The Show Must Go On?
This is how we started the year. Jeremy Renner's snow plow accident had him in critical condition on Sunday then on Monday millions of viewers witnessed Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, 24, suffer a cardiac arrest and collapse on the field during a game against the Cincinnati Bengals. The NFL said the Bills-Bengals will not resume this week.
The Origins of the Phrase the Show Must Go On
When a circus performer got injured performing their death-defying or otherwise demanding act or when an animal got loose, supposedly the ringmaster and the band would keep the entertainment going so that the crowd wouldn't worry and panic. And thus the expression was born.
Here are a few examples of times in entertainment when tragedy struck and the show went on. This comes in from Wikipedia.
1993: Brandon Lee, son of martial artist Bruce Lee, died while filming the movie The Crow in Wilmington, North Carolina. A prop gun had been squib loaded, causing the blank cartridge to propel the bullet into Lee and kill him. Contrary to urban legend, the footage of his death was not kept in the movie. Instead, they re-shot the scene using a different actor, whose death in the film was by a throwing knife.
1999: Owen Hart, a Canadian-born professional wrestler for WWF, died during Over the Edge, a pay-per-view event, when performing a stunt. It was planned to have Hart come down from the rafters of the Kemper Arena on a safety harness tied to a rope to make his ring entrance. The safety latch was released and Hart dropped 78 feet (24 m), bouncing chest-first off the top rope resulting in a severed aorta, which caused his lungs to fill with blood.
Astroworld Festival Crowd Crush - On November 5, 2021, a fatal crowd crush occurred during the first night of the 2021 Astroworld Festival, a music event founded by American musician Travis Scott that was held at NRG Park in Houston, Texas. Eight people died on the night of the concert, and two more died in the hospital over the following days. As Scott was starting to sing at approximately 9:34 p.m, a man yelled at a camera operator multiple times from the bottom of his media tower to stop the show, which was ignored.
A woman soon joined him, climbing its ladder onto his platform to shout the same concerns of someone dead in the crowd. After also being ignored, the other concertgoer came up onto the platform to join her, but another audience member told them both that the crowd would take care of it. "People are fucking dying! I want to save somebody's life! At approximately 9:42 p.m. Scott stopped performing "Skeletons" mid-song for his third and final time of the concert after noticing an unconscious attendee.