1. I Love Lucy was a groundbreaking TV series that unintentionally created how the TV industry works to this day.
When the show first aired during the early days of TV, most of the things we think of as part of watching a show didn’t exist. One of those things was reruns. During the show’s second season, CBS decided to rebroadcast some episodes because Lucille needed time off after giving birth. The rerun episodes were a ratings hit.
I Love Lucy was perfect for rebroadcasting because, unlike other TV shows at the time that were filmed on kinescope — a type of film that was blurry and would deteriorate in quality with each rebroadcast — it was filmed on 35mm film. The decision to film in 35mm was because Lucille and Desi Arnaz refused to move from LA to New York to film the show. At the time, almost all TV shows taped in New York because the majority of the population (and TV viewers) lived in the Northeast, so they would get the best kinescope broadcast. So, to compromise, Desi said they would tape the series on 35mm film to have a high-quality product to broadcast on the East Coast (and, by extension, the entire country).
Taping on 35mm not only allowed the show to be rebroadcast in reruns but also to be syndicated, which created an entirely new revenue stream for the show after it went off the air.
2. James Cameron wanted to make/direct Jurassic Park, and got pretty close to it.
Cameron envisioned it as a much darker and “nastier” movie, which, if you’ve read the book, that tone makes sense. According to him, it “would have been Aliens with dinosaurs.” However, Steven Spielberg beat him to the film rights by a few hours.
Spielberg had a decades-long friendship and working relationship with Jurassic Park‘s author, Michael Crichton. In fact, Spielberg had heard about the book from Crichton a few years before it was even published, and he loved the story so much that he made sure to buy the film rights as soon as they were available.
For his part, Cameron felt it all worked out in the end, saying, “When I saw the film, I realized that I was not the right person to make the film; he was.”
3. The Michelin Guide and its stars were created by the Michelin tire company (yes, that Michelin!) in France.
In the early 1900s, cars were still new and a novelty, and the company wanted to encourage people to drive more (because they wanted to sell tires!). The guide provided travelers with practical information, including maps, tire repair tips, and the location of gas stations. Over time, it also began including lists of hotels and restaurants. As it gained popularity, the restaurant section became the most important part. To set certain places apart, Michelin introduced a star rating system. One star meant the food was very good, two stars meant it was worth going out of your way for, and three stars meant it was worth a special trip. Today, it’s the most prestigious recognition a restaurant can get.
4. Madonna, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera’s iconic 2003 VMA opening performance was a direct response to the 2002 show, where Bruce Springsteen opened with a somber tribute song to 9/11.
MTV wanted something fun and cheery to open the show to contrast the 2002 VMAs. So, former MTV president Van Toffler called Madonna’s manager to see if she would be interested in opening the show and collaborating on a segment with full creative control.
Originally, Madonna picked Britney and Jennifer Lopez because they were the best pop star dancers. However, Jennifer had to drop out because rehearsals for the performance lasted weeks, and she needed to film Shall We Dance? They then approached Christina for it, knowing that having her and Britney performing together (as supposed rivals) would have everyone talking.
Madonna also requested that very few people know this performance was coming, and it was a total secret. Even the kiss part was kept secret from MTV executives, who only saw bits of rehearsal footage. Another big reason it became the night’s biggest moment was that MTV never announced the performance, so it was a total surprise to viewers at home and the audience.
5. Nachos are called nachos because they are named after their inventor, Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya.
According to the story, in 1940, a few American women crossed the border into Piedras Negras in Coahuila, Mexico, to do some shopping. They stopped at the Victory Club restaurant looking for something to eat, but it was outside of business hours, so there was no chef or cook there. However, Nacho, the maître d’ at the restaurant, offered to make them something, and he ran into the kitchen, grabbed some fried corn tortilla chips, topped them with Colby cheese and slices of pickled jalapeños, and placed them in the oven. The women loved them and called them Nacho’s special, and the rest is culinary history.
6. Instagram actually started out as a location check-in app called Burbn.
When it launched in 2010, Burbn was very, very similar to Foursquare, where people could share the places they visited. To make it more fun, the app included a small feature that let users add filters to photos. Over the first few months, the founders noticed that people weren’t as interested in the check-in part. Instead, they were obsessed with taking and sharing filtered pictures. Seeing this, the team decided to strip away everything else and focus only on photos. They rebranded the app as Instagram, leaning into its social aspect and addictive filters.
7. Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul Thomas Anderson finally working together has been almost three decades in the making.
Back in the mid-’90s, Anderson was casting his breakout film Boogie Nights. At the time, he wanted DiCaprio to play the lead role of Dirk Diggler. DiCaprio, however, had to turn it down because he was already signed on to do Titanic (he has since said it is the only role he regrets turning down and wishes he had found a way to do both). Even though he had to pass, he still helped shape the film in a big way. He was the one who suggested Anderson consider Mark Wahlberg for the role because the two had worked together on the film The Basketball Diaries. Wahlberg was cast, and the movie went on to become a classic, launching both Wahlberg’s and Anderson’s careers. After all these years, DiCaprio and Anderson finally teamed up on One Battle After Another.
8. M&Ms were created for soldiers during World War II and were exclusively for the US military.
The idea was to give soldiers a candy that they could keep in their rations and that wouldn’t melt easily in the heat. The solution actually came years earlier, when Forrest Mars Sr. of the Mars candy company visited Spain during the Spanish Civil War and noticed that soldiers were eating small pieces of chocolate coated in a hard candy shell. This protective layer kept the chocolate from melting in soldiers’ hands or pockets. When Mars returned to the US, he worked on creating a candy similar to that. After the war, M&Ms were released to the public, and the troops who had grown accustomed to the treats helped make them popular. Oh, and their slogan, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand,” came directly from their wartime design.
9. In 2004, Mattel announced that Barbie and Ken had broken up, and that she was dating a surfer named Blaine (pictured below).
Russell Arons, vice president of marketing at Mattel, said at the time, “Like other celebrity couples, their Hollywood romance has come to an end; [they] will remain friends.” And what caused the breakup? Well, Arons implied that it was Ken’s fault for not wanting to get married (which they had been dating for 43 years at that point, so fair). Barbie then began a brief relationship with Blaine, an Australian surfer and the brother of Barbie’s friend, Summer.
In 2006, Ken underwent a makeover in an attempt to win Barbie back. It didn’t work! But the two would reunite in 2011, when Barbie made it Facebook official by updating her status to “In a Relationship.”
10. And lastly, Lin-Manuel Miranda pitched “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” as a song so that they would be able to “hold all the characters” in Encanto.
According to Miranda, before working on Encanto, he had worked on Moana, where he saw firsthand in the development process that characters are cut if they aren’t important to the main character (saying that Moana originally had eight brothers when he started working on it). By having a “song as a way to check in with the family members who weren’t going to get a solo,” he knew they would be able to keep all the characters, which was important since the “magic of the story” was that it revolved around a large family. Luckily, Disney agreed to have that song, because as we all know, it turned out to be a HUGE hit!
