Rotten Tomatoes is about to turn 10. In human years, that
means getting bumped up the allowance pay scale and starting the painful process
of weaning yourself off Raffi records. But in Internet years, turning 10 is a
rarity and blessing. Few sites live to see it, and we couldn’t have done it
without readers like you. Let us regale you now with the top 10 things you never
knew about this humble site, and pay tribute to the people who saw an untamed
Internet wild and said, “Yeah, needs more quote bubbles.”
10. Rotten Tomatoes founder Senh Duong was inspired
while looking for reviews of Jackie Chan flicks —
Rumble in the
Bronx, Supercop,
Twin Dragons,
and
First Strike. Initial RT design took two weeks to color and code, with
the blurb-centric presentation of reviews inspired by a newspaper ad for 1993’s
In the Line of Fire. Says Senh: “The ad had what must have been over fifty
something blurbs from critics.”
9. Senh originally wanted a “Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down”
rating system in tribute to Siskel & Ebert. Legal reasons (and lack of
domain availability) put the kibosh on that.
8. RT’s first day drew 100 readers. Within the week,
the site was featured on Yahoo!, USA Today, Netscape.
7. First known televised mention of Rotten Tomatoes:
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart when
Mark Ruffalo
was a guest. Ruffalo didn’t know what he was talking about.
6. Rotten Tomatoes raised $1 million in venture
capital in 2000, enabling the company to weather the dot-com burst, though the
staff had to be reduced from 20 to 8. As of June 2008, staff head count is 14.
5. There were once plans for Rotten Tomatoes to
expand into book and car reviews. Reviews for adult films were also briefly
entertained. The working name: Pink Tomatoes.
4. Before our reviews expanded into the vast
database it is today, old reviews were added manually. When
The Phantom Menace came out, RT staff raided library newspaper archives
and uploaded every Star Wars review through an optical character
recognition machine.
3. Locations Rotten Tomatoes has called home: an
apartment in downtown Sacramento, an office down the street from Pixar in
Emeryville, a business complex in San Francisco shared with IGN, and the MySpace
building in Los Angeles.
2. Each movie’s Tomatometer was originally
calculated by hand.
1. While throwing rotten tomatoes at lousy entertainment harkens back to
vaudeville days, Senh admits the
Jean-Claude
Lauzon film Leolo
served as a major inspiration. It features a woman who is impregnated by a
tomato.
