'Defying Gravity,' from 'Wicked,' references 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'

EY 'Yip' Harburg is the lyricist behind 'The Wizard of Oz'

The 1939 film’s songs were written by composer Harold Arlen and lyricist EY “Yip” Harburg. In an early draft of "Over the Rainbow," the movie's most famous song, Harburg scribbled "Some day I’ll wish upon a star + wake + find the darkness far behind me,” which would eventually become the iconic line, “Some day I’ll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me.”

'Over the Rainbow' became a widely covered standard

Judy Garland’s original 1939 version won the Academy Award for best original song, though it never appeared on the Billboard pop singles chart (which didn’t appear until 1940). Twenty different versions of the song by other artists—including Willie Nelson, Patti LaBelle, and Israel "Iz" Kamakawiwo'ole—have appeared on numerous Billboard charts.

100 of Broadway's best songs

From the pathos of "One Day More" from "Les Misérables," to the soaring "Defying Gravity" from "Wicked," this video showcasing 100 of Broadway's best songs will keep any musical theater lover quite busy. While the list trends toward modern pieces, there are still plenty of selections from classics and Tony Award winners like "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Miss Saigon."

Musicals use motifs to tell stories

This clickable interactive illustrates how famous musicals reuse musical motifs to convey character, power, and change—using "Wicked," "Les Misérables," and "Hamilton" to demonstrate how recurring melodies subtly drive the story.

Dorothy's famous entrance into Oz in 'The Wizard of Oz' relied on analog tricks, including a body double and sepia-toned paint, as much as it did on technology

A theory about Pink Floyd and 'The Wizard of Oz' was popularized by a 19-year-old

Pink Floyd’s seminal album “Dark Side of the Moon” eerily synchronizes with “The Wizard of Oz,” offering a psychedelic soundtrack for the movie. Journalist Charlie Savage popularized the phenomenon when he was 19. He’d go on to write for the Boston Globe and New York Times winning a Pulitzer Prize.

Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of 'Wicked,' is named after 'The Wizard of Oz' author

Gregory Maguire named the Wicked Witch of the West after L. Frank Baum. “I tried Lafaba, I tried Lafeyba," he said. "And then I tried Elphaba. As soon as I got Elphaba, I thought, oh, that's it.”

The 'Wicked' movies turned an already-successful Broadway show into a behemoth

The production was already one of the most successful in Broadway history, but the release of the first movie kicked it into overdrive: It grossed 15% more in 2024, the year "Wicked: Part I" was released, than the previous year, bringing in more than $112M.

Judy Garland's body double wore a sepia dress in the movie's most famous scene

A famous scene from "The Wizard of Oz" features Dorothy leaving behind her home in Kansas and walking into Oz. The filmmakers wanted the character to exit a colorless world and enter a Technicolor one, though the nascent technology required more than some clever postproduction tricks. The scene was painted sepia, as was Judy Garland's body double's dress. As she walks through the door, into Oz, the camera turns away. Then, Judy Garland strides back into frame, wearing her iconic blue dress.

Watch an orchestra perform Danny Elfman's theme for 'The Simpsons'

The composer (and former member of new wave band Oingo Boingo) said that the show's main theme, one of the most recognizable in TV history, came to him while driving. It's become a widely performed orchestral piece, including by the all-volunteer Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra, which you can watch below.

Wales has had a massive influence on fantasy music, movies and books

Many of "The Lord of the Rings" settings and languages are rooted in the country's landscape and dialect. Studio Ghibli icon Hayao Miyazaki was inspired by Wales' countryside. Rock band Fleetwood Mac used Welsh myths as a basis for songs.

The 'Jeopardy!' theme was originally written as a lullaby

Merv Griffin originally composed the song in 1963 as a way to help his son Tony fall asleep and claims he wrote it in less than a minute. The song, played during Final Jeopardy!, is called "Think." It's estimated that the song alone has earned Griffin over $100M.

The surprising and strange sources behind 12 famous songs

Britney Spears's "Toxic" borrowed strings from a 1981 Bollywood film, Billie Eilish sampled The Office, and one duo made an entire album using only the sounds of their Whirlpool washing machine. Explore how sampling can pull from pretty much anywhere.

Sylvester's 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)' is a definitive LGBTQ+ anthem

The 1978 dance hit was all about self-acceptance, inspired by the artist's difficult experience growing up gay in a Pentecostal church. The song has influenced numerous contemporary artists and inspired an off-Broadway musical.

'Steamboat Willie' was inspired by 'The Jazz Singer'

Walt Disney was mesmerized by Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer" and the way it used synchronized sound, which synced film with audio. He replicated that effect in “Steamboat Willie," producing the first animated film to do so.

Baz Luhrmann's 'Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)' is based on a fake graduation speech

The 1997 song, which was a chart-topping hit in Australia and appeared on the Billboard "Hot 100" in the US, is based on a fake commencement speech written by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich. For a time, many people erroneously believed Kurt Vonnegut gave the speech at MIT's graduation ceremony.

'Blowin' in the Wind' became a rallying cry for the Civil Rights Movement

The song is based on a spiritual titled "Many Thousand Gone," whose melody Dylan reworked. The result was popularized by the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary and from there became an anthem for the growing Civil Rights Movement, culminating in Dylan's appearance at the March on Washington.

JRR Tolkien believed fairy tales needed dramatic reversals of fortune

Tolkien coined the term "eucatastrophe" to define what he believed as an essential key to good storytelling: “The consolation of fairy-stories [is] the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn.'"

'Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul—and sings the tunes without the words—and never stops at all.'

- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

The story behind Copland and Graham's 'Appalachian Spring'

The ballet, which premiered in 1944, was conceived by the composer and choreographer through the mail, with the two corresponding about how the music might fit the dancing. Later, designer Isamu Noguchi would design a set that whittled the western Pennsylvanian pioneer town down to its core elements.

The general theory of relativity defines gravity as the curvature of spacetime

The breakthrough that redefined Isaac Newton's picture of gravity came when Albert Einstein realized that freely falling is indistinguishable from weightlessness, leading him to the principle of equivalence between gravity and acceleration. His prediction that gravity bends light was confirmed in 1919 during a solar eclipse.

One disco producer saw 'Star Wars' four times on its opening weekend and was so inspired that he recorded the album 'Star Wars and Other Intergalactic Funk,' which produced a chart-topping single.

Visualizing a synaesthetic soundscape

Artist Michal Levy has chromesthesia, a subtype of synesthesia in which sounds and music trigger involuntary associations with and sensations of color. This condition gives Levy a unique artistic perspective and ability to interact with and interpret music. In this short animation, Levy tries to capture her audiovisual experience of 'Giant Steps," considered a landmark composition in jazz history by musician John Coltrane.

As a kid, Jay-Z was inspired by the Broadway musical “Annie”

That led to the rapper’s 1998 track “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” which sampled one of the show’s most recognizable songs, “Hard Knock Life.” "When the TV version [of Annie] came on, I was drawn to it," he told NPR in 2010.

Shakespeare included a reference to toasting in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’

At one point in the 1602 play, the character Falstaff calls for a quart of wine, asking for toast to be placed in it, as was customary at the time.

Disney World's Magic Kingdom includes an underground utilidor

Walt Disney viewed everything happening in his parks as a performance and didn't like it when that performance was disrupted by necessary aspects of the park's maintenance, like trash collection. With Florida's Disney World, the company corrected that problem by building a massive area underneath the park to be used as a "backstage."

The first surviving opera tells the story of Orpheus and Euridice

Jacopo Peri's “Euridice,” premiered in 1600, is the oldest surviving opera. The story is based on the Greek mythology tale about a musician named Orpheus who attempts to save his wife from the underworld by pleasing the god Hades with his musical talents.

In preparation for this weekend's Eurovision finale, which is something like the World Cup of pop music, here's a young Céline Dion performing (for Switzerland?) at the 1988 competition.

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

All rainbows are 'raincircles' caused by water droplets separating white sunlight into a spectrum of colors, but Earth's surface blocks the bottom half of the circle from our line of sight.

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

The Ramones' 'Pet Sematary,' the theme song for the Stephen King novel of the same name, was written while the band was admiring the writer's collection of horror memorabilia.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

Fireworks make a loud booming sound after exploding due to air expanding faster than the speed of sound.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

While the sun's gravity keeps the planets in orbit, their gravity also pulls on the sun, causing it and everything else in the solar system to orbit around a mutual balance point called the barycenter—the true center of the solar system.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

The Great Salt Lake's distinct dual coloration results from high-salinity organisms that only live in the northern portion and produce a purple protein.

Explore our favorite visualization of the immense scale of space, from an astronaut to the size of the observable universe

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

The US Constitution is widely regarded as the longest-standing written national constitution still in force—see how it has influenced rights worldwide.