■ The Pop Edition
September 23: Storks Soars, Springsteen Turns 77
Bruce Springsteen
Born 1949 · Turns 77
He spent years playing Jersey bar bands before Born to Run turned him into a Time and Newsweek cover story in the same week. Decades and a Broadway residency later, he's still the guy who plays four-hour shows because two feels short.
Ray Charles
Born 1930 · Would Have Been 96 (Died 2004)
He fused gospel and blues into something radio hadn't classified yet, and Georgia later made his version of its state song official. Jamie Foxx's Oscar-winning portrayal in 2004 introduced him all over again to a generation that knew the songs but not the story.
Mickey Rooney
Born 1920 · Would Have Been 106 (Died 2014)
He was MGM's top box office draw before he could legally drive, then spent the next eighty years proving a child star could actually have a second act. He worked into his nineties, closing out a career that started in vaudeville before sound film existed.
Jason Alexander
Born 1959 · Turns 67
He'd already won a Tony before George Costanza made him famous to people who'd never seen a Broadway stage. Nine seasons of Seinfeld turned a supporting neurotic into the character most people picture first.
Anthony Mackie
Born 1978 · Turns 48
He built a resume in serious dramas like The Hurt Locker before Marvel handed him Captain America's shield, first as sidekick and eventually as the guy actually carrying it. He's one of the few actors to move from supporting player to title lead within the same franchise.
OPENING WEEKEND: Storks Delivers, Ten Years Later
The reason Storks won the weekend of September 23, 2016 had nothing to do with a marketing blitz — it barely had one. Warner Animation Group's second feature, about a delivery stork forced to hand-carry a baby instead of a package, opened against a mostly bare late-September calendar and pulled in a little over $21 million, enough for the top spot.
It wasn't a Pixar-level cultural event. Critics found it scattered but funny, and it never became the kind of movie people quote at parties. But it did something quietly useful for Warner's animation ambitions: it proved the studio could compete in a release window without a built-in franchise, a sequel number, or a Disney logo attached. That mattered more than the opening number itself, since Warner Animation Group had launched only a year earlier with The Lego Movie's success still doing most of the heavy lifting.
Ten years on, Storks isn't a title most people bring up unprompted. But it's a decent snapshot of a specific mid-2010s moment when every studio wanted its own scrappy animated original, before the genre consolidated back around a handful of proven franchises.
PRIME TIME: The Jetsons Land on ABC
The Jetsons premiered on ABC on September 23, 1962, and the pitch was simple: do to the future what The Flintstones had just done to the Stone Age. Hanna-Barbera built it as a Sunday-night companion piece, complete with the same sitcom bones — working dad, wisecracking kid, robot maid instead of a housekeeper — just dressed up in flying cars and moving sidewalks.
It only ran one season of new episodes at first, 24 in all, and got outrated by Bonanza in its original Sunday slot. What saved it was reruns — decades of Saturday morning airings that introduced Rosie the robot and George Jetson's three-day work week to kids who weren't even alive for the original broadcast. A 1985 revival and a feature film in the early '90s kept the franchise alive long after ABC's original bet had come and gone.
What's held up is the design work more than the jokes — the Googie-architecture skyline, the flying saucer cars, a vision of 2062 that still shows up in retro-futurism mood boards today. Sixty-four years later, it's remembered less as a sitcom and more as a piece of mid-century American optimism about where technology was headed.
1955Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman" was still working its way up the R&B charts, a track that would later be cited as one of the first true soul records.
1962The same night The Jetsons debuted, ABC's Sunday lineup was betting heavily on animation reaching adult audiences, not just kids.
1973Bruce Springsteen released his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, still a cult favorite years before Born to Run made him a headline name.
1991Nirvana's Nevermind was in stores and climbing, quietly setting up the chart takeover it would pull off within weeks.
2016Snowden, Oliver Stone's biopic of the NSA leaker, opened the same weekend as Storks and landed well behind it at the box office.
2018Bruce Springsteen's Broadway residency, Springsteen on Broadway, was in the middle of its extended run, a stripped-down one-man show that later won a special Tony.
