80s News Today

Listen up, you consumerist mall rats and suburban speed merchants! August the thirteenth, nineteen eighty-two. Mark it down in your Trapper Keepers, because that, my friends, was the day the cinematic supernova known as Fast Times at Ridgemont High exploded onto the silver screens of your very own mall multiplexes. Forget your stuffy period pieces and your earnest message movies. This wasn’t your daddy’s after-school special, oh no. This was… verité ! The unvarnished, gloriously greasy truth of the Southern California high school experience, laid bare for your wide, innocent, or perhaps not-so-innocent, eyeballs. Forget those carefully-coiffed teens of yesteryear, all bobby socks and forced pleasantries. Here were the real Reagan-era deal: Jeff Spicoli, the archetypal stoner dude, a walking testament to the mind-bending properties of hydroponic horticulture, perpetually locked in a cosmic ballet with authority figures. Stacy Hamilton, navigating the treacherous terrain of teendom, eac...

August the Twelfth, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Eight. The suburban air, thick with the pre-millennial anxieties of lawn care and the bafflingly persistent popularity of Jordache jeans, crackled with a peculiar voltage. Not from some tectonic shift beneath the tract housing of the burgeoning exurbs, oh no. This jolt, dear readers, this frisson of anticipation, emanated from the nation’s darkened picture palaces, where a cinematic chimera known as Mac and Me was about to be deployed upon an unsuspecting populace. Mac and Me was America in 1988: bold, shameless, and shot through with corporate synergy. Mac and Me didn’t just premiere that day; it exploded like a grease fire in the cultural fryer. Mac and Me wasn’t just a movie; it was a corporate carnival, a love letter to McDonald’s so blatant it made The Coca-Cola Kid look like a PBS documentary. They unleashed it upon us that day. Mac and Me. Mac? Like Big Macs? Me? Like us, the unsuspecting, soon-to-be-scarred audience? The premise...

Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...

The summer of ’84 was a neon-lit, synth-drenched fever dream, and on August 10, the cinematic Molotov cocktail called Red Dawn exploded into theaters like a Soviet MiG screeching over a Colorado high school. This wasn’t just a movie, but a testosterone-fueled, flag-waving, M-16-toting fantasia of Cold War paranoia, served up hot and raw by director John Milius, that bearded bard of American machismo. The multiplexes, those air-conditioned temples of Reaganite bravado, were packed with patriotic patrons in acid-washed jeans clutching hot-buttered popcorn and Cokes, all ready to see the Commies get theirs. And oh, did they ever. Picture it: the sun barely up, the dew still clinging to the grass in suburban sprawl from coast to coast, and the marquees on every Main Street, in every mall, screaming RED DAWN in block letters that might as well have been carved in granite. The film didn’t ease you in—no, sir, it grabbed you by the collar and threw you into the dirt.  Opening shot: a qui...

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...

Cape Canaveral, Florida - August 8, 1989 Well, now, lookee here, folks! It’s August of ’89, the tail end of the Reagan Rhapsody, the air thick with the scent of Aqua Net and the clatter of yuppie wingtips on the marble floors of power. And down there in the steamy flats of Florida, at that cathedral of chrome and chill steel they call Cape Canaveral, something peculiar is afoot. Forget your splashy satellite launches with the network news anchors breathlessly narrating the banalities. This ain’t that kind of rodeo, podner. This one, see, has got that purple storm shroud of the unsaid . The Space Shuttle Columbia, that magnificent white dart of American ingenuity, is perched on the launchpad, all fueled up and ready to rumble. But this time? This time it’s…different. Oh, they went through the motions, you betcha. The pre-flight checks, the laconic pronouncements from Mission Control, the whole nine yards of NASA niceties. But there was a hush in the air, a certain... obfuscation , shall...

On August 7, 1987, a new kind of drug was hitting the market, and it wasn't something you could snort or shoot. This one came in a grey plastic shell, a little slab of synthetic reality called Rad Racer . Yes, Rad Racer. The very name conjures up images of Reagan-era excess, of Ray-Bans and rolled-up sleeves, of pastel-hued dreams fueled by gasoline and the insistent thrum of an 8-bit engine. Jehoshaphat Crisp, what a name. "Rad Racer." It sounded like a fever dream from the collective unconscious of a generation raised on Sugar Corn Pops and Saturday morning cartoons. A game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a machine that looked like a dystopian VCR and held the power to hijack your central nervous system for hours at a stretch. The box promised "3-D" thrills, a claim so ludicrously bold it could only be true in the same way a politician's promise is true: by sheer, brutal force of will. You'd cram that cartridge into the machine, hit the power, a...