Popular culture

The Beatles turned the studio into a creative tool, made the album central, popularised self-written songs by bands, and opened the US market to British acts.

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Hip-hop grew from 1970s Bronx parties, most famously DJ Kool Herc's August 1973 jam, where looped drum breaks, MCs and dancers combined into a new culture.

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Launched in 1981, MTV made visual image central to selling pop music, helped lift a slumping record industry, and boosted stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna.

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The MCU grew from a 2005 financing deal in which Marvel borrowed $525 million against its characters to make its own films, starting with Iron Man in 2008.

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Star Wars set box-office records, made merchandising a business of its own, pushed special effects and sound forward, and encouraged franchise filmmaking, though some historians say little of it was new.

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Filmmakers moved from New York to Southern California from about 1908 for climate, scenery and cheap land and labor. Scale effects and World War I then cemented Hollywood's lead.

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Nintendo paired well-made games with the NES and strict control over who could publish for it, and sold it to wary US retailers as a toy. Some historians say this also stifled developers.

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No single cause explains it. Market saturation, a flood of weak games, overestimated demand and competition from home computers combined to collapse the US console market.

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Pokémon grew from a modest 1996 Game Boy release in Japan into a worldwide franchise through trading and linking, playground word of mouth, and coordinated anime, card and game launches abroad.

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D&D grew out of Midwestern wargaming in the late 1960s and early 1970s, created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. It set conventions for role-playing and video games.

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Hungarian architecture professor Ernő Rubik built a wooden prototype in 1974 to teach 3D movement, patented it in 1975, and saw it sold worldwide from 1980 as Rubik's Cube.

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Monopoly grew from The Landlord's Game, patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904, and spread through players before Charles Darrow sold his version to Parker Brothers in 1935.

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Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster developed Superman from a 1933 villain into a hero over five years, sold him for $130, and debuted him in Action Comics #1 in 1938.

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Snow White (1937) was not the first animated feature, but it combined depth effects, live-action study, and personality animation in a feature that competed with live-action films.

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Anime spread first through cheap TV licensing, then through fan networks built on VCRs and fansubbing, then through companies, discs and the internet.

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Pierre de Coubertin organised a Paris congress in 1894 that revived the Games and created the IOC. The first modern Games opened in Athens on 6 April 1896.

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Once a filler break with marching bands, halftime became a star-driven spectacle in the 1990s, after a rival broadcast and Michael Jackson's 1993 show showed the NFL the audience it was losing.

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James Naismith created basketball in December 1891 at a YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, to give restless students an indoor winter game.

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