■ The Pop Edition
October 28: Wrigley Hosts Series, Roberts Turns 59
Julia Roberts
BORN 1967 · TURNS 59
She went from Georgia unknown to the highest-paid actress in the world on the strength of a laugh that carried Pretty Woman, and she's spent three decades since proving she could do more than that laugh, from Erin Brockovich's Oscar to Ocean's Eleven's ensemble cool.
Joaquin Phoenix
BORN 1974 · TURNS 52
He built a career on discomfort, from the volatile emperor in Gladiator to the unraveling comic in Joker, an approach that finally won him an Academy Award and cemented him as one of the few actors who treats a role like a full-body commitment rather than a costume change.
Bill Gates
BORN 1955 · TURNS 71
The kid who co-founded Microsoft in a Harvard dorm room helped put a computer, and eventually a graphical interface, on a desk in nearly every home and office — a shift in daily life that pop culture is still reckoning with.
Annie Potts
BORN 1952 · TURNS 74
Janine Melnitz in Ghostbusters, the sardonic receptionist fielding calls about slime and specters, gave the franchise its deadpan center, and she followed it with a long run of TV work that never quite got the recognition the film work deserved.
Charlie Daniels
BORN 1936 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 90
He died in 2020, but The Devil Went Down to Georgia turned a fiddle showdown into a Southern rock standard that outlived every trend it was supposed to fade with, and his sound helped define what country-rock radio meant for a generation.
THE MOMENT: World Series Returns to Wrigley Field
On October 28, 2016, the Chicago Cubs hosted Game 3 of the World Series at Wrigley Field, ten years ago today — the first World Series game played there since 1945, back when FDR was still in office the last time the franchise had won it all in 1908. The Cubs fell to the Cleveland Indians 1-0 that night, but the significance had nothing to do with the score.
The ivy-covered ballpark had spent 71 years as a symbol of lovable futility, a stage for heartbreak rather than triumph, and the goat curse had calcified into a national punchline. Just having the Series back on Waveland Avenue was itself the story, months before the Cubs would clinch it four days later in Cleveland with an extra-innings Game 7 that ended the longest championship drought in North American professional sports.
Fox's broadcast that October drew some of the largest World Series audiences in a generation, a sign that a genuinely uncertain, historically loaded story could still pull a live national audience the way appointment television used to. Wrigley Field itself became a character in the coverage — the bricks, the hand-turned scoreboard, the neighborhood rooftops packed with fans who'd waited their whole lives for this.
OPENING WEEKEND: Puss in Boots Claws to #1
DreamWorks Animation's Puss in Boots opened wide on October 28, 2011, fifteen years ago, and debuted at number one at the domestic box office. The film pulled the fan-favorite Shrek sidekick, voiced by Antonio Banderas, out of a supporting role and into his own origin story, teaming him with Salma Hayek's Kitty Softpaws and Zach Galifianakis's Humpty Dumpty.
The bet was a risky one on paper. Spin-off movies built around a scene-stealing side character rarely equal the original, and the Shrek franchise itself was showing signs of fatigue after four increasingly uneven installments. Puss in Boots sidestepped the exhaustion by leaning into style over gag density, borrowing visual cues from spaghetti Westerns and swashbuckler films rather than recycling the fairy-tale-mashup jokes that had defined Shrek.
Critics responded better than they had to the last couple of Shrek sequels, and the film went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature, a rare honor for a spin-off. It also set up a sequel of its own nearly a decade later, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which many consider the sharper of the two films — proof that the character had more in the tank than anyone expected back in 2011.
1886The Statue of Liberty is dedicated in New York Harbor, instantly becoming one of the most photographed and referenced landmarks in American film and television.
1994Stargate, starring Kurt Russell and James Spader, opens in theaters and quietly launches a franchise that would eventually spin off into three television series.
2005Saw II opens in theaters, cementing the low-budget horror franchise's habit of releasing a new installment every Halloween season.
2009Michael Jackson's This Is It, assembled from rehearsal footage for his planned comeback concerts, opens in theaters worldwide and tops the box office.
1971Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention play a Montreux Casino show that burns down mid-set, an incident later immortalized in Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water.
1962The Cuban Missile Crisis ends, but pop culture's Cold War anxieties keep showing up in film and television for decades afterward.