'The Wizard of Oz' was panned by some contemporary critics

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

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

In 1945, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and legendary animator Walt Disney began collaborating on a short film that was not completed until 2003, years after both men had died.

The distributor behind 'Rocky Horror' pulled the film from its scheduled national release, believing it would be a failure, though it eventually amassed a dedicated fanbase through midnight showings, a trend that continues over 50 years later.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

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

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.

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

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.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

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

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

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

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Brian Wilson wrote the Beach Boys' 'Don't Worry Baby' for the Ronettes, but the legendary girl group rejected it.

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.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

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

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

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.

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.

The US first hosted the World Cup in 1994, a tournament that lives in soccer infamy for its poor planning and the murder of Colombian player Andres Escobar, who'd accidentally scored on his own net.

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

Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

The Dracula character, now seen as the vampire archetype, was inspired by a seafood-induced nightmare its creator experienced.

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

See a ranking of the best (and worst) Federal Reserve Chairs since 1914 out of the 16 men and women who have held the office since.

See this overview of the firework rules across all 50 states, ranging from a complete ban on non-professional fireworks in Massachusetts to states with more lax rules like Indiana.

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

Most of the observable universe's volume consists of voids and supervoids—enormous regions of space with little to no galaxies, stars, or light.

View the ten deadliest tornadoes in US history.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

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.