80s News Today

You have to understand, in those days, Clackamas wasn’t much more than a collection of blackberry brambles and gravel roads that didn't know where they were going. But Ernest Hahn had a vision, the kind of vision that smells like money and fresh asphalt. On March 6, 1981, that vision finally opened its eyes—a million square feet of retail muscle rising out of the Oregon mud like some prehistoric beast. They called it the Clackamas Town Center . The suburbs had been growing teeth out here for years—tract homes sprouting like mushrooms after a hard rain, young families moving in with station wagons full of kids and dreams no bigger than a backyard barbecue. But there'd been nothing to hold them together, no heartbeat. Just the long gray slog between home and whatever passed for downtown.  Then Ernest Hahn's people showed up, that California developer with the shark's smile and the patience of Job when it came to lawyers and environmental hearings. The land had once been e...

A very small thing happened to a great many people on March 5, 1981, and it was called the Sinclair ZX81 . The ZX81 was a computer that consisted almost entirely of Nothing. It had four chips. Not four hundred, not four thousand. Four. If you opened the casing, you’d find a vast, echoing plastic cavern that suggested the computer was actually just a very expensive place for a spider to raise a family. It came with one kilobyte of RAM. To put that into perspective for the modern reader (who likely has more computing power in their electric toothbrush than existed on the entire planet in 1954), one kilobyte is roughly the amount of memory required to remember a medium-sized grocery list, provided you don't buy any exotic cheeses with long names. And yet, it was magnificent. Or, at least, it looked magnificent in glossy magazine ads. It was a sleek, black wedge of plastic that looked like it had been fallen off the back of a passing UFO. It didn't have a keyboard so much as a ...

Bethesda, Maryland - February 19, 1981 A new arcade machine appeared at the Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour at the Westwood Shopping Center today. The air was heavy with the scent of hot Old Time Franks, Holland Dutch Chocolate sauce, and butterscotch candy. A player piano's automated keys frantically rippled up and down like John Wesley Hardin was expected through the doors any second. And at the center of this electric storm, standing like some gleaming, alien monolith, was the Defender cabinet. Its marquee, a jagged burst of purple and blue, practically vibrated with the promise of high-tech violence. You have to picture the scene, the sheer, unadulterated chaos of it. Until this glorious, terrifying Thursday, video games were...polite. Simple, even. Pac-Man was a cheerful, yellow glutton, blithely navigating a maze. Space Invaders was a slow, methodical march of descending marching bands. Defender? Defender was an assault. It was the digital equivalent of being shoved into a ...

The snow lay thick on the streets of New York that February in 1981, the kind of wet, clinging snow that turns the city into something older, something that remembers when the world was simpler and crueler at the same time. The North American International Toy Fair had opened its doors at the Sheraton Centre and the toy people were there in force—men in sharp suits with smiles like switchblades, women with hair teased high enough to scrape the low ceilings, all of them moving through the aisles like pilgrims who had come to worship at the altar of plastic and profit. And Milton Bradley had brought a god. A plastic one, sure, but a god nonetheless. They called it Dark Tower . A hulking, obsidian monolith, studded with cryptic symbols, looming over a round board divided into four kingdoms—Brass, Iron, Silver, Gold—like the four quarters of a dying heart. The tower itself was plastic, sure, but it felt like stone carved by hands that didn't belong to this world. It rotated with a low,...

It is an observational fact that most things simply do not happen in New Zealand. This is because New Zealand is primarily occupied with being green, being vertical, and being roughly twelve thousand miles away from anyone who might complain about the noise. A pair of islands that had drifted so far south they appeared to have been lost in the post, and then decided to stay lost on purpose. The inhabitants, a hardy breed of people who had learned to call sheep their closest relatives and rain their national anthem, had for many years produced films in much the same way they produced wine: in small quantities, with great earnestness, and frequently to the bemusement of everyone else. However, on February 6, 1981, something happened. And it happened with a yellow Mini and a spectacular lack of regard for the police. Goodbye Pork Pie was released to a public that had, until that point, largely assumed that "cinema" was a sophisticated export involving British people in drawing r...

The wind outside isn’t just cold; it’s the kind of cold that feels like a razor blade with an aftersplash of rubbing alcohol. It’s February 2, 1981, a Monday that feels like a Tuesday, and in the record stores, a certain vinyl disc is sliding out of its sleeve. It’s called Killers . And let me tell you, the name isn't just hyperbole. The cover art gives you the first jolt. There’s Eddie. You remember Eddie, don’t you? That skeletal, grinning mascot with the hair like a dry hayfield and eyes that have seen the inside of a furnace. This time, he’s standing under a streetlamp that casts shadows long enough to hide a dozen sins. He’s clutching a hatchet—dripping, of course—and his victim is reaching up, fingers clawing at Eddie’s shirt in a final, useless plea. It’s a nasty bit of business. It looks the way a scream sounds. The first rock band apparel I ever bought? A black Iron Maiden jacket with this album cover emblazoned on the back. It doesn't get any better than that. But wh...

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 ...

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...

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...

It is January 9, 1981—though, in the neon-flicker of our collective memory, it feels more like Year Zero. A divorced, balding Englishman sits in a cold studio, nursing a heartbreak that would have sent a lesser mortal to the bottom of a gin bottle. But not Phil. No, Phil Collins has a drum machine and a grudge that could power the National Grid. For more than three-and-a-half minutes, the world is a vacuum. It is a minimalist’s nightmare. Tick-thwack. Tick-thwack. A ghostly, gated-reverb pulse. Collins whispers—he doesn't sing, he hisses—about a drowning man and the "long time coming." The tension is unbearable. It is the sonic equivalent of staring at a closed door, knowing something terrible is breathing on the other side. Picture it: the airwaves crackling, radios dialed in across the fog-shrouded isles of Britain first, then rippling out like shockwaves from a detonated dream. Collins, that Everyman with the voice of a wounded angel, had been pounding skins for years...

Let us journey back to January 8, 1981, to a place in France so delightfully obscure it practically begged for something utterly out of the ordinary to happen: Trans-en-Provence. Now, Trans-en-Provence is, by all accounts, a perfectly normal, entirely un-interstellar sort of village. The kind of place where the biggest excitement is probably a well-baked baguette or a spirited debate about the correct ripeness of cheese. So, you can imagine the sheer, unadulterated bafflement that must have descended upon Monsieur Renato Nicolai, a gentleman of a robust seventy-five years, when his otherwise unremarkable day took a turn for the cosmically peculiar. Mr Nicolai, being a practical sort, was not the type to gaze at the stars pondering the meaning of life; he was more concerned with whether the pump would survive another Provençal winter. Life, for him, was straightforward: earth, sky, cheese, occasional glass of rosé. Then came the whistle. Not a particularly dramatic whistle, mind you...

LONDON — January 5, 1981 . A Monday. A gray, drizzly, post-Christmas slump of a day in the Big Smoke. The sort of day where the British public—wrapped in their itchy wool cardigans and nursing the last of the festive sherry—stared into the cathode-ray tube with a desperate, hollow longing for something beyond the nightly news and the local weather report. Fortunately for them, this was the very eve when the BBC, that venerable institution of tweed-jacketed producers and tea-stained scripts, unleashed upon an unsuspecting nation something utterly improbable: the television premiere of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Picture it! In an era when color television was still a status symbol in many a semi-detached suburban home, when the airwaves were dominated by the stiff-upper-lip dramas of Brideshead Revisited (still gestating in the wings) and the endless parade of news about Thatcherite upheavals, here comes this...this thing! A sci-fi comedy, no less, adapted from a radio se...

The world is a stage for the exceptional, a battleground where the strong thrive and the weak wallow in their self-imposed mediocrity. On December 12, 1981, a new clarion call echoed for those with the ears to hear, a raw, unpolished testament to carnal instinct and aggressive self-preservation: Welcome to Hell by the triumvirate known as Venom . Cronos, Mantas, and Abaddon—three northern English barbarians who looked as though they had clawed their way out of a Hieronymus Bosch canvas—did not “dabble” in Satanism. They WERE Satanism made flesh, leather, and decibels. And their audio recruitment office was opening on turntables and boomboxes worldwide. “Welcome to hell,” Cronos snarls across the title track, and one does not merely hear the words; one is dragged by the hair through the gates. The production is gloriously primitive—drums like gunshots in a sewer, guitars like chainsaws carving pentagrams into cathedral doors, bass an Inner Earth pile-driver throbbing 3,959 miles down. ...

On November 1, 1981, TV wasn't enough anymore. It was time for Super TV. A brand new TV station, WCQR 50, began broadcasting a new kind of television in America: subscription television, which was broadcast over the air, but could only be viewed by paying customers using a descrambler box atop their TV set. HBO was distributed in a similar fashion at the time, a time when many areas of the country did not yet have cable TV service. Super TV promised viewers - and delivered - first-run movies, concerts, live sporting events, and, as the announcer would state with an intentionally leering tone at the end of this laundry list, "late night adult films." The Super TV story dates back more than 10 years before those scrambled pictures could fly through the air over our nation's capital. Ted Ledbetter, a telecommunications industry veteran, spent the entire 1970s fighting to get WCQR on the air. Ledbetter was a pioneer in subscription television, and an eccentric entrepreneu...

A blast of a synthesizer. A cold, mechanical thump of a drum machine. It is October 16, 1981, and the future has arrived! This event, dear reader, was the release of Dare! , the third album by a curious Sheffield-based collective known as The Human League . Now, to describe Dare! as merely an "album" would be akin to describing a Four Loko Gold as "a bit of a drink." It was not just music; it was a glittering, synthetic, sequined juggernaut of sound that careened through the FM airwaves of the early 1980s like a rogue spaceship piloted by a crew of impeccably-coiffed androids. But few would have predicted this smashing sonic success prior to that day. For it is a well-established fact that The Human League were, for a time, utterly doomed .  The original members, whose music had, until that point, been of the sort one generally plays at parties where the primary goal is to ensure the guests leave as quickly as possible, had departed in a huff. This left the frontman...

Sweet, sultry, sweat-soaked Memphis, city of the blues and the barbecue, where the Mississippi rolls lazy like a hungover alligator and the air hangs thick with the scent of fried everything. And here we are, on this balmy autumn morning of October 7, 1981, when the whole damn town—White, Black, rich, poor, the debutantes and the factory hands—pours out of their shotgun shacks and split-level ranches like ants from a hill that's been dynamited by the hand of Progress himself. Progress with a capital P, mind you, the kind that wears a hard hat and a grin wider than the Grand Canyon, courtesy of those Memphis land barons James Bridger and Stanley Trezevant Jr., who back in 1972 started snapping up acreage on Cherry Road and American Way like it was the last rack of ribs at Rendezvous. Picture it, folks: the sun's barely crested the treetops out by Nonconnah Creek, and already the parking lots—five thousand five hundred and sixty-four spaces, each one a concrete promise of liberat...

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...

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 ...

A good book serves as a vacation, a portal to another world. But what do you do when you are already on vacation and the weather turns? The sky over Ocean City, Maryland, in August 1982, is a bruised purple, the color of a bad cut. You can feel the storm coming, a low thrumming in your bones, a promise of broken skies and a good old-fashioned electrical show. The air smells of salt and fried clams, and the gulls are screaming like they know something I don’t. I’m holed up at the Sea Scape Motel, room 204, with its peeling wallpaper and view of the angry Atlantic, which suits me fine. I'm staring down a long, wet afternoon with nothing but the television’s blurry offerings for company. Not good. Not good at all.  So, I pull on my sneakers, the ones with the perpetually untied laces, and head out into that heavy, humid air. The Phillips Square shopping center isn’t far, and I figure Welsh Drugs might have reading materials to keep the brain busy. I zip up my windbreaker and...