■ The Pop Edition
October 27: Saw III Turns 20, Cleese Turns 87
John Cleese
1939 · TURNS 87
He co-founded Monty Python's Flying Circus, wrote and starred in Fawlty Towers, and turned a dead parrot into one of the most quoted sketches in comedy history. Later career turns in A Fish Called Wanda and the Bond franchise proved his particular brand of controlled chaos traveled well beyond British TV.
Roberto Benigni
1952 · TURNS 74
The Italian filmmaker climbed over chairs to accept his Best Actor Oscar for Life Is Beautiful in 1999, a moment that remains one of the Academy Awards' most spontaneous. He'd already built a career blending slapstick with sincerity, and that Oscar night made him a permanent fixture in awards-show highlight reels.
Lee Greenwood
1942 · TURNS 84
His anthem God Bless the U.S.A. became a fixture of American public life well beyond country radio, resurfacing at sporting events, campaign rallies, and Fourth of July broadcasts for four decades running.
Simon Le Bon
1958 · TURNS 68
As Duran Duran's frontman, he helped define MTV's early visual language with videos like Rio and Hungry Like the Wolf, turning the New Romantic look into a global export. The band's staying power through decades of lineup shuffles owes plenty to his steady presence out front.
Kelly Osbourne
1984 · TURNS 42
She grew up on camera as part of MTV's The Osbournes, one of the shows that proved celebrity families made compelling unscripted television years before the format took over cable. She later built her own lane as a fashion commentator and podcast host.
OPENING WEEKEND: Saw III
Twenty years ago, Saw III opened in theaters just before Halloween, the third installment of a franchise that had already turned a shoestring premise into an annual box-office event. Where the original Saw ran on a single locked-room concept, the third film widened the mythology considerably, giving Tobin Bell's Jigsaw a fuller backstory and Shawnee Smith's Amanda a larger role as his reluctant apprentice.
Critics were unkind at the time, and the reviews for Saw III read a lot like the reviews for Saw II — plenty of complaints about gore for gore's sake. Audiences disagreed, or at least showed up anyway, and Lionsgate had by then locked into a release pattern that would define the studio's fall calendar for years: a new Saw movie, every October, like clockwork. The franchise's insistence on annual Halloween-season releases predated the modern glut of legacy sequels and reboots, and in retrospect looks like an early blueprint for how a studio could turn one property into a recurring cultural appointment rather than a one-off hit.
The series would eventually run to ten films, with Saw III often cited by fans as the point where the puzzle-box plotting either tipped into satisfying complexity or collapsed under its own convolution, depending who you ask.
ON THE CHARTS: Prince's 1999
Prince released his fifth studio album, 1999, on this date in 1982, and it's the record where all the pieces of his sound finally locked into place at once — the drum machines, the falsetto, the guitar solos that seemed to arrive from nowhere and then vanish just as fast. The title track and Little Red Corvette both became hit singles, and the album itself would eventually go multi-platinum, though its impact on the radio charts was slower than its impact on the culture.
What made 1999 different from Prince's earlier work was scale: it was a sprawling double album at a moment when double albums were considered commercially risky, and it bet correctly that MTV's still-new video format would reward an artist who understood image as much as sound. Little Red Corvette became one of the first videos by a Black artist to get heavy rotation on the still largely segregated network, a fact that mattered as much to Prince's trajectory as any chart number.
The album's title track would get a second life entirely on its own terms come the actual year 1999, when radio stations across the country dusted it off for millennium countdown parties — a strange kind of victory lap seventeen years after release.
1954ABC premieres Disneyland, Walt Disney's anthology series, giving the studio its first foothold in living rooms and previewing the theme park that would open the following year.
1968The Beatles' Hey Jude continues its extended run atop the Billboard Hot 100, part of a nine-week stay that was the longest of the band's career.
1989Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers opens in theaters, keeping the slasher franchise's yearly October tradition alive well before Saw picked up the mantle.
2004The Boston Red Sox complete a sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first World Series title since 1918, ending one of sports' most talked-about droughts.
1982Prince releases 1999, the double album that pushes his sound toward the mainstream and lands him regular rotation on MTV.
2006Saw III opens nationwide, extending the franchise's run as the horror genre's reliable annual Halloween-season event.