80s News Today

February 20, 1984. The year George Orwell warned us about has already arrived, only instead of Big Brother it’s Maggie in her power-blue suit and the dole queue snaking around the Arndale Centre like some great socialist python digesting yesterday’s dreams. It's Ronnie in an arms race, Dodge Caravans in suburban driveways, and corporate megamergers. The kids are wearing anoraks the color of wet concrete, the radios are pumping Duran Duran and Culture Club and all that glossy, shoulder-padded, pastel-synth nonsense about Rio and karma chameleons, and the newspapers are full of gold medal winners, nuclear nightmares, and Princess Di’s latest hat.  And then—wham—Rough Trade Records, that scruffy little indie bunker in London that smelled of damp cardboard and revolutionary zeal, ships out the vinyl. The Smiths . Self-titled. Ten tracks of pure, unadulterated Northern English misery wrapped in the most glorious jangle you ever heard. The cover: some poor doomed American actor from a 19...

The cartridge arrived in the stores on February 17, 1984, like a quiet stranger stepping off a Greyhound bus in a small Maryland town at dusk. No fanfare, no parade, just a bright orangish box with a man in khakis swinging from a vine, staring out with that calm, almost amused expression Pitfall Harry always wore—like he knew something the rest of us didn't. But inside that box, something waited. Something that shouldn't have been possible on the old Atari 2600, that faithful little machine already wheezing toward the grave while the Colecos and Commodores strutted around like they owned the future. If Indiana Jones could have a sequel, so could Pitfall Harry. Ergo, inside that box was Pitfall II: Lost Caverns . Kids grabbed it off the shelf because the first one had been magic—jungles, crocodiles, scorpions, that swinging vine business that made your palms sweat. But this wasn't just a sequel. This was something darker, deeper. David Crane, the man who built it, had looked...

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...

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...

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...

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, ...

Do you see them? These are the new wizards, the digital alchemists of Access Software out in the suburban sprawl of Salt Lake City. And what have they conjured up for the winter of 1984? They call it Raid Over Moscow. Picture the scene: It is January. The sky is the color of a bruised plum. In every split-level ranch from Levittown to Palo Alto, the Commodore 64—that beige breadbox of destiny, that 64-kilobyte marvel of the New Era—groans with the weight of the Apocalypse. And there it is on the screen! The Great Bear itself! The USSR! Only they aren't playing fair, are they? The storyline tells us the U.S. has dismantled its nukes—The Great Disarmament!—and now the Soviets, those "deceitful aggressors," have launched a sneak attack! Your mission? Not just to defend, but to STRIKE BACK!  You aren't just a boy in a striped velour shirt anymore. You are a Stealth Pilot! You guide your craft out of the hangar—taps, nudges, frantic stick-wiggling—trying not to scrape the ...

On the eve of 1985—December 31, 1984, to be precise—the guardians of law and order across this great land of the free were clutching their mimeographed bulletins like talismans against the darkness, warning of impending "occult activity" and "blood rituals" beneath the turning of the calendar. Police departments, those bastions of pragmatic authority, circulated dire memos about gatherings in remote woods, animal mutilations, and the ever-popular human sacrifice, all supposedly timed to the infernal clock of some fabricated Satanic calendar. New Year's Eve, they claimed, was a night of "revels," "blood rites," and high witchcraft—perfect for luring the unsuspecting into the flames. The bulletins started quiet, a murmur in the police scanner's static, then louder, typed out on cheap paper in police stations from Des Moines to Eureka, tacked up next to lost dog posters. Beware, they whispered. Beware of unusual activity. Beware of gathering...

My dear readers, let us cast our minds back, if you will, to that frigid Saturday in December, the twenty-second of the month, 1984. The very air of Manhattan, crisp and brittle as a dried leaf, crackled with that peculiar, electric tension—a subterranean thrum, really—that only a city teetering on the precipice of its own magnificent chaos can truly generate. Ah, New York! A symphony of grime and glitter, a dazzling, dangerous carnival where every denizen, from the haughty Beekman Place dowager to the denizen of the deepest, graffiti-scarred subway car, played their part in the grand, cacophonous opera of urban life. On this particular day, our stage was set in the very bowels of Gotham, a downtown No. 2 express rumbling south, rattling its way from Fourteenth Street to Chambers. And who, pray tell, was our unlikely protagonist? Not some gilded titan of Wall Street, nor a strutting denizen of Studio 54, but a small, bespectacled engineer, a man of modest means and—it would soon become...

It's epic! It's divisive! It's controversial! And it's also the definitive and superior film adaptation of the novel Dune by Frank Herbert. Yes, I'm talking about David Lynch's Dune , which opened in theaters on December 14, 1984. The later reboots simply don't hold a glowglobe to Lynch's lavish treatment of one of the greatest works in Western literature. You see, Dune is the rare genre novel that achieves escape velocity from the mere science fiction orbit to legitimate comparison with Great Expectations or The Great Gatsby . A true desert island book, it can be reread endlessly. And not simply because Herbert creates a universe the reader is sucked into, but because his writing is so damn good. I will occasionally pick up my copy - a mass market paperback released with the 1984 flick - and, some time later, regain consciousness to realize I'm already 100 pages into the story once again. It's that good. So, theoretically, I should be one of t...

In the cold grip of winter, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth moon in the year we mortals reckon as 1984, a new power stirred in the realm of Fairyland—no, not in the ancient lands of song and saga, but in the flickering glow of the NEC PC-8801, that strange artifact of the Rising Sun's ingenuity. It was there, in the hidden workshops of T&E Soft, that Tokihiro Naito, a young visionary not unlike a wizard forging spells from forbidden tomes, unleashed Hydlide upon an unsuspecting world. It was a quiet beginning, a single seed planted in the fertile ground of Japanese computing. Yet from this humble release date of December 13, 1984, a legacy grew, one that would eventually cross the Vast Sea to foreign shores. A million copies were sold, a testament to the hunger for new tales of heroism. One day, the tales of Hydlide would be told in the West, on the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Saturn. But before this could come to pass, a hero had to emerge in Fairyland during ...

It is a widely known, though rarely acknowledged, fact that the most perplexing force in the universe is not the infinite stretch of space, nor the baffling nature of black holes, but the sheer, unadulterated audacity of a sequel. Specifically, the sequel to a film so deeply philosophical, so profoundly slow-moving, that entire university departments have dedicated decades to simply deciphering which end of the monochrome monolith was up. And so it was that on this day, December 7, 1984, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released a new chapter in human misunderstanding: 2010: The Year We Make Contact . This film, directed by Peter Hyams, attempted the seemingly impossible: explaining the inscrutable. The original 2001: A Space Odyssey left humanity floating in a bath of cosmic ambiguity, which is precisely where many feel it belonged. It was a film that whispered profound questions to the void. 2010 chose instead to shout the answers with a reasonable degree of urgency. The central thesis of 20...

When we survey the sparkling snowscape of Christmas music, it's almost exclusively a nostalgia exercise. Like your great grandma's pink aluminum Christmas tree, most of these tracks haven't been released since the 1970s. There's been no shortage of Christmas records foisted on the public since then, and we can objectively say they all suck. But there are three exceptions - all singles - that are worthy of standing alongside the greats of Christmas Past: "All I Want for Christmas is You" by Mariah Carey, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid, and the one released on December 3, 1984, "Last Christmas" by Wham! Now, before we consider "Last Christmas," we should establish the objective criteria for what makes a great Christmas song. First and foremost, the songwriting has to be superlative. Unlike many shovelware b-side-quality Christmas songs phoned in by artists, "All I Want for Christmas" would have been a hit e...

It wasn’t the soft, forgiving kind of chill you feel when the first powder of winter dusts the eaves; this was New York City’s November bite, smelling of exhaust and hot dog carts, reaching right through your wool coat like a skeletal hand. The year was 1984, the same year a certain razor-gloved dream-walker was cutting up Elm Street and the Boss was singing about Dancing in the Dark on every radio in America. And down here, on 34th Street, a different kind of darkness was gathering. It was Thanksgiving morning, a day for normalcy, for turkey and football and the relentless, saccharine cheer of the Macy’s parade. But the people lining the route weren't just here for Snoopy or Santa Claus. They were waiting for them . The Visitors. The sweet-faced lizards who had charmed America on the NBC alien invasion miniseries V. The whole thing felt wrong, like putting a funeral wreath on a bouncy castle. The float wasn't a float so much as a metallic monstrosity, a gleaming, angular piece...

It is a little-known fact, buried somewhere between the invention of the cassette tape and the controversial decision to put pineapple on pizza, that on the sixteenth of November in the year 1984, the human race was quietly issued a cinematic memo informing it that, in the event of a comet passing perilously close to Earth and turning ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the population into either dust or zombies, the last remnants of civilization would be two Valley Girl sisters and a trucker. The film in question was Night of the Comet , written and directed by Thom Eberhardt. It is nothing less than one of the quintessential 80s films, one that future generations and offworld guests will be shown, should they express a curiosity to truly understand what life was like in the 1980s. It shares cinematic DNA with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension - which opened earlier the same year - but presents a far more cinéma vérité approach in its depiction of the...

Out in the sun-baked cauldron of the Orange Bowl, where the palms sway like mocking sentinels and the air hangs heavy with the salt of defeat, a miracle unfolded on the fateful day of November 10, 1984. It was the kind of tale that old football gods might whisper over tankards of nectar, a saga of grit and glory that turned the University of Maryland's Terrapins from whipped curs into crowned lions. Frank Reich , the unheralded quarterback with the steady arm of a blacksmith, led his band of Old Liners on a charge that shook the pillars of the defending national champions, the Miami Hurricanes, and etched his name in the eternal ledger of gridiron legend. For in the second half, with the scoreboard mocking them at 31-0, the Terps didn't just claw back—they stormed the heavens and claimed the throne, 42-40. The first half had witnessed the Hurricanes leave nothing in their wake but wreckage and despair. For the Terrapins of Maryland, hope was but a flickering ember, nigh extingu...

Entry Date: The 10th Month of the 7th Standard Galactic Year After the Battle of Yavin From: Lord Vader, to be disseminated for authorized Imperial eyes only. Subject: Vader Lives! The graffiti seen on walls in inefficiently-run cities across the galaxy is true. I, Darth Vader, live, and command your unreserved allegiance as your Emperor. It has come to my attention that a new installment in the continuing saga of my galactic dominance – what the primitives call "comic books" – has been released. Marvel Star Wars #88, they brand it. October 1984. A trivial date in the grand scheme of the Empire, yet even these paper pamphlets serve a purpose: to remind you of my power.  In our endless task of crushing the Rebellion, moments of true interest are few. Most are a predictable cycle of insurrection, followed by inevitable Imperial retribution. But recently, an event has unfolded that warrants a modicum of attention, if only to recognize the machinations of a truly useful asset. A...

Today, we cast our collective, slightly bewildered gaze back to the rather unassuming date of October 26, 1984. A day that, like many Fridays, likely began with a quiet sense of impending weekend and ended with...well, something entirely different for those who ventured into a darkened cinema.  Picture, if you will, the Earth in 1984—a planet blissfully unaware that legwarmers were not the pinnacle of fashion and that shoulder pads were staging a hostile takeover of wardrobes everywhere. Into this sartorially confused world strode a film directed by one James Cameron, a man who, if not actually in possession of a time machine, certainly behaved as though he’d borrowed one from a careless acquaintance. The Terminator was not merely a movie; it was a narrative juggernaut, a cybernetic fairy tale wrapped in a leather jacket and armed with a shotgun that didn’t so much fire shells as it did existential dread. Now, films had, for some time, featured what are known as "robots." Th...

ZAP! POW! WHAM! A narrative straight out of the Me Decade! The very quintessence of the little man on the make, a veritable Horatio Alger story with a pizza cutter instead of a shoe-shine box! The man, of course, was John Schnatter, and the broom closet—a genuine, honest-to-God broom closet in his father's Jeffersonville, Indiana, tavern!—was his rocket booster. October 2, 1984, the day the secret of all that was pure and good about pizza was revealed not in a high-tech laboratory or a mahogany-paneled corporate boardroom, but amidst the dusty, proletarian detritus of Mick's Lounge. A revelation! Ah, yes! The broom closet! The ignominious, un-glamorous, wholly un-mythic birthplace of empire! Because, you see, it was never meant to be mythic at first, not with the flickering fluorescent tubes, the smell of Pine-Sol and forgotten mop water, the very banality of its existence.  Schnatter, all wiry ambition and Indiana grit, stood hunched over a makeshift counter, sweat beading on ...