50 Fun Facts About 21st Century Pop Culture

At which university did Mark Zuckerberg launch Facebook in 2004, at first for fellow students only?

Harvard students were the only people allowed to join at first, and the site went by TheFacebook until it was renamed in 2005.

Which rapper interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards?

Kanye West took the microphone to argue that Beyoncé deserved the prize. When Beyoncé won Video of the Year later that night, she called Swift back on stage to finish her speech.

Which singer accepted a prize at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards wearing a dress made of raw beef?

Lady Gaga's meat dress was later preserved by taxidermists as a kind of jerky so it could go on show at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Time named it the top fashion statement of 2010.

Which fantasy TV epic accidentally left a disposable coffee cup in shot during a 2019 banquet scene?

Game of Thrones showed the cup, from a local café, in the first broadcast of the episode The Last of the Starks. It was digitally erased two days later.

Which Central Asian country does Sacha Baron Cohen's blundering reporter Borat call home?

Kazakhstan was played by Romania: the scenes in Borat's home village were filmed in Glod, a Romanian village whose residents later sued the producers.

Which British singer named four studio albums 19, 21, 25 and 30 after her age at the time?

Adele expected 25 to be the last album titled this way, calling it the end of a trilogy, then released 30 six years later.

Which film was wrongly announced as Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars before Moonlight took the prize?

La La Land's producers were midway through their thank-you speeches when the error was announced. Presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had been handed a spare Best Actress envelope.

Which photo app, run by just 13 employees, did Facebook buy for about a billion dollars in 2012?

Instagram was only about 18 months old when the deal was struck. It had started out as Burbn, a location check-in app that its founders refocused on photo-sharing.

Which social network made co-founder Tom Anderson the automatic first friend of every new member?

Myspace had dropped Tom as the default friend by 2010. As a teenage hacker he had broken into a Chase Manhattan Bank computer system, prompting an FBI raid.

Which two colors was the dress that split the internet in February 2015 finally confirmed to be?

Blue and black was the real thing: retailer Roman Originals did not sell the dress in white and gold at the time. It later made a single white-and-gold one to sell for charity.

Which animated film beat Monsters, Inc. to the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature?

Shrek won the brand-new category in 2002 and was also the first animated film named among the American Film Institute's ten best of the year.

Which rock star, Johnny Depp's model for Captain Jack Sparrow, later played the pirate's father?

Keith Richards turned up as Captain Teague in At World's End and On Stranger Tides. Depp had researched eighteenth-century pirates and decided they were the rock stars of their day.

Which Saturday Night Live writer turned a self-help book into the 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls?

Tina Fey got the idea from Rosalind Wiseman's guide Queen Bees and Wannabes, then phoned producer Lorne Michaels to say it could be a film.

Which Oklahoma zookeeper was the main subject of Tiger King, Netflix's documentary hit of 2020?

Joe Exotic, who kept big cats at his park in Wynnewood, also ran for US president in 2016 as an independent novelty candidate.

Which name for the character nicknamed Baby Yoda was revealed in season two of The Mandalorian?

Grogu was officially just the Child until the episode Chapter 13: The Jedi, which also revealed that he was raised at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.

Which actor played basketball captain Troy Bolton in the Disney Channel film High School Musical?

Zac Efron did little of Troy's singing in the first film: Drew Seeley provided most of the character's singing voice.

Which Disney Channel sitcom followed a schoolgirl hiding a double life as a famous pop star?

Hannah Montana cast Billy Ray Cyrus as the heroine's father, opposite his real daughter Miley. He was only asked to audition after she had won the lead.

Which actor starred opposite Martin Freeman's Doctor Watson in the BBC's modern-day drama Sherlock?

Benedict Cumberbatch and Freeman both won Emmy Awards for the series, which moved Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian detective to present-day London.

In which Southwestern city is Breaking Bad set, after an early script placed the story in California?

Albuquerque was chosen at the studio's suggestion because New Mexico offered generous financial terms for filming. The first scripts had set the story in Riverside.

Which singer won the first season of American Idol in 2002, defeating runner-up Justin Guarini?

Kelly Clarkson's winner's single, A Moment Like This, then made the biggest leap to number one the Billboard Hot 100 had seen, breaking a record the Beatles had held for 38 years.

Which South Korean thriller was the first non-English-language winner of the Oscar for Best Picture?

Parasite had already become the first Korean film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and Bong Joon Ho took the Oscar for Best Director on the same night.

Which actor's Joker in The Dark Knight earned the first acting Oscar for a comic-book film role?

Heath Ledger had died in January 2008, before the film was released, and his family accepted the award on his behalf.

Which Marvel Studios film was the first superhero movie ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar?

Black Panther lost the top prize to Green Book but still won three Oscars, the first Academy Awards for any film in its shared superhero universe.

Which pop star's 13-year conservatorship ended in 2021 after a long fan campaign for her freedom?

Britney Spears was placed under the arrangement on February 1, 2008, with her father Jamie among the people put in charge of her affairs.

On whose talk show did Tom Cruise jump on the couch in 2005, declaring his love for Katie Holmes?

Oprah Winfrey's yellow couch got jumped on in May 2005, a month after the couple, nicknamed TomKat by the media, first appeared in public together.

Which rapper's Lose Yourself, from the film 8 Mile, was the first hip-hop song to win an Oscar?

Eminem skipped the ceremony because he did not expect to win, and was asleep at home when the award was announced. He finally performed the song at the Oscars in 2020.

Which singer pulled away part of Janet Jackson's costume during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show?

Justin Timberlake's move gave English the phrase wardrobe malfunction, and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim credits the incident with leading to the creation of the video site.

Which South Korean rapper's Gangnam Style became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views?

Psy passed the milestone in December 2012, five months after release, having tried panda and kangaroo dance moves before settling on the horse trot.

Which Spanish-language hit topped the US chart for 16 weeks in 2017 after a Justin Bieber remix?

Despacito was the first Spanish-language song to top the Billboard Hot 100 since Macarena in 1996. Its run at number one tied the record of the time.

Which rock band's 2004 concept album American Idiot was later turned into a Broadway musical?

Green Day built the record around a suburban teenage anti-hero called the Jesus of Suburbia. The stage version opened on Broadway in April 2010 and won two Tony Awards.

Which helmeted French electronic duo teamed up with Pharrell Williams for the 2013 hit Get Lucky?

Daft Punk wore robot helmets for their public appearances, one silver and one gold. The song, with Nile Rodgers on guitar, won the Grammy for Record of the Year.

Which English singer's 1987 hit became the internet's favorite bait-and-switch prank link from 2007?

Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up waits behind a disguised link in the prank, known as rickrolling, which reached the height of its popularity in 2008.

Which Blur frontman created the cartoon band Gorillaz with comic artist Jamie Hewlett?

Damon Albarn recorded much of the 2010 Gorillaz album The Fall on his iPad while the band was out on tour.

Which animals stand behind Jawed Karim in Me at the zoo, the first video ever uploaded to YouTube?

Elephants at the San Diego Zoo share the 19-second clip from April 2005, in which Karim does little more than remark on how long their trunks are.

Which symbol did Chris Messina propose in a 2007 tweet as a way to group Twitter posts by topic?

Hash (#) had labelled chat channels on Internet Relay Chat since around 1988. Messina never tried to patent his idea, feeling that hashtags belonged to the internet.

Which dog breed was Kabosu, the pet whose photo became the Doge meme and the face of Dogecoin?

Shiba Inu Kabosu was photographed in 2010, and the picture took off in late 2013, when Know Your Meme named Doge its top meme of the year.

Which illness did millions of people drench themselves to fight in the 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge?

Lou Gehrig's disease, known to doctors as ALS, received about 115 million dollars from the 2014 challenge, which filled Facebook with millions of soaking videos.

Which newspaper bought the daily word game Wordle from its creator Josh Wardle in January 2022?

The New York Times paid a sum in the low seven figures. Wardle had built the game as a private project for his partner, a fan of the paper's word puzzles.

In which country did Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon found the streaming service Spotify?

Sweden's capital, Stockholm, is where the pair set up the company in 2006. They conceived it as a legal alternative to the music piracy of the time.

Which video app absorbed the lip-syncing service Musical.ly in 2018 after ByteDance bought it?

TikTok took over every existing account in August 2018. ByteDance was reported to have paid as much as a billion dollars for its rival the previous November.

Which block-building game did Microsoft buy with its studio Mojang for 2.5 billion dollars in 2014?

Minecraft was first written in the Java programming language by Markus Persson, known online as Notch, who had earlier been a developer at the games company King.

Which fictional planet is the setting of Blizzard's 2004 online game World of Warcraft?

Azeroth drew a peak of 12 million paying subscribers in 2010, and a 2018 expansion to the game was titled Battle for Azeroth.

Which real English country house plays the Crawley family seat in the ITV drama Downton Abbey?

Highclere Castle is the seat of the Earls of Carnarvon. The fifth earl, a keen amateur Egyptologist, employed Howard Carter in the search for Tutankhamun's tomb.

Which actress voiced the unseen narrator of Gossip Girl, uncredited, in every episode?

Kristen Bell asked for the job herself, pointing out how much narration she had done as the lead of Veronica Mars, which was then facing cancellation.

Which fictional airline's Flight 815 crashes on a mysterious island at the start of the drama Lost?

Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 was on its way from Sydney to Los Angeles. The handful of survivors who later make it home become known as the Oceanic Six.

Which podcast, hosted by Sarah Koenig, became a 2014 hit by re-examining a 1999 Baltimore killing?

Serial was developed by the radio show This American Life and won a Peabody Award in 2015 for its telling of a long true story across many episodes.

Which fashion house made the dress Catherine Middleton wore to marry Prince William in 2011?

Alexander McQueen's creative director, Sarah Burton, designed the gown, which went on display at Buckingham Palace that summer.

Which cancer charity's yellow wristband, launched with Nike in 2004, set off a gel-bracelet craze?

Livestrong chose yellow to echo the leader's jersey in the Tour de France, the race its founder, cyclist Lance Armstrong, was then famous for winning.

Which armored supersoldier, seldom seen without his helmet, is the hero of the Halo video games?

Master Chief was given few lines and a hidden face so that players could project themselves onto him. His voice actor was asked for a man of few words, in the mould of Clint Eastwood.

Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries pick as its Word of the Year for 2015 instead of an actual word?

Face with Tears of Joy made up 20% of all the emoji used in Britain that year, up from just 4% the year before.