■ The Pop Edition
October 21: Carrie Fisher at 70, MGS Turns 28
Carrie Fisher
1956 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 70
She was 19 when Star Wars made her a princess and a general, and she spent the decades after refusing to be defined by either. Fisher became one of Hollywood's sharpest script doctors and memoirists, turning her own struggles with addiction and mental health into best-selling, unflinching comedy rather than tabloid fodder. She died in December 2016, days before her final on-screen appearance in The Force Awakens's follow-up hit theaters.
Kim Kardashian
1980 · TURNS 46
She turned a reality show about her family into a media empire, then turned that empire into a shapewear company and a law degree. Whatever you think of the path, Kardashian rewrote the rules for how fame converts into business, and every influencer working today is operating in the market she helped build.
Steve Cropper
1941 · TURNS 85
As the guitarist in Booker T. & the M.G.'s and a Stax Records house writer, Cropper co-wrote “Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay” and “In the Midnight Hour,” among dozens of soul standards. His clean, economical riffs became the blueprint for Memphis soul guitar.
Jeremy Miller
1976 · TURNS 50
As Ben Seaver on Growing Pains, Miller spent his childhood as the sitcom's baby of the family, a role he held for the show's entire seven-season run. He later stepped back from acting to work in addiction counseling.
Dizzy Gillespie
1917 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 109
With his puffed cheeks and bent trumpet, Gillespie co-invented bebop alongside Charlie Parker, dragging jazz away from dance-band swing and into something faster and stranger. He died in 1993, but his fingerprints are on nearly every jazz trumpeter who followed.
PRESS START
Metal Gear Solid landed on PlayStation in North America on October 21, 1998, and the reason it mattered had less to do with stealth mechanics than with ambition. Hideo Kojima built a game around the idea that hiding was more interesting than shooting, then wrapped it in hours of cinematic dialogue, codec calls, and fourth-wall-breaking tricks that no console game had attempted at that scale.
Players spent as much time crawling through air ducts and pressing themselves against walls as they did fighting bosses, and the game's willingness to slow down for long conversations felt closer to a film than an arcade shooter. Solid Snake's mission to stop a nuclear-armed terrorist group called FOXHOUND became a template: the codec-call storytelling, the boss fights built around gimmicks rather than reflexes, even the moment a boss reads your actual memory card to comment on your other saves.
Twenty-eight years on, the stealth genre it helped popularize is a fixture of every major publisher's lineup, and Kojima's insistence on games as auteur-driven narrative art has only gotten louder with each sequel.
OPENING WEEKEND
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back opened in US theaters on October 21, 2016, ten years ago now, and the honest story is that nobody was demanding it. The first Jack Reacher had underperformed expectations in 2012, and four years is a long gap for a franchise sequel to arrive on.
Tom Cruise returned as Lee Child's wandering ex-military investigator, this time paired with Cobie Smulders as a framed Army major and burdened with a subplot involving a teenager who may or may not be Reacher's daughter. Critics were unmoved — the consensus was competent-but-forgettable action filmmaking — and the film opened to a modest debut against Tim Burton's Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which had the previous weekend's momentum.
It made back its budget internationally but never sparked the ongoing franchise Paramount hoped for, and Cruise didn't return for another installment. The property found new life a few years later as an Amazon streaming series instead, with a different actor in the lead role — proof that sometimes a character survives a movie's stumble by changing formats entirely.
MEANWHILE…
1879Thomas Edison tests a carbon-filament light bulb that stays lit for over 13 hours, a lab breakthrough that would eventually reshape how people spend their evenings.
1967More than 50,000 anti-Vietnam War demonstrators march on the Pentagon, a protest that later inspired Norman Mailer's book The Armies of the Night.
1976The New York Yankees fall to the Cincinnati Reds in a World Series sweep, capping the Big Red Machine's second straight championship run.
1980The Empire Strikes Back, still riding its summer release, remains a fixture in second-run theaters as audiences return for repeat viewings of the twist.
2003Skype launches to the public, quietly laying groundwork for the video-call habits that would define the following two decades.
2008Britain's Strictly Come Dancing format continues its global expansion, having already spun off Dancing with the Stars adaptations in dozens of countries.