In Philadelphia, a 15-year-old, still-dirty alt-weekly was going apeshit over 12 Monkeys. We started 1996 with a cover story on director Terry Gilliam's still-filming movie. We were so not used to this kind of thing happening that we interviewed each and every Philly actor who stumbled into Gilliam's viewfinder.

Also groundbreakingly, we peered into the dastardly underworld of free movie tickets, running an expose on ticket man Nathan Lerner that prompted a year's worth of letters to the editor in the man's defense.

Margit Detweiler blew the lid off the mysterious Andre the Giant posters that'd popped up all over town, and got to the bottom of the Mütter Museum's plans to shed its macabre image. Scott Farmelant, in addition to rousing Lerner's army, stirred up some muck looking into the construction of Vince Fumo's new house, and wrote about the phoenix-like rebirth of Bart Blatstein's li'l brother Ricky. David Warner opened up the arts section for a lively, watershed debate between lightning rod critic Toby Zinman and actress Megan Bellwoar. And in a cover package about headaches, Brian Howard wrote about his migraines and had his picture taken holding his head, grimacing in pain (and, we're told, hasn't had a migraine since).

We said hello to Jennifer Darr and Frank Lewis; to Nate Chinen and Jim Quinn (and thus goodbye to Russell Woessner and Holly Moore); to the totally hot sales force of Deirdre Affel, Andrew Moore, Craig Santucci and Eric Loudenslager; to cool-hand Chris Ellison, who would eventually grumble his way to the upper reaches of the masthead. We also welcomed Earshot, our scrappy li'l music publication.

But 1996 was Neil Gladstone's year: With Howard Altman he reported on "The Chickenbutt Bandit," a guy in the band Chickenbutt who'd turned to a life of crime. In "Bad Rap" he and Noreen Mallory investigated Philly's underdog hip-hop scene. And in a piece called "True to their Roots," he penned the first of a series of trailblazing pieces on Philly's nonpareil hip-hoppers.