Writer of Pop Culture

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This Day in Pop Culture for February 16

On this day in pop culture history, a superhero movie was the first to receive an Oscar Best Picture nomination, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant brought up Baby and USA won the first Olympic gold medal for downhill skiing.

March 4, 2020

2–3 minutes

2018: ‘Black Panther’ Roars into Theaters

After seeing the success of Marvel Studio’s 18th feature film, Black Panther, Disney must have thought, “Why did we wait so long? The character was Marvel Comics’ first Black superhero and this movie Marvel’s first to feature a predominantly black cast and director. Many critics and fans consider the film to be one of Marvel’s best overall and it has been praised it for its cultural significance.

Black Panther has an all-star cast including Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa aka Black Panther. It also starred Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Sterling K. Brown, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker and Andy Serkis.

Besides becoming the ninth-highest-grossing film of 2018, Black Panther was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won three for Best Costume Design, Production Design and Original Score. It also has the distinction of being the first superhero movie to be nominated for a Best Picture award.

Sadly, unbeknownst to Marvel Studios, Boseman had been dealing with colon cancer and died in August of 2020. However, the studio released the sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, in November 2022. The role of T’Challa was not recast and the story moved along without Boseman.

1984: First American to Win Gold for Downhill Skiing

In January of 1984, Bill Johnson was the first American man to win a World Cup downhill race, at Wengen, Switzerland. So impressed with himself, he boasted that he would take home a gold medal the following month at the Olympic Games in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. On February 16, 1984 he did just that and became the first American man to win Olympic gold in downhill skiing.

Johnson practically became an American hero which was short lived. He didn’t make the 1998 Olympic ski team and suffered a terrible crash in 2001 in training for the 2012 games. The crash put him in a coma and left him with brain damage.

1938: Bringing Up Baby

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. (TVDB)

Many years ago RKO Radio Pictures released the Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby. The story involves a paleontologist, a scatterbrained heiress and a leopard named Baby.

Based on a short story written by Hagar Wilde (and published in Collier’s Weekly magazine), it is said that the script was written specifically for Hepburn and her part was tailored to her personality. It is also said that the film went over schedule because of uncontrollable laughter between the two leads.

Unfortunately, the film tanked in the box office and Hepburn became known as “box office poison” for a time. Ironically, the film ranked 88 on the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American films of all-time list.