80s News Today

I have come here not to bury Kilroy, but to praise him. Or, more accurately, it. Kilroy Was Here is the brilliant concept album released by Styx on February 22, 1983. It's also the album that supposedly destroyed the band, and has been lambasted and mocked by many a music critic and fair-weather Styx fan who possess an irrational hatred of Dennis DeYoung. And by members of Styx who possess an equally-irrational hatred of Dennis DeYoung. Woe unto them who cannot realize that without Dennis DeYoung, most of the band's fanbase and record buyers would never have heard of Styx. Rock critics already had their sharp snark out for the band once it gained megasuccess in the late 70s, and, look, how many times do we look back at a biting critique of an album in Rolling Stone that reads as positively moronic thirty years later? A lot. Critics hate art that is understood and embraced by a circle wider than themselves. But the turncoats among Styx fans cannot be excused so easily. As far ...

February 13, 1983: The air thick with Reagan's morning-in-America optimism, but down in the streets—zoom! crash! bang!—the ghosts of the 1970s still haunted every corner, every alleyway, every flickering TV screen blaring out the nightly news of muggings, burglaries, and that endless, soul-sucking crime wave that had Americans locking their doors triple-time and dreaming of vigilante justice. The Me Decade? Ha! More like the Mugger Decade, the decade where soft-on-crime judges let the perps walk with a slap on the wrist, where urban decay spread like some psychedelic fungus from Haight-Ashbury to Hackensack and the homicide rate doubled—doubled!—between 1960 and 1980, violent crimes tripling like a bad acid trip gone national. The American Citizen—that beleaguered creature of the suburban sprawl—is tired. Tired of the muggers, tired of the squeegee men, tired of the "social rehabilitators" who looked at a street thug and saw a misunderstood poet. They wanted order. They w...

(The wind howls outside, a mournful, hungry sound. It rattles the windowpanes of this old house, sounding like the ghost of a thousand drowned men. And tonight, friends, tonight it brings to mind a story, a true story, of two ships, too much ambition, and the unforgiving maw of the Bering Sea. Pull up a chair, won't you? It gets cold out there, and some stories are best told with the chill of dread pressing at your back.) In the winter of '83, a cold, hard year that felt like the earth itself was holding its breath, two ships vanished. Not just any ships, mind you. These weren't rickety old trawlers held together with spit and baling wire. These were the Americus and the Altair , twin sisters, state-of-the-art beauties, the pride of Anacortes, Washington. Steel behemoths, designed to conquer the brutal, bottomless pockets of the Bering Sea and bring home the king's ransom in crab. They were strong, they were fast, and they were, everyone thought, damn near unsinkable. ...

On February 1, 1983, Journey did two things rock bands virtually never do, and one they rarely do. Every successful rock band promises their follow-up to their breakthrough hit album will be rawer and heavier. Journey actually did it, cranking up the guitar crunch and drum hits, and Steve Perry taking a more aggressive approach vocally. Every successful rock band promises to take a new direction stylistically on their next record. Journey actually did it, with no song on Frontiers resembling their 1981 megahit "Don't Stop Believin.'" And rock bands who have success on the level Journey did with previous platter Escape rarely can sustain that level of sales and popularity on their follow-up disc. Yet Journey was among the few to stay at least as hot on Frontiers. Lead single "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" arguably became as iconic of an 80s cut as "Don't Stop Believin.'" Despite having an easy blueprint for repeat success, Journey took a ...

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...

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’s a kind of terrible, heavy silence in old places, isn’t there? A waiting. You can feel it in the foundations of an ancient house, or maybe down in the root cellar, where the air hangs thick and cold, smelling of damp earth and things that should stay buried. It’s the silence of history holding its breath. The movie they called The Keep , which sneaked into theaters on a blustery Friday back in '83, December 16th to be precise, understood that feeling in its bones, even if the folks in Hollywood—those well-meaning idiots in the cheap suits—didn't quite know what to do with the beast they'd bought. Folks bundled up against the cold, shuffled in with their popcorn and sodas, expecting maybe another war picture or a straightforward scare. What they got was something else entirely. Something that burrowed under the skin and stayed there. The story starts simple enough, the way the best nightmares do. A detachment of German soldiers, weary from the endless grind of war, ro...

ZAP! POW! BAM! There it was, on that crisp Thursday evening in the winter of '83, flickering into America's living rooms like a bolt from the digital blue yonder: Automan , premiering on ABC at eight o'clock sharp, December 15th, to be precise. And what a spectacle it was!  Picture this: the nation still buzzing from the neon trance of Tron the year before—that Disney dazzler where Jeff Bridges got sucked into the grid and came out glowing like a circuit board on fire—and here comes Glen A. Larson, that prolific wizard of television schlock and sparkle (the man behind Knight Rider, no less, with its talking Trans Am prowling the highways), unleashing his latest confection: a holographic superhero, birthed not from some mythic lab accident or radioactive spider, but from the humming bowels of a police department computer. Walter Nebicher—played by Desi Arnaz Jr., that scion of the Ricardo dynasty, looking every bit the awkward genius in his rumpled shirts and earnest glare...

Miami. The word hangs in the humid air like the promise of a particularly potent Cuban cigar. A place where the American Dream hadn't just arrived; it had hot-wired a speed boat and was doing donuts in the intercoastal waterway. And into this glittering, grimy tableau of excess and ambition, right on the precipice of Christmas consumerism, arrived a cinematic detonation: Scarface , opening nationwide on December 9, 1983. BAM! A visual and auditory assault that immediately separated the squares from those who understood that style is a moral imperative. Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone—those enfants terribles of cinema—had taken the relatively quaint, black-and-white 1930s gangster archetype and injected it with enough pure, unadulterated flesh, flash, and fury to make Howard Hawks spin in his grave, likely shouting for a proper tailor. It wasn't just a movie; it was a manifesto wrapped in a white linen suit, slightly tailored at the waist, worn by a man with the eyes of a shark ...

What is it about those cheap cardboard and plastic glasses that can supercharge a mere movie sequel into a phenomenon for the ages? Yes, my friend, I'm talking about those 3-D glasses. Not the fancy ones of today that you have to drop in a box after the movie. I'm talking about the real deal, the OG, with the blue lens and the red lens. Every couple of decades, Hollywood gets a bad case of global amnesia that it can make 3-D movies, and then reintroduces the fad anew. So it did in 80s, and that time around, it was the third installment of a film franchise that would be gifted the three-dimensional treatment. The schlock 3-D trifecta was begun by Friday the 13th Part III and Jaws 3-D, and completed on November 18, 1983, with the release of Amityville 3-D. The house was back, the windows were eyes again, and this time the tagline screamed, "Warning: In this movie, you are the victim." An all-too-knowing professor in the movie says, "The only thing remotely inter...

Pull up a chair by the fire, because we're not talking about some gentle strumming of a folksy tune today. Oh no. We're diving headfirst into something that snarled and howled its way out of the darkness, a beast unleashed on November 15, 1983. The album Bark at the Moon , by Ozzy Osbourne. And I'm not afraid to make the controversial statement that this record featured the strongest songwriting from start to finish of any of the Black Sabbath frontman's solo efforts. It's hard to comprehend the pressure Ozzy was under in the creation of his third studio album. He and his fans were still shaken by the senseless death of guitarist Randy Rhoads, whose monster riffs and melodic leads had been a major driver in establishing Ozzy as a solo act, quickly banishing the clouds of the Sabbath legacy from overshadowing his fresh new sonic direction.  The loss of Rhoads changed Ozzy forever in ways that were very obvious. He seemed to age a decade or more overnight, his gait on...

Los Angeles - November 14, 1983: Twenty-three hand-picked souls have been summoned to the Crest Theater on Westwood Boulevard, a modest little palace usually reserved for sneak previews of pictures nobody will remember by breakfast. Tonight, though, the marquee is dark. No title. No stars. Just a velvet rope, two security men built like Michelin Men in Brioni, and the low throb of anticipation that feels like the bass line to something unholy. Inside, the chosen glide down the aisle in a hush that is almost ecclesiastical: Fred Astaire in a navy blazer sharp enough to shave with, looking like a man who has seen the future and is mildly amused; Jane Fonda, fresh from a workout that cost more than most people’s rent, her cheekbones still humming from the Nautilus; Diana Ross in silver lamé that catches the projector beam and throws it back like a disco ball in heaven; Eddie Murphy, twenty-two years old and already owning the room simply by refusing to sit still; Marlon Brando, mountainou...

Folks, let me take you back to a chilly autumn evening in 1983, when the wind carried a whisper of something wrong in the air. October 29, to be exact. The kind of night where the shadows stretch a little too long, and the TV screen flickers with something more than static. That was the night Tales from the Darkside slithered into our living rooms, courtesy of some mad genius named George A. Romero and his band of twisted storytellers. Tales from the Darkside wasn’t your mama’s Twilight Zone , though it owed a nod to Rod Serling’s black-and-white morality plays. No, this was something grittier, something that smelled of damp basements and forgotten graves. The pilot was a nasty little number called “Trick or Treat,” written by Romero himself. This one’s about an old miser named Gideon Hackles. A real skinflint. A man who likes to remind everyone just how much they owe him, keeping their debts filed away like trophy heads. Every year, he has a special Halloween game. He hides the IOUs ...

You ever notice how the worst things in life sneak up on you? Not with a bang or a scream—no, that's too merciful. They slither in quiet, like the fog off the ocean in Antonio Bay, before you even think to run. That's how it was with the Atari 2600 back in 1983, that squat little wood-trim black box humming in living rooms across America, presenting worlds of pixels that made kids forget the dark outside the window. They thought they were safe, huddled there with their joysticks and cartridges, battling aliens and plumbers and whatever else those clever fellas in California dreamed up. But then October rolled around, leaves turning bloody red and the wind whispering "Haddonfield" through the cracks in the door, and BAM—here comes Halloween . Not the movie, mind you, though God knows that shape in the mask had already carved its way into our nightmares five years earlier. No, this was the game . The one that brought the Boogeyman right into your den, flickering on a th...

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...

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...

ZAP! BAM! POW! The sky cracks open, a jagged tear in the atmospheric fabric, and down, down, down spirals Korean Airlines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 carrying 269 souls, plummeting into the cold, black Sea of Japan on September 1, 1983. A Soviet Su-15 Flagon, a steel wasp with a red star, has stung it dead—KABOOM!—missiles ripping through the fuselage like a butcher’s cleaver through a side of beef. And at the heart of this high-altitude slaughter? Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald.  Just months earlier, McDonald had appeared on TV's Crossfire , where he claimed to reveal the existence of a "New World Order," a grand conspiracy knitting together the global elites in a web of power and control. "The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies," McDonald told hosts Patrick Buchanan and Tom Braden, "is to create a one-world government, combining super-capitalism and communism under the same tent, all under their control." He named names—the Council on Foreig...

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...

Why, just the other day, I found myself in a veritable fog of cinematic nostalgia, at a suburban cineplex showing a midnight screening of… Krull . Yes, Krull, that 1983 fantasy flick that, for a brief, glorious moment 42 years ago today, convinced a nation newly-blessed with Star Wars , Dungeons & Dragons, and pay television that there was still room in the cosmos for a prince named Colwyn, a five-bladed love child of a boomerang and throwing star called the Glaive, and a supervillain so dastardly he could get away with being named The Beast. And, wouldn’t you know it, this wasn’t just some dusty old VHS tape we were talking about; no sir, this was a genuine, honest-to-goodness *theatrical* revival, complete with the requisite gaggle of ironic hipsters, aging Gen-Xers misty-eyed with forgotten childhood wonder, and at least one character who showed up in full cyclops regalia. Now, I’m not about to sit here and tell you Krull was "King Lear." The dialogue...well, let’s jus...