Kim Clijsters (Belgium) became the the first female wildcard player to win a tennis grand slam with her memorable singles victory at the 2009 US Open.

The comedy whodunnit Clue (USA, 1985) was based on the boardgame Cluedo. It starred Tim Curry (UK) as the butler, Wadsworth, aiming to finger the killer of his employer, Mr Boddy. The six suspects are all characters from the game: Mrs Peacock (Eileen Brennan, USA), Mrs White (Madeline Kahn, USA), Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd, USA), Mr Green (Michael McKean, USA), Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull, USA) and Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren, USA). Three different endings were filmed, and a different one shown at different theatres.

The character Ernest P. Worrell, played by actor Jim Varney (USA), was originally created by US advertising agency Carden and Cherry in 1980. He proved extremely popular and a spin-off television series, Hey Vern, It’s Ernest!, was subsequently produced. Ernest’s first movie, Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, was released in 1986, and he went on to star in a further nine productions.

The first film given a public release where the background footage was wholly created using computer generated imagery (CGI) was Able Edwards (USA 2004), produced by Graham Robertson and first shown at the South by Southwest Film Festival, Austin, Texas, USA on 15 March 2004. The film combined real actors shot against a green screen. Immortel (ad vitam) (France, Italy, UK 2004), released two days earlier on 13 March 2004 at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Films combined CGI sets with physical ones.

Thomas Edison’s ‘Black Maria’, a frame building covered in black roofing-paper, was built at the Edison Laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, USA and completed at a cost of $637.67 (then £132.15) on 1 Feb 1893. Here Edison made short vaudeville-act films for use in his Kinetoscope, a peep-show machine designed for amusement arcades. The building was constructed so that it could be revolved to face the direction of the sun.

Experiments and shorts aside, the first colour 3-D movie was Bwana Devil (USA, 1952), which used the red-green “anaglyph” process first demonstrated as early as 1856.

Wo hu zang long (Taiwan/Hong Kong/USA/China 2000), aka Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, grossed $128,067,808 (£65,645,165) at the US box office, the first foreign-language movie (it was filmed in Mandarin Chinese) to break the $100 million (£51 million) mark.

The first attempt to fix a genetic disorder in a human being was made in September 1990. 4 year old Ashanti DeSilva (USA), suffering from a deficiency of adenosine deaminase (ADA), had been chronically ill for her whole life with the weak immune system caused by her condition. Her pioneering doctors gave her healthy copies of the gene that produces ADA by placing the gene in a modified virus that was then allowed to infect her blood cells. Ashanti has lived a healthy life ever Continue reading →

The first communications satellite to operate in the geostationary orbit was Syncom 3. It was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, on 19 August 1964 and manoeuvred to its orbit, some 35,788 km (22,238 miles) above the Earth. At this altitude, Syncom 3 took exactly 24 hours to orbit the Earth and so appeared stationary from the ground. Today more than 200 satellites operate in the geostationary or ‘Clarke’ orbit.

Graphic novels are book-length comics ­ printed stories told visually. Creators of these ‘graphic stories’ or ‘graphic literature’ often argue that they represent an artistic movement, not merely a publishing format. The word ‘graphic novel’ first appeared in 1976 on the dust jacket of Bloodstar by Richard Corben (illustrator, USA) and Robert E. Howard (author, USA). In the same year, George Metzger’s (USA) comic book Beyond Time and Again was subtitled A Graphic Novel, and Red Tide by Jim Steranko (USA) was labelled both a Continue reading →