Milestones: December 3, 2023

December 3, 2023 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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FROM SLEEPER TO BEST PICTURE — THE MOVIE ‘ROCKY’ WAS RELEASED TO GENERAL AUDIENCES ON DEC. 3, 1976 (after a soft premiere in New York City two weeks earlier). Sylvester Stallone was both the writer and the star in this film about a scrappy but hard-working boxer who wanted his chance at fame. Although it was a low-budget film, “Rocky” became a box office success and wound up winning the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1977 Academy Awards, as well as Oscars for Directing and Film Editing.

John G. Avildsen, who won the Academy Award for Best Director of “Rocky,” went on to direct the first three “Karate Kid” movies during the 1980s.

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BOTH BLANCHES WON ‘BEST ACTRESS’ — THE BROADWAY PRODUCTION, “A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE’ PREMIERED ON DEC. 3, 1947, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Theatrical newcomer Marlon Brando played the crass and selfish Stanley Kowalski, and Jessica Tandy played Blanche DuBois, his sister-in-law, a faded and rather destitute Southern belle. “Streetcar,” set in New Orleans’ Old Quarter, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its playwright, Tennessee Williams, who had already garnered success for “The Glass Menagerie.” “Streetcar” ran for two years and 855 performances, according to the Library of Congress archives online.

Jessica Tandy won a Tony Award for Best Actress. However, she did not reprise her role in the film version. Vivien Leigh (who had played Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind”) played Blanche in the movie, winning an Oscar for Best Actress.

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CRYPTIC ACRONYMS AND GREEN BUBBLES — THE FIRST SMS text message in history was sent on Dec. 3, 1992, when a 22-year-old engineer named Neil Papworth, from his computer, typed in “Merry Christmas” to a colleague via the Vodafone network. At the time, Papworth was part of a team developing a “Short Message Service Centre” (SMSC) for the British telecommunications company Vodafone UK, with the goal of developing a paging service. Papworth’s friend called him to say he had received the text message; he couldn’t answer in the same manner because cell phones could not yet transmit reply messages. A year later, Nokia introduced its first cellphone with an SMS feature, but with limitations. The character limit birthed an idiom of acronyms and slang, such as “IDK” (for “I don’t know”), or LOL (now a household phrase).

A NY Times tech column, published earlier this week on Nov. 29, 2023, dealt with the problem of “Green Bubble Shaming.” Lead tech writer Brian X. Chen focused on finding remedies for the“dreaded green bubble” that appears when an Android user texts an iPhone user. Considered inferior, the “green bubble” has become a tool for bullying kids whose phones lack the “blue” bubble that iPhones display, with more emoji offerings and other technology.

See previous milestones, here.