80s News Today

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...

They tried to bury it. Oh, yes. The Mouse House, with its white gloves and perfect teeth, tried to send it down to the cold, wet dark, like so many bad dreams. But some things just won't stay buried, will they? No, sir. They crawl back to the surface, scratching at the door, demanding to be let in. So it was on October 9th, 1980, when The Watcher in the Woods shambled back into theaters, its stitches still fresh, a Frankenstein's monster of a movie hoping for a second chance. It was a second bite at the apple, see? The first one, a few months back in New York City, in a balmy April, had gone down like a lead balloon. A ten-day, POOF!, disappearing act, and the word on the street was the real clunker of an ending, a final fifteen minutes that left audiences more befuddled than petrified.  So Disney hauled it back into the operating theater, gave it a new brain, and trotted it out again for Halloween 1980. This was the phase when Walt's old studio was making a new push in li...

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...

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...

Before the Nickelodeon Hotel, the cable channel embarked on its first voyage out of the cathode ray tube into real life: the Nick at Nite TV Land Mall Tour . The date is etched in the calendar like a tattoo on a sailor's forearm: October 6, 1989.  Picture this: The sky over Long Island is that particular autumnal gray, the kind that makes the sodium-vapor lamps in the parking lot flicker on early, casting everything in a glow that's half diner at midnight, half perpetual twilight zone. Green Acres Shopping Center, this behemoth of a mall—two levels of linoleum dreams, anchored by Macy's on one end and Gertz on the other, with escalators humming like the arteries of some great retail beast—has been prepped for invasion. And what an invasion! Nick at Nite, that sly after-dark alter ego of the kiddie channel Nickelodeon, the one that's been beaming reruns into living rooms since 1985 like a bootlegger slinging moonshine in a racetrack parking lot, has rolled up with the fu...

October 5, 1987. A day like any other, one might assume. The planet Earth, in its infinitely-peculiar wisdom, continued its pointless hurtle around a rather unremarkable star. Somewhere, a kettle boiled. A bus arrived late. And in the labyrinthine, probably Dorito-strewn offices of Lucasfilm Games, something… improbable …was unleashed. Maniac Mansion . Now, the very concept of Maniac Mansion is, in itself, a testament to the bewildering complexity of the human (and occasionally, extraterrestrial) psyche. Imagine, if you will, a young chap named Dave. Dave, in a moment of entirely-understandable hormonal delirium, decides his girlfriend, Sandy, must be rescued. From whom, you ask? Oh, merely from a mad scientist, Dr. Fred, who lives in a decaying California mansion with his rather unusual family, including a sentient purple tentacle with aspirations of world domination. One might think a simple phone call to the authorities would suffice, but no. That, you see, would be entirely too se...

It is a well-established fact that nothing ever truly begins. Things simply get to a point where they are slightly less not-happening than they were before. This is particularly true of rock and roll bands, which have a rather peculiar knack for coalescing into existence only to subsequently implode with all the predictable grace of a collapsing star, but with considerably more shouting and far less interesting physics. And so it was for The Smiths . On October 4, 1982, in a Manchester nightclub called The Ritz, a group of four life-forms, consisting of one Morrissey, one Johnny Marr, one Mike Joyce, and one Andy Rourke, decided that they would make a noise.  It was, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary Monday evening in Manchester. The kind of evening that slouched casually into existence with all the understated enthusiasm of a damp dishcloth. Outside, the world was busying itself with the usual humdrum affairs: taxis navigated the perpetually bewildered geometry of city streets...