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1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 7 of 21.

361. The word cyberpunk was built by mixing two lists of wordsBruce Bethke wrote one list of technology words and another of troublemaker words, then spliced them until something clicked. His 1980 short story gave a name to a whole mood of s…
362. Demon Slayer's first draft was rejected for being too gloomyKoyoharu Gotouge's early pitch for a demon-hunting story was turned down as too dark and humourless. The editor asked for a brighter, ordinary hero instead. The result, a charcoal…
363. Desperate Housewives was narrated by a woman who dies in its first episodeEvery episode of Desperate Housewives was framed by the voice of Mary Alice Young, whose sudden suicide opens the pilot and sets up the first mystery. Her neighbours on Wisteria L…
364. Nolan's Dunkirk never shows a clear German face, and that is deliberateChristopher Nolan built his war film around a retreat, not a victory, and kept the enemy almost invisible, just as soldiers on the beach experienced it. Its three stories run on d…
365. Pixar's Cars began life as a script about an electric carBefore Lightning McQueen existed, a draft called The Yellow Car imagined an electric vehicle stuck in a world addicted to gasoline. The idea was reworked into a road-trip fable ab…
366. Cartoon Network was born to give a vast film vault somewhere to liveIn 1992 Ted Turner owned a mountain of old animation, from MGM classics to the entire Hanna-Barbera catalogue, and nowhere to show it. His answer was the first cable channel devot…
367. Casino Royale rebooted Bond by making him lose at cardsThe 2006 Casino Royale threw out decades of gadgets and continuity to show a rookie 007 who could be outplayed, poisoned and betrayed. Built around a poker tournament in Montenegr…
368. Early Christians were slow to adopt the cross as their emblemThe cross now stands for Christianity almost everywhere, yet for its first few centuries the faith used it sparingly. It recalled a deliberately agonising public execution, and op…
369. Hollywood fought television with a French lens nobody had wantedIn 1926 Henri Chrétien patented a lens that squeezed a wide scene onto ordinary film and stretched it out again in the projector. Studios shrugged. A quarter of a century later, w…
370. Brian De Palma helped rewrite the opening crawl of Star WarsBefore he was a thriller director, Brian De Palma was a physics student who built computers and won a science-fair prize for an analog machine solving differential equations. Year…
371. Buffy's big idea: high school really is hell, with an actual HellmouthJoss Whedon built Buffy the Vampire Slayer on one joke taken seriously. Sunnydale High sits directly above a Hellmouth, a portal to demon worlds under the library, so the horrors …
372. Janine's Ghostbusters accent was borrowed from a real New Yorker friendAnnie Potts gave the Ghostbusters receptionist Janine Melnitz her famous New York twang by copying a friend from the city. She has now played the part across four decades of films…
373. Zorba's outstretched hand came from a Los Angeles evangelist Quinn once servedAnthony Quinn, born in Mexico during the revolution, boxed and studied architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright before acting. As a boy he preached alongside Aimee Semple McPherson, …
374. A planned five-month shoot for Apocalypse Now stretched past a yearFrancis Ford Coppola went to the Philippines in March 1976 expecting five months of filming. Storms wrecked costly sets, Marlon Brando showed up unprepared and Martin Sheen nearly…
375. Liza Minnelli joined Arrested Development because Ron Howard's former babysitter said yesThe producers of Arrested Development dreamed of casting Liza Minnelli but assumed a star of her size would never agree. Ron Howard simply rang her. She had looked after him as a …
376. Babylon lost Paramount $87 million, then found a cult audienceDamien Chazelle's Babylon, a sprawling portrait of Hollywood lurching from silent films to talkies, took just $65 million against a budget near $80 million. Paramount wrote off an…
377. Bebop was jazz you weren't supposed to dance toIn the 1940s young jazz players walked away from the dance floor. Bebop swapped the big swing orchestras for small combos, sped the tempos up and piled on dissonant harmony, turni…
378. Blu-ray's big trick was simply a shorter-wavelength laserA Blu-ray disc is exactly the size of a DVD, yet one layer holds 25 GB. The difference is the light that reads it: a blue-violet laser at 405 nanometres, whose shorter wavelength …
379. Alex Trebek lost the Hockey Night in Canada job because of his mustacheIn 1971 Alex Trebek was the producer's favourite to host Hockey Night in Canada, but the job went to Dave Hodge because the producer's boss objected to a mustached presenter. Treb…
380. Amadeus imagined a murderous rivalry, and its own writer called it a fantasiaAmadeus presents Antonio Salieri as a jealous rival bent on destroying Mozart, but Peter Shaffer, who adapted his own stage play, framed the story as an invented fantasia on a rea…
381. American Dad! began as its creators' way of venting about the 2000 electionSeth MacFarlane and Matt Weitzman were so frustrated after the 2000 US presidential election that they poured it into a cartoon about a conservative spy and his left-leaning daugh…
382. American Horror Story resets its story every season but keeps its actorsEach season of American Horror Story is a self-contained miniseries with fresh characters and a new setting, yet the same performers keep returning in different roles. Evan Peters…
383. Anastasia was the first feature from Fox's own animation divisionDon Bluth and Gary Goldman's Anastasia turned the lost Romanov grand duchess into an amnesiac orphan in an alternate 1926, chasing her past to Paris. Some historians objected to t…
384. Aamir Khan's first film was a silent movie shot behind his parents' backsAt sixteen, Aamir Khan starred in a 40-minute silent film called Paranoia, filmed in secret because his parents wanted him to become an engineer or doctor. Decades later, five of …
385. Only one Best Adapted Screenplay winner has also won an acting OscarEmma Thompson, honoured for Sense and Sensibility, stands alone among winners of this category in also holding an Oscar for performing. The award has existed since the Academy's f…
386. Only one line among America's top 100 movie quotes belongs to a CGI characterWhen the American Film Institute ranked the 100 most memorable lines in American cinema in 2005, a jury of 1,500 artists, critics and historians put Rhett Butler's parting brush-o…
387. Robin Williams joined Aladdin after animators drew the Genie over his stand-upDisney's directors wrote the Genie with Robin Williams in mind, but he needed persuading. Animator Eric Goldberg drew the character acting out one of Williams's old stand-up routi…
388. Five bedridden years with bone tuberculosis shaped the novelist Alberto MoraviaAt nine, Alberto Pincherle caught tuberculosis of the bone and spent five years in bed, reading Dostoevsky, Joyce and Shakespeare. He later named that illness and Fascism as the t…
389. Fox mortgaged its studio on CinemaScope, then sold its back lot for CleopatraIn 1953, with cinema audiences halved since 1946, Twentieth Century-Fox bet its own lot on a French widescreen lens system and won. A decade later the runaway budget of Cleopatra,…
390. World of Warcraft made dying less painful and conquered online gamingBlizzard borrowed heavily from EverQuest but softened the punishments for death and made it easy to find a group. The result, launched in November 2004, became the most popular on…
391. Seventeen has thirteen members, and the maths behind the name explains whyPledis Entertainment first imagined a boy band of 17 teenagers averaging 17 years old. After years of trial broadcasts and more than 30 hopefuls, 13 made the cut. The name survive…
392. Sonic began as a rabbit, took his shoes from Michael JacksonSega needed a star to fight Mario, and its first idea was a rabbit that grabbed things with its ears. The hardware could not cope, so the team chose a hedgehog that rolls into a b…
393. Brand New Day strips Spider-Man of everyone who remembers himAt the close of No Way Home a spell wiped Peter Parker from the world's memory. The 2026 sequel picks up four years later with a hero nobody knows, whose stress starts rewiring hi…
394. The liberal Guardian was born as a mill-owners' paper in ManchesterThe Guardian now sits on the mainstream left, yet it launched in 1821 as the voice of Manchester's cotton bosses, sprang up after police shut a radical rival, and later cast doubt…
395. A hip hop class at age nine put Tom Holland on the Spider-Man pathTom Holland was dancing to Janet Jackson songs at a Wimbledon school when a choreographer spotted him and sent him to audition for Billy Elliot. The ballet, tap and acrobatics tha…
396. Troy Baker has voiced Batman, the Joker and three different RobinsBefore he became Joel in The Last of Us, Troy Baker fronted a Dallas rock band and read radio adverts. He now holds the record for most acting nominations at the BAFTA Games Award…
397. A John Denver song sits at the heart of a Studio Ghibli romanceIn Whisper of the Heart, a bookish Tokyo girl notices one boy's name on every library card she borrows, then rewrites Take Me Home, Country Roads as a joke about concrete suburbs.…
398. Optimus Prime's calm voice was modelled on a Marine brother home from VietnamWhen Peter Cullen read for a heroic truck-robot in Burbank, his older brother Larry told him real heroes are tough enough to be gentle. Cullen channelled that quiet strength into …
399. Sony's PSP ran its processor at two-thirds speed to save the batteryThe PlayStation Portable was the most powerful handheld of its day, yet for years Sony throttled its chips to stretch battery life and fought a spinning optical disc that drained …
400. Randy Newman's early albums flopped while other singers turned his songs into hitsBefore he wrote You've Got a Friend in Me for Toy Story, Randy Newman was the songwriter's songwriter: critics adored his records, shops barely sold them, and stars from Nina Simo…
401. Gaslighting took its name from a Victorian stage thriller about flickering lampsIn a 1938 London play, a husband searching the attic for jewels makes the house lamps dim, then tells his wife she is imagining it. That plot gave English a word for bending someo…
402. Gorillaz began as a joke about manufactured pop and sold millionsFlatmates Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett watched too much MTV in the late 1990s and decided that if boy bands were fabricated anyway, they would fabricate a better one. Their cart…
403. Agents once told Keanu Reeves his first name was too ethnicBorn in Beirut, raised mostly in Toronto and expelled from an arts school, Keanu Reeves briefly auditioned as K. C. or Casey after agents objected to his Hawaiian first name. He w…
404. Mark Gatiss turned a boyhood of Hammer Horror and Sherlock Holmes into a careerA County Durham boy who grew up across the road from a Victorian asylum, collected fossils and devoured Doctor Who, Mark Gatiss ended up writing for the Doctor, playing Mycroft Ho…
405. Before superheroes saved it, Marvel was a pulp publisher hiding behind 59 shell companiesMarvel's history is less about capes than about a pulp publisher chasing trends. Martin Goodman ran his comics through dozens of paper companies, dumped superheroes when they went…
406. Hackers auctioned Wolverine's secrets for 50 bitcoin years before the game shippedIn December 2023 a ransomware gang broke into Insomniac Games and put its files up for auction, starting at 50 bitcoin. When nobody paid, plot details, gameplay slices and even th…
407. Ohio's name means good river, and its mound builders traded across a continentLong before Ohio produced seven presidents and the Wright brothers' first plane, its valley held villagers who raised the Great Serpent Mound and traders whose network reached acr…
408. A Chinese studio sold 20 million copies of a monkey epic in a monthBlack Myth: Wukong picks up where the classic novel Journey to the West ends: the Monkey King has refused heaven, been sealed in stone, and scattered into six relics. Players guid…
409. Bob Hoskins got his first real acting job by accident in a barBob Hoskins was waiting in a London theatre bar for a friend when someone pushed a script into his hands and said he was next. He passed the audition, his friend ended up as his u…
410. The C-17's wing 'failed' its test, until engineers rechecked the loadingIn 1992 the C-17 Globemaster III's wing buckled at 128 percent of its design limit, short of the 150 percent target, and about $100 million went into a redesign. A second test fai…
411. Goethe once met himself on the road, wearing clothes he didn't ownRiding away from a lover in Alsace, Goethe saw in his mind's eye a rider coming towards him: himself, dressed in grey trimmed with gold. Eight years later he found himself on that…
412. Sega's last console shipped a modem in every box and still floppedThe Dreamcast was the first console with a built-in modem for online play, an idea Sega's own staff resisted over the extra $15 per machine. It launched before the PlayStation 2, …
413. America's largest state was once mocked as Seward's FollyAlaska covers more ground than Texas, California and Montana put together, yet in 1867 the United States bought it from Russia for $7.2 million and critics sneered. It sits closer…
414. Alec Baldwin has hosted Saturday Night Live more than anyone elseSeventeen times since 1990, Alec Baldwin has stepped onto the Saturday Night Live stage as host, a record. The Long Island teacher's son once bussed tables at Studio 54, got a con…
415. A spider species is named after Andrew Garfield's Spider-ManAndrew Garfield only took up drama at sixteen because a friend's A-level class was one pupil short. That accident led to a BAFTA, a Tony, two Oscar nominations and a web-slinging …
416. Black metal bands deliberately recorded badly to keep outsiders awayEarly black metal musicians could afford only basements and cheap tape, but many kept the murky sound even after studios opened their doors. The fuzz was a gatekeeper: raw, cold r…
417. In Toy Story 5, the toys' new rival is a tablet named LilyTom Hanks called Toy Story 4 the last one in 2019. Seven years later Pixar spent a reported 250 million dollars on a fifth film in which Jessie leads the toys against a frog-shape…
418. Ted Turner owned MGM for barely three months, and kept the filmsIn 1986 Ted Turner bought MGM, found the debt crushing, and sold the studio back within months. What he held on to was the film library. Eight years later that hoard of old Hollyw…
419. Tyler Perry's first play flopped, so he rewrote it for six yearsAt 22 Tyler Perry spent his entire 12,000 dollars of savings staging a musical in an Atlanta community theatre. Almost nobody came. He kept rewriting it for six years until a 1998…
420. The US Open has played on grass, clay and hard courts, and never skipped a yearTennis's fourth Grand Slam is the one that kept going: no cancellation for either world war, none for the pandemic. It has also been the sport's laboratory, first with tiebreaks, …

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