Mental Floss

POP CULTURE

AtariAge.com

In 1983, the gaming company Atari decided to capitalize on the recent success of the hit movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Grossing a total of $359 million in North America alone by the end of its theatrical run, the exciting, kid-friendly adventure seem

Maureen Monahan


Hulton Archive/Getty Images

From pranks to unsolved mysteries, let's check out some hoaxes—Alien autopsies! Fairy bones! Left-handed Whoppers! And more!—that people actually believed.

Erin McCarthy






Thinkstock/Bryan Dugan

Sometimes TV shows take their plotlines too far; sometimes, they don't go far enough. Either way, viewers typically aren't afraid to voice their frustrations. Here are 18 plot points (and sometimes, major cliffhangers) that have elicited a strong reaction

Bryan Dugan
Wikimedia Commons/Bryan Dugan

Sure, everyone knows Iron Man and Superman were comic-book heroes well before they made the jump to the big screen, but there's no shortage of movies out there with secret origins in the world of comics.

Rick Marshall
Walt Disney Studios

Iron Man 3 opened in theaters Friday. Here's what you need to know about high-tech hero Tony Stark and his armored alter ego.

Rick Marshall


Getty Images

With the number of remakes, reboots, and re-imagined movies coming out of Hollywood lately, the industry seems intent on taking everything old and making it new again. And while that's hardly just a recent trend, you might be surprised at some of the film

Rick Marshall






Lil Bub visiting the Museum of the Moving Image in 2016

Lil Bub, the internet's cutest cat, died on December 1, 2019. Here's what we learned about her when we visited her in 2013.

Erin McCarthy


Thinkstock

If you're turning 25 this year, good news—you can now rent a car in the US without paying a weird fee <i>and</i> you're as old as the California Raisins. Read on, before your quarter-life crisis hits.

Chris Higgins, Adrienne Crezo


French Toast Sunday/Bryan Dugan

There's a lot of language in movies that you can't show on TV. We're so used to the standard ways of dubbing over words for TV that we hardly notice them—but sometimes the dubs or alternate versions do something so unusual that they stand out.

Arika Okrent


Lost-World.Com

When I was a little dinosaur fan, all I wanted was a pet dinosaur. An Apatosaurus would have been choice—big enough to be impressive, but not especially likely to eat me. But that’s never going to happen. As much as I hate to say that science will never s

Riley Black


Disney/Lastfm

Ever wonder if the actors who voice the villains are just as mean-looking as their on-screen counterparts? Wonder no more. For the most part, the answer is no—but there are definitely a few uncanny resemblances in the bunch.

Stacy Conradt
IMDb

Over the last two decades, some truly astonishing new discoveries have been made, spanning just about every conceivable topic in the biology, behavior, and evolution of the dinosaurs featured in Jurassic Park since the film was released 20 years ago.

Mark Mancini
Gameofthrones.wikia.com/

The producers of Game of Thrones did the smart thing when they hired language creator David Petersen to work out realistic languages for the show. This season fans will be getting to know two new languages, High and Low Valyrian. But before you start tryi

Arika Okrent