A 90s road trip

The original page still exists at its original URL, resurrected by CERN in 2013 — and it renders perfectly in every browser ever made because HTML has stayed backwards-compatible for 35 years.

Cobain hated the polished mix and forced the label to remix the whole record — the 'Nevermind' you know is actually take two, made after he threatened to walk away.

Arnold got paid $15 million and had only 700 words of dialogue — that works out to $21,429 per word, including every 'Hasta la vista, baby'.

Mike Myers threatened to quit the film unless the studio kept the Bohemian Rhapsody scene — the producers wanted a Guns N' Roses song they could license cheaper.

The T-Rex animatronic weighed 12,000 pounds and kept malfunctioning in rain — the shaking water cup was invented on set to hide the fact that the whole robot was vibrating uncontrollably.

David Duchovny slept through his own audition — literally arrived hungover, delivered his lines in a monotone, and only got cast because Chris Carter thought that was exactly how Mulder should sound.

Doom's shareware model made John Carmack and John Romero millionaires by mail — people literally sent cheques in envelopes to Texas to unlock the other three episodes, and id's PO box was so full USPS complained.

Joe Carter's walk-off is one of only two World-Series-ending home runs in history — the other one is Bill Mazeroski's from 1960, so the wait between them was 33 years.

The original Woody in early drafts was a mean, sarcastic ventriloquist dummy — Disney execs saw a screening in '93, panicked, and forced a rewrite that gave us the Woody we know.

Sony sold PS1 hardware at a loss for the first 18 months and made all its money on games — inventing the razor-and-blades model that every console maker has copied since.

Bill Gates paid the Stones just for 'Start Me Up' but Jay Leno joked about it so much the band's lawyer sent a cease-and-desist to NBC — Microsoft had bought the sync licence, not the naming rights.

Bezos originally wanted to name the company 'Cadabra' until his lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver' — he changed it to Amazon because he wanted a name starting with A that sounded 'big and exotic'.

MissingNo., the famous glitch Pokémon, exists because Cinnabar Island's tile loader reads leftover memory data as sprite data — Nintendo left it in Red/Blue rather than recall the cartridges and just told players not to catch it.

The 'draw me like one of your French girls' scene was Cameron's own hand doing the sketching — Leo couldn't draw and they didn't have time to teach him, so Cameron shot his hand from behind.

The show's animation was originally cut and stop-motion animated by hand — a single 22-minute episode took three months to make. They switched to CorelDRAW in season two, cutting production to six days per episode.

Tiger's caddie Fluff Cowan mistakenly gave him the wrong yardage on hole 15 — Tiger corrected him mid-swing, chose his own club, and made the shot that basically sealed the tournament.

Will Smith turned down the role of Neo to do Wild Wild West — he's said in interviews it's the biggest regret of his career, and Keanu got the part on his second audition after crying reading the script.

Jake Lloyd, who played young Anakin, quit acting the year after the film came out because of relentless bullying from Star Wars fans at school — a story that eventually became a cautionary tale in Hollywood about child casting.

Napster wasn't shut down for copyright infringement — it was shut down because a federal judge ruled it had to filter out infringing files, which was technically impossible with its architecture. It came back later as a legal streaming service.

Some elevators, cash registers, and gas pumps genuinely did fail at midnight — but engineers had spent five years planning the failovers, so 99.9% of them rolled back to safe mode within seconds.