80s News Today

Ah, the late '80s, that glittering, gaudy vortex of excess! Los Angeles, the Sunset Strip – a neon-lit jungle where dreams clawed their way up from the gutters, enveloped in hairspray and leather pants, electric guitars screaming like banshees in the night! And into this maelstrom, on January 31, 1989, bursts Warrant , those Hollywood hustlers, unleashing their debut album Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich upon an unsuspecting world hungry for hooks, for heartaches wrapped in power chords, for anthems that could make the stadiums shake and the groupies swoon. Pow! There it was, certified platinum, storming the charts with its sleazy swagger, peaking at number 10 on the Billboard 200, spawning hits that blasted through car radios and MTV screens like fireworks in a fireworks factory explosion! The title alone encapsulating the 80s zeitgeist! But while Warrant visually resembled the glam bands that were a dime a dozen in the wake of Poison and Theatre of Pain -era Motley Crüe, the b...

The snow had started falling again in late January 1980, the kind of wet, clinging snow that sticks to everything like bad memories you can't quite shake. In living rooms across America, people were still arguing over whether the picture on their new television sets looked better with the lights on or off, and the machines—those big, clunky VCRs and Betamax players—sat like squat, patient animals in the corners of dens and family rooms, waiting for something to feed them. Up until then, if you wanted to see a flick like Deliverance , you had to wait for it to show up at the local cinema or pray the network censors didn’t chop it into confetti for the Saturday Night Movie. But around January 30, 1980, the world shifted on its axis just a hair. Warner Home Video dumped a whole bucket of titles onto the market—VHS and Betamax—and suddenly, the cinema wasn't a place you went; it was a thing you owned. Imagine it. You’re sitting there in your wood-paneled den, the smell of stale Pal...

One must appreciate the sheer audacity of it all. To take something so gloriously, defiantly simple – a cube, mind you, six sides, six colors – and then to render it utterly, bafflingly, frustratingly complex. Such was the magnificent, bewildering debut of what was then simply called the "Magic Cube." On January 29, 1980, in the grey and drizzly environs of Earl's Court, London—where the British Toy and Hobby Fair was unfolding with all the restrained excitement of a civil service tea break—a small, brightly colored plastic object made its entrance on the international stage. This was no ordinary entrance. This was the Rubik's Cube stepping into the world spotlight, like a Hungarian mathematics lecturer who has accidentally invented a device capable of driving the entire species mildly insane while charging only $1.99 for the privilege. Its inventor, one Ernő Rubik, had been quietly tormenting himself with it since 1974. He arrived at the Ideal Toy Corporation's s...

The morning of January 28th, 1986, was cold. Too cold. A bone-biting, rivet-popping cold that had no business lingering on the Florida coast. But there it was, a grim, unwelcome guest, making the breath steam in front of your face and frosting the windshields of every car from Cocoa Beach to Orlando. You could feel it in your teeth, that cold, a deep ache that seemed to hint at something wrong. Down at Cape Canaveral, the space shuttle Challenger sat on the pad, a gleaming white needle against a sky that was too blue, too clear, too innocent. Inside, seven souls were strapped in, ready to punch a hole in that perfect sky and ride a controlled explosion into the heavens. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, the teacher. The everywoman. The smiling face that made it all seem so close, so real, so possible. America watched. We always did, back then. We gathered around our televisions, in classrooms and living rooms, sipping coffee or juice, a collective gasp of anticipation held tight in our...

BOOM! It wasn't just a sound; it was the crack of a decade, the rupture in the fabric of the Eighties, a singular, searing moment in the supernova life of the greatest pop star the world had ever known. We were talking Michael Jackson , folks, and the stage was set, not for another moonwalk, but for a blaze that would forever scar the King of Pop and, in a strange, twisted way, brand the very soul of an era.  The date? January 27, 1984. The locale? That venerable temple of tinsel, the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where the air shimmered with ambition and the scent of hairspray. This wasn’t just another gig; this was Pepsi, the other cola, the upstart, the challenger to that venerable brown baron, Coca-Cola. And Michael? He wasn't just endorsing; he was embodying the brand. He was the bolt of lightning in a bottle, the pure, uncut sugar rush that Pepsi needed to go toe-to-toe with the behemoth. Remember the "Choice of a New Generation"? Nonsense! It was the Choice...

In the shadowed annals of a world not yet bowed by the weight of endless sequels and remakes, there came a day when the gods of code and pixel decreed the birth of a new epic. It was the twenty-sixth day of January, in the year nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, when the iron gates of Enix swung wide, unleashing upon the Famicom—a.k.a. the Nintendo Entertainment System—a tale of bloodlines cursed and kingdoms imperiled. Dragon Quest II, or as the bards in western realms would rename it, Dragon Warrior II , emerged not as a mere game, but as a chronicle of heroism fraught with peril, where the descendants of legends must forge alliances or perish in the attempt. The first Dragon Warrior, a modest affair, had planted the seed. It told a simple tale, a single hero, a princess to rescue, a Dragon Lord to slay. But with its sequel, the world of Alefgard, once thought vast, was revealed to be but a sliver of a greater tapestry. The blood of the hero Erdrick, once so potent in a singular cham...

The wind howls through the pines tonight like a banshee (or should that be Banshee, with a capital "B"?) with a stubbed toe, but my mind isn’t on the cold. It’s on a different kind of winter—the one that settled into the spinner racks in January 1980. I remember the smell of those old drugstores. Stale tobacco, floor wax, and the sweet, electric scent of fresh newsprint. I reached past the Archie digests and the gothic paperbacks, and there it was: Uncanny X-Men #129 . The cover had that frantic, desperate energy John Byrne and Terry Austin caught so well. You didn’t just look at it; you felt like you were being pulled into a dark alleyway by your coat collar. And like 99% of the time you're pulled into a dark alleyway, you weren't coming back. This was the start of "The Dark Phoenix Saga," but the real magic wasn't in the cosmic fire. It was in the introductions. Chris Claremont, a man who understands the machinery of the human soul better than most, de...

January 24, 1984—Cupertino, California, the Flint Center at De Anza College crackling like a Van de Graaff generator in a mad scientist's lab! The air thick with the scent of revolution, shareholders fidgeting in their pinstripes, tech whiz kids slouched in denim, all eyes glued to the stage where the wizard himself, Steve Jobs, twenty-eight years old and burning like a supernova, steps out under the lights, beaming that Cheshire cat grin, that knowing smirk that says, I've got the future in my pocket, folks, and it's about to bite Big Blue right on the ass! He stood there, a maestro before his orchestra, a palpable energy radiating from him like heat from a nuclear reactor. This was a showman, not a salesman. A showman who understood that in the arena of commerce, style was substance and presentation was a sacrament. He moved with the predatory grace of a cougar, pacing, pausing, his voice a mesmerizing instrument, rising and falling, a sermon in the church of Silicon Vall...

The living rooms of America were lit that Sunday night, January 23, 1983, with the peculiar blue flicker of NBC, the network that had decided—perhaps in a fit of desperate programming bravado—to unleash something called The A-Team upon the populace. Outside, the wind was whipping cold across the heartland, the kind of January wind that makes you think of bankrupt farms and Reagan's morning-in-America smile, but inside, behind the picture windows of split-levels from Levittown to the San Fernando Valley, something louder, brasher, and more gloriously unapologetic was about to explode. And then, WHAM! Out of the cathode-ray tube bursts a cacophony of screeching tires, rattling machine guns, and the sheer, unadulterated manhood of a black-and-red GMC Vandura. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the birth of the A-Team. Picture it: George Peppard, that silver-haired, cigar-chomping veteran of The Blue Max, Breakfast at Tiffany's , and Banacek , stepping into the role of John "H...

Let's talk about one of the most iconic moments in advertising history—the Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad . You remember it, right? That dystopian masterpiece directed by Ridley Scott, straight out of George Orwell's nightmare. A gray, soulless world where rows of drone-like workers stare blankly at a massive screen, listening to some authoritarian figure droning on about conformity and control. Then, in bursts this athletic woman in bright red shorts, hurling a sledgehammer right through the screen, shattering the illusion. "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh," the voiceover declares. "And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'" It was genius. Pure, unadulterated marketing brilliance. Back then, Apple was the plucky underdog, positioning itself as the liberator against the evil empire of IBM. The IBM PC was the corporate behemoth—clunky, bureaucratic, designed for suits in boardrooms who wanted everything standardized, con...

DUNMURRY, NORTHERN IRELAND — JANUARY 21, 1981 And there it was! The Thing Itself! Not merely a car, no, but a shimmering, unpainted slab of Tomorrow, squinting through the Belfast drizzle like a terrestrial UFO. Out of the hangar-sized gestation crates of the DeLorean Motor Company, the first production DMC-12—VIN 500—was whelped into the gray light of a Tuesday morning. Can you feel the sheen? Can you smell the ozone and the hubris? John Zachary DeLorean—the man with the silver-streaked pompadour and the jawline of a Roman consul—had done it. He had defected from the mahogany-paneled cathedrals of General Motors to build his own altar to the Great American Ego. He didn’t want just another "automobile." He wanted a Social Statement. He wanted a brushed-stainless-steel exoskeleton that screamed: "I have arrived, and I am traveling at the speed of the future!" John Z. himself, with his impeccably coiffed hair and movie-star looks, must have surveyed it with the pride ...

BOOM! It wasn't just a record. It wasn't merely another vinyl frisbee spinning on the hi-fi, destined for the back of the closet, forgotten between a Macramé owl and a stack of Star Wars trading cards. No, sir. On January 20th, 1983, as the Winter of Our Discontent clung to the eaves of America, when the grey pallor of the everyday threatened to smother the last flickering ember of Rock 'n' Roll, something happened. Something resplendent. Something that screamed from the rooftops, from the darkest corners of the suburban garage, from the very core of the American teenager's soul, that the future, my friends, was not just here—it was LOUD. And it was called PYROMANIA . It burst forth from the grimy, smoke-filled crucible of Sheffield, England, hurled across the Atlantic like a shimmering, chrome-plated projectile. Def Leppard , those five lads, barely out of their school blazers, had done it. They had bottled the lightning. They had captured the very essence of zeitg...

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the British Broadcasting Corporation is for and why it exists, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened, and it resulted in a television program called The Computer Programme . On a cold Monday in January 1982—specifically the 11th, a day generally reserved for the nursing of mild hangovers and the profound realization that winter is quite long—the British public was introduced to a machine that looked like a very expensive, very sophisticated biscuit tin. This was the BBC Micro. The first episode of The Computer Programme featured Chris Serle, a man who possessed the heroic level of bewilderment required to represent an entire nation that still thought "software" was a type of comfortable knitwear. Alongside him was Ian McNaught-Davis, who explained the digital revolution with the kin...

We’re about to take a brief, mildly absurd, and entirely necessary jaunt back to January 18, 1980. Picture it: the world, still collectively nursing a hangover from the 70s (which, frankly, was less a decade and more a protracted bout of psychedelic indigestion), was blinking into a new era. An era that, unbeknownst to most, would soon inflict us with erasable ink pens, excessive use of synthesizers, and the concept of "power dressing." But amidst this nascent chaos, on that very Friday, something rather monumental, and perhaps even a trifle depressing, achieved the dizzying heights of the American musical landscape. Pink Floyd’s The Wall ascended to the coveted #1 spot on the Billboard album chart. Now, one might reasonably ask, "Was the world truly ready for a double concept album about alienation, mental breakdown, and the crippling effects of an overprotective mother and a brutally conformist education system?" The answer, rather unsettlingly, was a resounding,...

Alright, fasten your seatbelts, 80s pop culture voyeurs, because we're about to plunge, headfirst and without a parachute, into the swirling vortex of a legal decision that, on a deceptively placid January 17th of 1984, ripped a hole in the fabric of American entertainment, forever altering the landscape of our living rooms and the very texture of how we consumed moving pictures. This wasn't just a Supreme Court ruling; no, my friends, this was an earthquake felt in every split-level, every ranch house, every suburban palace across the land, an event that birthed the glorious, untamed beast we now know as Home Video! The gavel dropped like Thor's hammer, splitting the skies over Tinseltown. In a razor-thin 5-4 verdict, the justices declared that Sony's Betamax video tape recorder wasn't some pirate's gadget for plundering copyrights but a legitimate tool for the average Joe to time-shift his TV viewing, fair and square under the law.  Rewind a bit, if you will, ...

Let's peel back the layers of that singular day, January 16, 1981, when the tectonic plates of American rock 'n' roll shifted with the release of two behemoths: Styx's Paradise Theatre and Toto's Turn Back . Picture it, if you will, through the lens of a chrome-plated, mirror-sunglasses-wearing, cocaine-fueled zeitgeist – a world where shoulder pads were beginning their ascent, the economy was a roller coaster of terrifying peaks and valleys, and the electric guitar remained, for a precious few years more, the undisputed king of teenage dreams. Two eagerly anticipated albums following records with massive hit singles, with similar fan bases...on the same day? What were the label honchos thinking? Needless to say, the rarefied air in the record stores—those glorious, fluorescent-lit cathedrals of commerce, heavy with the scent of vinyl and old carpet—was thick with anticipation. Not for some punk-rock snarl, mind you, nor for the burgeoning New Wave synth-pop that w...

It was January 15, 1986, and the sky over America had been open for a long time—too long, some said. The big white dishes in backyards from Maine to Malibu had been drinking in the signals like thirsty men at an open bar, pulling down movies and boxing matches and late-night specials from satellites that didn't care who was watching. HBO and Cinemax had been up there, naked and unashamed, beaming their treasures to anyone with a dish and a dream. No locks. No keys. Just the cold beauty of open transmission. Then came the day the locks turned. HBO and Cinemax, you see, they weren't happy about all those freeloaders. They’d been bleeding money, like a wound that won’t quite close, every time a dish owner snagged their programming without subscribing. For years, the sky had been an open buffet. If you had a satellite dish in your backyard, you were a god. You reached up and plucked Ghostbusters or Gremlins right out of the ether, free as a summer breeze. HBO and Cinemax were t...

January 14, 1981! Mark it, folks— today's the day Walt Disney's enchanted empire, that sprawling fantasia of castles and critters, makes its first audacious foray into home video releases for the everyday Joe and Jane to buy, not just rent. No more begging the video store clerk for a weekend loaner; now you can own the magic, slap it into your hulking VCR beast, and rewind Old Yeller's heart-tug tears until the tape squeals for mercy (or unravels out and jams up your machine)! Can you see them? The suburban legions, the station-wagon commuters, the beige-polyester titans of the cul-de-sac—they are descending upon the electronics boutiques with a new, frantic glint in their eyes! They aren’t looking for Zenith consoles or those clacking Teletype machines. No! They are after the TAPE. The Magnetic Ribbon of Dreams! For years, the high priests at Disney kept their treasures locked in a literal vault, dolefully releasing them to theaters once every seven years like some druidic...

One must pause, occasionally, in the relentless, illogical march of human history, to appreciate moments of truly splendid absurdity. And few moments in the mid-1980s achieved such a perfectly poised balance of brilliance, frustration, and sheer, delightful pointlessness as the saga of Kit Williams' Masquerade . And so, on January 13, 1987, the peculiar, tantalizing aroma of a mystery—already famously solved, mind you, but more on that later—wafted across the Atlantic to the unsuspecting shores of America. This was the day Schocken Books released the American special edition of Masquerade. Now, Masquerade was not a normal book. Most books are content to sit on a shelf and be read, occasionally serving as a coaster or a way to level a wobbly table. Masquerade was different. It was a book that actively encouraged you to leave your house, buy a shovel, and dig up large portions of the English countryside in search of an 18-carat golden hare. The American edition, published years after...