Culture & entertainment
Discover facts about culture & entertainment. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Culture & entertainment
The 3D camera families abandoned after one vacation
Before the iPhone gave everyone a 3D camera in their pocket, the 1952 View-Master Personal system let you shoot your own stereoscopic memories. The camera…
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When Deep Throat became an elite Hollywood event
In a twist that defies all logic, a mob-funded adult film starring a woman with a bizarre anatomical anomaly became the cultural touchstone of 1972. You…
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The director who buried himself alive for circus money
Before directing Dracula, Tod Browning realized the best way to avoid a normal job was to run away and join the carnival. He didn't just sweep up elephant…
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The Beatles' rejected script was wildly unlike Help
In 1967, The Beatles decided they wanted a grittier follow-up to Help! and inexplicably hired subversive playwright Joe Orton. He handed them a chaotic script…
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TV screen photos rescued lost BBC episodes
Before the invention of the VCR, the only way to rewatch a TV show was to hire a guy to literally take photos of his television screen as it aired. John Cura…
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Nixon’s makeup melted during the first TV debate
Hubris has a brand name, and it’s 'Lazy Shave'. Richard Nixon famously refused professional TV makeup for the first televised presidential debate in 1960,…
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How combat trauma shaped The Twilight Zone
Rod Serling didn’t just pull creepy alternate dimensions out of thin air; he brought them home from the Philippines. Serving as a paratrooper in the US Army…
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Soviet teens pressed rock music onto discarded X-rays
When the Soviet Union banned Western music, desperate teenagers turned hospital waste into a thriving black market. Because vinyl was heavily controlled and…
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The secret comic empire warning of Satanic pop culture
Jack Chick pumped out hundreds of millions of unhinged evangelical comic tracts warning that Dungeons & Dragons, Catholicism, and rock music would literally…
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How Snow White helped spark Disney's animators' strike
Walt Disney’s cinematic masterpiece was built on the exhausted, underpaid backs of animators sweating through a brutal 1937 crunch. While audiences marveled…
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The TV studio on wheels that nearly cooked its crew
In the late 1940s, the doomed DuMont Television Network decided to take live broadcasting on the road by cramming an entire TV studio into a massive, heavily…
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The bitter feud behind Looney Tunes
Behind the slapstick, anvil-dropping violence of Looney Tunes was a very real, incredibly petty feud between animation legends Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones.…
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Lamb Chop's creator wrote a Star Trek episode
Most people remember Shari Lewis as the terrifyingly cheerful woman who subjected an entire generation of children to "The Song That Doesn't End" via a sock…
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How live TV made child stars replaceable
Early live television was an unregulated meat grinder, and nobody learned that faster than pioneering child hosts like Myrta Zobel. Plucked from obscurity to…
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The teenager who shook up New York’s avant-garde
At just 17 years old, Barbara Rubin borrowed a camera and shot Christmas on Earth, a violently explicit, double-projected, gender-bending underground film…
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The fake Picasso story Orson Welles told
By 1973, Hollywood exile Orson Welles was tired of conventional narratives, so he released F for Fake, a dazzling cinematic sleight of hand disguised as a…
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The movie premiere that sparked a fascist riot
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí didn't just make a movie; they engineered a riot. When their anti-clerical, bourgeois-bashing surrealist fever dream L'Age d'Or…
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The Nazi art show that made modern art more popular
In 1937, the Nazi regime organized the 'Entartete Kunst' (Degenerate Art) exhibition to publicly humiliate avant-garde artists, filmmakers, and stage…
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Mirrors made early animation smoother
The early Zoetrope was fun until the flickering gave you a Victorian migraine. Enter Émile Reynaud in 1877 with the Praxinoscope. By replacing the dreadful…
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How Jack Horkheimer turned astronomy into late-night camp
Nobody expected a guy with severe degenerative lung disease to become the most energetic man on late-night public television. Jack Horkheimer hosted 'Star…
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The nuclear war film the BBC kept off television
Imagine making a movie so terrifyingly accurate that the government steps in to protect the fragile psyche of the public. That is exactly what happened to…
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How analog video made those glowing ’70s logos
Before pixels ruined the magic of television, graphic designers had to essentially weaponize math. The Scanimate didn't render images; it manipulated analog…
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The TV joke that made children rob their parents
In a move that proved live television was a beautifully lawless wasteland, children's host Soupy Sales looked directly into the camera in 1965 and instructed…
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When filming a TV screen was broadcast technology
It sounds like something your technologically illiterate uncle would do, but pointing a 16mm camera at a television monitor was once the height of broadcast…
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