culture

Celebrating 50 years of The Rocky Horror Picture Show

cult classics, culture, film anniversaries, midnight movies, Rocky Horror Picture Show / Beth Washington / August 17, 2025

hot patootie, bless my soul

“It’s had a profound impact on our culture, especially on people who’ve felt different and marginalized.”

Credit: 20th Century Studios

When The Rocky Horror Picture Show premiered in 1975, no one could have dreamed that it would become the longest-running theatrical release film in history. But that’s what happened. Thanks to a killer soundtrack, campy humor, and a devoted cult following, Rocky Horror is still a mainstay of midnight movie culture. In honor of its 50th anniversary, Disney/20th Century Studios is releasing a newly restored 4K HDR version in October, along with deluxe special editions on DVD and Blu-ray. And the film has inspired not one, but two documentaries marking its five decades of existence: Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror and Sane Inside Insanity: The Phenomenon of Rocky Horror.

(Spoilers below, because it’s been 50 years.)

The film is an adaption of Richard O’Brien‘s 1973 musical for the stage, The Rocky Horror Show. At the time, he was a struggling actor and wrote the musical as an homage to the science fiction and B horror movies he’d loved since a child. In fact, the opening song (“Science Fiction/Double Feature“) makes explicit reference to many of those, including 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, Flash Gordon (1936), King Kong (1933), The Invisible Man (1933), Forbidden Planet (1956), and The Day of the Triffids (1962), among others.

The musical ran for six years in London and was well-received when it was staged in Los Angeles. But the New York City production bombed. By then the film was already in development with O’Brien—who plays the hunchbacked butler Riff Raff in the film—co-writing the script. Director Jim Sharman retained most of the London stage cast, but brought in American actors Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon to play Brad and Janet, respectively. And he shot much of the film at the Victorian Gothic manor Oakley Court in Berkshire, England, where several Hammer horror movies had been filmed. In fact, Sharman made use of several old props and set pieces from old Hammer productions, most notably the tank and dummy from 1958’s The Revenge of Frankenstein.

The film opens with nice wholesome couple Brad and Janet attending a wedding and awkwardly getting engaged themselves. They decide to visit their high school science teacher, Dr. Scott (Jonathan Adams), because they met in his class, but they get a flat tire en route and end up stranded in the rain. They seek refuge and a phone at a nearby castle, hoping to call for roadside assistance. Instead, they are pressured into becoming guests of the castle’s owner, a transvestite mad scientist called Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), and his merry bad of misfits.

The flamboyantly lascivious Frank-N-Furter is about to unveil his new Creature, the titular Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood). Rocky is a buff, tanned, blond figure clad only in gold speedos and booties, with the body of a god and the mind of a child. Actually, he’s got half the brain of a motorcycling, rock-n-roll loving rebel named Eddie (Meat Loaf), who briefly escapes from the deep freeze where he’d been stored and causes a bit of havoc, before Frank-N-Furter kills him with an ice pick.

Things just get weirder from there. There’s a lot of sexual partner swapping, with the insatiable Frank-N-Furter bedding his Creature and then seducing the virginal Janet and Brad in turn. A sexually awakened Janet then gets down with Rocky, enraging their host. Dr. Scott shows up in time for Rocky’s birthday dinner, with the main course being the mutilated remains of Eddie. Frank-N-Further then zaps his guests with a Medusa freeze ray and turns them into Greek marble statues. He dresses them in sexy cabaret costumes—matching corsets and fishnets—before unfreezing them and forcing them to perform in an elaborate stage number.

Eventually his butler and maid—siblings Riff Raff and Magenta (Patricia Quinn), respectively—revolt, revealing that they are all actually aliens from the planet Transsexual, Transylvania. They kill Frank-N-Furter with a laser in revenge for his excesses, along with poor Rocky. The entire castle turns out to be a spaceship and Riff Raff and Magenta blast off into space, leaving Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott crawling around the ground in confusion.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show made its London debut on August 14, 1975, along with eight other cities worldwide, but it was quickly pulled because audiences were so small. A planned Halloween opening night in New York was cancelled altogether. The film might have faded into obscurity if the studio hadn’t decided to re-market it to the midnight movie circuit, along with other counterculture fare like Pink Flamingoes (1972) and Reefer Madness (1933).

Rocky Horror fit right in and finally found its audience. It quickly became a fixture at New York City’s Waverly Theater, which ignited the film’s cult following. People went to see it again and again, and started dressing up in costumes and acting out the lines in front of the big screen, a practice that became known as shadow casting. (I saw it myself several times in the late 1980s, although I never joined a shadow cast.)

Why has Rocky Horror endured for so long? “The music, first of all, is up there, in my biased opinion, with the greatest soundtracks of all time,” Linus O’Brien, director of Strange Journey and Richard O’Brien’s son, told Ars. “I think maybe it doesn’t get recognized as such because on the surface, it just seems like a bit of fluff. But if the songs were only half as good, we wouldn’t be talking about Rocky today. It would be a very small B-movie that we’d laugh at or something.”

It really is an amazingly catchy collection of tunes, perfect for singing (and dancing) along, particularly “The Time Warp.” (Many of us can still perform the basic dance steps.) There’s “Dammit Janet,” “Over at the Frankenstein Place,” and Frank-N-Further makes an unforgettable entrance with “Sweet Transvestite.” Eddie gets his moment in the spotlight with “Hot Patootie—Bless My Soul,” and Janet seduces Rocky with “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me.”

In addition to the unforgettable songs, O’Brien cites Curry’s inspired performance, as well as “all the things my dad loved in terms of bodybuilding and science fiction movies and ’50s rock and roll, the transgressive themes, [and] the classic reimagining of the Frankenstein story,” he said. “Whenever you have something that lasts this long, it’s usually working on many different levels that makes people keep coming back week after week, year after year.”

Shadow casting

Gia Milinovich, an American-born writer and TV presenter now living in England, was part of the second generation of Rocky Horror fans. She grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, which boasted a local repertory cinema that screened a lot of cult movies, and saw Rocky Horror for the first time in 1984. She saw it again in New York in 1987 and started her own shadow cast when she moved to London later that year—playing Frank-N-Furter, of course.

“For me, the moment when Frank-N-Furter threw off his cape—I’ve described it as a religious experience,” Milinovich told Ars. “It was like this world opened up to me and I just thought, ‘I want to be in that world.’ I was completely obsessed from then on. There’s lots of different things that I like as a fan, but there’s nothing that’s grabbed me like Rocky Horror. The atmosphere is the same every time I’ve seen it, this kind of electricity in the air.”

Decades later, Milinovich remains part of the Rocky Horror fandom, with fond memories of her shadow casting days. “I would call shadow casting an art form or a form of theater that doesn’t really exist anywhere else,” she said. “We were doing cosplay before cosplay was a thing. Part of the thing about shadow casting is getting your costumes to be screen accurate to a really obsessive degree. People are still discovering new details because as the quality of the prints go up, the higher and higher quality DVDs that you get, the more detail you can see in the costumes. There’s a whole Facebook group dedicated just to Frank-N-Furter’s leather jacket.”

And it’s not just the members of the shadow casts who participate. “There’s also all of the talk back, the audience lines,” said Milinivoch. “There are loads of people who might not want to perform, but they’re really into doing costumes or making the props for the shadow cast. So you can be sitting in the audience but still be part of the show. No one needs permission, you just do it. There’s no difference between the audience and the performers and the film, it’s all kind of one thing melded together and it’s like nothing else.”

This was a period when Rocky Horror was still very much part of underground counterculture. “For someone to walk around dressed as Columbia (Little Nell) in the late 1980s, and certainly for men wearing lipstick or black fishnet stockings, it wasn’t necessarily a safe thing to dress up and go to Rocky Horror,” said Milinovich. “Now, all these years later, I feel like it’s acceptable. For the first and second generations of fans, it felt much more radical than it does now.”

Yet in some respects, it’s as relevant as ever. “There are still those extreme prejudices in society and Rocky Horror still provides a space for people to be themselves, or to be someone else, for the two hours that it takes to do the film,” Milinovich said. “The line in the film is ‘Don’t dream it, be it.'” People still take that line to heart.

Rocky Horror has had its share of detractors over the last five decades, but judging whether it’s a “good” film or not by the same criteria as other films is kind of missing the point. The magic lies not in passively watching Rocky Horror, but in the interactive live experience—very much in keeping with its theatrical roots. “I can’t really separate the film from the whole audience experience,” said Milinovich. “I wouldn’t even watch the film at home on its own, I just don’t. I’ve seen it so many times, but watching it at home was how I would always rehearse.”

Don’t dream it, be it

The documentary Strange Journey ends with a fan telling Richard O’Brien, “It doesn’t matter what people think about Rocky because it belongs to us, not to you”—and Rocky‘s creator agreeing that this was true. “Art takes on a life of its own,” Linus O’Brien concurred, citing Karen Tongson, a gender studies professor at the University of Southern California.

“She talks about how our art expresses how we’re feeling inside way before we’ve ever had a chance to understand it or explore it,” he said. “That’s what happened in the case of Rocky with my dad. He was essentially a 13-year-old boy writing a stage play, even though he was 30 at the time. He didn’t think about what he was doing. He was just expressing, took all the things that he liked, all the things that he was thinking about and put it all together. They came from within him, but he wasn’t consciously aware of it.”

At the time, Richard O’Brien also had no idea what his creation would end up meaning to so many people. Linus O’Brien decided to make Strange Journey while gathering archival clips of his father’s work. He came across a video clip of “I’m Going Home” and found himself browsing through the comments.

“It was one after another, [talking] about how Rocky had saved their lives, and how much that song in particular meant to them,” he said. “There was a soldier in Iraq who would always play it because he wanted to go home. A daughter who used to watch Rocky with her mother all the time and then played it at her funeral. It was startling and touching, how profound the impact of Rocky has been on so many people’s lives.”

When Strange Journey screened at SXSW earlier this year, a man came up to O’Brien after the Q&A. “He was shaking and he said, ‘Listen, my wife and I met 32 years ago at Rocky, and she wanted to let you and your dad know that if it wasn’t for Rocky, she wouldn’t be alive today,'” O’Brien recalled.

“I don’t think there’s another work of art that has tangibly saved the lives of people like Rocky has,” he continued. “A lot of people just think it’s a little bit of trashy fun, a bit naughty and rude, but it’s much more than that. It’s had a profound impact on our culture, especially on people who’ve felt different and marginalized—regardless of their sexuality. It’s created a community for people who didn’t feel part of society. We’ve all felt like that to a degree. So it’s a wonderful thing to celebrate.”

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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Dedicated volunteer exposes “single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history”

culture, David woodard, wikipedia / DJ Henderson / August 15, 2025

After a reduction in activity, things ramped up again in 2021, as IP addresses from around the world started creating Woodard references and articles once more. For instance, “addresses from Canada, Germany, Indonesia, the UK and other places added some trivia about Woodard to all 15 Wikipedia articles about the calea ternifolia.”

Then things got “more sophisticated.” From December 2021 through June 2025, 183 articles were created about Woodard, each in a different language’s Wikipedia and each by a unique account. These accounts followed a pattern of behavior: They were “created, often with a fairly generic name, and made a user page with a single image on it. They then made dozens of minor edits to unrelated articles, before creating an article about David Woodard, then making a dozen or so more minor edits before disappearing off the platform.”

Grnrchst believes that all the activity was meant to “create as many articles about Woodard as possible, and to spread photos of and information on Woodard to as many articles as possible, while hiding that activity as much as possible… I came to believe that David Woodard himself, or someone close to him, had been operating this network of accounts and IP addresses for the purposes of cynical self-promotion.”

After the Grnrchst report, Wikipedia’s global stewards removed 235 articles on Woodard from Wikipedia instances with few users or administrators. Larger Wikipedias were free to make their own community decisions, and they removed another 80 articles and banned numerous accounts.

“A full decade of dedicated self-promotion by an individual network has been undone in only a few weeks by our community,” Grnrchst noted.

In the end, just 20 articles about Woodard remain, such as this one in English, which does not mention the controversy.

We were unable to get in touch with Woodard, whose personal website is password-protected and only available “by invitation.”

Could the whole thing be some kind of “art project,” with the real payoff being exposure and being written about? Perhaps. But whatever the motive behind the decade-long effort to boost Woodard on Wikipedia, the incident reminds us just how much effort some people are willing to put into polluting open or public-facing projects for their own ends.

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They’re golden: Fictional band from K-Pop Demon Hunters tops the charts

animated film, culture, Entertainment, film reviews, films, K-Pop Demon Hunters, netflix, Reviews, streaming television / Beth Washington / August 12, 2025

The fictional band Huntr/x, from K-Pop Demon Hunters, has a real-world hit with “Golden.”

Netflix has a summer megahit on its hands with its animated musical feature film, K-Pop Demon Hunters. Since its June release, the critically acclaimed film has won fans of all ages, fueled by a killer Korean pop soundtrack featuring one earworm after another. The biggest hit is “Golden,” which just hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 100 chart. (The last time a fictional ensemble topped the charts was in 2022 with Encanto‘s “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.”)

K-Pop Demon Hunters is now Netflix’s most-watched animated film of all time, and that’s not just because of the infectious music. The Sony Animation team delivers bold visuals that evoke the look and feel of anime, the plot is briskly paced, and the script strikes a fine balance between humor and heart.

(Spoilers below.)

The film deftly lays out the central premise in the first few minutes. In ancient times, demons roamed the Earth freely and preyed upon human souls, until a trio of women—gifted singers and demon hunters—created a magical protective barrier with their voices known as the Honmoon, trapping the demons behind it. The Honmoon has been maintained ever since by subsequent musical trios/demon hunters from each generation. The dream is that one day, the Honmoon will become so strong it will turn “golden” and seal away the demons forever.

Naturally the demons, led by their king Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun), don’t want that to happen, but the latest incarnation of demon hunters—a K-Pop band called Huntr/x—is close to accomplishing the Golden Honmoon. Rumi (Arden Cho) is the lead singer, Mira (May Hong) is the group’s dancer/choreographer, and American-born Zoey (Ji-young Yoo) is the rapper and lyricist. But Rumi harbors a secret: her father was a demon, and she is marked by the telltale purple “patterns,” which she keeps hidden from her bandmates.

Hoping to destroy the Honmoon once and for all, Gwi-Ma sends five of his demons to form a K-pop boy band, the Saja Boys, led by Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop). Their popularity soon rivals that of Huntr/x and threatens the Honmoon—just as Rumi’s patterns spread to her throat and weaken her singing voice.

How it’s done, done, done

Mira, Rumi, and Zoey take a timeout from fighting demons to carb-load with ramen. Netflix

That’s a big problem because their new hit single, “Golden” (performed by South Korean singer/songwriter Ejae), spans an impressive three-octave range, eventually hitting an A-5 on the chorus—a high note usually reserved for classically trained operatic sopranos. (Ejae’s performance on this song has impressed a lot of YouTube vocal coaches.) And the first live global performance of “Golden” is supposed to be the event that ushers in the Golden Honmoon. It’s a soaring, impeccably constructed “I Want” tune typical of Disney princesses.

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Netflix drops One Piece S2 teaser, renews for S3

culture, netflix, One Piece, streaming television, Trailers / Shannon Garcia / August 11, 2025

We have the first teaser for the second season of Netflix’s live-action series adaptation of One Piece, subtitled Into the Grand Line. The streaming platform also released some first-look images and announced that the series has been renewed for a third season.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, the original One Piece manga debuted in 1997, following the adventures of one Monkey D. Luffy, who heads a motley crew called the Straw Hat Pirates. There’s swordsman Roronoa Zoro, thief and navigator Nami, sniper and compulsive liar Usopp, and a cook named Sanji. They’re searching for the legendary One Piece, a mythical treasure that would make anyone who possesses it King of the Pirates. Monkey wants to be the Pirate King, but so do a host of other pirates with their own ships and crews.

An anime TV series based on the original manga premiered in 1999 and became a global hit; it was the most-watched TV show of 2022, even beating out Stranger Things. So Netflix decided to make a live-action version, which received critical and popular acclaim, particularly for its fidelity to the source material. Iñaki Godoy stars as Monkey, who has rubber-like abilities thanks to accidentally ingesting a Devil Fruit. Mackenyu plays Zoro, Emily Rudd plays Nami, Taz Skylar plays Sanji, and Jacob Romero Gibson plays Usopp, son of an infamous pirate father named Yasopp. The S2 teaser features several new faces that will be familiar to fans of the manga and anime series.

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Green dildos are raining down on WNBA courts. Why? Crypto memecoins, of course.

crypto, culture, memecoins, wnba / DJ Henderson / August 9, 2025

Take a deep breath and prepare yourself, because the “saga of the green dildos” is going to get really, really dumb.

Now take another one, just to steel yourself—this story involves crypto and memecoins, after all.

Ready? Okay.

Perhaps you’ve heard that people have been tossing lime green dildos at WNBA players for the last few weeks. Front Office Sports counts five such incidents; other sites say six.

Two men, Delbert Carver and Kaden Lopez, have so far been arrested. Both are under 25—young, but old enough to know that throwing sex toys at professional female athletes is both unsafe and deeply disrespectful.

WNBA players have been emphatic about their dislike and disapproval of these actions, which have been widely covered even in outlets like Cosmopolitan, which railed against “these idiots throwing dildos onto the court” who “don’t care about what women deserve or how disgusting and violating their actions are.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. recently posted an image to Instagram showing his dad on the White House roof, tossing a large green dildo down at women on a basketball court. (Representative reply comment: “Cool. Epstein files now?”)

Why would anyone pay money for a WNBA ticket, only to throw dildos at the players? According to the Associated Press, both men arrested so far claimed that the incidents were pranks, with one saying the idea was intended “to go viral.” If you read that and find yourself wondering why you’d want green dildos to go viral, USA Today got the “EXCLUSIVE” answer:

It was crypto bros.

Pushing a memecoin.

Called “Green Dildo Coin.”

That now has a market cap of $12 million.

The paper talked to someone representing Green Dildo Coin, who explained that the stunts were done for truly noble reasons. Indeed, they were a form of “protest” against injustice.

Green dildos are raining down on WNBA courts. Why? Crypto memecoins, of course. Read More »

Review: The Sandman S2 is a classic tragedy, beautifully told

culture, Entertainment, Neil Gaiman, netflix, Reviews, streaming television, The Sandman, TV reviews / Beth Washington / August 9, 2025

I unequivocally loved the first season of The Sandman, the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s influential graphic novel series (of which I am longtime fan). I thought it captured the surreal, dream-like feel and tone of its source material, striking a perfect balance between the anthology approach of the graphic novels and grounding the narrative by focusing on the arc of its central figure: Morpheus, lord of the Dreaming. It’s been a long wait for the second and final season, but S2 retains all those elements to bring Dream’s story to its inevitably tragic, yet satisfying, end.

(Spoilers below; some major S2 reveals after the second gallery. We’ll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

When Netflix announced in January that The Sandman would end with S2, speculation abounded that this was due to sexual misconduct allegations against Gaiman (who has denied them). However, showrunner Allan Heinberg wrote on X that the plan had long been for there to be only two seasons because the show’s creators felt they had only enough material to fill two seasons, and frankly, they were right. The first season covered the storylines of Preludes and Nocturnes and A Doll’s House, with bonus episodes adapting “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from Dream Country.

The S2 source material is drawn primarily from Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, weaving in relevant material from Fables and Reflections—most notably “The Song of Orpheus” and elements of “Thermidor”—and the award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. This season’s bonus episode adapts the 1993 standalone spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. All that’s really missing is A Game of You—which focuses on Barbie (a minor character introduced in A Doll’s House) trying to save her magical dream realm from the evil forces of the Cuckoo—and a handful of standalone short stories. None of that material has any bearing on the Dream King’s larger character arc, so we lose little by the omissions.

Making amends

After escaping his captors, regaining his talismans, tracking down the rogue Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and dealing with a Vortex, S2 finds Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) rebuilding the Dreaming, which had fallen into disrepair during his long absence. He is interrupted by his sibling Destiny’s (Adrian Lester) unexpected summons to a family meeting, including Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles).

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Invasion S3 trailer hints the series is finally finding its stride

Apple TV Plus, culture, Entertainment, Invasion, streaming television, Trailers / 9u50fv / August 5, 2025

Chances are you haven’t been watching Invasion, an Apple TV+ sci-fi drama overshadowed to some extent by two of the streamer’s other sci-fi shows, Silo and Foundation. Yes, Invasion has received mixed reviews for its ponderous pacing (especially in the first season). Even its fans may admit to having something of a love/hate relationship with the show. But the cinematography is gorgeous, and the writers are clearly trying to explore some ambitious themes, with variable success. Apple TV+ just released a trailer for the upcoming third season that suggests this series with so much promise might finally be hitting its stride.

(Some spoilers for first two seasons below.)

Invasion was created by David Weil (Hunters) and Simon Kinberg (best known for writing and/or producing several X-Men films, as well as The Martian, which was nominated for several Oscars). The first season focused on the initial stages of the titular alien invasion, portraying the events through the eyes of ordinary people around the world—the series is in English, Japanese, and Pashto—as they come to terms with the existential threat Earth is facing. In fact, the aliens take a back seat to the human interactions, which irritated some viewers eager to see actual aliens in a show about an extraterrestrial invasion.

The full-on invasion closed out the first season. A much stronger, action-oriented S2 essentially re-invented itself to explore how our surviving main characters adjusted to their brave new world, as well as the occasionally terrible decisions that had to be made in order to survive. The aliens rapidly took over, with humans relegated to small safe zones. It was still a bit of a slow burn, but it set up several intriguing elements for S3, which takes place two years later. And the aliens are evolving. Per the official premise:

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These are the best streaming services you aren’t watching

culture, Features, streaming, Tech / 9u50fv / August 4, 2025

Discover movies and shows you’ve never seen before.

If you’ve seen The Office enough to know which episode this is, it may be time to stream something new. Credit: NBCUniversal

We all know how to find our favorite shows and blockbuster films on mainstream streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+. But even as streaming has opened the door to millions of hours of on-demand entertainment, it can still feel like there’s nothing fresh or exciting to watch anymore.

If you agree, it’s time to check out some of the more niche streaming services available, where you can find remarkable content unlikely to be available elsewhere.

This article breaks down the best streaming services you likely aren’t watching. From cinematic masterpieces to guilty pleasures, these services offer refreshing takes on streaming that make online content bingeing feel new again.

Curiosity Stream

Host James Burke pointing to puffs of smoke rising from the ground in the distance — James Burke points to puffs of smoke rising from the ground in Curiosity Stream’s *Connections* reboot. Credit: Curiosity Stream

These days, it feels like facts are getting harder to come by. Curiosity Stream‘s focus on science, history, research, and learning is the perfect antidote to this problem. The streaming service offers documentaries to people who love learning and are looking for a reliable source of educational media with no sensationalism or political agendas.

Curiosity Stream is $5 per month or $40 per year for an ad-free, curated approach to documentary content. Launched in 2015 by Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks, the service offers “more new films and shows every week” and has pledged to produce even more original content.

It has been a while since cable channels like Discovery or The History Channel have been regarded as reputable documentary distributors. You can find swaths of so-called documentaries on other streaming services, especially Amazon Prime Video, but finding a quality documentary on mainstream streaming services often requires sifting through conspiracy theories, myths, and dubious arguments.

Curiosity Stream boasts content from respected names like James Burke, Brian Greene, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Among Curiosity Stream’s most well-known programs are Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, a News and Documentary Emmy Award winner; David Attenborough’s Light on Earth, a Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival award winner; Secrets of the Solar System, a News & Documentary Emmy Award nominee; and the currently trending Ancient Engineering: Middle East.

Curiosity Stream doesn’t regularly report subscriber numbers, but it said in March 2023 that it had 23 million subscribers. In May, parent company CuriosityStream, which also owns Curiosity University, the Curiosity Channel linear TV channel, and an original programming business, reported its first positive net income ($0.3 million) in its fiscal Q1 2025 earnings.

That positive outcome followed a massive price hike that saw subscription fees double in March 2023. So if you decide to subscribe to Curiosity Stream, keep an eye on pricing.

Mubi

Demi Moore looking into a mirror and wearing a red dress and red lipstick in The Substance. — *The Substance* was a breakout hit for Mubi in 2024. Credit: Mubi/YouTube

Mubi earned street cred in 2024 as the distributor behind the Demi Moore-starring film The Substance. But like Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle, there’s more than meets the eye with this movie-focused streaming service, which has plenty of art-house films.

Mubi costs $15 per month or $120 per year for ad-free films. For $20 per month or $168 per year, subscriptions include a “hand-picked cinema ticket every single week,” according to Mubi, in select cities. Previous tickets have included May December, The Boy and the Heron, and The Taste of Things.

Don’t expect a bounty of box office blockbusters or superhero films on Mubi. Instead, the spotlight is on critically acclaimed award-winning films that are frequently even more obscure than what you’d find on The Criterion Channel streaming service. Save for the occasional breakout hits (like The Substance, Twin Peaks, and Frances Ha), you can expect to find many titles you’ve never heard of before. That makes the service a potential windfall for movie aficionados who feel like they’ve seen it all.

Browsing Mubi’s library is like uncovering a hidden trove of cinema. The service’s UI eases the discovery process by cleanly displaying movies’ critic and user reviews, among other information. Mubi also produces Notebook, a daily publication of thoughtful, passionate editorials about film.

Further differentiating Mubi from other streaming services is its community; people can make lists of content that other users can follow (like “Hysterical in a Floral Dress,” a list of movies featuring females showcasing “intense creative outbursts/hysteria/debauchery”), which helps viewers find content, including shows and films outside of Mubi, that will speak to them.

Mubi claims to have 20 million registered users and was recently valued at $1 billion. The considerable numbers suggest that Mubi may be on its way to being the next A24.

Hoopla

The online and on-demand convenience of streaming services often overshadows libraries as a source of movies and TV shows. Not to be left behind, thousands of branches of the ever-scrappy public library system currently offer on-demand video streaming and online access to eBooks, audiobooks, comic books, and music via Hoopla, which launched in 2013. Streaming from Hoopla is free if you have a library card from a library that supports the service, and it brings simplicity and affordability back to streaming.

You don’t pay for the digital content you borrow via Hoopla, but your library does. Each library that signs a deal with Hoopla (the company says there are about 11,500 branches worldwide) individually sets the number of monthly “borrows” library card holders are entitled to, which can be in the single digits or greater. Additionally, each borrow is limited to a certain number of days, which varies by title and library.

Libraries choose which titles they’d like to offer patrons, and Hoopla is able to distribute content through partnerships with content distributors, such as Paramount. Cat Zappa, VP of digital acquisition at Hoopla Digital, told Ars Technica that Hoopla has “over 2.5 million pieces of content” and “about 75,000 to 80,000 pieces of video” content. The service currently has “over” 10 million users, she said.

Hoopla has a larger library with more types of content available than Kanopy, a free streaming service for libraries that offers classic, independent, and documentary movies. For a free service, Hoopla’s content selection isn’t bad, but it isn’t modern. It’s strongest when it comes to book-related content; its e-book and audiobook catalogue, for example, includes popular titles like Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games prequel, and Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm 2, plus everything from American classics to 21st-century manga titles.

There’s a decent selection of movies based on books, like Jack Reacher, The Godfather series, The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Crucible, Clueless, and The Rainmaker, to name a few out of the 759 offered to partnering libraries. Perusing Hoopla’s older titles recalls some of the fun of visiting a physical library, giving you access to free media that you might never have tried otherwise.

Many libraries don’t offer Hoopla, though. The service is a notable cost for libraries, which have to pay Hoopla a fee every time something is borrowed. Hoopla gives some of that money to the content distributor and keeps the rest. Due to budget constraints, some libraries are unable to support streaming via Hoopla’s pay-per-use model.

Hoopla acknowledges the budget challenges that libraries face and offers various budgeting tools, Zappa told Ars, adding, “Not every library patron has the ability to… go into the library as frequently as they’d like to engage with content. Digital streaming allows another easy and efficient opportunity to still get patrons engaged with the library but… from where it’s most convenient for them in certain cases.”

Dropout

The Internet brings the world to our fingertips, but I’ve repeatedly used it to rewatch episodes of The Office. If that sounds like you, Dropout could be just what you need to (drop)kick you out of your comedic funk.

Dropout costs $7 per month or $70 per year. It’s what remains of the website CollegeHumor, which launched in 1999. It was acquired by US holding company IAC in 2006 and was shuttered by IAC in 2020. Dropout mostly has long-form, unscripted comedy series. Today, it features 11 currently running shows, plus nine others. Dropout’s biggest successes are a wacky game show called Game Changer and Dimension 20, a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game show that also has live events.

Dropout is for viewers seeking a novel and more communal approach to comedy that doesn’t rely on ads, big corporate sponsorships, or celebrities to make you smile.

IAC first launched Dropout under the CollegeHumor umbrella in 2018 before selling CollegeHumor to then-chief creative officer Sam Reich in 2020. In 2023, Reich abandoned the CollegeHumor name. He said that by then, Dropout’s brand recognition had surpassed that of CollegeHumor.

Dropout has survived with a limited budget and staff by relying on “less expensive, more personality-based stuff,” Reich told Vulture in late 2023. The service is an unlikely success story in a streaming industry dominated by large corporations. IAC reportedly bought CollegeHumor for $26 million and sold it to Reich for no money. In late 2023, Reich told Variety that Dropout was “between seven and 10 times the size that we were when IAC dropped us, from an audience perspective.” At the time, Dropout’s subscriber count was in the “mid-hundreds of thousands,” according to Reich.

Focusing on improvisational laughs, Dropout’s energetic content forgoes the comedic comfort zones of predictable network sitcoms—and even some offbeat scripted originals. A biweekly (or better) release schedule keeps the fun flowing.

In 2023, Reich pointed to the potential for $1 price hikes “every couple of years.” But Dropout also appears to limit revenue goals, further differentiating it from other streaming services. In 2023, Reich told Vulture, “When we talk about growth, I really think there’s such a thing as being unhealthily ambitious. I don’t believe in unfettered capitalism. The question is, ‘How can we do this in such a way that we honor the work of everyone involved, we create work that we’re really proud of, and we continue to appeal to our audience first?'”

Midnight Pulp

Bruce Li doing a leaping kick in Fist of Fury. — Bruce Li in *Fist of Fury*. Credit: Fighting Cinema/YouTube

Mark this one under “guilty pleasures.”

Midnight Pulp isn’t for the faint of heart or people who consider movie watching a serious endeavor. It has a broad selection of outrageous content that often leans on exploitation films with cult followings, low budgets, and excessive, unrealistic, or grotesque imagery.

I first found Midnight Pulp as a free ad-supported streaming (FAST) channel built into my smart TV’s operating system. But it’s also available as a subscription-based on-demand service for $6 per month or $60 per year. I much prefer the random selection that Midnight Pulp’s FAST channel delivers. Unlike on Mubi, where you can peruse a bounty of little-known yet well-regarded titles, there’s a good reason you haven’t heard of much of the stuff on Midnight Pulp.

But as the service’s slogan (Stream Something Strange) and name suggest, Midnight Pulp has an unexpected, surreal way of livening up a quiet evening or dull afternoon. Its bold content often depicts a melodramatic snapshot of a certain aspect of culture from a specific time. Midnight Pulp introduced me to Class of 1984, for example, a movie featuring a young Michael J. Fox enrolled in a wild depiction of the ’80s public school system.

There’s also a robust selection of martial arts movies, including Bruce Li’s Fist of Fury (listed under the US release title Chinese Connection). It’s also where I saw Kung Fu Traveler, a delightful Terminator ripoff that introduced me to one of Keanu Reeves’ real-life pals, Tiger Chen. Midnight Pulp’s FAST channel is where I discovered one of the most striking horror series I’ve seen in years, Bloody Bites, an anthology series with an eerie, intimate, and disturbing tone that evolves with each episode. (Bloody Bites is an original series from horror streaming service ScreamBox.)

Los Angeles-based entertainment company Cineverse (formerly Cinedigm and Access IT Digital Media Inc.) owns Midnight Pulp and claims to have “over 150 million unique monthly users” and over 71,000 movies, shows, and podcasts across its various streaming services, including Midnight Pulp, ScreamBox, RetroCrush, and Fandor.

Many might stick their noses up at Midnight Pulp’s selection, and in many cases, they’d be right to do so. It isn’t always tasteful, but it’s never boring. If you’re feeling daring and open to shocking content worthy of conversation, give Midnight Pulp a try.

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

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The case for memes as a new form of comics

culture, Internet memes, memes, Science, sequential art / Beth Washington / July 30, 2025

Both comics and memes rely on the same interplay of visual and verbal elements for their humor.

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip

It’s undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an English professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.

“One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics,” Abate told Ars. “I’ve published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and various titles: everything from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts to The Far Side, to Little Lulu to Ziggy to The Family Circus. So I’ve been working on comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many years now.”

Her most recent book is 2024’s Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States, which Abate was researching when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. “I was reading a lot of single panel comics and sharing them with friends during the pandemic, and memes were something we were always sharing, too,” Abate said. “It occurred to me one day that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the single panel comics I’m sharing and the memes. In terms of how they function, how they operate, the connection of the verbal and the visual, there’s more continuity than there is difference.”

So Abate decided to approach the question more systematically. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 popular science book, The Selfish Gene, well before the advent of the Internet age. For Dawkins, it described a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of information”: ideas, catchphrases, catchy tunes, fashions, even arch building.

distraught woman pointing a finger and yelling, facing an image of a confused cat in front of a salad — Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp

In a 21st century context, “meme” refers to a piece of online content that spikes in popularity and gets passed from user to user, i.e., going viral. These can be single images remixed with tailored text, such as “Distracted Boyfriend,” “This Is Fine,” or “Batman Slapping Robin.” Or they can feature multiple panels, like “American Chopper.” Furthermore, “Memes can also be a gesture, they can be an activity, they can be a video like the Wednesday dance or the ice bucket challenge,” said Abate. “It’s become such a part of our lexicon that it’s hard to imagine a world without memes at this point.”

For Abate, Internet memes are clearly related to sequential art like comics, representing a new stage of evolution in the genre. In both cases, the visual and verbal elements work in tandem to produce the humor.

Granted, comic artists usually create both the image and the text, whereas memes adapt preexisting visuals with new text. Some might consider this poaching, but Abate points out that cartoonists like Charles Schulz have long used stencil templates (a static prefabricated element) to replicate images, a practice that is also used effectively in, say, Dinosaur Comics. And meme humor depends on people connecting the image to its origin rather than obscuring it. She compares the practice to sampling in music; the end result is still an original piece of art.

In fact, The New Yorker’s hugely popular cartoon caption contest—in which the magazine prints a single-panel drawing with no speech balloons or dialogue boxes and asks readers to supply their own verbal jokes—is basically a meme generator. “It’s seen more as a highbrow thing, crowdsourcing everybody’s wit,” said Abate. “But [the magazine supplies] the template image and then everybody puts in their own text or captions. They’re making memes. If they only published the winner, folks would be disappointed because the fun is seeing all the clever, funny things that people come up with.”

Memes both mirror and modify the comic genre. For instance, the online nature of memes can affect formatting. If there are multiple panels, those panels are usually arranged vertically rather than horizontally since memes are typically read by scrolling down one’s phone—like the “American Chopper” meme:

American Chopper meme with each frame representing a stage in the debate — Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip

Per Abate, this has the added advantage of forcing the reader to pause briefly to consider the argument and counter-argument, emphasizing that it’s an actual debate rather than two men simply yelling at one another. “If the panels were arranged horizontally and the guys were side by side in each other’s face, installments of ‘American Chopper’ would come across very differently,” she said.

A pad with infinite sheets

Scott McCloud is widely considered the leading theorist when it comes to the art of comics, and his hugely influential 2000 book, Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form, explores the boundless potential for digital comics, freed from the constraints of a printed page. He calls this aspect the “infinite canvas,” because cartoonists can now create works of any size or shape, even as tall as a mountain. Memes have endless possibilities of a different kind, per Abate.

“[McCloud] thinks of it very expansively: a single panel could be the size of a city block,” said Abate. “You could never do that with a book because how could you print the book? How could you hold the book? How could you read the book? How could you download the book on your Kindle? But when you’ve got a digital world, it could be a city block and you can explore it with your mouse and your cursor and your track pad and, oh, all the possibilities for storytelling and for the medium that will open up with this infinite canvas. There have been many places and titles where this has played out with digital comics.

“Obviously with a meme, they’re not the size of a city block,” she continued. “So it occurred to me that they are infinite, but almost like you’re peeling sheets off a pad and the pad just has an endless number of sheets. You can just keep redoing it, redo, redo, redo. That’s memes. They get revised and repurposed and re-imagined and redone and recirculated over and over and over again. The template gets used inexhaustibly, which is what makes them fun, what makes them go viral.”

comic frame showing batman slapping robin — Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp

Just what makes a good meme image? Abate has some thoughts about that, too. “It has to be not just the image, but the ability for the image to be paired with a caption, a text,” she said. “It has to lend itself to some kind of verbal element as well. And it also has to have some elasticity of being specific enough that it’s recognizable, but also being malleable enough that it can be adapted to different forms.”

In other words, a really good meme must be generalizable if it is to last longer than a few weeks. The recent kiss-cam incident at a Coldplay concert is a case in point. When a married tech CEO was caught embracing his company’s “chief people officer,” they quickly realized they were on the Jumbotron, panicked, and hid their faces—which only made it worse. The moment went viral and spawned myriad memes. Even the Phillies mascots got into the spirit, re-enacting the moment at a recent baseball game. But that particular meme might not have long-term staying power.

“It became a meme very quickly and went viral very fast,” said Abate. “I may be proved wrong, but I don’t think the Coldplay moment will be a meme that will be around a year from now. It’s commenting on a particular incident in the culture, and then the clock will tick, and folks will move on. Whereas something like ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ or ‘This is Fine’ has more staying power because it’s not tied to a particular incident or a particular scandal but can be applied to all kinds of political topics, pop culture events, and cultural experiences.”

black man stroking his chin, mouth partly open in surprise — Credit: Sean Carroll via imgflp

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Review: Fantastic Four: First Steps is the best film version so far

culture, film reviews, marvel studios, mcu, MCU Phase Six, The Fantastic Four: First Steps / Shannon Garcia / July 29, 2025

Shakman wanted a very 1960s aesthetic for his reboot, citing Kubrick films from that era as inspiration, right down to his choice of camera lenses. And the film definitely delivers on that score. The Four’s penthouse headquarters is pure midcentury modern, with Reed’s lab divided into three rooms differentiated by bright primary colors. Then there’s all that retrofuture technology: Johnny Storm records mysterious signals from space onto golden record platters and plays them on an old-school turntable, for example, and the team’s Fantasticar is straight out of sci-fi’s Golden Age.

And you couldn’t ask for a better main cast: Pascal, Kirby, Moss-Bachrach, and Quinn all have great chemistry and effectively convey the affectionate family dynamic that comprises the central theme of the film. That’s essential, particularly since we’ve mostly skipped the origin story; the characters are familiar, but this incarnation is not. They banter, they bicker, they have heart-to-hearts, and the inevitable tensions in Reed and Sue’s marriage that a new baby brings—occurring just as the Earth faces annihilation—feel entirely believable.

And then there are the cons, which boil down to a weak, predictable plot that jerks from one scene to the next with tenuous coherence and, shall we say, less than stellar dialogue. The actors deserved better, particularly Kirby, whose Sue Storm gives an inane rallying “speech” to the people of New York as Galactus approaches that makes no sense whatsoever. (The St. Crispin’s Day speech it is not.)

Kirby also has the unenviable task of portraying Sue giving birth in space, a scene that is just plain laughable. One doesn’t expect strict verisimilitude concerning the messier parts of birth, although Reed does briefly mention the challenges posed by zero gravity/warp speed. But it’s far too sanitized here. And spare a thought for poor Sue having to kick off the lower part of her space suit to deliver Franklin in front of her brother and her husband’s best friend.

In the end, though, the film’s shortcomings don’t matter because it’s still a fun, entertaining superhero saga. I give it a solid B—a decent start to the MCU’s Phase Six. Just try not to think too hard about the plot, sit back, and enjoy the ride.

Fantastic Four: First Steps is now playing in theaters.

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Peacemaker S2 trailer finds our anti-hero in a parallel world

culture, Entertainment, HBO Max, Peacemaker, san diego comic con, streaming television, Trailers / 9u50fv / July 28, 2025

HBO Max dropped the hotly anticipated full trailer for S2 of Peacemaker—James Gunn’s Emmy-nominated series spun off from his 2021 film, The Suicide Squad—at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, the eight-episode first season was set five months after the events of The Suicide Squad. Having survived a near-fatal shooting, Peacemaker—aka Christopher Smith—is recruited by the US government for a new mission: the mysterious Project Butterfly, led by a mercenary named Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji). The team also includes A.R.G.U.S. agent John Economos (Steve Agee) of the Belle Reve Penitentiary, National Security Agency agent and former Waller aide Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), and new team member Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks).

Project Butterfly turned out to be a mission to save Earth from an alien species of parasitic butterfly-like creatures who took over human bodies. The misfit members of the project eventually succeeded in defeating the butterflies in a showdown at a ranch, and even survived the carnage despite some severe injuries.

Cena, Brooks, Holland, Agee, and Stroma are all back for S2, along with Nhut Lee as Judomaster and Eagly, of course. Robert Patrick is also listed in the S2 cast, reprising his role as Chris’ father, Auggie. New cast members include Frank Grillo as Rick Flagg Sr. (Grillo voiced the role in the animated Creature Commandos), now head of A.R.G.U.S. and out to avenge his son’s death; Tim Meadows as A.R.G.U.S. agent Langston Fleury; Sol Rodriguez as Sasha Bordeaux; and Michael Rooker as Red St. Wild, described as Eagly’s “nemesis.”

The events of S1 played out within the old DCEU, while S2 takes place in the new DCU, but Gunn has said that those earlier events are nonetheless considered “canon,” apart from the cameos by DCEU Justice League members. S2 is part of Gunn’s “Gods and Monsters” slate; Cena’s Peacemaker even made a brief cameo in Superman. This time around, Chris will be struggling “to reconcile his past with his newfound sense of purpose while continuing to kick righteous evil-doer butt in his misguided quest for peace at any cost,” per the official synopsis.

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20 years after Katrina, New Orleans remembers

Climate science, culture, Disney Plus, documentaries, Hurricane Katrina, National Geographic, Natural disasters, Science / Kelly Newman / July 28, 2025

20 years ago, Ivor Van Heerden warned of impending disaster in New Orleans. Are his warnings still going unheeded?

A man is stranded on a rooftop in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Credit: Wickes Helmboldt

Next month marks the 20th anniversary of one of the most devastating natural disasters in US history: Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm that made landfall on August 29, 2005. The storm itself was bad enough, but the resulting surge of water caused havoc for New Orleans in particular when the city’s protective levees failed, flooding much of New Orleans and killing 1,392 people. National Geographic is marking the occasion with a new documentary series: Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time.

The five-part documentary is directed by Oscar nominee Traci A. Curry (Attica) and co-produced by Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media, in conjunction with Lightbox. The intent was to go beyond the headlines of yesteryear and re-examine the many systemic failures that occurred while also revealing “stories of survival, heroism, and resilience,” Proximity’s executive producers said in a statement. “It’s a vital historical record and a call to witness, remember and recon with the truth of Hurricane Katrina’s legacy.”

Race Against Time doesn’t just rehash the well-worn narrative of the disaster; it centers the voices of the people who were there on the ground: residents, first responders, officials, and so forth. Among those interviewed for the documentary is geologist/marine scientist Ivor Van Heerden, author of The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina: the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist (2006).

Around 1998, Van Heerden set up Louisiana State University’s (LSU) fledgling Hurricane Center with his colleague Marc Levitan, developing the first computer modeling efforts for local storm surges. They had a supercomputer for the modeling and LiDAR data for accurate digital elevation models, and since there was no way to share data among the five major parishes, they created a networked geographical information system GIS) to link them. Part of Van Heerden’s job involved driving all over New Orleans to inspect the levees, and he didn’t like what he saw: levees with big bows, sinking under their own weight, for example, and others with large cracks.

Van Heerden also participated in the 2004 Hurricane Pam mock scenario, designed as a test run for hurricane planning for the 13 parishes of southeastern Louisiana, including New Orleans. It was essentially a worst-case scenario for the conditions of Hurricane Betsy, assuming that the whole city would be flooded. “We really had hoped that the exercise would wake everybody up, but quite honesty we were laughed at a few times during the exercise,” Van Heerden told Ars. He recalled telling one woman from FEMA that they should be thinking about using tents to house evacuees: “She said, ‘Americans don’t live in tents.'”

Stormy weather

Mayor Ray Nagin orders a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. ABC News Videosource

The tens of thousands of stranded New Orleans residents in the devastating aftermath of Katrina could have used those tents. Van Heerden still vividly recalls his frustration over the catastrophic failures that occurred on so many levels. “We knew the levees had failed, we knew that there had been catastrophic structural failure, but nobody wanted to hear it initially,” he said. He and his team were out in the field in the immediate aftermath, measuring water levels and sampling the water for pathogens and toxic chemicals. Naturally they came across people in need of rescue and were able to radio locations to the Louisiana State University police.

“An FBI agent told me, ‘If you find any bodies, tie them with a piece of string to something so they don’t float away and give us the lats and logs,'” Van Heerden recalled. The memories haunt him still. Some of the bodies were drowned children, which he found particularly devastating since he had a young daughter of his own at the time.

How did it all go so wrong? After 1965’s Hurricane Betsy flooded most of New Orleans, the federal government started a levee building program with the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in charge. “Right at the beginning, the Corps used very old science in terms of determining how high to make the levees,” said Van Heerden. “They had access to other very good data, but they chose not to use it for some reason. So they made the levees way too low.”

“They also ignored some of their own geotechnical science when designing the levees,” he continued. “Some were built in sand with very shallow footings, so the water just went underneath and blew out the levee. Some were built on piles of earth, again with very shallow footings, and they just fell over. The 17th Street Canal, the whole levee structure actually slid 200 feet.”

There had also been significant alterations to the local landscape since Hurricane Betsy. In the past, the wetlands, especially the cypress tree swamps, provided some protection from storm surges. In 1992, for example, the Category 5 Hurricane Andrew made landfall on Atchafalaya Delta, where healthy wetlands reduced its energy by 50 percent between the coast and Morgan City, per Van Heerden. But other wetlands in the region changed drastically with the dredging of a canal called the Mississippi Gulf Outlet, running from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of Mexico.

“It was an open conduit for surge to get into New Orleans,” said Van Heerden. “The saltwater got into the wetlands and destroyed it, especially the cypress trees. This canal had opened up, in some places, to five times its width, allowing waves to build on the surface. The earthen levees weren’t armored in any way, so they just collapsed. They blew apart. That’s why parts of St. Bernard saw a wave of water 10 feet high.”

Just trying to survive

Stranded New Orleans residents gather in a shelter during Hurricane Katrina. KTVT-TV

Add in drastic cuts to FEMA under then-President George W. Bush—who inherited “a very functional, very well-organized” version of the department from his predecessor, Bill Clinton, per Van Heerden—and the stage was set for just such a disaster like Katrina’s harrowing aftermath. It didn’t help that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin delayed issuing a mandatory evacuation order until some 24 hours before the storm hit, making it much more difficult for residents to follow those orders in a timely fashion.

There were also delays in conveying the vital information that the levees had failed. “We now know that the USACE had a guy in a Coast Guard helicopter who actually witnessed the London Avenue Canal failure, at 9: 06 AM on Day One,” said Van Heerden. “That guy went to Baton Rouge and he didn’t tell a soul other than the Corps. So the Corps knew very early what was gong on and they did nothing about it. They had a big megaphone and millions of dollars in public relations and kept saying it was an act of God. It took until the third week of September for us to finally get the media to realize that this was a catastrophic failure of the levees.”

The USACE has never officially apologized for what happened, per Van Heerden. “Not one of them lost their job after Katrina,” he said. But LSU fired Van Heerden in 2009, sparking protest from faculty and students. The university gave no reason for his termination, but it was widely speculated at the time that Van Heerden’s outspoken criticism of the USACE was a factor, with LSU fearing it might jeopardize funding. Van Heerden, sued and the university settled. But he hasn’t worked in academia since and now consults with various nonprofit organizations on flooding and storm surge impacts.

The widespread reports of looting and civil war further exacerbated the situation as survivors swarmed the Superdome and the nearby convention center. The city had planned for food and water for 12,000 people housed at Superdome for 48 hours. The failure of the levees swelled that number to 30,000 people stranded for several days, waiting in vain for the promised cavalry to arrive.

Van Heerden acknowledges the looting but insists most of that was simply due to people trying to survive in the absence of any other aid. “How did they get water on the interstate?” said Van Heerden. “They went to a water company, broke in and hot-wired a truck, then went around and gave water to everyone.”

As for the widespread belief outside the city that there was unchecked violence and a brewing civil war, “That doesn’t happen in a catastrophe,” he said. The rumors were driven by reports of shots being fired but, “there are a lot of hunters in Louisiana, and the hunter’s SOS is to fire three shots in rapid succession,” he said. “One way to say ‘I’m here!’ is to fire a gun. But everybody bought into that civil war nonsense.”

“Another ticking time bomb”

LSU Hurricane Center co-founder Ivor Van Heerden working at his desk in 2005. Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The levees have since been rebuilt, and Van Heerden acknowledges that some of the repairs are robust. “They used more concrete, they put in protection pads and deeper footings,” he said. “But they didn’t take into account—and they admitted this a few years ago—subsidence in Louisiana, which is two to two-and-a-half feet every century. And they didn’t take into account global climate change and the associated rising sea levels. Within the next 70 years, sea level in Louisiana is going to rise four feet over millions of square miles. If you’ve got a levee with a [protective] marsh in front of it, before too long that marsh is no longer going to exist, so the water is going to move further and further in-shore.”

Then there’s the fact that hurricanes these days are now bigger in diameter than they were 30 years ago, thanks to the extra heat. “They get up to a Category 5 a lot quicker,” said Van Heerden. “The frequency also seems to be creeping up. It’s now four times as likely you will experience hurricane-force winds.” Van Heerden has run storm surge models assuming a 3-foot rise in sea level. “What we saw was the levees wouldn’t be high enough in New Orleans,” he said. “I hate to say it, but it looks like another ticking time bomb. Science is a quest for the truth. You ignore the science at your folly.”

Assuming there was sufficient public and political will, how should the US be preparing for future tropical storms? “In many areas we need to retreat,” said Van Heerden. “We need to get the houses and buildings out and rebuild the natural vegetation, rebuild the wetlands. On the Gulf Coast, sea level is really going to rise, and we need to rethink our infrastructure. This belief that, ‘Oh, we’re going to put up a big wall’—in the long run it’s not going to work. The devastation from tropical storms is going to spread further inland through very rapid downpours, and that’s something we’re going to have to plan mitigations for. But I just don’t see any movement in that direction.”

Perhaps documentaries like Race Against Time can help turn the tide; Van Heerden certainly hopes so. He also hopes the documentary can correct several public misconceptions of what happened—particularly the tendency to blame the New Orleans residents trying to survive in appalling conditions, rather than the government that failed them.

“I think this is a very good documentary in showing the plight of the people and what they suffered, which was absolutely horrendous,” said Van Heerden. “I hope people watching will realize that yes, this is a piece of our history, but sometimes the past is the key to the present. And ask themselves, ‘Is this a foretaste of what’s to come?'”

Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time premieres on July 27, 2025, on National Geographic. It will be available for streaming starting July 28, 2025, on Disney+ and Hulu.

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