■ The Pop Edition

October 11: Long Kiss Goodnight at 30, SNL Debuts

A Renny Harlin action gamble turns 30, NBC's late-night experiment finds its footing, and a cluster of birthdays span comedy, pop, and prime time.

Thirty years of Geena Davis with an axe, and fifty-one of Not Ready for Prime Time Players.

October 11 is a date that rewards patience — nothing here is the obvious headline you'd expect, but dig in and it's a solid one. A mid-budget action movie that flopped on arrival is now a cult favorite exactly thirty years later. A sketch show nobody expected to survive its first season is still on the air fifty-one years on. And the birthday list runs from a hip-hop chart-topper to a sitcom mainstay to a heartthrob gone too soon. Here's the full accounting.

Born On This Day

Cardi B

BORN 1992 · TURNS 34

She went from Bronx bartending and viral Instagram rants to a Grammy-winning rap career, breaking chart records with “Bodak Yellow” before most of the industry took her seriously. She's since built a media presence as outsized as her discography.

Daryl Hall

BORN 1946 · TURNS 80

As half of Hall & Oates, he helped write the biggest-selling duo catalog in pop history, blending blue-eyed soul with radio hooks that never let go. He kept working in his own showcase series long after the duo's commercial peak.

Joan Cusack

BORN 1962 · TURNS 64

Two Oscar nominations and a career full of scene-stealing supporting turns, from Working Girl to Toy Story 2, made her one of the most reliable character actors of her generation. She's rarely the lead but she's often the reason a scene works.

Dawn French

BORN 1957 · TURNS 69

One half of French and Saunders, she spent decades as a fixture of British sketch comedy before finding a second life as the title character in The Vicar of Dibley. Her comic timing shaped a generation of UK television.

Luke Perry

BORN 1966 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 60

He became a teen idol overnight as Dylan McKay on Beverly Hills, 90210, then spent years trying to outrun that image before finding a warmer late-career groove on Riverdale. He died in 2019 following a stroke.

Opening Weekend: The Long Kiss Goodnight

Renny Harlin's action thriller opened on October 11, 1996, and it lost money — that's the part the reissue-loving corners of the internet tend to skip. Geena Davis played a suburban schoolteacher who turns out to be an amnesiac government assassin, and Shane Black's screenplay was one of the most sought-after specs in Hollywood, reportedly selling for a then-record sum. The movie itself opened soft against a crowded fall slate and never recouped its budget domestically.

What's changed in thirty years is the reputation. Critics at the time called it derivative of Harlin's own Cliffhanger; audiences now cite it as one of the sharper action scripts of the decade, a rare studio film willing to let its female lead be genuinely, cheerfully violent rather than softened for likability. Samuel L. Jackson's supporting turn as a down-on-his-luck private investigator became a template he'd revisit for years. The film's afterlife on cable and home video did more for its standing than its opening weekend ever did, and it's now regularly cited alongside Black's other scripts — Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout — as evidence he understood the genre better than the studios releasing his work.

Prime Time: Saturday Night Live Premieres

NBC had no real plan for what it was launching on October 11, 1975. The show aired as NBC's Saturday Night — the Saturday Night Live title was tied up with another program at the time — and it went out live from Studio 8H with George Carlin as host and a cast of unknowns billed as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. The network's own affiliates weren't sure what to do with it; some pre-empted it entirely.

It was an odd, loose, occasionally shaky ninety minutes by the standards of what the show would become, closer to a fringe comedy revue than the institution it turned into. Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and the rest of the original cast were paid modestly and given almost no promotional push. What saved it was the timing: late-night television had nothing else like it, and word of mouth from a restless, post-Watergate audience did the rest. Five decades and dozens of cast turnovers later, it remains the only entertainment franchise from that era still running weekly on the same network, in the same studio, with the same closing line that's become as recognizable as any in television.

Meanwhile…

1958NASA launches Pioneer 1, its first attempt at a lunar probe, feeding a space-race obsession that would dominate American pop culture for the next decade.

1967Comedian Artie Lange is born in Union, New Jersey, later a staple of Howard Stern's radio show and MADtv.

1968Apollo 7 launches, NASA's first crewed Apollo mission, broadcast live to television audiences and reviving national interest in the space program.

2013Machete Kills, the gleefully trashy Danny Trejo sequel, opens in theaters.

2019Jexi, starring Adam DeVine as a man whose smartphone assistant develops feelings, opens in theaters.

1962Joan Cusack's future Working Girl co-star era is still decades off, but the Chicago-born character actor is born this year.

From an action flop that found redemption on cable to a late-night experiment nobody expected to last a season, October 11 makes the case that first reactions rarely tell the whole story. Sometimes it just takes thirty or fifty years to catch up.