Popverse's top stories

• Made in '87: Rewinding to the movies, comics, games, and TV shows that define pop culture to this day
• Watch now: Watch the Bob's Burgers team - H. Jon Benjamin, John Roberts, Kristen Schaal, Eugene Mirman, Dan Mintz, Larry Murphy and creator Loren Bouchard - grill up memories at NYCC 2025
• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick

All week long: Revisit the highlights and lowlights of 1987 with Popverse's Made in 87 week.

Popverse’s Made in ‘87 is winding the clocks back to examine one of that year’s major pop culture offerings: John McTiernan’s Predator. Well, I say John McTiernan because he’s the director, but as anybody even a little invested in the franchise will know - a chunk of the script comes from Shane Black, who would eventually go on to direct an entry into the franchise, The Predators. But the thing is, there’s a possibility that he wouldn’t have made those contributions to the series, had he not been brutally killed.

In the film, obviously.

We recently took a look back into the history of Predator via The Hollywood Reporter’s 2017 oral history of the original film. It tells the tale of a script that was in some amount of flux, until producer John Davis realized that someone was on their set who could steer a better course. See, ol’ Shane Black had just finished writing a little script called Lethal Weapon (ever heard of it?), and in him, the producer thought he could find someone to right the script ship (schript?). The only problem - Shane Black was on set to act, not write, playing nerdy addition to Duke’s crew Hawkins.

But hey, when you’re the producer of a big-budget film, I guess you can change little things like that.

In 1987, the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon debuted - and all our lives were changed. Watch this reunion of the original voice actors:

"I met Shane on that movie," Davis told THR. "Shane was a really great writer who had just written this great script called Lethal Weapon. We wanted him to do a rewrite on the script. So we put him in the movie, because he’s an actor. And we got him down there, and we asked him to do a rewrite, and he said he was an actor in the movie and not a writer. So he was the first person we killed. He got killed seven minutes into the movie."

Sorry, Shane (or to be more accurate - sorry Hawkins). As you surely know by now, making art takes great sacrifice. Sometimes in gallons and gallons of fake blood.

Predator is available to stream now on Hulu. 

Get your wide-shoulder blouses and your Members-Only jackets, and go back in time with Popverse's Made in 87. Highlights include:

• How Bart Simpson was quietly toned down from being "so mean" before The Simpsons' first episode, as revealed by his long-time voice actor Nancy Cartwright
• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick
• Why the Princess Bride’s iconic duel is an even better swordfight than you remember
• How The Golden Girls became a staple at gay bars in the 80s
• Inside Spider-Man’s chaotic 1987 bachelor party that Marvel turned into a real-life spectacle