Thanks to metal shortages during World War II, there was a three year span of time where Oscar recipients received a plaster statue painted gold; after the war, the Academy replaced the plaster statues with the traditional gold-plated metal ones.

The Hoover Dam construction project (started in 1931) was the first construction project in the world where the workers were required to wear hard hats.

Bolaji Badejo, the actor inside the alien suit in the 1979 sci-fi horror classic Alien, took Tai Chi and mime lessons in order to give the alien the slow, smooth, and deliberate movements that thoroughly terrified audiences around the world.

In the 1980s, many families owned a VHS deck but no VHS tapes. Throughout the decade, many VHS deck owners in America had yet to purchase a movie and instead relied on weekly rentals from a neighborhood store.

The idea of cats having multiple lives is found around the world, but the number of lives is inconsistent. While Americans say a cat has nine lives, Germans and Italians say a cat has seven lives, and in many regions of the Middle East, they are believed to have only six.

Thanks to Spanish explorers bringing the bird back from the Americas, by the end of the 16th century, turkey was widely eaten across England.