80s News Today

Dateline: February 21, 1980. Columbus, Ohio. (Where else?) In the heart of the great American boredom, in a sleek, air-conditioned corporate bunker of polished steel and beige carpeting, the pioneering dial-up online service CompuServe flipped a switch. Click. And just like that, the universe cracked open! They called it the "CB Simulator." Hah! "Citizen's Band Simulator." Can you feel the mid-century corporate desperate-for-relevance clinging to that name? Like calling a spacesuit a "very fancy raincoat." They were trying to capture the raw, screeching energy of the CB radio, that great diesel-fumed trucker opera of the 1970s. But this wasn't 10-4, good buddy, on the I-95. This was something else entirely. This was the future, man. This was 300-baud acoustic couplers mating with Ma Bell’s lines in a screech that sounded like two tomcats being electrocuted in a tin can. This was phosphor-green letters crawling across your $2,000 CRT like divine r...

The date was February 15, 1980, and the air over the Pacific was thick with the stench of cheap exhaust and impending doom. We were hovering on the edge of a new decade, clutching our tattered Carter-era souls, when a low-budget Australian nightmare called Mad Max tore through the celluloid curtain and ran over our collective consciousness like a runaway semi-truck. George Miller—a doctor, for God's sake!—had unleashed a savage, high-octane fever dream onto American screens. This wasn't the polished, plastic Hollywood garbage the studios had been pumping into the vents. This was pure, unadulterated motor-oil madness. The premise? Simple enough for a barbiturate addict to follow: A leather-clad road cop named Max Rockatansky—played by a young, wild-eyed Mel Gibson—trying to maintain "The Law" in a world that had clearly sold its soul for a gallon of high-test premium. It was a landscape of scorched earth and screaming metal, populated by a gang of degenerate bikers wh...

February 8, 1980. Mark it down, folks, because that was the day the Silver Screen coughed up something truly, utterly, and gloriously American onto the unsuspecting public. Forget your grimacing anti-heroes, your tormented auteurs, your foreign-film gloom! This was something else entirely, a cinematic confection as bright and unapologetically earnest as a freshly starched shirt on a Sunday morning. We’re talking about Hero at Large , a motion picture that landed in theaters with the subtle grace of a bowling ball dropped from a skyscraper. And who, you might ask, was at the very epicenter of this particular cultural collision? None other than the gangly, grinning, rubber-faced maestro of physical comedy himself: John Ritter! Yes, that John Ritter, the man who, for the better part of a decade, had been tumbling and pratfalling and generally making a delightful spectacle of himself as Jack Tripper on "Three’s Company." This wasn't some Method-acting, inner-demon-wrestling p...

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 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...

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,...

There it was. The Click-Clack-Zzzzzzt of the cassette drive, a sound like a swarm of electric locusts devouring a silicon harvest. It was January 6, 1980, and the Great Gods of Avalon Hill had just handed the American suburbanite the ultimate status symbol: the power to vaporize Moscow from the comfort of a swivel chair. There it was, gentlemen, in the crisp winter light of a new decade, slipping quietly into the world like a sleek, variable-swept-wing bomber emerging from the hangar: B-1 Nuclear Bomber , released for the Apple II. No fanfare, no ticker-tape parade down Silicon Valley's nascent boulevards—just a cassette tape or floppy disk in a box, priced for the serious enthusiast, arriving at computer shops and hobby stores where the new breed of masters of the universe gathered. B-1 Nuclear Bomber was not, emphatically not, a game for the casual Atari-paddle-wielding plebeian. Oh no. This was a Serious Simulation, a high-fidelity, low-resolution plunge into the heart of the ul...

A rather ordinary, yet profoundly significant, thing happened on the fourth day of January, in the year of nineteen hundred and eighty.  A record was released. Now, a record, for those of you born after the advent of digital downloads and the subsequent existential dread of owning nothing tangible, was a round, flat, black disc made of vinyl. It spun. It made noises. Sometimes, if you were lucky, those noises coalesced into something approaching "music." For several years prior, the musical landscape had been dominated by Progressive Rock (songs so long they required their own zip codes) and Disco (a genre based entirely on the belief that white polyester could solve human suffering).  The Romantics looked at this situation, adjusted their incredibly narrow neckties, and decided to do something quite radical: they played songs that were three minutes long, contained three chords, and possessed a level of energy usually reserved for toddlers who have discovered a six-pack of ...

Pull up a seat by the crackling fire, because we're gonna talk about a scream in the dark of winter. A rumble of thunder from a place where the shadows stretch long and the old gods still hold sway. December. Nineteen-eighty. A time when the world was shivering on the cusp of a new, louder, more demonic sound. Somewhere in that gloom, a band called Angel Witch unleashed their eponymous debut, a slab of vinyl with a cover that looked like a fever dream from a Sunday School teacher’s worst nightmare. This was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and Angel Witch, well, they were like the strange, pale kid in class who drew demons in his notebook – unsettling, fascinating, and utterly unforgettable. They had a raw, occult energy that made Black Sabbath look like a church choir and Iron Maiden look like they were still practicing their scales. From the moment the needle dropped, or the tape started to hiss, you knew this wasn't going to be a walk in the park. A horned demon leering...

Good heavens. December in the U.K. A time for mince pies, questionable knitwear, and the perennial British tradition of watching ghost stories and The Great Escape on the BBC. But in December 1980, something rather less traditional decided to drop in on the proceedings. Not a forgotten Christmas present, you understand, but a rather large, presumably confused, and altogether unidentifiable flying object. The setting, naturally, was Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. Because where else would a genuinely baffling extraterrestrial encounter take place but in a rather damp, entirely unremarkable patch of woodland adjacent to two highly secret NATO airbases? It's like finding a sentient trug in your garden shed; utterly illogical, yet somehow, perfectly British. Chapter 1: The Torchlight Tour of Utter Bewilderment The whole thing kicked off, as these things often do, with a peculiar light. Not a car headlight, nor the distant glint of a particularly enthusiastic disco ball, but something......

A decade of neon and pastel got off to a much darker start when America failed to get out of its first year without the shocking loss of John Lennon . The creative giant and political activist was gunned down outside his New York City apartment building on the evening of December 8, 1980, in an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a government conspiracy, complete with an unconvincing patsy pulling the trigger. Lennon had been hounded by the FBI, and illegally by the CIA, since moving to the United States. The powers-that-be feared his potential influence on elections, particularly among younger voters. Gunman Mark David Chapman remains in prison, serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, New York. He has been denied parole all fourteen times he has been eligible for it. His explanation for killing Lennon, who was only 40 at the time, doesn't add up. He claimed on the one hand that he was obsessed with what he thought was Lennon...

Pull up a chair by the dying embers of the fireplace, because we're about to talk about a little something that slithered out from under a white house in December of 1980, a little something called Zork I: The Great Underground Empire . Or, at least it was great. Now this abandoned subterranean imperial realm was yours for the taking on your TRS-80 home computer, courtesy of RadioShack.  You’re eight, maybe nine, and it’s a Friday night in a suburban tract home where the snow is already knee-deep and the wind sounds like something trying to get in sideways. Your parents are downstairs watching The Love Boat or whatever the hell passes for entertainment when you’re born before color TV. Up in your room, the only light comes from the green glow of a TRS-80 Model I, its fan humming like a dying June bug trapped in a mason jar. Two guys in a lab at MIT had basically built their own private haunted house out of words. And now you're sliding it into the Trash 80: a floppy disk, thi...

It is a little-known fact that the Earth was very nearly destroyed on December 5, 1980. The instrument of this near-apocalypse was a motion picture called Flash Gordon , directed by a man named Mike Hodges who, one suspects, had been locked in a screening room with too many Saturday-morning serials and an industrial quantity of gin. The result was released upon an unsuspecting planet exactly forty-five years ago today, and the universe has never quite recovered. Picture the scene. Somewhere in the trackless depths of space, the rogue planet Mongo is being steered – by hand, apparently, because Emperor Ming the Merciless has strong opinions about power steering – directly toward Earth. Ming, played by Max von Sydow with the sort of gravitas normally reserved for reading the shipping forecast during an alien invasion, has decided that Earth is simply too cheerful and must be punished. His solution is to hurl hot hail, cold hail, tidal waves, and the occasional bit of erratic wind at us u...

Paducah, Kentucky - November 30, 1980 Intellivision brought the sport of kings into the family rooms and basements of America today, with the release of the Horse Racing cartridge. But it isn't just a button masher. The game sports a pari-mutuel betting feature, letting players gamble on the outcome. And where does all of this digital horse racing action take place? Right here at Plympton Downs in the great state of Kentucky, the newest track in the Bluegrass State, and home to the historic Rainbow Thoroughbred Stables. If you love the action of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno, Lake Tahoe, there's nothing like seeing it in person. But the lucky gamers who picked up a copy of Horse Racing today are taking it all in from the comfort of home. The best seat in the house! If you're a real sharpie, if you have an eye for the future and a little taste for the action, you got your hands on the Horse Racing cartridge today. And you were front and center when the races featured Pink ...

You ever smell a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A when it’s been running too long? That hot-plastic, cheap-capacitor stink that sneaks out of the vents like robots dying behind the walls. During the Christmas season of 1980, that odor hung over half the dens in America, because something had just woken up inside those beige coffins. Something hungry. Something that had been sleeping since the caves of mainframes past. They called it Hunt the Wumpus . A different kind of darkness was stirring. A primal one. A necessary one. The Wumpus was loose, and it wanted a piece of your soul, or at least a few hours of your time. Texas Instruments, bless their cold, calculating hearts, decided to bring the horror home. The original game, a text-based thing made of words and imagination, had been kicking around on big, clunky university computers since '73. It was pure dread, conjured in the mind. But this, this new beast on the TI-99/4A computer, it had pictures. It had color. It had sound. And in th...

You just had to be there. That's the only lens one can sometimes use to fully comprehend a major event in the past. Sure, it's notable that the first television set was manufactured on a particular date, when you sit in a room with one today that receives thousands of channels. But what was the dawn of television like if you'd never seen a moving picture in your own home before? That's the lens through which one must view the arrival of the Stern arcade machine Berzerk on November 12, 1980. America had seen Space Invaders. It had been devoured by Asteroids. But Berzerk brought sci-fi horror into a more intimate space. Instead of shooting at aliens at a distance from the relative safety of your base or starship, you were in what Lin Manuel Miranda might call "the room where where it happens." Your "humanoid," with the physique of Christopher Lee and the gait of Joe Biden after five espressos, runs and laser guns his way through rooms filled with kill...

It was November 1980. A time when the concept of an internet that could tell you the nutritional value of a kumquat in under a microsecond was still, well, utterly preposterous. And amidst this glorious tapestry of human folly, new wave, and fashion faux pas, something truly remarkable occurred. The Beano , that venerable, vibrant, and utterly unhinged periodical, published its 2000th issue. Picture the scene: it is 1938, and the editors of D.C. Thomson & Co. in Dundee are staring at a blank sheet of paper the way early man once stared at fire—equal parts terror and the dawning realisation that this thing might be useful for keeping warm, cooking mammoths, or, in their case, keeping small boys quiet on a Saturday morning. They fill the sheet with Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, and the Bash Street Kids, whose collective IQ hovers somewhere around room temperature on the Kelvin scale. The comic is launched. Britain shrugs, buys a copy, and promptly forgets to cancel the subscrip...

The Blair Witch Project may be the most financially successful horror movie filmed in Maryland, but it's not the only one. November 7, 1980 saw the nationwide release of The Boogey Man , most of which was filmed in Southern Maryland. Many film critics dismissed it at the time because it arrived among a cacophony of Halloween knockoffs at the dawn of the 80s. And while Hollywood's burgeoning interest in the slasher genre certainly helped the movie get made and distributed widely, The Boogey Man took a much more novel approach than another lumbering stabber stalking teenagers. The choice of title was probably the biggest mistake, as it suggested exactly such a tired scenario, and was literally one of the descriptives applied to Michael Myers in the John Carpenter vehicle that started the whole damn thing in 1978. Because the true villain in The Boogey Man isn't a man at all. It's a mirror. A mirror that's seen things. And when that mirror is shattered twenty years l...

The year was 1980. People were still grappling with the notion of personal computers, nuclear war was a daily concern for those paying adequate attention, and the concept of "punk rock" was already becoming as quaint and historical as a Roman toga party. And then, precisely on November 3rd, 1980, a Monday, which in itself is an act of almost deliberate perversity for an album release, something rather extraordinary happened. I am, of course, referring to the release of The Damned 's sprawling, mausoleum-dark, magnificent, and utterly bonkers double album, The Black Album . Their magnum opus, The Black Album was a record that was, according to some highly unreliable sources, meant to sound like it had been recorded inside a very large, slightly damp, cathedral. Dave Vanian, the singer and master of ceremonies on this multidisc aural odyssey, delivers his vocals with the sort of theatrical gloom that suggests he has been practicing in front of a mirror with a candle and a c...