80s News Today

In the late summer of ’87, the world was restless. Reagan was in the White House, the Berlin Wall still stood like a scar across the heart of Europe, and somewhere in the ether, the ghost of Thriller lingered— Michael Jackson ’s 1982 monster that sold millions and rewrote the rules of music. Michael himself had been a ghost for five years. Five years is a long time in the pop music world; enough time for the ground to shift, for new pretenders to rise, for the public to grow restless.  There were whispers, of course, always whispers around Michael. He was building an amusement park in his backyard, they said. He slept in an oxygen tent. He was turning into something else, something…not quite human. People thought he’d peaked, that he’d danced his last moonwalk. They were wrong. Dead wrong. Bad hit the shelves on August 31, 1987, and it wasn’t just a follow-up. It was a declaration. A gauntlet thrown down.  Michael, the King of Pop, wasn’t here to play nice. He’d spent fi...

It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...

The summer of '89 was a scorcher, folks. But now it was coming to an end. Cicadas, those tireless harbingers of summer's demise, sawed their mournful dirges from the sycamore trees, each rasping note a cruel reminder that the season of freedom, of sun-drenched idleness and forbidden midnight escapades, was drawing to its inevitable, dreaded close. The days, once endless and shimmering with possibility, were now starting to fray at the edges, the shadows lengthening a touch earlier. Sprinklers hissed on lawns, cars idled in driveways, the predictable cycle of aspiration and disillusionment playing out in countless living rooms. And then there was this machine. The NEC TurboGrafx-16 . It dropped on August 29th, like a brick through a plate-glass window, shattering the quiet monotony of another fading summer. You saved your lawn-mowing money and your allowance, counting out the crumpled bills and jingling quarters. You went to the store, and you bought that strange black box. It h...

On the eve of August 28th, 1981, under a moon of unsettling mien, a cinematic shadow stretched forth, cast by a nascent terror known only as Hell Night . Yet, to speak of mere "film" in this context is to diminish the chilling essence that permeated the ether, a subtle, creeping dread that spoke of forces beyond the ken of mortal men. For producers Bruce and Tommy Curtis were not content to simply deliver a cheap Halloween or Friday the 13th knockoff to capitalize on the new teen slasher craze. They pushed the writers and director to deliver a force of evil beyond masked summer camp stalkers, and the result was as if the script itself had been etched by the hands of forgotten cultists, those who knew the true nature of the cosmos and the monstrous entities that slumber beyond the stars. The film tells of four young fraternity and sorority pledges—Marti, Jeff, Seth, and Denise—forced to spend the night in forsaken Garth Manor. Twelve years prior, Raymond Garth had strangled ...

Folks, let me tell you, Captain Power – tremendous show, absolutely tremendous. And the toys? Believe me, nobody had toys like that. This wasn't some weak, failing little cartoon; this was serious stuff, the best. It was like the Trump Shuttle of action toys – innovative, exciting, and way ahead of its time. We're talking post-apocalyptic battles, robots taking over the world, and heroes fighting back bigly. If you were a kid in the '80s, you remember this, or if you don't, you're missing out on pure gold. Picture this: It's the year 2147, after these "Metal Wars," where machines went rogue and wiped out most of humanity. But we don't want to have wars, we have to have peace. I could have ended the Metal Wars in one day; in fact, they never would have started if I had been president.  Lord Dread, this evil cyborg villain – he's digitizing people into pixels, total nightmare, very bad. He's digitizing the dogs, he's digitizing the cats,...

Wham! Blam! Shazam! Ladies and gentlemen, the future, in all its retail glory, descended upon Owings Mills, Maryland, on August 26, 1986. Forget your quaint little Main Streets, your dusty emporiums with their creaking floorboards and polite, whispered transactions. This, my friends, was the Owings Mills Fashion Mall , a gleaming, chrome-and-glass titan of commerce, a veritable cathedral of consumption, and its Grand Opening was nothing short of a Happening of the highest order. 820,000 square feet of air-conditioned paradise, 155 stores and eateries beckoning like sirens to the upwardly-mobile masses, 26 minutes from downtown Baltimore. There they were, the shoppers of the eighties, those status-anxious strivers in their pastel Lacoste polo shirts and pleated khakis, the women in shoulder-padded blazers and leg-warmers, fur coats draped over their shoulders even in the summer swelter—because why not? This wasn't just a mall; it was the Fashion Mall , tres chic , a shrine to the A...

ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...

August 24th, 1989. Up in his Hacienda Nápoles, a spread so gaudy it’d make Liberace blush, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, El Patrón himself, a man whose girth strained the finest silk shirts like kielbasa in a casing, surveyed his dominion. Not rolling hills of coffee, mind you, but a kingdom built on the snow-white slopes of cocaine, with the self-made monarch's royal fanfare orchestrated by the roaring engines of Learjets and the staccato bursts of AK-47s. His Medellín Cartel, a sprawling empire of labs and airstrips, pumps cocaine into Miami’s veins, raking in $60 million a day. A day! That’s enough to buy entire governments, and Pablo’s done just that, greasing palms from Bogotá to Washington. And on this day, miércoles , the word was out. No more tiptoeing around the lily-livered bureaucrats in Bogotá, those santurrones  with their fancy degrees and their pinky rings. No more greasing the palms of judges who’d just as soon pocket your bribe as sign your extradition papers. Eno...

Folks, let me tell you something. Back in 1983, something tremendous happened. Something that, frankly, nobody saw coming. But believe me, it was HUGE. We're talking about the introduction of the Chicken McNuggets ! McDonald’s, they’re already the kings of burgers, right? Big Macs, Quarter Pounders—tremendous burgers, the best. But they’re looking at the market, and they’re saying, “Chicken’s getting big. People want chicken. They want something new.” And they were right. So they put their best people on it, their top chefs, their geniuses—and McDonald’s has the best people, believe me. Before McNuggets, chicken in fast food was mostly fried chicken buckets—great, don’t get me wrong, I love a good bucket of chicken. But McNuggets? They created a whole new category. Bite-sized chicken, perfect for sharing, perfect for dipping. Every other fast-food chain had to scramble to catch up. Folks, let me tell you, nobody loves McDonald’s more than me, nobody. And when I think back to the da...

In the realm of mortal men, where the fires of ambition burn eternal and the shadows of innovation cast long webs across the ages, there came a day—August 22, in the year of our reckoning 1987—when a legend was born. Not wrought of steel nor crowned in blood, but spun from the dreams of a distant land called Kyoto, where the artificers of Nintendo, those cunning weavers of digital fate, unveiled a tale that would echo through the halls of time: The Legend of Zelda . The world was younger then, its peoples yet untested by the tempests of modernity. The Nintendo Entertainment System, a grey altar of plastic and circuitry, had only begun to claim its dominion in the hearths of the West. Into this nascent kingdom came a cartridge, golden in form and bottomless in spirit, bearing the name of a princess whose legacy would prove as enduring as Crom's steel. The Legend of Zelda, it was called, and its arrival was no mere happenstance but a clarion call, a summons to adventure that would st...

August of '89. A tremendous month. A lot of great things happened, believe me. And one of the greatest? The release of Bad Dudes for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES! Fantastic system. Really terrific. Now, some people, the fake news probably, will try to tell you about other things that happened that month. Maybe some boring news story, maybe some Hollywood flop. Sad! But the real story, the big story, was Bad Dudes. When I heard about Bad Dudes hitting the NES in August 1989, I said, "This is huge, absolutely huge!" Let’s talk about Bad Dudes – great name, by the way, very strong. Data East, a terrific company, they developed this game, and let me tell you, they did a fantastic job. It’s got this incredible cover art by Marc Ericksen – a real patriot, that guy.  The game was already a hit in the arcades in 1988, making tons of money, one of the top five earners in America that year. Tremendous success! And then they brought it to the NES, which was the best co...

By now, even the most addled members of the booboisie must recall the phosphorescent shimmer of the cathode ray tube in the late innings of the Carter Administration and the early sorties of the Reagan Revolution. A time, mind you, when the very notion of interacting with a television screen beyond the passive absorption of sitcoms and Bert Convy was still a novelty, a flicker on the very edge of the national consciousness. And who should step into this nascent electronic frontier, this pixelated prairie, but none other than George Ames Plimpton , the very avatar of the bon vivant intellectual, the man who famously pitched for the Yankees (sort of), traded jabs with Archie Moore (briefly), quarterbacked for the Detroit Lions (disastrously), and even tromped through the African bush with George Adamson (for a spell, naturally). Yes, that George Plimpton, the lanky, sweater-vested Brahmin, the co-founder of The Paris Review. And who better to introduce the hoi polloi to the new pastim...

Austin, Texas - August 19, 1981 ZAP! POW! WHAM! The future crash-landed in Austin, Texas, on August 19, 1981, and it came with a thousand glittering storefronts, a million square feet of air-conditioned dreams, and the kind of consumerist fervor that could make a cowpoke forget his spurs. Barton Creek Square Mall , that gleaming, sprawling monument to the American urge to shop, opened its doors, and oh, what a spectacle it was—a neon cathedral for the suburban soul, a palace of plenty carved out of a limestone hill overlooking the sleepy, funky town that still thought it was just a college burg with a yen for breakfast tacos. Picture it: the sun blazing down on that 104-acre slab of land, once just a dusty hilltop, now transformed by Melvin Simon & Associates into a consumerist Valhalla. The earthmovers had growled, the cranes had hoisted, and the concrete had poured like a river of ambition since late 1977, when the first plans were announced. Now Austin—scruffy, guitar-strumming ...

Picture it: America, August 1985. The nation’s arteries pulsing with the electric hum of Reagan’s second term, MTV blaring “The Power of Love” on every wood-paneled Zenith, and the golden arches of McDonald’s gleaming like a chrome cathedral under the suburban sun. The fast-food wars were raging, a culinary cage match where Burger King’s Whopper swung its beefy fists, daring the competition to step up or slink away. And McDonald’s? Oh, they weren’t just stepping up—they were launching a intercontinental ballistic missile: a burger so audacious it came with its own architectural manifesto: the McDLT . McDonald’s Lettuce and Tomato. The McDLT wasn’t just a hamburger; it was a cultural event, a gastronomic moon landing. It arrived on the scene with a swagger, a quarter-pound beef patty sizzling on one side, lettuce and tomato cool and crisp as the air in an Antarctic UFO base on the other, all held together in a double-decker Styrofoam container that was half spaceship, half lunchbox. The...

Replacing the legendary Casey Kasem as host of American Top 40 wasn't enough of a challenge for Shadoe Stevens in 1988. No, siree, the man was going to conquer Hollywood in the same year. Backed by no less than Dino De Laurentis, a budget of $6.5 million, and the screenwriter of Raw Deal , Stevens would make his bid for celluloid greatness as disgraced former Texas state trooper and soldier of fortune Traxx .  Yes, Traxx! The very name hangs in the air like the faint aroma of stale Pop Secret and forgotten dreams! And those forgotten dreams would ultimately include Shadoe Stevens' movie career. For, you see, he shot for the moon, but merely landed among the stars...on videocassette shelves. Not destined for the gilded multiplexes, those temples of celluloid illusion where the masses flocked for their weekly dose of manufactured heroism and pre-packaged romance. No, no, my velvet-collared voyeurs of the VCR, Traxx bypassed all that. It slithered directly into the plastic clamsh...

Los Angeles - August 16, 1984 A tremor ran through the land back in the dog days of '84! Not an earthquake, mind you, nothing so plebeian. No, this was a tremor of pure, unadulterated spectacle . The kind that tickles the very ganglia of our celebrity-besotted, headline-huffing, status-seeking souls. I speak, of course, of The Acquittal ! Yes, that three-syllable thunderclap that echoed from the hallowed halls of the Los Angeles courthouse, proclaiming one John Zachary DeLorean , the man with the stainless steel dream machine and the panache of a Medici prince, 100% Not Guilty ! Oh, the drama of it all! Here was a man, see, who had zoomed onto the American scene like a god Mercury on a skateboard. A titan of torque from the gritty, gear-grinding factories of General Motors, a man who dared to dream of a better car, a sexier car, a car that would gleam like a freshly minted dime in the suburban driveway – the DeLorean! A vehicle so futuristic, so now , that it practically hummed t...

The air was thick with the kind of static electricity only Hollywood can muster when it’s trying to birth a new cult classic. It was the night of August 15, 1984, and the White Flint Mall cineplex was a pulsating neon cathedral, its marquee screaming The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension like a war cry from some deranged dimension-hopping prophet. This wasn’t just a movie premiere; it was a cosmic gamble, a $17 million bet by 20th Century Fox that a rock-star neurosurgeon test pilot could punch through the cultural zeitgeist.  Now, I ask you, fellow seekers of the zeitgeist, could there be a title more perfectly calibrated to the Reaganite, yet subtly yearning, spirit of the age? Buckaroo Banzai! The very name crackled with a certain chutzpah. It hinted at derring-do, at a fearless plunge into the very terra incognita of, well, the 8th Dimension, no less!  The White Flint cineplex, that citadel of weekend entertainment, drew a curious clientele that nigh...

By now, you’ve likely mainlined enough Coppola and Scorsese to give you the genuine New Yawk jitters, and the Spielbergian southern California that was all the rage. But hold on to your Giorgio Armani suspenders, my friends! Because thirty-some-odd years ago, on this very blessed (or perhaps unblessed ) August 14th, 1981, a cinematic tremor shook the very foundations of the drive-in and the multiplex alike. Yes, sir! I’m talkin’ ‘bout Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing ! Now, Craven, you see, he wasn’t content with just your run-of-the-mill slasher flick, the kind where some pimply-faced psycho with a machete chases nubile teenagers through the woods (though, Lord knows, there was plenty of that going around). No, no, no! Craven, who grew up in a very religious family, decided to inject a little…shall we say… theological unease into the whole bloody business. He took us, the oh-so-sophisticated denizens of the burgeoning Reagan religious-right era, with our preppie sweaters and our burgeoni...