title: Rocky Balboa (film)

text: The film was an unexpected box office success and exceeded studio expectations grossing over three times the opening night estimates of (at best) $2,000,000 and doing so despite a harsh spell of winter weather. The film not only finished third in its opening weekend, grossing $12,540,000, but eventually became Stallone's most successful starring role since 1993's "Cliffhanger" and the sixth highest grossing boxing film of all time, topped only by the first "Rocky" through "Rocky IV" and Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby", and was nominated for an MTV award for best on screen duo. Total U.S. box office gross receipts were $70,269,899 while the international gross stands at $85,959,151 making for a total worldwide gross of $156,229,050.


title: Rocky Balboa (film)

text: As of August 2020, the film had a score of 77% on Rotten Tomatoes based on a sample of 183 reviews, with an average score of 6.5/10. The site's consensus read, "Implausible but entertaining and poignant, "Rocky Balboa" finds the champ in fighting form for the first time in years." On Metacritic as of August 2020, it had a weighted average score of 63 out of 100 based on 36 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "B+" on a scale of "A+" to "F".


title: Rocky Balboa (film)

text: On the television show "Ebert & Roeper", both Richard Roeper and guest reviewer Aisha Tyler gave the film a "thumbs up" rating. Among other positive reviews were from "Variety", David Edelstien of "New York Magazine", Ethan Alter of "Premiere Magazine", Victoria Alexander of Filmsinreview.com, Jeanne Aufmuth of "Palo Alto Weekly", Brett Buckalew of "Filmstew.com", "The Hollywood Reporter", and Owen Gleiberman of "Entertainment Weekly".


title: Rocky Balboa (film)

text: Kenneth Turan of the "Los Angeles Times" criticized the film's premise as implausible and derivative, and the plot development as cursory, while Colm Andrew of the "Manx Independent" said the film "captures the look and feel of the first Rocky but becomes too much of a sentimental homage" and overall "there is little point in joining Stallone on this ultimately dull nostalgia trip".


title: Rocky Balboa (film)

text: Stallone was quoted as having told reporters that he would rather "do something that he enjoyed badly, than feel bad about not doing something he enjoyed."


title: Rocky Balboa (film)

text: The film was greeted warmly by the majority of the boxing community, with many experts believing the Rocky character is still a key symbol of the sport and that the boxing scenes were the most realistic of any film. On the DVD, Stallone attributes this to the fact that he used realistic sound-effects (the previous installments had become notorious for their unrealistic and loud sounds of punches landing) and the fact that both Stallone and Tarver threw real punches at each other.


title: Rocky Balboa (film)

text: In 2015, "Rocky Balboa" was followed by the sequel "Creed" taking place nine years after the events in "Rocky Balboa".


title: Rocky Balboa (film)

text: On December 13, 2006, it was officially announced by Ubisoft and MGM that a new "Rocky" video game, titled "Rocky Balboa", was to be made exclusively for the PlayStation Portable handheld console. It was released on March 20, 2007, to coincide with the Blu-ray and DVD release.


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Rachel Emily Nichols is an American actress and model. Nichols began modeling while attending Columbia University in New York City in the late 1990s, and transitioned into acting by the early 2000s; she had a part in the romantic drama "Autumn in New York" (2000) and a one-episode role in the fourth season of "Sex and the City" (2002). Her first major role was in the comedy "" (2003), and she went on to achieve wider recognition playing Rachel Gibson in the final season of the action television series "Alias" (2005–2006) and for her role in the horror film "The Amityville Horror" (2005).


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Nichols obtained her first starring film role in the thriller "P2" (2007) and found mainstream success with the science-fiction action films "Star Trek" (2009) and "" (2009). Her other notable films include "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2" (2008), "Conan the Barbarian" (2011), "Alex Cross" (2012), "Raze" (2013), and "Inside" (2016). Nichols starred in the television series "Continuum" (2012–2015), and played notable roles in the sixth season of "Criminal Minds" (2010–2011), the fourth seasons of both "Chicago Fire" (2015–2016) and "The Librarians" (2017–2018), and five episodes as a Gestapo officer named Martha on "The Man in the High Castle".


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Rachel Nichols was born in Augusta, Maine, to Jim, a schoolteacher, and Alison Nichols. She attended Cony High School, where she competed in the high jump. Nichols said in an interview that, when she was in high school, her mother would euphemistically refer to her as "a late bloomer", "which meant that I had uncontrollable arms and legs, I had very long appendages. It took several years of very highly structured dance classes for me to be able to control myself."


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Upon graduating in 1998, she enrolled at Columbia University in New York City, aiming for a career as a Wall Street analyst. She was noticed by a modeling agent during lunch one day and was invited to work in Paris; she eventually paid her tuition with the proceeds from her modeling work. She worked on advertising campaigns for Abercrombie & Fitch, Guess, and L'Oréal; she also hosted several MTV specials. Nichols studied economics and psychology, as well as drama, graduating from Columbia in 2003 with a double major in mathematics and economics. Nichols said in September 2008 that "the modeling shoes have been hung up."


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Nichols had done commercial work and had a bit part as a model in the romantic drama film "Autumn in New York" (2000) when her modeling agent helped her get a one-episode role in the fourth season of "Sex and the City" (2002). She later said she had "never really done a proper audition before", and added that "I had such fun [filming on set], that day actually made me want to pursue [acting] more seriously." Later that year she was cast in her first major film role as Jessica, a dogged student newspaper reporter, in "" (2003). Although the film was panned by critics, making it was a learning experience for Nichols. She said, "I was a sponge for the entire time I was in Atlanta [during filming] and freely admitted that I had no idea what was going on. I had never done a big film before, I had never been the lead in a film before and any advice anyone wanted to give me, I was more than willing to take." The following year, Nichols played a member of a high school debate team in the independent film "Debating Robert Lee" (2004) and had a two-episode role in the crime drama television series "Line of Fire" (2004), which was cancelled after 11 of 13 produced episodes were broadcast. By August 2004, she was cast in supporting roles in the horror films "The Amityville Horror" (2005) and "The Woods" (2006).


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: In late February 2004, Nichols was cast in a starring role in a then-untitled drama pilot for the Fox Broadcasting Company (Fox). According to "Variety", her character was to be "a DEA agent who goes undercover at a high school". Todd and Glenn Kessler were developing the series, ultimately titled "The Inside". The pilot they produced did not satisfy studio executives, however, and Tim Minear was brought in to create a new pilot for the series in late September 2004, replacing the Kesslers as executive producer and showrunner. "The Inside" was originally supposed to air midseason, but the new pilot itself was reshot and the series was pushed back. The new concept made Nichols' character a rookie FBI agent assigned to the FBI's Los Angeles Violent Crimes Unit. The series premiered in June 2005 and critical reception was mixed; it had been scheduled opposite the popular "Dancing with the Stars" on ABC, and due to low ratings six of the 13 produced episodes were aired. It was not picked up for further episodes.


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Following "The Inside", Nichols found work on the fifth season of the serial action series "Alias" in 2005, being cast that July. Nichols starred as Rachel Gibson, a computer expert who thought she was working for the CIA when in fact she was working for a dangerous criminal organization—a situation similar to that of the series' main character Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) in the first season. Discovering the truth, Gibson joins the real CIA and becomes Bristow's protégée. Of working on "Alias", Nichols said that "to say it's the nicest set on the planet is an understatement". Her role involved multiple fight sequences, as did Garner's. Nichols worked with Garner's personal trainer; she said she "already knew that [Garner's] job was extremely hard. But I didn't know how difficult it was until I started training for just one fight." Nichols was being groomed to replace Garner as the main character due to the latter's pregnancy, which had been written into the storyline. But "Alias" was canceled in November 2005, making its fifth season its final. "I think everybody knew that the show wouldn't work without Jennifer", Nichols said, "But still, they were grooming me, so it was heartbreaking when it happened."


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: In 2005, Nichols played a brief role in the romantic drama "Shopgirl" and played a more notable role as a babysitter in "The Amityville Horror". For the latter, she was nominated for the Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Scream Scene and the MTV Movie Award for Best Frightened Performance. She later revealed that she almost did not audition for the film due to her fear of dogs. "[Producer] Michael Bay has these gigantic [dogs]. [...] And, when I went to audition for "The Amityville Horror", I went into his offices and literally these three huge dogs were there, and I almost turned around. I was like, 'No, I'm not going to read for this film.' I actually used the dogs in my audition to think of what would scare me the most." "The Amityville Horror" received generally negative reception from critics, but was a commercial success.


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: "The Woods", which had been shelved for around 18 months, was released directly-to-DVD in October 2006, to a positive critical response. Nichols had a small part in the drama film "Resurrecting the Champ" (2007), playing the assistant to a sportswriter (Josh Hartnett) who believes he has found a former boxing legend (Samuel L. Jackson) living homeless on the streets. Also that year, Nichols had a bit part in the fact-based political drama "Charlie Wilson's War" (2007) and was cast in a new science fiction drama television series "Them", which was ultimately not picked up by Fox.


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Her first starring film role was in the 2007 horror–thriller "P2", as a businesswoman who becomes trapped inside a public parking garage with a deranged security guard. About the dress her character wears for much of the film, Nichols said, "When I read the script originally, it wasn't a dress, it was a small nightgown with no bra or underwear. Then I read the first scene where she gets wet, and I went: 'OK, this has got to be altered! Nichols said in an interview that among the rules established in her contract were: "I will not get wet and show nipples" in addition to no nudity. A bra was sewn into the "Marilyn Monroe dress" she wore in the film. She said, "I wasn't going to run around for two months without a bra, I thought that was inappropriate. But in place of the nipples there's clearly a lot of cleavage. So we made a compromise." "P2" was generally disliked by critics and flopped at the box office. Reviewer James Berardinelli said that her performance was "admirable, although one wonders whether she was cast more for her physical assets than her acting ability." John Anderson of "Variety" wrote that "Nichols is in territory well trod over the years by everyone from Fay Wray and Grace Kelly to Heather Langenkamp, the terrified but gutsy heroine, who in this case has been chloroformed and put into a sheer white evening dress by her abductor—who must have anticipated that his captive would try to escape in an elevator, which he could then fill with water. (Nichols' considerable physical attributes, henceforth, seem to occupy most of the screen.) She's sympathetic, hysterical when required and likeable."


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Nichols had a supporting role in "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2" (2008), playing a jealous friend of America Ferrera's character. Overall, the film was well received by critics. Roger Ebert commented that Nichols as her character Julia "proves a principle that should be in the Little Movie Glossary: If a short, curvy, sun-kissed heroine [Ferrera] has a tall, thin blond as a roommate, that blond is destined to be a bitch. No way around it." Stephen Holden, writing for "The New York Times", similarly said, "It falls to Ms. Nichols to play the movie's designated blond baddie, a cold, arrogant vixen who tries to undermine [Ferrera's character's] triumphs in romance and onstage." Nichols was cast in "Star Trek" (2009) in November 2007, but due to the project's secrecy her role was initially unknown even to her; she said that month she did not even know her character's name. It was speculated that she would play Janice Rand, but she would actually play an Orion cadet at Starfleet Academy.


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Nichols was cast as Shana "Scarlett" O'Hara in the live-action film adaptation of the "G.I. Joe" franchise "" (2009) in late 2007. She later said that she accepted director Stephen Sommers' offer for the role without having read the actual script. "I'd heard from other people that the script was quite good. And then when I finally got to read it myself ... I really, really liked it ... I liked that there were two kick-ass female roles. And I liked the fact that it wasn't just a big action movie ... And there was comedy in it. I was genuinely really happily surprised when I read the script." She put on approximately of muscle for the role and trained in mixed martial arts with co-star Sienna Miller for some of the film's action sequences. Nichols was burned by a flame during the filming of a fight scene with Miller. Like "The Amityville Horror", "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" was not well received by most critics, but performed well at the box office. Richard Corliss of "Time" wrote that Nichols had "an appealing manner and comely biceps" as Scarlett O'Hara and took notice of her "savory girl fight with Sienna Miller, as the mostly villainous Baroness." After "G.I. Joe", Nichols' next project was the horror film "For Sale by Owner", where she played the half of a newly wed couple buying a house with a secret past. The film only received a direct-to-DVD release.


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Nichols starred as a police detective assigned to investigate the murder of a young boy in the small-scale crime drama "Meskada" (2010), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and received a limited theatrical release in North America. In the 3-D sword and sorcery film "Conan the Barbarian", a reimagining of the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name. Nichols starred as a master of martial arts, a priestess, and the love interest of the titular character. She performed her own stunts in the high-stakes action scenes and fight sequences, but a double was used for a sex scene with co-star Jason Momoa. Filming occurred between March and July 2010 in Bulgaria, and "Conan" was released on August 19, 2011. Budgeted at US$90million, the film received negative reviews, and only grossed US$48.8 worldwide. "Boston Globe" felt that Nichols portrayed her "pure-blooded innocent" character with the "enthusiasm of a bored office receptionist".


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Nichols first guest starred in three episodes of the CBS television series "Criminal Minds" and was then promoted as a series regular. Her role was Ashley Seaver, an FBI cadet assigned to the BAU. The casting choice came amid uproar from the series' fanbase as she was brought in to replace exiting actresses A.J. Cook and Paget Brewster. However, as the season progressed, viewers eventually warmed to the character. "It just kind of worked. It was a long process," she said. It was eventually announced that Nichols had been let go from the show. Nichols next starred in the independent romantic comedy "A Bird of the Air" (2011) as "a librarian who joins a highway patrolman to uncover the mysteries behind the cryptic sayings spoken by an ancient parrot." She described the production as a "quirky, edgy love story" and felt that her part was a "departure from some of the roles I've been offered". The film received a limited theatrical release and a mixed critical response. "The New York Times" remarked that the actress "is consistently appealing in the kind of role Zooey Deschanel has pretty much cornered", while the "Village Voice" found her character to be a "grating twit".


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: In "Continuum", a Canadian science fiction TV series, Nichols starred as a police officer against a group of rebels from the year 2077 who time-travel to Vancouver in the year 2012. The series premiered on Showcase on May 27, 2012, and its first episode became the highest-rated episode in the network's history. "Continuum" ran for four seasons until October 9, 2015, and earned Nichols a Constellation Award and two Saturn Award nominations for Best Actress on Television. Nichols starred opposite Tyler Perry in the thriller "Alex Cross" (2012), as the blighted colleague of a psychologist and police lieutenant. Like "Conan", her previous wide release, the film garnered negative reviews, and made a lackluster US$34.6million worldwide.


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: In the independent exploitation film "Raze" (2013), she appeared opposite Zoë Bell as women forced to fight against each other for the twisted entertainment of the wealthy elite. Nichols is credited as an executive producer in the film, and was drawn to the project for its female "empowering" message, remarking: "Give us a challenge and we'll meet it. We're stronger than you think we are. I loved that about it. That was what drew me to it and that's what had always been promised". "Raze" premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and received a limited release in NYC and Los Angeles. She next starred with Nicolas Cage in the action thriller "Rage" (2014), as the wife of a reformed criminal seeking his own brand of justice after their daughter gets kidnapped. The film was released for selected theaters and VOD. In 2014, she made a one-episode appearance in the Lifetime series "Witches of East End" and debuted in a recurring arc in USA Network's "Rush". The following year, she obtained a recurring role as a "problem employee at the law firm she works at" in the fourth season of "Chicago Fire".


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Nichols starred in the science-fiction thriller "Pandemic" (2016) as a doctor who leads a group to find survivors of a worldwide pandemic. The film was released for selected theaters and VOD, and in its review, "The Hollywood Reporter" remarked that Nichols "attempts to adopt an attitude somewhere between shell-shocked survivor and sympathetic physician, but doesn't manage to fulfill the role's potential". In "Inside" (2016), a Spanish-American remake of the 2007 French horror film of the same name, Nichols took on the starring role of a pregnant woman accosted in her home by an unknown woman who intends to steal her baby. The film was released in Spain cinemas on July 28, 2017, where it made US$557,083, and in the United States on January 12, 2018. Nichols next obtained another recurring role on television as a former guardian who has been thrust back five centuries into the past to finally move forward, in the fourth season of the TNT fantasy series "The Librarians". For her four-episode performance, she received a Saturn Award nomination for Best Guest Starring Role on Television.


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: In 2019, Nichols had a five-episode run as Martha Stroud, a Gestapo bodyguard, on the fourth season of the alternate history series "The Man in the High Castle".


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: Nichols married film producer Scott Stuber on July 26, 2008, in Aspen, Colorado. Nichols allowed her hair to return to its natural blond color for the ceremony, as it had been dyed red for her consecutive roles in "Star Trek" and "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra". They were working on building a home in Cabo San Lucas shortly after their honeymoon. Seven months later, in February 2009, Nichols and Stuber separated due to irreconcilable differences.


title: Rachel Nichols (actress)

text: On December 30, 2013, Nichols confirmed her engagement to Michael Kershaw, a real estate developer. They married in September 2014.


title: MythBusters

text: MythBusters is a science entertainment television program, developed by Peter Rees and produced by Australia's Beyond Television Productions. The series premiered on the Discovery Channel on January 23, 2003. It was broadcast internationally by many television networks and other Discovery channels worldwide. The show's original hosts, special effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, used elements of the scientific method to test the validity of rumors, myths, movie scenes, adages, Internet videos, and news stories. The show was one of the most popular on Discovery Channel, being preceded only by "How It's Made" and "Daily Planet", both in Canada.


title: MythBusters

text: Filmed in San Francisco and edited in Artarmon, New South Wales, "MythBusters" aired 282 total episodes before its cancellation at the end of the 2016 season in March. Planning and some experimentation took place at Hyneman's workshops in San Francisco; experiments requiring more space or special accommodations were filmed on location, typically around the San Francisco Bay Area and other locations in northern California, going to other states or even countries on occasion when required.


title: MythBusters

text: During the second season, members of Savage's and Hyneman's behind-the-scenes team were organized into a second team of MythBusters ("The Build Team"). They generally tested myths separately from the main duo and operated from another workshop. This arrangement continued until August 2014, when it was announced at the end of "Plane Boarding" that Tory Belleci, Kari Byron, and Grant Imahara would be leaving the show. Savage and Hyneman subsequently hosted the final two seasons alone. On October 21, 2015, it was announced that "MythBusters" would air its 14th and final season in 2016. The show aired its final episode with the original cast on March 6, 2016.


title: MythBusters

text: On November 15, 2017, sister network Science Channel revived the series with new hosts Jon Lung and Brian Louden, who were selected via the competition spin-off "". The revival was filmed in Santa Clarita and on location in other parts of Southern California, airing for two seasons that lasted until 2018. Savage would later return in "MythBusters Jr.", a spin-off featuring children.


title: MythBusters

text: The most recent iteration of the franchise, "Motor Mythbusters", was produced by Beyond Television and aired on MotorTrend in 2021. Belleci returned for the series, and was joined by engineer Bisi Ezerioha and mechanic Faye Hadley. The series focused on testing myths and urban legends about automobiles.


title: MythBusters

text: The series concept was developed for the Discovery Channel as "Tall Tales or True" by Australian writer and producer Peter Rees of Beyond Productions in 2002. Discovery rejected the proposal initially because they had just commissioned a series on the same topic. Rees refined the pitch to focus on testing key elements of the stories rather than just retelling them. Discovery agreed to develop and co-produce a three-episode series pilot. Jamie Hyneman was one of a number of special-effects artists who were asked to prepare a casting video for network consideration. Rees had interviewed him previously for a segment of the popular science series "Beyond 2000" about the British–American robot combat television series "Robot Wars". Adam Savage, who had worked with Hyneman in commercials and on the robot combat television series "BattleBots", was asked by Hyneman to help co-host the show because, according to Savage, Hyneman thought himself too uninteresting to host the series on his own.


title: MythBusters

text: During July 2006, an edited 30-minute version of "MythBusters" began airing on BBC Two in the UK. The episodes shown on the European Discovery Channel sometimes include extra scenes not shown in the United States version (some of these scenes are included eventually in "specials", such as "MythBusters Outtakes").


title: MythBusters

text: The 14th season, which premiered in January 2016, was the final season for the series with Savage and Hyneman.


title: MythBusters

text: Adam Savage returned to TV with the show "MythBusters Jr.", without his original co-host Jamie Hyneman, but with a cast of teenagers, hence the name. The show debuted on the Science Channel on January 2, 2019 with rebroadcasts every Saturday morning on Discovery, as well as international broadcasts.


title: MythBusters

text: Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman are the original MythBusters, and initially explored all the myths of the series using their combined experience with special effects. The two worked at Hyneman's effects workshop, M5 Industries; they made use of his staff, who often worked off-screen, with Hyneman and Savage usually shown doing most of the work at the shop. The show is narrated by Robert Lee, though in some regions, his voice is replaced by a local narrator.


title: MythBusters

text: As the series progressed, members of Hyneman's staff were introduced and began to appear regularly in episodes. Three such members, artist Kari Byron, builder Tory Belleci, and metal-worker Scottie Chapman, were organized as a second team of MythBusters during the second season, dubbed the "Build Team". After Chapman left the show during the third season, Grant Imahara, a colleague of Hyneman's, was hired to provide the team with his electrical and robotics experience. Byron went on maternity leave in mid-2009, with her position on the Build Team temporarily filled by Jessi Combs, best known for co-hosting Spike's "Xtreme 4x4". Byron returned in the third episode of 2010 season. The Build Team worked at its own workshop, called M7, investigating separate myths from the original duo. Each episode typically alternated between the two teams covering different myths. During the Build Team's tenure, Belleci was the only member to appear in every myth that the team tested. At the end of the 2014 season finale "Plane Boarding", Savage and Hyneman announced that Byron, Belleci, and Imahara would not be returning in the 2015 season. This was reportedly over salary negotiations due to the rising cost of five hosts. Hyneman and Savage returned to being the sole hosts. Byron, Belleci, and Imahara went on to host Netflix's "White Rabbit Project".


title: MythBusters

text: The series had two interns, dubbed "Mythterns": Discovery Channel contest winner Christine Chamberlain and viewer building contest-winner Jess Nelson. During the first season, the program featured segments with folklorist Heather Joseph-Witham, who explained the origins of certain myths, and other people who had first-hand experience with the myths being tested, but those elements were phased out early in the series. The MythBusters commonly consulted experts for myths or topics for which they needed assistance. These topics included firearms, for which they mostly consulted Lt. Al Normandy of the South San Francisco Police Department, and explosives, for which they consulted retired FBI explosives expert Frank Doyle and Sgt. J.D. Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff's Office. The MythBusters often asked other people, such as those supplying the equipment being tested, what they knew about the myth under investigation. When guests were on the show, the MythBusters generally consulted them or included them in the experiments.


title: MythBusters

text: No consistent system was used for organizing MythBusters episodes into seasons. The program has never followed a typical calendar of on- and off-air periods. The official "MythBusters" website lists episodes by year. However, Discovery sells DVD sets for "seasons", which sometimes follow the calendar year and sometimes do not. In addition, Discovery and retail stores also sell "collections" which divide up the episodes in a different way; each collection has about 10 or 12 episodes from various seasons.


title: MythBusters

text: Each "MythBusters" episode focuses typically on two or more popular beliefs, Internet rumors, or other myths. Many of the myths are on mechanical effects as portrayed in live-action films and television of fictional incidents. The list of myths tested by the series is compiled from many sources, including the personal experiences of cast and crew, as well as fan suggestions, such as those posted on the Discovery Channel online MythBusters forums. Occasionally, episodes are produced in which some or all of the myths are related by theme, such as pirates or sharks, and occasionally these are dubbed as "[Theme] Special" episodes. As of May 2009, four myths have required such extensive preparation and testing that they had entire episodes devoted solely to them, and four specials have been double-length. Several episodes (including the 2006 Holiday Special) have included the building of Rube Goldberg machines. Before a myth is introduced by the hosts, a myth-related drawing is made on a blueprint. After the hosts introduce the myth, a comical video explaining the myth is usually shown.


title: MythBusters

text: The MythBusters typically test myths in a two-step process. In early episodes, the steps were described as "replicate the circumstances, then duplicate the results" by Savage. This means that first the team attempts to recreate the circumstances that the myth alleges, to determine whether the alleged result occurs; if that fails, they attempt to expand the circumstances to the point that will cause the described result, which often reveals that the claims of the myth are objectively ridiculous or impossible to achieve without specialized training or equipment. Occasionally, the team (usually Savage and Hyneman) holds a friendly competition between themselves to see which of them can devise a more successful solution to recreating the results. This is most common with myths involving building an object that can accomplish a goal (for example, rapidly cooling a beer, or finding a needle in a haystack).


title: MythBusters

text: While the team obeys no specific formula in terms of physical procedure, most myths involve construction of various objects to help test the myth. They use their functional workshops to construct whatever is needed, often including mechanical devices and sets to simulate the circumstances of the myth. Human actions are often simulated by mechanical means to increase safety, and to achieve consistency in repeated actions. Methods for testing myths are usually planned and executed in a manner to produce visually dramatic results, which generally involves explosions, fires, or vehicle crashes. Thus, myths or tests involving explosives, firearms and vehicle collisions are relatively common.


title: MythBusters

text: Tests are sometimes confined to the workshop, but often require the teams to be outside. Much of the outdoor testing during early seasons took place in the parking lot of M5, and occasionally M6 and M7. A cargo container in the M7 parking lot commonly serves as an isolation room for dangerous myths, with the experiment being triggered from outside. However, budget increases have permitted more frequent travel to other locations in San Francisco and around the Bay Area. Common filming locations around the Bay Area include decommissioned (closed) military facilities (such as Naval Air Station Alameda, Naval Air Station Moffett Field, Concord Naval Weapons Station, Naval Station Treasure Island, Marin Headlands, Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, and Hamilton Air Force Base, and abandoned base housing at Marina, California's former Fort Ord), and the Alameda County Sheriff's facility in Dublin, California, especially the firing range, emergency-vehicles operation course, and bomb range. Occasionally, mainly for special episodes, production is out of state, or even out of the country.


title: MythBusters

text: Results are measured in a manner scientifically appropriate for the given experiment. Sometimes, results can be measured by simple numerical measurement using standard tools, such as multimeters for electrical measurements, or various types of thermometers to measure temperature. To gauge results that do not yield numerical quantities, the teams commonly make use of several types of equipment that can provide other forms of observable effects. When testing physical consequences to a human body, which would be too dangerous to test on a living person, the MythBusters commonly use analogues. Initially, they mainly used crash-test dummies (usually, whatever form and function it possessed, it would be named Buster) for observing blunt trauma injury, and ballistic gelatin for testing penetrating trauma. They have since progressed to using pig carcasses when an experiment requires a more accurate simulation of human flesh, bone, and organs. They have also occasionally molded real or simulated bones within ballistics gel for simulations of specific body parts. They have also used synthetic cadavers (or SynDavers) such as in the "Car Cushion" myth.


title: MythBusters

text: Both for the purposes of visual observation to determine a result and simply as a unique visual for the program, high-speed cameras are used during experiments and have become a trademark of the series. Very fast footage of moving objects in front of a measured scale is commonly used to determine the speed of the object.


title: MythBusters

text: Testing is often edited due to time constraints of a televised episode. It can often seem as if the teams draw results from fewer repetitions and a smaller data set than they actually have. During the "Outtakes Special", they specifically stated that while they are, in fact, very thorough in testing myths and repeat experiments many times in many different configurations, it is simply impossible to display the entire process during a program. Beginning in the fifth season, episodes typically contain a prompt for the viewer to visit the show's homepage to view outtake footage of either additional testing or other facets of the myths being tested. However, Savage himself has acknowledged that they do not purport always to achieve a satisfactorily large enough set of results to overcome definitively all bias. In response to criticisms they receive about their methods and results in previous episodes, the staff produced several "Myths Revisited" episodes in which the teams retest myths to see if the complaints have merit. These episodes have sometimes resulted in overturning results of several myths, as well as upholding some results for reasons different from the original.


title: MythBusters

text: Occasionally, the MythBusters take the opportunity to test "mini-myths" during the course of one of the episode's main myths, usually in the name of satisfying personal curiosity. These can either be planned in advance to take advantage of the testing location—for instance, in the "Peeing on the Third Rail" myth Adam got permission to find out if placing coins on a train track was sufficient to derail a train (he found that the test locomotive was not affected at all)—or can simply take place without prior planning.


title: MythBusters

text: MythBusters refuse to test some myths. Paranormal concepts, such as aliens or ghosts, are not addressed because they cannot be tested by scientific methods, although one exception, pyramid power, prompted Adam to comment, "No more 'oogie-boogie' myths, please" and state at a tour show in Indianapolis in 2012 that it was a mistake. Another myth related to the paranormal was the "Haunted Hum" myth, which involved testing if a particular, inaudible sound frequency can lead people to believe that an area is haunted. The program generally avoids experiments harmful to live animals, though in one episode, they bombarded cockroaches and other laboratory insects with lethal doses of radiation; the cast addressed this, saying that the insects were specifically bred for experiments and would have likely died anyway. However, animal carcasses (including those of pigs and chickens) are often used, but the MythBusters have repeatedly emphasized that the animals have died of natural causes.


title: MythBusters

text: The book "MythBusters: The Explosive Truth Behind 30 of the Most Perplexing Urban Legends of All Time" () also gives a list of a dozen myths that are unlikely to be explored (although four were eventually tested). Savage has commented that testing myths that require them to disprove general claims is difficult because of the inherent difficulty in disproving a negative. As a result, when they do pursue such myths, they typically go about disproving specific methods that claim to achieve results.


title: MythBusters

text: Additionally, certain myths are not tested due to various objections by Discovery Channel or their advertisers, most notably myths pertaining to radio-frequency identification vulnerability. Through nine seasons, a total of 2,391 experiments were performed and 12 tons of explosives were used to test 769 myths. The team has also expressed reluctance to test conspiracy theory myths such as the JFK assassination or 9/11 conspiracies, although they have tested some of the conspiracy theories relating to the "Apollo" Moon landings.


title: MythBusters

text: Myths are rated as "busted" when the myth's results cannot be replicated under either the described parameters or reasonably exaggerated ones. Often, when a myth is declared busted, the team will attempt to see what would be required to replicate the result of the myth through scientific means, discarding the original parameters of the myth itself. Going to absolute limits of what is physically possible to replicate the results is the origin of what is unofficially titled the "Mythbusters" motto, "If it's worth doing, it's worth "over"doing." This is also commonly referred to in the series as "the MythBusters way", and often reveals that the circumstances required to accurately recreate a 'busted' myth are physically impossible or highly unlikely to occur with the scientific facts presented, or the equipment used in the myth used to gain the results is neither available to the general public, nor capable of producing the results. For example, when trying to see if diamonds can be made with a microwave, and the myth is busted, the team arranges with an expert to have diamonds created with a large quantity of explosives.


title: MythBusters

text: Some of these myths are retested if the viewers are dissatisfied with the results, and are declared "rebusted" if the results of this second attempt result in the same conclusions as the original attempts. On rare occasions, retested myths result in a conclusion different from the first attempt, usually going from "busted" the first time, to "plausible" or even "confirmed" on the retest.


title: MythBusters

text: Many of the myths tested involve purported household scenarios, so all episodes begin with a disclaimer against attempting the experiments seen on the series; most episodes also feature a second warning halfway through the running time. These disclaimers are not broadcast on SBS in Australia, in the Netherlands, Discovery Mix in Sweden, the Discovery Channel in Denmark, or on the Prime and Sky Discovery Channels in New Zealand. Often, they are presented with an element of humor, such as Savage wearing a padded suit as Hyneman hits him in the chest with a baseball bat, or Hyneman explaining that Savage and he are professionals before Savage slides into view and crashes into a barrier, while saying, "Don't try this at home!".


title: MythBusters

text: The series employs various degrees of safety- or courtesy-related censorship. Vulgar language is censored, as the show is considered family-friendly, and most such language occurs spontaneously when the team is surprised or overexcited; at other times, a deliberate effort is made to keep the scripted material clean. In addition to the standard bleep, the show often uses a relevant or humorous sound effect. Euphemisms and scientific terminology are used for potentially offensive terms. In the "Peeing on the Third Rail" myth, the show censored the valve used to release urine from the dummy. The names of ingredients used in the production of hazardous materials and some explosives are usually censored to prevent amateurs from recreating potentially dangerous substances. For example, in the "Hindenburg" special, Savage ignited thermite with a hypergolic mixture of "blur" (a syrupy, pale blue liquid) and "blur" (a dark powder). In a Civil War-themed episode, the ingredients for making a form of homemade black powder were censored in similar fashion.


title: MythBusters

text: In one extreme instance of self-censorship, the team explored an urban legend stating that a widely available material could be used to create an explosive. To their surprise, the seemingly unlikely legend proved true, but the material was so easy to obtain, and the resulting explosion so powerful, that the production team decided allowing such information to reach the general public would be irresponsible, instead electing to destroy all footage of the experiment and agreeing never to speak of the incident. Several years later, when DARPA solicited advice from the public regarding potentially unknown bomb risks, Savage contacted them about their discovery.


title: MythBusters

text: In another episode that focused on myths surrounding electronic security devices, a segment was aired on defeating biometric fingerprint readers using various methods. One of these techniques involved creating a fake 3D fingerprint from a 2D image of the authorized print. After some trial and error, the team successfully cast a viable ballistics gel reproduction using a copper-coated circuit board, a picture of the fingerprint printed on acetate, and a photochemical acid etching process. After the reproduction was shown to defeat both fingerprint scanners, and although the chemicals used during the etching process are never identified, the narrator still hints at an important step having been edited out and discourages viewers from trying it themselves. None of the other techniques that successfully defeated the fingerprint scanners or the other security devices tested in the episode was censored or obfuscated, perhaps because the rest were all fairly simple and straightforward methods, such as holding up a bedsheet or moving extremely slowly to hide from ultrasonic motion detectors or holding up a pane of glass to defeat thermal motion detectors.


title: MythBusters

text: Brand names and logos are regularly blurred or covered with tape or a "MythBusters" sticker. Brand names are shown when integral to a myth, such as in the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment or Pop Rocks in the first pilot episode of "MythBusters".


title: MythBusters

text: The Diet Coke and Mentos experiment is also an outlier regarding their safety warnings, as Savage and Hyneman stated on-air that this myth was perfectly safe for viewers to replicate on their own. Another example of this is the "Phone Book Friction" episode, in which they investigated the difficulty of pulling two telephone books apart after their pages had been interleaved. One episode from the 2014 season, ""DO" Try This at Home?", classified several myths as safe or unsafe for testing by viewers.


title: MythBusters

text: Owing to the nature of the experiments performed on the show, many did not go as expected. Sometimes, these mishaps rendered the test equipment unusable, such as when the rocket in the "Rocket Car Revisit" episode exploded on ignition. Others even resulted in minor injuries to the personnel involved with the show, such as when Tory banged his knee falling off a fire tower; the fall was expected and prepared for using a safety harness, but the injury to his knee was unforeseen. The most common injuries were caused when moving safety equipment, which resulted in stitches and at least four broken fingers. These kinds of incidents were usually included in the broadcast program, with little other media attention, but some things failed in more spectacular and newsworthy ways.


title: MythBusters

text: On March 20, 2009, the town of Esparto, California, was shaken and windows were shattered by a blast created by of ANFO during filming of the myth "Knock Your Socks Off". Some residents were upset that the blast took place without "telling anyone". Chief Barry Burns of the Esparto Fire Department had several firefighters present for the explosion. He said he made the decision not to notify anyone in town for safety's sake. ""MythBusters" is supposed to be a really popular show. Everybody would have been out there. We would have had to cancel it because it would have been too dangerous." Representatives from the show replaced some of the windows that same day. The experiment did air, but the hosts recounted in a 2011 special episode ("Location, Location, Location") that they have never returned to the Esparto quarry as a result of the mishap.


title: MythBusters

text: On December 6, 2011, while conducting the "Cannonball Chemistry" experiment, the MythBusters crew accidentally sent a cannonball through the side of a house and into a minivan in a Dublin, California, neighborhood. Although the experiment was being carried out at the Alameda County Sheriff's Bomb Range under the supervision of the Alameda County Sheriff's Office, the errant projectile went over its intended target of water barrels and instead skipped up a hill that was intended as a secondary safety target, and soared into a neighboring community, striking a house and leaving a hole, before striking the roof of another house and smashing through a window of a parked minivan. No one was hurt by the rogue cannonball.


title: MythBusters

text: A show producer visited the homeowners to apologize, followed by Savage and Hyneman; Savage later stated that the incident would not cause the series production to be suspended. Savage and Kari Byron returned to Dublin High School on February 22, 2012, to participate in a moderated panel session at Dublin High School's Engineering and Design Academy Open House during National Engineers Week 2012, in part to help repair relations with the community. The sold-out event attracted over 1,000 attendees.


title: MythBusters

text: During the airing of the experiment on November 11, 2012, the Build Team apologized for the accident and explained that they suspended testing after it occurred to assess damage and start an investigation. The testing resumed several months later, at a rock quarry in a much more remote area.


title: MythBusters

text: In January 2005, children's author and adventurer Andrew Knight commenced legal proceedings in Australia against Beyond Productions, the producer of "MythBusters", alleging passing off in relation to the use of the name "MythBusters". Knight asserted that he had previously organized a team of "MythBusters" and had used the name continuously since 1988 in relation to pursuing myths, ghosts, monsters, goblins, and other such mysteries in an offbeat manner around the world. Knight wrote a series of self-published children's books under the banner "MythBusters" in 1991, 1993, and 1996. In February 2007, the Federal Court of Australia dismissed Knight's claims against Beyond Productions. A parallel action, relying on the same three books and a collection of short television appearances, was brought later that year in the Chancery Division of the High Court of England and Wales. Beyond Properties Pty Limited was again a defendant, as were two other Beyond companies and Discovery Communications Inc, the entity responsible for broadcasting the "MythBusters" program in the UK. These claims were also dismissed.


title: MythBusters

text: Hyneman and Savage have appeared on numerous entertainment programs, such as "Good Morning America", the "Late Show with David Letterman", NPR's news program "All Things Considered", the syndicated radio "Bob and Tom Show", and in the movie "The Darwin Awards" (as two military surplus vendors who sold a JATO rocket to the main character). "Skeptic" magazine's Daniel Loxton interviewed the duo in a 2005 article titled "MythBusters Exposed". Hyneman and Savage spoke at the annual convention of the National Science Teachers Association in March 2006, and the California Science Teachers Association named them honorary lifetime members in October 2006. In 2009, they were the featured keynote speakers at RSA Conference. They also are occasionally interviewed for articles by "Popular Mechanics" and are featured in that magazine's September 2009 issue.


title: MythBusters

text: Hyneman and Savage occasionally appear at colleges around the United States to talk about what it is like to be a MythBuster; the show consists of an interview and discussion to give the audience the opportunity to ask the MythBusters questions. The Build Team members have sometimes made appearances in similar capacity. They hold lectures in both collegiate and corporate settings, though the technical colleges tend to be the most enthusiastic. They have spoken at WPI, RPI, MIT, Michigan Tech, UC Berkeley and many others.


title: MythBusters

text: Adam Savage has written a primer on mold-making for "Make" magazine, and has been featured guest at the San Mateo Maker Faire since 2008. Kari Byron was interviewed on "The Late Show", on January 16, 2006.


title: MythBusters

text: People involved in survival stories reported in local newscasts have sometimes mentioned previous viewings of "MythBusters" as an influence to their actions. Twenty-three-year-old Theresa Booth of St. Martin, Minnesota, credits a "MythBusters" episode for her infant child and her survival. On April 3, 2007, she skidded off the road into a drainage ditch, which had filled with flood water from the Sauk River. Unable to open the door, Booth recalled the "Underwater Car" myth and waited until the pressure equalized to open the door. On October 19, 2007, in Sydney, Australia, a teenager named Julian Shaw pulled a fainted middle-aged man off the railway tracks near a train station to safety below the platform. He pulled back as the train passed, citing that the "Train Suction" episode affected his response.


title: MythBusters

text: The 3rd Annual Independent Investigative Group IIG Awards presented an award to "MythBusters" recognizing the promotion of science and critical thinking in popular media on May 18, 2009.


title: MythBusters

text: On the May 1, 2008, episode of "", "", Hyneman and Savage appeared in a cameo as observers taking notes during a test to determine whether a stun-gun bolt can set someone on fire under various circumstances (which was later tested on "MythBusters" itself).


title: MythBusters

text: During August 2008, Hyneman and Savage appeared on the stage of NVISION 08, an event sponsored by Nvidia, having been asked by Nvidia's creative director, David Wright, to provide a visual demonstration of the power of the graphics processing unit vs a central processing unit. They did this by creating an image of the "Mona Lisa" with a giant parallel processing paintball gun, setting a world record for largest paintball gun in the process. An encore of the demonstration was given at YouTube Live featuring Hyneman standing in the path of the paintballs wearing a suit of armor.


title: MythBusters

text: On the April 17, 2012, episode of "NCIS", "Rekindled", the character Abby Sciuto demonstrates a thermite fire to her boss, Jethro Gibbs, by playing a clip from the "MythBusters" episode "End with a Bang". Gibbs asks if the men in the clip are pyromaniacs, and she replies, "Scientists, Gibbs! Okay, yeah, they're kind of pyromaniacs too."


title: MythBusters

text: Hyneman, Savage, and others from the "MythBusters" crew have appeared at The Amaz!ng Meeting, and subsequently were interviewed by Steven Novella and the "skeptical rogues" for the podcast The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. On April 16, 2010, Hyneman and Savage received the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism from the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy.


title: MythBusters

text: On October 18, 2010, President Barack Obama, as part of the White House Science Fair, announced he had taped a segment of "MythBusters" and would appear on December 8, 2010. Obama's segment covered the Archimedes solar ray myth.


title: MythBusters

text: Both men appeared at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30, 2010, in Washington, DC. They had an experiment with the crowd involving the wave. They had the audience make various noises (e.g. popping their cheeks or laughing) all at the same time. They also had everyone in the crowd jump up at the same time to see if it would register on a seismograph.


title: MythBusters

text: Hyneman and Savage received honorary doctorates from the University of Twente in the Netherlands for their role in popularizing science, on the occasion of the university's 50th anniversary, on November 25, 2011.


title: MythBusters

text: As of November 2011, all five MythBusters have also appeared in new shows, segments or specials for Discovery's Science Channel, including "Head Rush" (Byron, 2010–present); "Punkin Chunkin 2010" (Hyneman and Savage); "Flying Anvils 2011" (Belleci); "Road to Punkin Chunkin 2011" and "Punkin Chunkin 2011" (Belleci, Byron and Imahara); "Large Dangerous Rocket Ships 2010 and Large Dangerous Rocket Ships 2011" (Byron); "Killer Robots: RoboGames 2010" (Imahara); "Curiosity" (Savage); "Punkin Chunkin 2012" (Belleci, Byron and Imahara). Savage and Hyneman are judges on the game show "Unchained Reaction" which premiered in March 2012. Belleci and Byron are also hosts of the 2015 Science Channel show "Thrill Factor".


title: MythBusters

text: Aired on February 12, 2012, Hyneman and Savage lent their voices to "The Simpsons" episode "The Daughter Also Rises" to be featured on a show similar to "MythBusters "called "Mythcrackers" in which Hyneman and Savage take on the classic myth that a cat always lands on its feet. In the episode, they do not want to harm a real cat, so they took a Build A Bear carcass, stuffed it with ballistics gel, shot it with a 20-foot barrel steam cannon, then made a scatter plot of the remains. By the end of the experiment, Hyneman asked, "What was it we were trying to prove again?", to which Savage replied, "Don't know, don't care." Clips from this show appeared in the "MythBusters"' "Simpsons" Special that first aired in 2015.


title: MythBusters

text: On October 3, 2012, Byron and Belleci made a guest appearance on the Discovery series "Sons of Guns". They test-fired some of the weapons in the Red Jacket shop, then watched as the staff retested a myth busted by the Build Team in 2008, that a propane tank could explode when hit with a bullet.


title: MythBusters

text: In 2015, Hyneman and Savage appeared in a series of Australian television commercials for Dulux paint, depicting them testing the maker's claims of durability.


title: MythBusters

text: In 2016, a "New York Times" study of the 50 television shows with the most Facebook likes found that "MythBusters" "has the second-highest share of 'likes' from men of any show in the data, after "Fast N' Loud"."


title: MythBusters

text: A traveling museum exhibit called "MythBusters: The Explosive Exhibition" was developed over the course of about five years, premiering at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, in March 2012.


title: MythBusters

text: In 2011, Savage and Hyneman created a live stage show called the "MythBusters Behind the Myths" Tour, in which they conduct experiments on-stage and discuss some background details of the show.


title: MythBusters

text: The show and one particular episode (involving the myth of a cigarette being able to cause a fire when thrown into a pool of gasoline) was credited with helping to free a man from prison.


title: MythBusters

text: "MythBusters" is broadcast in several countries, primarily by each country's version of the Discovery Channel. In some countries, the English speech is either subtitled in the relevant language, or the narration voice-over is replaced, or the entire show (narration and hosts' voices) is dubbed. The United States customary units, used by the hosts throughout the show, are converted to metric in the process. In the UK since 2011, the use of US customary units in the show has often been retained, rather than being replaced with metric units. Sometimes, the part where the myth is explained in sketches is completely redrawn in that language. Excerpts of the show were also shown as part of the Beyond Television–produced "Beyond Tomorrow". It also shows in Hong Kong's ViuTVsix.


title: MythBusters

text: In late March 2016, "Variety" revealed that Discovery's sister network Science Channel was planning to produce a revival of "MythBusters" with a new cast, and that its hosts would be determined by a reality competition spin-off, "Search for the Next MythBusters" (later renamed ""), which was hosted by Nerdist's Kyle Hill. The revival, hosted by Brian Louden and Jon Lung, would premiere its first, 14-episode season on November 15, 2017.


title: MythBusters

text: In September 2016, Beyond announced it was producing a new original series for Netflix, "White Rabbit Project", starring Byron, Belleci, and Imahara. It ran for one season of 10 episodes.


title: MythBusters

text: In April 2018, Adam Savage was announced to be returning to the franchise to host and executive produce a new spin-off, "MythBusters Jr.", with a 10-episode first season, which premiered in December 2018 with a sneak-peek episode, and the series officially starting January 2, 2019. The series features Savage working with a group of six young scientists. Savage stated that his goal for the series was to "start passing on everything to the next generation" as he grows older.


title: MythBusters

text: In 2021, an automotive-focused spin-off was produced called "Motor MythBusters", with original Build Team member Tory Belleci being joined by Faye Hadley of the "All Girls Garage" series and professional race car driver Bisi Ezerioha. Robert Lee once again provided some voice over work for this series. The 13-episode series, which premiered on August 4, 2021, was initially only available on the Motor Trend app in the United States, before being released through Amazon Prime Video, and having its premiere on Motor Trend's TV channel on January 18, 2022. In 2021 Beyond also repackaged segments from the original series grouped into themed episodes to create a spin-off called "MythBusters: There's Your Problem!".


title: MythBusters

text: Savage has stated that he is unlikely to work with Hyneman on any future projects, stating that although they worked well together as a classic example of a double act (with Hyneman as the straight man), their personalities clashed off-screen and on-screen. Savage suspected that both he and Hyneman were enjoying spending time apart from each other.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: Soleil Moon Frye (; born August 6, 1976) is an American actress, director, producer, and screenwriter. She began her career as a child actress at the age of two. When she was seven, Frye won the role of Penelope "Punky" Brewster in the NBC sitcom "Punky Brewster". The series debuted in September 1984, and earned consistently low ratings, but the Punky character was a hit with young children. After NBC cancelled the series, it was picked up for the syndication market, where it aired for an additional two seasons before ending in 1988. Frye reprised the role in a 2021 reboot of the series.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: After the original Punky Brewster series ended, Frye continued her career in guest spots on television and supporting roles in films. She attended The New School during the late 1990s, and directed her first film, "Wild Horses", in 1998. In 2000, she joined the cast in The WB sitcom "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" as Roxie King, Sabrina Spellman's roommate and close friend. Frye remained with the series until its end in April 2003. She has since continued her acting career working mainly as a voice actor.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: In 1998, Frye married producer Jason Goldberg, with whom she has four children. She has since opened an eco-friendly specialty clothing boutique for children, The Little Seed, in Los Angeles. She also hosts a blog and web series which focus on child rearing and women's issues. In 2011, Frye released her first book "Happy Chaos: From Punky to Parenting and My Perfectly Imperfect Adventures in Between".


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: Frye was born in Glendora, California. Her father was actor Virgil Frye (1930-2012), and her mother is talent agent and caterer Sondra Peluce (née Londy). She has two half-brothers, Sean Frye and Meeno Peluce, both former child actors. Frye's parents divorced when she was two.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: Frye was educated at a private school in Los Feliz, and attended San Fernando Valley Professional School in Burbank.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: Frye made her acting debut in the 1982 television movie "Missing Children: A Mother's Story". In 1983, she had a supporting role in "Who Will Love My Children?", another television movie starring Ann-Margret. The following year, she portrayed Elizabeth (Bette) Kovacs in the biographical television movie "Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter", and appeared in another television movie, "Invitation to Hell", directed by Wes Craven.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: At the audition, Frye beat out over 3,000 girls (including her future "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch" co-star Melissa Joan Hart) to win the titular role on the NBC sitcom "Punky Brewster". The series, which was conceived by NBC's then-head of programming Brandon Tartikoff, premiered in September 1984. Scheduled opposite CBS's highly rated "60 Minutes", the series struggled in the ratings, but the character of Punky was popular among children. Frye routinely appeared at parades, participated in an antidrug walks with then-First Lady Nancy Reagan, and was the honorary chairperson for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Frye also voiced and reprised the role in the animated series "It's Punky Brewster", which began airing during Punky Brewster's first season. Despite the series' low ratings, Brandon Tartikoff decided to renew the show for a second season because it was the highest rated show watched by children 2 to 11 years old. "Punky Brewster"'s second season, which dealt with more serious subject matters such as CPR and first-aid training, drug use and the Just Say No campaign, and the Space Shuttle "Challenger" disaster, did not improve ratings, and NBC cancelled the series in April 1986. The series was quickly picked up by Columbia Pictures Television and began airing in first-run syndication. "Punky Brewster" aired for an additional two seasons, ending on May 27, 1988.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: Immediately upon "Punky Brewster"'s end, Frye landed the lead role in the ABC sitcom pilot "Cadets", which aired as a summer special on September 25, 1988. The pilot, however, was not picked up. In 1989, Frye hosted the syndicated weekly talk/variety show "Girl Talk". Based on the board game of the same name, Frye shared hosting duties with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Rod Brogan. The series was cancelled after one season. In 1990, she appeared in the Rodney Dangerfield sitcom pilot "...Where's Rodney?", but this was not picked up as a series, either.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: During the 1990s, Frye guest-starred on several television series, including "The Wonder Years", "Saved by the Bell", and "Friends", and voiced characters for the animated series "Tiny Toon Adventures", "The Ren and Stimpy Show", and "The Cartoon Cartoon Show"(namely, the "Johnny Bravo" pilot episode). In addition to her television work, Frye has appeared in the films "The Liars' Club" (1993) and "" (1995) and in stage productions of "Orestes, I Murdered My Mother" and "The Housekeeper".


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: From 2000 to 2003, Frye played the character of Roxie King in the last few seasons of "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch", with her longtime friend and series producer Melissa Joan Hart. During the run of "Sabrina", she voiced Zoey Howzer in the Disney Channel series "The Proud Family" and the series' 2005 television movie. She reprised the role in the revival series "".


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: In 2005, she voiced Jade, a Bratz character in the direct-to-video release "Bratz Rock Angelz". She also voiced the character for the television series, and the video games "Bratz Rock Angelz" (2005), "Bratz: Forever Diamondz" (2006), and Bratz: The Movie (2007) and the follow up movies until "Bratz: Fashion 4 Passion - Diamondz". From 2010 to February 2013, Frye voiced Aseefa in the animated series "Planet Sheen".


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: In 1996, Frye moved to New York to attend The New School and later directed her first film, "Wild Horses" (1998).


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: Frye directed her second film, "Sonny Boy", in 2004. The documentary chronicles a two-week trip Frye took with her father, Virgil, who had Alzheimer's disease. "Sonny Boy" was an official selection at the 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival and won Best Documentary at the San Diego Film Festival.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: In 2021, Frye directed "Kid 90", a documentary film using an archive of footage she shot in the 1990s, for which Leonardo DiCaprio was executive producer. The film was released on March 12, 2021, by Hulu.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: In 2007, Frye, along with two friends, opened The Little Seed, an eco-friendly children's specialty boutique in Los Angeles. The boutique closed in August 2012, and is now an Internet-based business.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: In March 2010, Frye and her friend and former co-star Melissa Joan Hart launched the "Better Together" campaign for Gain.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: In September 2011, Frye released her first book, "Happy Chaos: From Punky to Parenting and My Perfectly Imperfect Adventures in Between". In October 2013, she released a party-planning book, "Let's Get This Party Started". She also hosted a web series, "Her Say", from 2011 to 2012, and currently hosts a blog on her official website, moonfrye.com, both of which deal with women's issues and parenting.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: In 2014, Frye co-founded P.S. XO, a company that sells party decoration kits. The name was then changed to MoonFrye, and expanded to include DIY kits for families and an app of the same name. They later merged with the company Seedling, which specializes in "activity kits".


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: As a teen, Frye suffered from gigantomastia. She underwent a breast reduction three months before her 16th birthday.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: In the 1990s, Frye was romantically involved with hip-hop artist Danny Boy O'Connor, with whom she remains friends.


title: Soleil Moon Frye

text: On October 25, 1998, Frye married television producer Jason Goldberg in a Jewish ceremony (Frye's mother is Jewish, as is Goldberg). Frye and Goldberg have four children: daughters born in August 2005 and March 2008 and sons born in February 2014 and May 2016. Goldberg and Frye renewed their marriage vows in a ceremony in 2008. In 2020, after 22 years of marriage, the couple separated. In December 2020, Frye filed for divorce. The divorce was finalized in April 2022.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto City University of Arts in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. She was inspired by American Abstract impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly coloured polka dots. Since the 1970s, Kusama has continued to create art, most notably installations in various museums around the world.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Kusama has been open about her mental health. She says that art has become her way to express her mental problems. "I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art," she told an interviewer in 2012. "I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live."


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Yayoi Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano. Born into a family of merchants who owned a plant nursery and seed farm, Kusama began drawing pictures of pumpkins in elementary school and created artwork she saw from hallucinations, works of which would later define her career. Her mother was not supportive of her creative endeavors; Kusama would rush to finish her art because her mother would take it away to discourage her. Her mother was physically abusive, and Kusama remembers her father as "the type who would play around, who would womanize a lot". The artist says that her mother would often send her to spy on her father's extramarital affairs, which instilled within her a lifelong contempt for sexuality, particularly the male's lower body and the phallus: "I don't like sex. I had an obsession with sex. When I was a child, my father had lovers and I experienced seeing him. My mother sent me to spy on him. I didn't want to have sex with anyone for years [...] The sexual obsession and fear of sex sit side by side in me." Her traumatic childhood, including her fantastic visions, can be said to be the origin of her artistic style.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: When Kusama was ten years old, she began to experience vivid hallucinations which she has described as "flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots". These hallucinations included flowers that spoke to Kusama, and patterns in fabric that she stared at coming to life, multiplying, and engulfing or expunging her, a process which she has carried into her artistic career and which she calls "self-obliteration". Kusama's art became her escape from her family and her own mind when she began to have hallucinations. She was reportedly fascinated by the smooth white stones covering the bed of the river near her family home, which she cites as another of the seminal influences behind her lasting fixation on dots.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: When Kusama was 13, she was sent to work in a military factory where she was tasked with sewing and fabricating parachutes for the Japanese army, then embroiled in World War II. Discussing her time in the factory, she says that she spent her adolescence "in closed darkness" although she could always hear the air-raid alerts going off and see American B-29s flying overhead in broad daylight. Her childhood was greatly influenced by the events of the war, and she claims that it was during this period that she began to value notions of personal and creative freedom.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: She went on to study "Nihonga" painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1948. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo in the 1950s.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: By 1950, she was depicting abstract natural forms in water colour, gouache, and oil paint, primarily on paper. She began covering surfaces—walls, floors, canvases, and later, household objects, and naked assistants—with the polka dots that became a trademark of her work.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: The vast fields of polka dots, or "infinity nets", as she called them, were taken directly from her hallucinations. The earliest recorded work in which she incorporated these dots was a drawing in 1939 at age 10, in which the image of a Japanese woman in a kimono, presumed to be the artist's mother, is covered and obliterated by spots. Her first series of large-scale, sometimes more than 30 ft-long canvas paintings, "Infinity Nets", were entirely covered in a sequence of nets and dots that alluded to hallucinatory visions.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: After living in Tokyo and France, Kusama left Japan at the age of 27 for the United States. She has stated that she began to consider Japanese society "too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women". Before leaving Japan to the United States, she destroyed many of her early works. In 1957, she moved to Seattle, where she had an exhibition of paintings at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery. She stayed there for a year before moving on to New York City, following correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe in which she professed an interest in joining the limelight of the city, and sought O'Keeffe's advice. During her time in the US, she quickly established her reputation as a leader in the avant-garde movement and received praise for her work from the anarchist art critic Herbert Read.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 1961 she moved her studio into the same building as Donald Judd and sculptor Eva Hesse; Hesse became a close friend. In the early 1960s Kusama began to create so-called soft sculptures by covering items such as ladders, shoes and chairs with white phallic protrusions. Despite the micromanaged intricacy of the drawings, she turned them out fast and in bulk, establishing a rhythm of productivity which she still maintains. She established other habits too, like having herself routinely photographed with new work and regularly appearing in public wearing her signature bob wigs and colorful, avant-garde fashions.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Since 1963, Kusama has continued her series of "Mirror/Infinity" rooms. In these complex infinity mirror installations, purpose-built rooms lined with mirrored glass contain scores of neon-colored balls, hanging at various heights above the viewer. Standing inside on a small platform, an observer sees light repeatedly reflected off the mirrored surfaces to create the illusion of a never-ending space.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: During the following years, Kusama was enormously productive, and by 1966 she was experimenting with room-size, freestanding installations that incorporated mirrors, lights, and piped-in music. She counted Judd and Joseph Cornell among her friends and supporters. However, she did not profit financially from her work. Around this time, Kusama was hospitalized regularly from overwork, and O'Keeffe persuaded her own dealer Edith Herbert to purchase several works to help Kusama stave off financial hardship. She was not able to make the money she believed she deserved, and her frustration became so extreme that she attempted suicide.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In the 1960s, Kusama organized outlandish happenings in conspicuous spots like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, often involving nudity and designed to protest the Vietnam War. In one, she wrote an open letter to Richard Nixon offering to have sex with him if he would stop the Vietnam war. Between 1967 and 1969 she concentrated on performances held with the maximum publicity, usually involving Kusama painting polka dots on her naked performers, as in the "Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at the MoMA" (1969), which took place at the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art. During the unannounced event, eight performers under Kusama's direction removed their clothing, stepped nude into a fountain, and assumed poses mimicking the nearby sculptures by Picasso, Giacometti, and Maillol.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 1968, Kusama presided over the happening "Homosexual Wedding" at the Church of Self-obliteration at 33 Walker Street in New York and performed alongside Fleetwood Mac and Country Joe and the Fish at the Fillmore East in New York City. She opened naked painting studios and a gay social club called the "Kusama 'Omophile Kompany (kok)".


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: The nudity present in Kusama's art and art protests was severely shameful for her family. This made her feel alone, and she attempted suicide again.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 1966, Kusama first participated in the Venice Biennale for its 33rd edition. Her "Narcissus Garden" comprised hundreds of mirrored spheres outdoors in what she called a "kinetic carpet". As soon as the piece was installed on a lawn outside the Italian pavilion, Kusama, dressed in a golden kimono, began selling each individual sphere for 1,200 lire (US$2), until the Biennale organizers put an end to her enterprise. "Narcissus Garden" was as much about the promotion of the artist through the media as it was an opportunity to offer a critique of the mechanization and commodification of the art market.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: During her time in New York, Kusama had a brief relationship with artist Donald Judd. She then began a passionate, platonic relationship with the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell. She was 26 years his junior – they called each other daily, sketched each other, and he would send personalized collages to her. Their lengthy association lasted until his death in 1972.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 1973, Kusama returned in ill health to Japan, where she began writing shockingly visceral and surrealistic novels, short stories, and poetry. In 1977, Kusama checked herself into a hospital for the mentally ill, where she eventually took up permanent residence. She has been living at the hospital ever since, by choice. Her studio, where she has continued to produce work since the mid-1970s, is a short distance from the hospital in Tokyo. Kusama is often quoted as saying: "If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago."


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: From this base, she has continued to produce artworks in a variety of media, as well as launching a literary career by publishing several novels, a poetry collection, and an autobiography. Her painting style shifted to high-colored acrylics on canvas, on an amped-up scale.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Her organically abstract paintings of one or two colors (the "Infinity Nets" series), which she began upon arriving in New York, garnered comparisons to the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. When she left New York she was practically forgotten as an artist until the late 1980s and 1990s, when a number of retrospectives revived international interest. "Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective" was the first critical survey of Yayoi Kusama presented at the Center for International Contemporary Arts (CICA) in New York in 1989, and was organized by Alexandra Munroe.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Following the success of the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993, a dazzling mirrored room filled with small pumpkin sculptures in which she resided in color-coordinated magician's attire, Kusama went on to produce a huge, yellow pumpkin sculpture covered with an optical pattern of black spots. The pumpkin came to represent for her a kind of alter-ego or self-portrait. Kusama's later installation "I'm Here, but Nothing (2000–2008)" is a simply furnished room consisting of table and chairs, place settings and bottles, armchairs and rugs, however its walls are tattooed with hundreds of fluorescent polka dots glowing in the UV light. The result is an endless infinite space where the self and everything in the room is obliterated.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: The multi-part floating work "Guidepost to the New Space", a series of rounded "humps" in fire-engine red with white polka dots, was displayed in Pandanus Lake. Perhaps one of Kusama's most notorious works, various versions of "Narcissus Garden" have been presented worldwide venues including Le Consortium, Dijon, 2000; Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2003; as part of the Whitney Biennial in Central Park, New York in 2004; and at the Jardin de Tuileries in Paris, 2010.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Kusama continued to work as an artist in her ninth decade. She has harkened back to earlier work by returning to drawing and painting; her work remained innovative and multi-disciplinary, and a 2012 exhibition displayed multiple acrylic-on-canvas works. Also featured was an exploration of infinite space in her "Infinity Mirror" rooms. These typically involve a cube-shaped room lined in mirrors, with water on the floor and flickering lights; these features suggest a pattern of life and death.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 2015-2016 the first retrospective exhibition in Scandinavia, curated by Marie Laurberg, travelled to four major museums in the region, opening at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and continuing to Henie Onstad Kunstsenter Museum, Norway, Moderna Museet in Sweden, and Helsinki Art Museum in Finland. This major show contained more than 100 objects and large scale mirror room installations. It presented several early works that had not been shown to the public since they were first created, including a presentation of Kusama's experimental fashion design from the 1960s.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 2017, a 50-year retrospective of her work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. The exhibit featured six "Infinity Mirror" rooms, and was scheduled to travel to five museums in the US and Canada.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: On 25 February 2017, Kusama's "All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins" exhibit, one of the six components to her "Infinity Mirror" rooms at the Hirshhorn Museum, was temporarily closed for three days following damage to one of the exhibit's glowing pumpkin sculptures. The room, which measures and was filled with over 60 pumpkin sculptures, was one of the museum's most popular attractions ever. Allison Peck, a spokeswoman for the Hirshhorn, said in an interview that the museum "has never had a show with that kind of visitor demand", with the room totalling more than 8,000 visitors between its opening and its temporary closure. While there were conflicting media reports about the cost of the damaged sculpture and how exactly it was broken, Allison Peck stated that "there is no intrinsic value to the individual piece. It is a manufactured component to a larger piece." The exhibit was reconfigured to make up for the missing sculpture, and a new one was to be produced for the exhibit by Kusama. The Infinity Mirrors exhibit became a sensation among art critics as well as on social media. Museum visitors shared 34,000 images of the exhibition to their Instagram accounts, and social media posts using the hashtag #InfiniteKusama garnered 330 million impressions, as reported by the Smithsonian the day after the exhibit's closing. The works provided the perfect setting for Instagram-able selfies which inadvertently added to the performative nature of the works.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: On 9 November 2019, Kusama's Everyday I Pray For Love exhibit was shown at David Zwirner Gallery until 14 December 2019. The exhibition incorporated sculptures and paintings, and included the debut of her INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM - DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE, 2019. The catalogue, published by David Zwirner books, contained texts and poems from the artist.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In January 2020, the Hirshhorn announced it would debut new Kusama acquisitions, including two Infinity Mirror Rooms, at a forthcoming exhibition called "One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection". The name of the exhibit is derived from an open letter Kusama wrote to then-President Richard Nixon in 1968, writing: "let’s forget ourselves, dearest Richard, and become one with the absolute, all together in the altogether."


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In November 2021, a monumental exhibition offering an overview of Kusama's main creative periods over the past 70 years, with some 200 works and four Infinity Rooms (unique mirror installations) debuted in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The retrospective spans almost 3,000 m across the Museum's two buildings, in six galleries and includes 2 new works: A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe, 2021 and Light of the Universe Illuminating the Quest for Truth, 2021.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Curator Mika Yoshitake has stated that Kusama's works on display are meant to immerse the whole person into her accumulations, obsessions, and repetitions. These infinite, repetitive works were originally a way for Kusama to eliminate her intrusive thoughts. Claire Voon has described one of Kusama's mirror exhibits as being able to "transport you to quiet cosmos, to a lonely labyrinth of pulsing light, or to what could be the enveloping innards of a leviathan with the measles".


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Creating these feelings amongst audiences was intentional. These experiences seem to be unique to her work because Kusama wanted others to sympathise with her in her troubled life. Bedatri D. Choudhury has described how Kusama feeling not in control throughout her life made her, either consciously or subconsciously, want to control how others perceive time and space when entering her exhibits. This statement seems to imply that without her trauma, Kusama would not have created these works as well or perhaps not at all. Art had become a coping mechanism for Kusama.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In Yayoi Kusama's "Walking Piece" (1966), a performance that was documented in a series of eighteen color slides, Kusama walked along the streets of New York City in a traditional Japanese kimono while holding a parasol. The kimono suggested traditional roles for women in Japanese custom. The parasol, however, was made to look inauthentic, as it was actually a black umbrella, painted white on the exterior and decorated with fake flowers. Kusama walked down unoccupied streets in an unknown quest. She then turned and cried without reason, and eventually walked away and vanished from view.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: This performance, through the association of the kimono, involved the stereotypes that Asian-American women continued to face. However, as an avant-garde artist living in New York, her situation altered the context of the dress, creating a cross-cultural amalgamation. Kusama was able to highlight the stereotype in which her white American audience categorized her, by showing the absurdity of culturally categorizing people in the world's largest melting pot.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 1968, Kusama and Jud Yalkut's collaborative work "Kusama's Self-Obliteration" won a prize at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium and the Second Maryland Film Festival and the second prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The 1967 experimental film, which Kusama produced and starred in, depicted Kusama painting polka dots on everything around her including bodies.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 1991, Kusama starred in the film "Tokyo Decadence", written and directed by Ryu Murakami, and in 1993, she collaborated with British musician Peter Gabriel on an installation in Yokohama.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 1968, Kusama established Kusama Fashion Company Ltd, and began selling avantgarde fashion in the "Kusama Corner" at Bloomingdales. In 2009, Kusama designed a handbag-shaped cell phone entitled "Handbag for Space Travel", "My Doggie Ring-Ring", a pink dotted phone in accompanying dog-shaped holder, and a red and white dotted phone inside a mirrored, dotted box dubbed "Dots Obsession, Full Happiness With Dots", for Japanese mobile communication giant KDDI Corporation's "iida" brand. Each phone was limited to 1,000 pieces.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 2011, Kusama created artwork for six limited-edition lipglosses from Lancôme. That same year, she worked with Marc Jacobs (who visited her studio in Japan in 2006) on a line of Louis Vuitton products, including leather goods, ready-to-wear, accessories, shoes, watches, and jewelry. The products became available in 2012 at a SoHo pop-up shop, which was decorated with Kusama's trademark tentacle-like protrusions and polka-dots. Eventually, six other pop-up shops were opened around the world. When asked about her collaboration with Marc Jacobs, Kusama replied that "his sincere attitude toward art" is the same as her own.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 1977, Kusama published a book of poems and paintings entitled "7". One year later, her first novel "Manhattan Suicide Addict" appeared. Between 1983 and 1990, she finished the novels "The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street" (1983), "The Burning of St Mark's Church" (1985), "Between Heaven and Earth" (1988), "Woodstock Phallus Cutter" (1988), "Aching Chandelier" (1989), "Double Suicide at Sakuragazuka" (1989), and "Angels in Cape Cod" (1990), alongside several issues of the magazine "S&M Sniper" in collaboration with photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Her most recent writing endeavor includes her autobiography "Infinity Net" published in 2003 that depicts her life from growing up in Japan, her departure to the United States, and her return to her home country, where she now resides. "Infinity Net" includes the artist's poetry and photographs of her exhibitions.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: To date, Kusama has completed several major outdoor sculptural commissions, mostly in the form of brightly hued monstrous plants and flowers, for public and private institutions including "Pumpkin" (1994) for the Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art; "The Visionary Flowers" (2002) for the Matsumoto City Museum of Art; "Tsumari in Bloom" (2003) for Matsudai Station, Niigata; "Tulipes de Shangri-La" (2003) for Euralille in Lille, France; "Pumpkin" (2006) at Bunka-mura on Benesse Island of Naoshima; "Hello, Anyang with Love" (2007) for Pyeonghwa Park (now referred as World Cup Park), Anyang; and "The Hymn of Life: Tulips" (2007) for the Beverly Gardens Park in Los Angeles. In 1998, she realized a mural for the hallway of the Gare do Oriente subway station in Lisbon. Alongside these monumental works, she has produced smaller scale outdoor pieces including "Key-Chan" and "Ryu-Chan", a pair of dotted dogs. All the outdoor works are cast in highly durable fiberglass-reinforced plastic, then painted in urethane to glossy perfection.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 2010, Kusama designed a Town Sneaker styled bus, which she titled "Mizutama Ranbu (Wild Polka Dot Dance)" and whose route travels through her hometown of Matsumoto. In 2011, she was commissioned to design the front cover of millions of pocket London Underground maps; the result is entitled "Polka Dots Festival in London" (2011). Coinciding with an exhibition of the artist's work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, a reproduction of Kusama's painting "Yellow Trees" (1994) covered a condominium building under construction in New York's Meatpacking District. That same year, Kusama conceived her floor installation "Thousands of Eyes" as a commission for the new Queen Elizabeth II Courts of Law, Brisbane.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 1959, Kusama had her first solo exhibition in New York at the Brata Gallery, an artist's co-op. She showed a series of white net paintings which were enthusiastically reviewed by Donald Judd (both Judd and Frank Stella then acquired paintings from the show). Kusama has since exhibited work with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns, among others. Exhibiting alongside European artists including Lucio Fontana, Pol Bury, Otto Piene, and Gunther Uecker, in 1962 she was the only female artist to take part in the widely acclaimed "Nul" (Zero) international group exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Kusama's work is in the collections of museums throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Yayoi Kusama's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: In 2017, a fifty-year retrospective of Kusama's work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. That same year, the Yayoi Kusama Museum was inaugurated in Tokyo. Other major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art (1998), the Whitney Museum (2012), and the Tate Modern (2012). In 2015, the website Artsy named Kusama one of its top 10 living artists of the year.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Kusama has received many awards, including the Asahi Prize (2001); Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003); the National Lifetime Achievement Award from the Order of the Rising Sun (2006); and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art. In October 2006, Kusama became the first Japanese woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan's highest honors for internationally recognized artists. She received the Person of Cultural Merit (2009) and Ango awards (2014). In 2014, Kusama was ranked the most popular artist of the year after a record-breaking number of visitors flooded her Latin American tour, "Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Obsession". Venues from Buenos Aires to Mexico City received more than 8,500 visitors each day.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Kusama gained media attention for partnering with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to make her 2017 "Infinity Mirror" rooms accessible to visitors with disabilities or mobility issues; in a new initiative among art museums, the venue mapped out the six individual rooms and provided disabled individuals visiting the exhibition access to a complete 360-degree virtual reality headset that allowed them to experience every aspect of the rooms, as if they were actually walking through them.


title: Yayoi Kusama

text: Kusama's work has performed strongly at auction: top prices for her work are for paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s. As of 2012, her work has the highest turnover of any living woman artist. In November 2008, Christie's New York sold a 1959 white "Infinity Net" painting formerly owned by Donald Judd, "No. 2", for US$5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist. In comparison, the highest price for a sculpture from her New York years is £72,500 (US$147,687), fetched by the 1965 wool, pasta, paint and hanger assemblage "Golden Macaroni Jacket" at Sotheby's London in October 2007. A 2006 acrylic on fiberglass-reinforced plastic pumpkin earned $264,000, the top price for one of her sculptures, also at Sotheby's in 2007 Her "Flame of Life – Dedicated to Tu-Fu (Du-Fu)" sold for US$960,000 at Art Basel/Hong Kong in May 2013, the highest price paid at the show. Kusama became the most expensive living female artist at auction when "White No. 28" (1960) from her signature "Infinity Nets" series sold for $7.1 million at a 2014 Christie's auction.


title: Rich Paul

text: Rich Paul (born December 16, 1981) is an American sports agent based in Cleveland, Ohio. He founded Klutch Sports Group which represents a number of prominent NBA players. Paul was named by "Forbes" as one of the world's most powerful sports agents.


title: Rich Paul

text: Paul grew up in a one-bedroom apartment above his father's store, R & J Confectionery, on East 125th and Arlington in Glenville, a neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland. His father enrolled him in the private, fee-paying Benedictine, a Roman Catholic high school. His father died of cancer in 1999.


title: Rich Paul

text: After graduating from high school, Paul was mentored by Distant Replays owner Andy Hyman on selling vintage jerseys. He would buy throwback jerseys from Atlanta and sell them out of his trunk in Cleveland. In 2002, he met LeBron James at the Akron–Canton Airport, where James was impressed by Paul's authentic Warren Moon throwback jersey. The two exchanged contact information, and soon Paul had sold James a Magic Johnson Lakers jersey and a Joe Namath Rams jersey.


title: Rich Paul

text: In 2003, after the NBA draft, Paul joined James as a part of his small inner circle, along with James' childhood friends Maverick Carter and Randy Mims. He would later start working under Leon Rose, who had negotiated James' extension with the Cavaliers in 2006, at Creative Artists Agency. In 2012, Paul, along with James, left Rose and CAA to start his own agency, Klutch Sports Group. In 2013, Paul enlisted noted long-time agent and attorney Mark Termini to run the NBA contract negotiations for Klutch. By the conclusion of their agreement in 2020, Termini negotiated $1.4 billion in NBA contracts for Klutch Sports clients from 2014 through 2019. By 2019, Klutch had a roster of 25 clients and brokered over $1 billion in contracts. Later that year, United Talent Agency (UTA) made a strategic investment in Klutch Sports Group and asked Paul to run its sports division where he expanded the division's clients from 4 to 23. In 2020, he accepted a position on UTA's board of directors.


title: Rich Paul

text: Before the start of the 2017–18 season, Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver had told Paul that if he did not sever ties to head coach Earl Watson, who had Paul and the Klutch Sports Group as an agent at the time, he would fire Watson from the team. After the Suns got off to a 0–3 start, with two blowout losses (including the worst loss in franchise history and worst season opening performance in NBA history) being the perfect cover story in mind, Watson was fired on October 22, and replaced on an interim basis by associate head coach Jay Triano for the rest of that season. This story later became a part of a major report on Sarver on September 13, 2022, which led to his year-long suspension from the NBA and later resulted in Sarver agreeing to sell the Suns and Phoenix Mercury to a new owner eight days afterward.