80s News Today

September 30th, 1982. The day Bruce Springsteen walked out of the sunshine and into the deepest, darkest corner of the American night. Folks were expecting another Born to Run , another Darkness on the Edge of Town . Something with that big E Street sound. But that's not what we got. Not even close. We got a cassette. A cassette with a simple cover showing a black-and-white landscape that looked less like a picture and more like a faded memory. Or a bad omen. Before your Kmart cashier freed it from the anti-theft device, Nebraska was a set of four-track demos Springsteen recorded in January of that year at a house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, rough song sketches meant for the E Street Band to flesh out later. But when he listened back, he heard something else—songs that bled. Songs about folks on the edge—killers, cops, dreamers, and drifters, all caught in the gears of a machine that doesn’t care if they live or die. He decided to let ’em stand as they were, stark and unvarnished...

WHAM! There it was! September Twenty-Ninth, Nineteen Eighty-Five! Another Sunday Night, another languid drift of the television dial, a ritual of the masses, a flicker of cathodic blue in a million darkened living rooms, and then—BAM!—a phenomenon, a paradigm shift, a veritable explosion of pure, distilled, all-American ingenuity, erupting right there on ABC! MacGyver had landed. What was this? This MacGyver, this new television program on the third-rate-network-of-choice, ABC, in the autumn of 1985, arriving like some kind of strange CHEMICAL REACTION, a new concoction bubbling up from the cultural stew of the Me Decade? Here came this fellow, MacGyver, portrayed by Richard Dean Anderson, to make beta males great again. That's right: pacifist MacGyver, with his aversion to guns and his bleeding heart for the environment, would defy the panoply of 80s action icons - the Rambos, the Terminators, the former cowboys-turned-presidents - and solve problems with brains, not bullets. And...

The city, she’s a greedy old sow, and she’s always hungry. You think she cares about your memories? Your first Christmas window display, your mother’s perfume counter? Forget it. The city just wants what’s next. Thirty-eight years ago, on a crisp fall day that promised nothing but the usual urban squalor, a great hole opened up in Herald Square. On September 28, 1986, the lights went out. The doors locked. The escalators froze. Gimbels , that sprawling giant at 33rd Street and Broadway, was dead. And if you listen close, on a foggy New York night, you might still hear the echoes of its final day, like a ghost rattling its chains in the dark. The liquidation sale had been a cruel, lingering wound. People, with that particular vulture-like hunger that comes from thinking you’re getting something for nothing, had picked the store’s bones clean. They’d walked out with cheap toasters and discount sweaters, like little parasites carrying away their last bits of carrion. But even in their tri...

ZAP! POW! BOOM! The year is 1985, and America’s pulse is throbbing to the beat of Reagan’s red, white, and blue bravado, a nation flexing its muscles under the strobe lights of Cold War paranoia. On September 27, 1985, Invasion U.S.A. explodes into theaters, starring the squinting, denim-clad, karate-kicking colossus himself, Chuck Norris. This is no mere movie; it’s a fever dream of jingoistic machismo, a 107-minute carnival of explosions, Uzis, and unapologetic American swagger, served up raw and bloody like a T-bone steak at a VFW barbecue.  The titular invaders of the U.S.A.? Why, those damn pinko commies, of course! Soviets! Cubans! Assorted well-armed Fellow Travelers! They blow up suburban homes, shoot up shopping malls, and—most unforgivably—disrupt Christmas, that holiest of American holidays.  Who is the diabolical genius behind this invasion? A Soviet madman named Mikhail Rostov, played by frequent and always-convincing cinematic villain Richard Lynch. A man who li...

On September 26, 1982, the idea of a car that could think, could talk, felt like something torn from the pages of a sci-fi paperback you’d find in the spinner rack at the drugstore. But there it was, right in our living rooms. One of the most-essential, stylish, and definitive 1980s TV shows was about to premiere on NBC. And it wasn't Miami Vice . Kids across America were sprawled on the shag carpet, adults reclined in their La-Z-Boys, bowls of sour cream and onion potato chips forgotten as the screen lit up. The opening notes of that synth-heavy theme hit like a warning bell, a sound that promised adventure but carried an undercurrent of something darker, something unknowable. The words... Knight Rider ...in that distinctive font. And then there’s Michael Knight—David Hasselhoff, all jawline and swagger, a man who’s been given a second chance at life by a shadowy organization for the Reagan era called FLAG. He’s a loner, a drifter, a knight errant in blue jeans - but he’s not alon...

It was a cold, cruel little movie, a real meat-and-potatoes fright flick, the kind they don't seem to make anymore. Not that they couldn't, mind you. They just don't.  The year was 1981, a good year for horror if you were brave enough to go looking for it. Your local movie house was full of monsters—some in the woods ( The Evil Dead ), some in the desert ( The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 ), and even some in the local hospital ( Halloween II ). But on September 25th, an independent little creature feature with a dumb name showed up. The title card probably made a few people snicker into their popcorn. The Boogens . The Boogens crawled out of the shadowy corners of the drive-in circuit like something unearthed from a forgotten mine shaft. Which, fittingly enough, is exactly where its terrors began. Picture this: Silver City, Colorado, a nowhere town with a shuttered silver mine, sealed up tighter than a mummy’s tomb after a massacre a hundred years back. The kind of place where th...

From the desk of  Patrick Bateman Listen, let’s cut to the chase—September 24, 1989, was a night that pulsed with a certain kind of raw, primal energy, the kind that makes your blood hum and your pulse quicken, like the moment before you close a deal or snap a neck. ABC-TV aired The Preppie Murder , a made-for-TV movie that laid bare the sordid, intoxicating tale of Robert Chambers and the death of Jennifer Levin in Central Park. It’s the kind of film that demands a chilled martini in one hand and a copy of The Wall Street Journal in the other, because, let’s face it, it’s not just a murder—it’s a brand . A narrative polished to a glossy sheen, served up for the masses to devour while they’re ironing their Brooks Brothers shirts or flipping through Vogue . I was in my apartment that night, of course, the one with the bone-white walls and the Eames chair that costs more than most people’s rent. The TV was on, a sleek Sony Trinitron, its glow reflecting off the glass coffee table li...

Forty years ago, a different America was emerging, though many refused to see it. It was the America that Billy Joel captured with stark precision on his album, The Nylon Curtain , released on this very day in 1982. Joel, the piano man from Hicksville, delivered a powerful and unapologetic album that spoke to the silent majority's fears, disillusionment, and quiet patriotism. This was Ronald Reagan's America. The Cold War was back on, and we were "winning." Yet in the heartland, the factories were closing, and the promises made to the children of the Greatest Generation were being broken. Joel raised the nylon curtain on the dark underside of the 80s, where in the darkness of decomissioned coal mines and blast furnaces, it was anything but "morning in America." Billy Joel wasn't singing about champagne and limousines; he was singing about the factory worker in "Allentown" waiting for a Pennsylvania he'd been promised, but that never arrived...

We're talking about movies, specifically horror movies, and I got to thinking about September of '87. You remember '87? Hair metal, calculator watches...good times. And in that glorious month, something rather...unique arrived on the scene. We're talking about a little film called Hellraiser . Hellraiser. Good Lord - who came up with that? Well, some guy named Clive Barker. What's he doing? He's got a puzzle box. A little square thing, like a Rubik's Cube for Satanists.  You open it up, and next thing you know, you've got these...well, let's just say a group of very enthusiastic individuals show up. And they're not there to fix your plumbing.   Folks, when Doug Bradley stepped onto the screen as Pinhead, it was like someone took a Goth nightclub bouncer and gave him a PhD in pain. This guy wasn’t just a villain; he was a Cenobite with a capital “C,” delivering lines like “We have such sights to show you” with the gravitas of a Shakespearean actor...

The Tin Star . Big game. Tremendous game. Released on September 21, 1983, by Taito. A very good company, Taito. Very smart people, they knew what they were doing with this one. Now, you talk about arcade games, you had a lot of them. Some good, some...not so good. Total disasters, frankly. But The Tin Star? This was a winner. A truly great western shooting game. You had to protect the town, shoot the bad guys, very tough. Very challenging. It required skill, not like some of these games today where anyone can win. Sad! We're talking about a time when arcades were powerful. They were booming. Everyone was there, everyone wanted to play the best games. And The Tin Star, believe me, it was up there. It wasn't just another game. It had character. It had excitement. The Tin Star was an arcade game so fantastic, so revolutionary, it made every other game look like, frankly, a total disaster. I mean, we’re talking about a Western shooter, okay? Cowboys, guns, the Wild West—nobody love...

It was a Thursday, as I recall. Or perhaps a Tuesday . In the grand tapestry of galactic events, the precise day is often a matter of such profound insignificance that the universe generally refrains from bothering with it. However, for a small, slightly damp island off the coast of Europe, and indeed for a significant portion of the burgeoning digital consciousnesses within its borders, September 20th, 1984, was a day of quite remarkable - and entirely unexpected - import. For on this particular, admittedly rather unremarkable, day, something truly extraordinary happened. No, not the invention of a particularly comfortable sofa, nor the sudden discovery that socks could, in fact, match. Far more significant than either of those delightful fantasies, a computer game, a veritable digital universe, was unleashed upon the unsuspecting owners of the BBC Micro. Its name? Elite . Now, to understand the sheer improbability of Elite, one must first consider the BBC Micro itself. This was a mac...

The box rose on September 19, 1985. Not just any box, you understand, but a big box, a really BIG box, a sprawling, horizontal, concrete bunker, rising up out of the Prince William County soil with the sort of implacable, irresistible, goldarned force of a tidal bore! Out on Route One, they were coming, they were roaring up from Fredericksburg, and spilling off I-95 from the Capital Beltway, a whole NEW wave of Virginia colonists, not to conquer the wilderness this time, oh no, but to CONQUER THE SALES!! Potomac Mills Mall had opened. The sales, you see, were the point. Potomac Mills was designed as an outlet mall, not a high-end number like White Flint Mall or Mazza Gallerie. This is how you ended up with Teri Garr at the ribbon cutting instead of Elizabeth Taylor. And infamous Virginia Governor Chuck Robb, just one year removed from his New York hotel room massage.  Consumers drove to The Box to worship at the altar of the discount gods of retail - and what a pantheon of g...

ZOOM! SCREECH! BANG! American TV viewers were in for a HIGH OCTANE Sunday night of TV on September 18, 1983. That's when one of the greatest shows of the 1980s, Hardcastle and McCormick , premiered with a two-part pilot episode on ABC. Another hit from the prolific television genius and novelist Stephen J. Cannell, it spun a twist on the buddy cop genre by teaming up a retired judge and a criminal to pursue a literal file cabinet full of felons who had gotten off on technicalities. It featured some other tropes familiar to Cannell fans, such as casting an older veteran of the silver screen, snappy dialogue, cars mysteriously launching off of the trunks of other cars, and plenty of tire burning, fist-fighting ACTION. Brian Keith as Judge Milton C. Hardcastle, and Daniel Hugh Kelly as former race car driver and current convict "Skid" Mark McCormick, had believable father-son chemistry right off the bat. Keith needed no introduction to older viewers, and Kelly held his own o...

It’s September, and the goldenrod of late summer is just beginning to yield to the crisp, knowing breath of autumn. But inside the air-conditioned caverns of your local electronics and toy emporiums, a different kind of season is dawning. The season of the Lynx. The Atari Lynx . Well, it says Atari on the machine and the box. But it's actually from the mind of Epyx, a legendary software developer in the golden age of the Commodore 64. We are entering into the period where Atari is ceasing to develop its own video game hardware, that will culminate in utter 1990s failure. Did you ever hear the tragedy of the Atari Jaguar? I thought not. The kids in the back of the station wagon, they were the first to see it, to really feel it coming. Not hear it, not just hear the talk on the blacktop or the whispers in the dim-lit aisles of the arcade, but see it. See it in the magazines, glossy and bright, with some kind of advertisement. This Atari Lynx—it wasn't like the others.  You see, ...

"RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!" With the thundering words of Zeus himself echoing around the world, Japanese game company Sega proceeded to do just that in September of 1989. Out on the coasts, in the sun-drenched, palm-tree swaying land of California and amid the staggering towers and mayhem of New York – always a step ahead, aren't they? – the first whispers had begun on August 14. Little black boxes, sleek and dark as a fresh-dug grave, had started appearing on store shelves. " Sega Genesis ," the labels read, in a sci-fi font. But that was just the appetizer, a taste of what was coming, a single drop of blood before the main event. Because come September, that’s when the beast was truly unleashed. Nationwide. Sega had spent the mid-80s as an also-ran underdog. The 8-bit Sega Master System had nowhere near the number of hot titles or library size that Nintendo's NES boasted. But as the decade reached its end, it was planning its revenge. The Genesis would delive...

ZAP! POW! WHAM! On this fine morning of September 15, 1982, the newsstands of America shuddered under the weight of a new beast, a Technicolor dream machine called USA Today , bursting forth like a firework blast against a gray flannel sky. A nation of movers and shakers, of transient souls in Holiday Inn suites and airport lounges, finally got its own paper, a paper of the HOTELS, the AIRPORTS and the INTERSTATES! A paper for THEM! The ones who didn’t have time to slog through the leaden, beige columns of the Gray Lady. The ones who wanted their news like their Big Macs, FAST and HOT! Forget the monocolor, the staid, the ponderous pronouncements of the Old Guard dailies, those venerable, ink-stained monuments to textual heft. This, this thing – this USA Today – it was different. It practically shouted its difference, not with stentorian tones but with a vibrant, audacious burst of COLOR! The cognoscenti, the old-guard newspaper boys from The Washington Post and The New York Times , t...

SEPTEMBER 14, 1981. A Monday. The kind of day when, out there, beyond the glowing phosphor of the cathode-ray tube, the world spun on in its usual, rather predictable orbit. ZAP! POW! WHAM! The cathode rays hummed, the airwaves crackled. But inside that glorious, glowing box, something else was stirring. Something utterly, irrevocably, quintessentially Eighties was about to erupt! A double-barreled blast of televisual wizardry: two, two! new TV franchises that in their own disparate ways, would carve out a permanent, glittering niche in the cultural firmament! One was a creature of pure, unadulterated glamour, all shimmer and flash and teeth-gleaming, perfect-o smiles. The other...well, the other was the raw, unvarnished id of the American psyche, served up on a platter of municipal court papers and bad perm jobs. A truly cosmic collision! First, out of the electronic fog of syndication, came the perfectly groomed, perfectly manicured monster known as ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT ! It was a ...

There’s a house on Mercyful Lane - a manor, really - a crooked old place where the shadows don’t just linger—they crawl. It’s the kind of house that hums with secrets, where the wallpaper peels, and the air tastes of mold, rotting wood, and regret. The kind of house that has gargoyles on the peaks of its roof(!). Back on September 13, 1988, something wicked slithered out of that house, something that bestowed upon us a key to a door best left locked. That was the day King Diamond , that pale-faced conjurer of nightmares, unleashed Them upon the world—a record that didn’t just play but possessed. Now, if you knew King Diamond, you already knew you weren’t getting a sunny walk in the park. This wasn’t a man who sang about rainbows or puppies. This was a man who lived in the crypt of his own imagination, a maestro of the macabre, with a voice that could shatter glass or grumble like a Panzer tank. But Them…Them was different. King Diamond, always the storyteller, decided to invite us int...

Ah, September 12, 1985—a date that hangs in the air like the afterburn of a rocket launch, all fire and fury and that peculiar American dream of reinvention. There they were, the remnants of Jefferson Starship, those wild-eyed prophets of the Summer of Love, shedding their psychedelic wings like so much tie-dye confetti and reemerging as Starship . Not just any starship, mind you, but a sleek, chrome-plated vessel hurtling straight into the heart of the Reagan Revolution's pop cosmos. And on this crisp autumn day, they unleashed Knee Deep in the Hoopla upon an unsuspecting world, a sonic declaration that the hippies had traded their beads for synthesizers, their protests for platinum records, and their free love for the cold, hard calculus of the charts. The whole affair, it must be said, was a marvel of the new, late-20th-century American science of marketing. Could these really be the 80s descendants of Jefferson Airplane, a crew of grizzled veterans who had, in a previous lifet...

Something crawled out of the digital primordial soup on September 11, 1987. Not here in our sleepy corner of North America, mind you, but across the big pond, in the land of the rising sun. That's the day Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei clawed its way out of the Nintendo Famicom's cartridge slot. This wasn't just a game; it was a gateway, a crack in the wall between our safe little pixelated dreams and the real monsters that lurk in the code. Developer Atlus had a wild idea: take a trilogy of science-fantasy novels by some guy named Aya Nishitani and twist them into a role-playing nightmare. Published by Namco, this thing hit the shelves on September 11, 1987, right in the heart of Tokyo's bustling electronics districts. Picture it: salarymen rushing home, kids with pocket money burning holes in their shorts, all unaware that they were about to invite Lucifer himself into their living rooms. The story? A hotshot programmer kid named Akemi Nakajima cooks up this ...

Nineteen-eighty-six, that glittering, synth-soaked moment when America is flexing, preening, dreaming in Technicolor. The economy’s roaring like a Trans Am, Wall Street’s snorting lines of pure ambition, and the kids—those latchkey warriors in acid-washed jeans—are hungry for something bold, something that screams individuality, while still fitting neatly into a lunchbox.  And so it was that in the linoleum canyons of a supermarket, the fluorescent lights blared, and the shopping cart rattled and clattered, and there it was, sitting there, right there on the shelf, between the Nacho Cheese and the Taco flavors, a new flavor! a new—Cool! Ranch! DORITOS! Cool Ranch Doritos hit the shelves like a meteor, their turquoise bag a beacon in the snack aisle, whispering rebellion to every teen grabbing a fistful between rounds of OutRun . It wasn't just a chip; it was a lifestyle, a vibe, a mood. You didn't just eat Cool Ranch Doritos—you experienced them. The name itself? Genius. Cool...