…
Nobody likes an interrupted television broadcast, but Kris Straub weaponized that exact annoyance to pioneer the analog horror genre. Instead of relying on…
Discover moreJoseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor brilliantly tricked listeners into obsessing over eldritch cosmic horror by camouflaging their terrifying Welcome to Night Vale lore inside the…
Building a fictional universe usually involves giant maps and dense appendices, but modern audio drama proved you can accomplish the same thing with a fake…
Discover morePunchdrunk theatre violently disrupted Broadway traditions with Sleep No More by forcing audiences to wear creepy plague doctor masks and ruthlessly rifle through the actors'…
Forget sitting politely in a velvet chair while eating overpriced M&Ms. Immersive theater treats the audience like voyeuristic ghost detectives. By slapping…
Discover more