80s News Today

The joint was jumping at McCormick Place, Chicago, February 9, 1985, the 77th running of the Auto Show, where the air smelled of new rubber, fresh paint, and the faint metallic tang of ambition gone wild. The crowds moved in great herds, coat collars up against the February slush tracked in from the parking lots, eyes glazed from too many spotlights and too many promises. And then—there it was. Not just another car. Rotating on a raised altar like a secular god of the asphalt, it was the Chevrolet Camaro IROC-Z . Not just a car, you understand, but a Low-Slung, Fuel-Injected, Integrated-Spoiler Manifestation of pure, unadulterated Speed-Status. It wasn't merely yellow; it was a screaming lightning bolt of defying the beige doldrums of the seventies. It sat there, hunkered down on those 16-inch five-spoke aluminum wheels, looking for all the world like a predator that had just swallowed a wind tunnel and found it delicious. The crowd presses in. You can see the reflection of the str...

Managua, January 10, 1985 The tropical sun dipping low over the Plaza de la Revolución, that vast concrete expanse named for the very upheavals that birthed it, now thrumming with the electric hum of a new era. There he was, Daniel Ortega Saavedra , all of 39 years old, stepping up to the podium like a matador in olive drab, the guerrilla turned statesman, the former bank-robbing revolutionary now draped in the blue-and-white presidential sash over his fatigues—yes, fatigues!—as if to say, "Comrades, the fight goes on, but now with ballots and briefcases!" He sports those signature oversized spectacles—thick, dark frames that give him the look of a militant librarian who has just finished shelving the works of Marx and is now ready to seize the means of production. Around him, the plaza is a sea of red and black—the colors of the FSLN—waving, snapping, popping in the heat. It is a tableau of the New Left’s wildest dreams. You can practically smell the mixture of diesel exhaus...

Blacksmith, Ohio - January 1985 Can you hear it? That low-frequency hum vibrating through the drywall of every split-level ranch in the Midwest? That’s not just your new Panasonic microwave or the neighbors’ ultrasonic pest repellent—it’s the sound of the future arriving right on schedule, wrapped in a Viking Press dust jacket! It is January 1985, and while the rest of the world is busy worrying about the Super Bowl or the deep freeze on the East Coast, a man named Don DeLillo has given the erudite something else to worry about: White Noise . Look at him—DeLillo! He’s the anti-celebrity, the phantom of the suburban supermarket aisles, emerging from the "Statusphere" of high-concept fiction to show us exactly what we’ve become. And what are we? We are Jack Gladney, a man who has achieved the ultimate academic coup de grâce by inventing the Department of "Hitler Studies" at the College-on-the-Hill. Jack doesn’t speak a word of German—shhh, don't tell the Dean!—but...

It was November 25th, 1985. The air was already biting, the kind that promised a long, hard winter, like a whisper from a tomb that still had plenty of residents. Most folks were probably still bloated from Thanksgiving turkey, watching football or trying to figure out if that Cabbage Patch Doll they'd promised little Timmy actually existed, or if it was just a fever dream spun by Madison Avenue. The world, as it often does, was clanking along, oblivious. But in the dim, hallowed halls where true sound resided, something had just crawled out of the dark. Something beautiful and unsettling. I'm talking about Dead Can Dance's Spleen and Ideal . Now, if you were a kid at the time, scraping by on whatever hair metal or synth-pop dribbled out of the radio, this record probably wasn't on your radar. It wasn't designed for radars. It was designed for mausoleums. For ancient, crumbling cathedrals where the stained glass was long gone, letting in only a bruised, purple light...

Let me tell you something, 1985 was a fantastic year, one of the best years, maybe ever. We had Wham!, we had Back to the Future, and then, BOOM, the single greatest thing to ever happen to the frozen-food aisle: Hot Pockets . I’m talking real American genius here. Two brothers, smart guys, very smart, they came up with this idea: What if you could take a sandwich, make it a thousand times better, stuff it with cheese that’s hotter than the sun, wrap it in a beautiful golden crust, and cook it in two minutes? Two minutes! That’s faster than some people can tie their shoes. The brothers' company, Chef America - great name, very patriotic - launched it nationwide in ’85, and the people went wild. They’ve got pepperoni! They’ve got cheesesteak! They've got ham & cheese! All of the greatest flavors! You open the box, you see that silver sleeve, that crisping sleeve, very high-tech, very advanced for the time, you put it in the microwave, DING, and suddenly you’ve got lava-hot d...

I sing of arms and the man…no, wrong epic. I sing of cursors and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, who suddenly found himself clutching a plastic rodent, and staring into the glowing rectangle that promised to civilize him.  It was forty years ago today that Microsoft loosed upon an unsuspecting world something called Windows 1.0 . Not an operating system, mind you. Heavens no. That would come later, when the accountants and the lawyers had properly sanctified the theft. This was merely an "operating environment," atop the squat, utilitarian MS-DOS operating system. No longer would the American office worker be forced to endure the brutal, East German austerity of one full-screen program at a time. No! Now he could run a spreadsheet and a word processor simultaneously, watching them slide over one another, in a phenomenon known as "overlapping windows." And a new interfacing device, the mouse, would replace typing and keyboards with another innovation: "point a...

Let's talk about the creeping dread that arrived on computer screens back in 1985. Not a paperback, not a VHS tape, but something new, something...digital. It was October, and the wind was starting to hum those mournful tunes it likes to play before winter truly sets in. A perfect time, you might say, for a little taste of the infernal. And infernal it was. Because that month, in '85, something slouched onto the IBM PC. Something that wasn't just based on a story; it was a story you could walk through. Or, more accurately, limp through, heart pounding, trying to figure out what hellspawn awaited you in the next room. I'm talking about The Mist. Now, you know The Mist. Or, you should. It was a novella penned by the uber-prolific Stephen King in 1976, but only later published in two of his story collections during the 1980s, Dark Forces, and Skeleton Crew. King evolved The Mist from a simple premise: What if a monster, a really scary one, was loosed on the world while you...

It is a Saturday in Dallas, Texas, October 19, 1985. And out on Northwest Highway, at the Medallion Center, something new is coming into being, a thing of bright, fluorescent light and the silent, shimmering hope of a quadrillion flickering images captured on magnetic tape. A grand emporium, a veritable Xanadu of cinematic possibility, is throwing open its doors. It isn’t some dusty mom-and-pop video shop, smelling of cheap carpet and overheating projection TVs. No, this is  Blockbuster Video . The very first Blockbuster Video, in fact. The name itself, a potent admixture of Hollywood hyperbole and corporate efficiency, seems to reverberate with the promise of something…bigger. Fluorescent lights on the ceiling hum with an almost blinding intensity, reflecting off rows and rows of gleaming VHS clamshell cases. 8000 of 'em. Each one, a potential adventure, a dose of escapism waiting to be unspooled in the sanctity of one’s own suburban living room. Blockbuster's aisles, wide an...

Alright, listen up, pilgrim. You wanna talk about a real game-changer from back in the 1980s? A machine called Commando rolled into them arcades, and let me tell ya, it separated the men from the boys. Capcom's creation. Released right there in October of '85. It wasn't no fancy-pants, deep-thinking strategy game. No sir. This was pure, unadulterated, shoot-'em-up, grit-your-teeth-and-keep-movin' action, the pure 80s Rambo one-man-army spirit distilled into digital form. You played as Super Joe. One man. Against a legion. Sound like a fair fight? Not to them fellas he was shootin', I reckon. You had your trusty machine gun, blastin' forward, and a handful of grenades for when things got real crowded. And they always got real crowded.  What made it special, beyond the pure adrenaline rush? It was simple, but it was tough. You had to have your wits about you, keep moving, keep firing. No time for lollygagging when the enemy's comin' at ya from all sid...

The air's got that crisp bite to it now, doesn't it? The leaves are turning, a hint of woodsmoke is on the breeze, and the days are getting shorter, pulling the shadows longer behind them. It's the kind of season that feels right for a certain kind of story. The kind that makes you pull your collar a little tighter, maybe glance over your shoulder when you're walking home alone. The kind that makes you wonder what really goes bump in the night. And speaking of bumps, creaks, and things that go howl, today's the day. October 11. Just the kind of day that lulls you into forgetting the darkness that comes with October. And oh, boy, did the darkness come to Tarker's Mills, Maine. The story of what stalked Tarker's Mills took celluloid form this day in 1985, with the release of the movie Silver Bullet , based on the 1983 Stephen King novella Cycle of the Werewolf . In Tarker's Mills, a series of brutal murders begins to tear the community apart. At first, the...

The date is October 8, 1985, and the sound of the future is the clickety-clack of the Commodore 64 keyboard, a sound like a million little typewriters in a million little suburban bedrooms across the land! But this wasn't typing—oh, no, not like Miss Henderson's secretarial pool at corporate HQ! No, this was  The Fourth Protocol ! Based on the bestselling, Cold-War-chill-down-your-spine Frederick Forsyth novel of the same name! The gamers, they knew the name. The name Frederick Forsyth! The author of The Day of the Jackal.  The man who wrote thrillers so REAL they practically had blood smeared between the pages! And now, now...they could play one.  The young computer operator, a bowl of Sugar Corn Pops growing soggy on the desk beside him, was no longer just a kid. He was a SPY! A secret agent! He was JOHN PRESTON! A British intelligence officer! He was investigating a plot so diabolical, so sinister , so utterly Cold War, that his very blood ran cold! He would have to i...

WHAM! There it was! September Twenty-Ninth, Nineteen Eighty-Five! Another Sunday Night, another languid drift of the television dial, a ritual of the masses, a flicker of cathodic blue in a million darkened living rooms, and then—BAM!—a phenomenon, a paradigm shift, a veritable explosion of pure, distilled, all-American ingenuity, erupting right there on ABC! MacGyver had landed. What was this? This MacGyver, this new television program on the third-rate-network-of-choice, ABC, in the autumn of 1985, arriving like some kind of strange CHEMICAL REACTION, a new concoction bubbling up from the cultural stew of the Me Decade? Here came this fellow, MacGyver, portrayed by Richard Dean Anderson, to make beta males great again. That's right: pacifist MacGyver, with his aversion to guns and his bleeding heart for the environment, would defy the panoply of 80s action icons - the Rambos, the Terminators, the former cowboys-turned-presidents - and solve problems with brains, not bullets. And...

ZAP! POW! BOOM! The year is 1985, and America’s pulse is throbbing to the beat of Reagan’s red, white, and blue bravado, a nation flexing its muscles under the strobe lights of Cold War paranoia. On September 27, 1985, Invasion U.S.A. explodes into theaters, starring the squinting, denim-clad, karate-kicking colossus himself, Chuck Norris. This is no mere movie; it’s a fever dream of jingoistic machismo, a 107-minute carnival of explosions, Uzis, and unapologetic American swagger, served up raw and bloody like a T-bone steak at a VFW barbecue.  The titular invaders of the U.S.A.? Why, those damn pinko commies, of course! Soviets! Cubans! Assorted well-armed Fellow Travelers! They blow up suburban homes, shoot up shopping malls, and—most unforgivably—disrupt Christmas, that holiest of American holidays.  Who is the diabolical genius behind this invasion? A Soviet madman named Mikhail Rostov, played by frequent and always-convincing cinematic villain Richard Lynch. A man who li...

The box rose on September 19, 1985. Not just any box, you understand, but a big box, a really BIG box, a sprawling, horizontal, concrete bunker, rising up out of the Prince William County soil with the sort of implacable, irresistible, goldarned force of a tidal bore! Out on Route One, they were coming, they were roaring up from Fredericksburg, and spilling off I-95 from the Capital Beltway, a whole NEW wave of Virginia colonists, not to conquer the wilderness this time, oh no, but to CONQUER THE SALES!! Potomac Mills Mall had opened. The sales, you see, were the point. Potomac Mills was designed as an outlet mall, not a high-end number like White Flint Mall or Mazza Gallerie. This is how you ended up with Teri Garr at the ribbon cutting instead of Elizabeth Taylor. And infamous Virginia Governor Chuck Robb, just one year removed from his New York hotel room massage.  Consumers drove to The Box to worship at the altar of the discount gods of retail - and what a pantheon of g...

Ah, September 12, 1985—a date that hangs in the air like the afterburn of a rocket launch, all fire and fury and that peculiar American dream of reinvention. There they were, the remnants of Jefferson Starship, those wild-eyed prophets of the Summer of Love, shedding their psychedelic wings like so much tie-dye confetti and reemerging as Starship . Not just any starship, mind you, but a sleek, chrome-plated vessel hurtling straight into the heart of the Reagan Revolution's pop cosmos. And on this crisp autumn day, they unleashed Knee Deep in the Hoopla upon an unsuspecting world, a sonic declaration that the hippies had traded their beads for synthesizers, their protests for platinum records, and their free love for the cold, hard calculus of the charts. The whole affair, it must be said, was a marvel of the new, late-20th-century American science of marketing. Could these really be the 80s descendants of Jefferson Airplane, a crew of grizzled veterans who had, in a previous lifet...

Picture it: America, August 1985. The nation’s arteries pulsing with the electric hum of Reagan’s second term, MTV blaring “The Power of Love” on every wood-paneled Zenith, and the golden arches of McDonald’s gleaming like a chrome cathedral under the suburban sun. The fast-food wars were raging, a culinary cage match where Burger King’s Whopper swung its beefy fists, daring the competition to step up or slink away. And McDonald’s? Oh, they weren’t just stepping up—they were launching a intercontinental ballistic missile: a burger so audacious it came with its own architectural manifesto: the McDLT . McDonald’s Lettuce and Tomato. The McDLT wasn’t just a hamburger; it was a cultural event, a gastronomic moon landing. It arrived on the scene with a swagger, a quarter-pound beef patty sizzling on one side, lettuce and tomato cool and crisp as the air in an Antarctic UFO base on the other, all held together in a double-decker Styrofoam container that was half spaceship, half lunchbox. The...

The neon sun beat down on the freshly-minted pastel stucco, oh boy, did it ever! August the ninth, nineteen eighty-five, a date etched in the annals of…well, something down there in sunny San Diego! Not just any date, no sirree, but the glorious, the stupendous, the absolutely  happening unveiling of Horton Plaza ! The scene: San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, where history’s ghosts—and Alonzo Horton’s 19th-century dreams of a bustling port city—mingle with the scent of fresh paint and popcorn.  Jon Jerde - that mad architectural alchemist - and developer Ernest W. Hahn called it a "festival marketplace," a name as bland as beige wallpaper in a La Jolla condo. But what it was, my friends, was a vertical kaleidoscope of sherbet-colored towers and zig-zagging escalators, a postmodern palazzo plopped right down in the dusty heart of downtown. Like a fever dream dreamt by Michael Graves after one too many bong hits and a viewing of 1980's Flash Gordon . It wasn't a mall; it wa...

August 3, 1985 – The Republic of America, God Help Us All. Well, damn it, here we are. Another blistering August, the asphalt shimmering like a drunkard’s hallucination, and what do we find? The airwaves, those invisible tendrils of corporate-controlled auditory narcotics, have been utterly dominated by two pale, earnest lads from Bath. Yes, you heard me right, you quivering masses of Reaganomics and consumer fever dreams: Tears for Fears . And their song, "Shout," has just ripped its way to the top of the U.S. singles chart, where it will squat, unmoving, like some mystical, minimalist kraken for the next three agonizing, glorious weeks. This ain't no soft-focus, saccharine pop ballad, mind you. This is a primal scream. A guttural demand for… well, for something . Roland Orzabal, looking like a man perpetually on the verge of either a nervous breakdown or a grand revelation, bellows "Shout! Shout! Let it all out!" And the damn nation is obeying. They're le...