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This Day in Pop Culture

This Day in Pop Culture for June 29

Steve Wozniak, Apple, Cannonball and Ratatouille.

June 29, 2020

2–3 minutes

2007: ‘Ratatouille’ Open is Theaters

Co-written and directed by Brad Bird, Ratatouille tells the story of a rat, Remy whose love for food was greater than the average rat, goes to great lengths to become a French chef with the help of a young garbage boy, Linguini.

Production on this movie began in 2000 where the creators wanted to be as authentic as they could in regard to French cooking and the Paris backdrop. Bird had actually interned at Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry restaurant and some of the film’s crew visited Paris for inspiration. The movie crew also consulted with real chefs.

During the movie’s opening weekend, it debuted at the #1 spot with $47 million which sound very impressive at first, but at the time, it was the lowest Pixar opening since A Bug’s Life. Ironically, in France, the film broke the record for the biggest debut of an animated film.

Since then, Ratatouille has become the sixth highest grossing Pixar film. The animated movie won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and was later developed into a theme park ride for Disneyland Paris and Epcot in Orlando, Florida.

1975: Steve Wozniak Tests the Apple 1

Steve Wozniak is credited as single-handedly creating both the Apple I and Apple II computers. On this day in 1975, he tested the first working prototype. What makes this significant is that this was the first time that a character displayed on a TV screen was generated by a home computer. In 1976, he and Steve Jobs formed Apple Computer and the Apple I sold for $666.66. It is said that Wozniak had no idea about the relation between the number and the mark of the beast and said “I came up with [it] because I like repeating digits.” ^{_{(Image: Wikipedia)}}

2020: The Short-Lived ‘Cannonball’ Debuts

Thought of as a weaker version of Wipeout (and less chaotic), Cannonball first previewed on NBC on this day before airing on USA Network from July 9 to September 3, 2020. It was based on the British game show of the same name.

Each week, 16 contestants would perform water-based stunts in hopes of getting the highest score and moving on to the next round eventually winning $10,000.

The show was hosted by The Miz, Rocsi Diaz and Simon Gibson and was filmed at the Hansen Dam Recreation Park in Los Angeles, California.