■ The Pop Edition
October 10: Nickelodeon Launches, Fonda Turns 89
Jane Fonda
BORN 1937 · TURNS 89
Two Oscars for Klute and Coming Home, a fitness empire that got millions of people onto shag carpets in leg warmers, and a late-career second act on Grace and Frankie that introduced her to viewers who'd never heard of Barbarella. Few careers have reinvented themselves this many times this successfully.
David Lee Roth
BORN 1954 · TURNS 72
The Van Halen frontman who turned rock frontman theatrics into a full-body sport, all splits and screams and a solo career that gave us a Just a Gigolo cover nobody asked for and everybody remembers.
Bai Ling
BORN 1970 · TURNS 56
The actress broke through internationally with The Crow and Red Corner before becoming one of the more recognizable faces on red carpets of the 2000s, known as much for her fashion choices as her filmography.
Mario Lopez
BORN 1973 · TURNS 53
Forever A.C. Slater to a generation of Saturday morning viewers, he parlayed Saved by the Bell into a decades-long hosting career, from Extra to Access Hollywood, rarely leaving television screens since 1989.
Brett Favre
BORN 1969 · TURNS 57
The gunslinging quarterback whose iron-man streak and Wrangler commercials made him as much a piece of Americana as a Hall of Fame athlete, retiring and un-retiring so many times it became its own running joke.
PRIME TIME: Nickelodeon Signs On
The email teased that this launch had nothing to do with cartoons at all — and it's true. When Nickelodeon debuted as Pinwheel on a Columbus, Ohio cable system on October 10, 1979 (rebranding as Nickelodeon the following spring, though the calendar date belongs to that original sign-on), it wasn't chasing Looney Tunes reruns. It was built as commercial-free educational programming, closer in spirit to public television than to the slime-drenched network it would become.
That mission drifted fast. Within a decade the channel had found its real identity through shows like You Can't Do That on Television, which literally invented the green slime gimmick that became Nickelodeon's signature, splashed across Kids' Choice Awards stages for decades after. By the early '90s, with Rugrats and Doug and The Ren & Stimpy Show anchoring a Sunday night block, Nickelodeon had become appointment television for anyone under twelve — and had built enough cultural equity that networks are still trying to replicate its playbook today.
Forty-seven years on, the channel that started as earnest kids' programming is inseparable from a specific, sticky, orange-tinted idea of childhood television.
ON THE CHARTS: Midnight Oil Break Through
Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning wasn't built for American radio — it's a protest song about Indigenous land rights in Australia's Outback, sung by a bald, six-foot-five frontman who danced like he was being electrocuted. And yet by the time Diesel and Dust worked its way up US charts in the fall of 1988, it had become inescapable on album-oriented rock stations, a genuine crossover for a band that had spent a decade as a strictly domestic phenomenon back home.
The song's climb mattered because it proved a message-heavy protest anthem, with no love story and no easy hook beyond that title chant, could still land in American ears purely on the strength of Peter Garrett's conviction and the band's relentless rhythm section. It never topped the Hot 100, but its cultural footprint outlasted plenty of songs that did — it's still the song most casual American listeners can name when Midnight Oil comes up, and Garrett went on to an actual career in Australian politics, which is its own kind of only-in-the-'80s footnote.
Diesel and Dust remains the album that introduced an entire American audience to a band that had already been a phenomenon at home for years.
1957Buddy Holly and the Crickets release That'll Be the Day, the single that cracked American radio wide open for rock and roll's next wave.
1975Saturday Night Live is just weeks old, still finding its footing as an unpredictable, occasionally chaotic late-night experiment.
1997The Peanuts comic strip continues its late-career run, still appearing in thousands of newspapers decades after its debut.
2003Bruce Springsteen's The Rising tour rolls on, one of the most talked-about arena runs of the year.
2008The financial crisis dominates headlines everywhere except, mercifully, here.
2014Fright Night and Halloween-season programming ramps up across cable as networks lean into spooky-season counterprogramming.
2019Streaming wars intensify as new platforms jockey for October subscriber pushes ahead of the holidays.