Culture & entertainment
Discover facts about culture & entertainment. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Culture & entertainment
Victorians watched animation by staring into mirrors
A slotted cardboard disc spun in front of a mirror made drawings appear to move. One animation showed a demon endlessly swallowing a man.
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Before board games, Milton Bradley sold spinning illusions
Milton Bradley’s paper strips showed figures in sequence; spinning them inside a wooden drum made the images appear to move.
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An angry satellite dealer interrupted HBO with a complaint about its price
In April 1986, John MacDougall used an uplink to override HBO's signal with a message signed 'Captain Midnight.' He was protesting the scrambling of satellite…
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The Atari console that turned music into shapes
In 1977, Atari released a wood-paneled console that turned stereo audio into geometric shapes on a TV screen. The Video Music was aimed at music fans rather…
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Narcisa Hirsch used apples to lure people into cinema
During Argentina's military dictatorship, artist Narcisa Hirsch handed apples to pedestrians to draw them into her expanded-cinema installations, turning an…
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The artist who attacked a TV with a magnet
Nam June Paik used a horseshoe magnet to distort the image on a cathode-ray television, warping it into abstract waves and making the TV itself part of the…
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Top of the Pops made a record look like a live performance
Artists often mimed to recorded tracks on the television show, matching movements to sounds already captured in the studio. The camera supplied the…
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Shostakovich gave a silent film a fiercely difficult voice
His 1929 score for New Babylon demanded close coordination between a live orchestra and the film's editing. The music could mock what appeared on screen…
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The 1968 catalog Steve Jobs called a paper search engine
The Whole Earth Catalog collected tools, books, and ideas for people interested in self-sufficiency and alternative ways of living. Steve Jobs later compared…
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A 1931 film found an alien-looking world in a wineglass
Mary Field's The World in a Wine-Glass used microscopic photography to reveal organisms living in an infusion of hay and water. Magnification turned an…
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Pierre Schaeffer built a keyboard out of tape loops
Its keys triggered and pitch-shifted tape loops of recorded sounds, including street noise and train whistles. Built in the 1950s, the clunky Phonogene often…
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A hospital retired Alberta Hunter at 70—she was actually 82
The blues singer had spent two decades working as a nurse without advertising her former career. When the hospital retired her in 1977, it had underestimated…
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How Maya Deren distributed her own films
She rented theaters in Greenwich Village with her own money, printed promotional flyers, and sold tickets herself, bypassing commercial distributors.
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He thought terrible movies were accidental masterpieces
Surrealist critic Ado Kyrou argued that clumsy B-movies and commercial Hollywood films could become accidental masterpieces. To him, their broken storytelling…
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Lucasfilm developed an audio editor as well as movie sounds
SoundDroid was part of Lucasfilm's push into digital production tools. Nonlinear editing let sound be arranged without treating a physical tape reel as the…
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Scandal overshadowed Mabel Normand's comedy career
Normand had visited director William Desmond Taylor before his unsolved 1922 murder, drawing intense press attention. A later shooting involving her chauffeur…
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Ghostwatch made a fictional haunting look like live television
The BBC's 1992 drama used familiar presenters, a studio setup, and a purported outside broadcast to mimic a real investigation. Some viewers took the…
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How Loie Fuller turned fabric into stage lighting
She illuminated the billowing silk from several directions and used colored gels, making the fabric seem to shift like flame or a blossoming flower.
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When Asta Nielsen played Hamlet as a woman
In her 1920 silent film, Nielsen recast Hamlet as a princess raised as a prince to preserve the royal line. The role let her push her androgynous screen image…
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How Carmen Miranda's fruit hats became propaganda
Under FDR's Good Neighbor policy, Hollywood was encouraged to promote South American culture to keep those nations from siding with the Axis during World War…
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Christine Jorgensen answered publicity with her own public voice
After news of her transition drew enormous attention in the 1950s, she gave interviews and developed a public career as an entertainer and speaker. Surviving…
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How Oscar Micheaux built a cinema outside Hollywood
White-owned theater chains refused to show Oscar Micheaux’s films about Black life, so he carried reels across the country and persuaded segregated theaters…
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The projector that electrified a layer of oil
The Eidophor used an electron beam to deform an oil film on a rotating mirror; light passing through the changing surface produced a large-screen TV image,…
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A blacklisted writer won Oscars under fake names
Blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo used pseudonyms and fronts to keep working. He won two Academy Awards under false identities while accused communists…
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