86 Pop Culture Facts - Film, Music, Gaming & Sports

Film

The first film ever made was ‘Roundhay Garden Scene’ in 1888, lasting just 2.11 seconds.
Psycho (1960) was the first American film to show a toilet being flushed on screen.
The sound of a lightsaber in Star Wars was created by combining the hum of an old TV and the buzz of a film projector.
During the filming of The Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man’s costume was so stiff that the actor had to eat meals through a straw.
Jurassic Park’s dinosaur roars were made by mixing sounds of animals like tigers, penguins, and dolphins.
The famous shower scene in Psycho took seven days to film and used 70 different camera setups.
Inception’s rotating hallway scene was filmed without CGI, using a full-size rotating corridor.
In The Lord of the Rings, the sound of the Balrog’s roar was created by dragging a cinder block across a wooden floor.
The Oscars were originally meant to last just 15 minutes, but now run over three hours.
The most expensive film ever made is Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, costing over $379 million.
Avatar (2009) took nearly ten years to make due to the development of new 3D and motion capture technology.

See also: History Facts - Ancient Civilisations, Wars & Hidden Stories

Music

Beethoven continued composing music even after going completely deaf by feeling the vibrations of the piano.
The longest officially released song is ‘The Rise and Fall of Bossanova’ by PC III, which lasts over 13 hours.
Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was recorded in six studios over three weeks and features 180 vocal overdubs.
The Beatles hold the record for the most number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100, with 20.
Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ remains the best-selling album of all time, with over 70 million copies sold.
Freddie Mercury designed Queen’s logo himself, combining zodiac signs of the band members.
Elvis Presley never wrote any of his songs, even though he’s credited on many.
Vinyl records have made a comeback, with sales surpassing CDs for the first time since 1987.
‘Happy Birthday’ is one of the most recognised songs in the world, translated into dozens of languages.

See also: Weird Facts - Strange Laws, Records & Mysteries

Literature

The first novel ever written is often considered to be ‘The Tale of Genji,’ penned in 11th-century Japan by Lady Murasaki Shikibu.
Dr Seuss wrote ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ after being challenged to use no more than 50 different words.
Mary Shelley wrote ‘Frankenstein’ when she was only 18 during a rainy summer in Switzerland.
J.R.R. Tolkien typed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on a single typewriter he owned for decades.
Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, with over two billion copies of her books sold.
The word ‘robot’ first appeared in a 1920 Czech play titled ‘R.U.R.’ by Karel Čapek.
The Guinness Book of Records was created by the managing director of the Guinness Brewery as a bar argument settler.
Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words still in use today, including ‘bedazzled,’ ‘lonely,’ and ‘swagger.’
George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ was once banned in the USSR for mocking totalitarianism.

Gaming

The first video game Easter egg appeared in the 1980 Atari game ‘Adventure,’ hidden by its programmer to credit his work.
The term ‘Nintendo’ roughly translates to ‘leave luck to heaven’ in Japanese.
Pac-Man was inspired by the shape of a pizza missing one slice.
The most expensive video game ever made is Grand Theft Auto V, costing about $265 million.
The first computer game ever made was ‘Spacewar!’ in 1962, developed at MIT.
The world’s first home video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972.
Tetris has been played on nearly every gaming platform since its release in 1984.
The original PlayStation was born from a failed partnership between Sony and Nintendo.
‘Minecraft’ is the best-selling video game of all time, with over 300 million copies sold.

Sports

The Olympic Games were originally a religious festival in honour of Zeus held in ancient Greece.
In football, the term ‘hat trick’ originated from cricket when a bowler took three wickets with three consecutive balls.
Basketball was invented in 1891 by a Canadian teacher using a peach basket and a soccer ball.
The longest tennis match in history lasted 11 hours and 5 minutes, played at Wimbledon in 2010.
The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896 with only 14 countries participating.
Golf is the only sport played on the Moon; astronaut Alan Shepard hit two balls during Apollo 14 in 1971.
The World Cup trophy was once stolen and found by a dog named Pickles in 1966.
Sumo wrestlers in Japan are considered living treasures and follow centuries-old rituals.

Famous Events

The Woodstock Festival of 1969 was expected to draw 50,000 people but over 400,000 attended.
The first televised presidential debate in 1960 between Nixon and Kennedy changed political campaigning forever.
The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed 13,000 homes but only six people were officially recorded as dead.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the symbolic end of the Cold War.
Neil Armstrong’s famous Moon landing quote was broadcast to over 600 million viewers worldwide.
The Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, and its wreck was not found until 1985.
Live Aid in 1985 raised millions for famine relief and featured performances watched by 1.9 billion people globally.
The Y2K bug panic in 1999 led many to fear a global computer crash that never happened.

Celebrities

Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and lost.
Elvis Presley never performed outside North America due to his manager’s lack of a valid passport.
Marilyn Monroe’s famous white dress scene from ‘The Seven Year Itch’ was filmed in front of hundreds of onlookers in New York.
David Bowie’s different coloured eyes were caused by a teenage injury, not genetics.
Morgan Freeman didn’t get his big break in Hollywood until his fifties.
Keanu Reeves gave away most of his Matrix earnings to the film’s special effects team.
Nicolas Cage once bought a dinosaur skull for $276,000 and later had to return it after learning it was stolen.
Tom Hanks is a distant relative of Abraham Lincoln.

Memes

The word ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe how cultural ideas spread, long before the internet existed.
The first viral internet meme is often credited to ‘Dancing Baby,’ which spread via email in the late 1990s.
The Rickroll meme began in 2007 and has since become one of the internet’s most enduring pranks.
The ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ meme originates from a 2015 stock photo series called ‘Disloyal Man Walking with His Girlfriend.’
‘Grumpy Cat,’ one of the most famous internet cats, had feline dwarfism, giving her the iconic frown.
‘Pepe the Frog’ started as a comic character in 2005 before becoming one of the most remixed images online.
The Ice Bucket Challenge raised over $100 million for ALS research in just one month in 2014.
The term ‘going viral’ was inspired by biological viruses due to the way content spreads exponentially online.

Art

The Mona Lisa has no clearly visible eyebrows because they were accidentally removed during early restorations.
Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime.
The Starry Night was painted by van Gogh while he was in a mental asylum in France.
Michelangelo’s David was carved from a single block of marble that had been discarded by previous sculptors.
Banksy’s ‘Girl with Balloon’ shredded itself moments after being sold at auction, increasing its value.
Salvador Dalí once arrived at a lecture in a full deep-sea diving suit to show he was ‘diving into the depths of the human mind.’
Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand while drawing with the other at the same time.
The world’s oldest known cave paintings are over 45,000 years old and found in Indonesia.

Internet Trends

The first YouTube video, titled ‘Me at the Zoo,’ was uploaded by one of the site’s founders in 2005.
TikTok became the most downloaded app in the world in 2020, surpassing even Facebook and Instagram.
Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and now has over 6 million English-language articles.
MySpace was once the world’s most visited website, even surpassing Google in 2006.
The hashtag was first used on Twitter in 2007 by a user suggesting a way to group topics.
The first tweet ever posted simply said ‘just setting up my twttr.’
Facebook was originally limited to Harvard students before opening to the public in 2006.
The world’s first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, is still online today.