80s News Today

It was November 1980. A time when the concept of an internet that could tell you the nutritional value of a kumquat in under a microsecond was still, well, utterly preposterous. And amidst this glorious tapestry of human folly, new wave, and fashion faux pas, something truly remarkable occurred. The Beano , that venerable, vibrant, and utterly unhinged periodical, published its 2000th issue. Picture the scene: it is 1938, and the editors of D.C. Thomson & Co. in Dundee are staring at a blank sheet of paper the way early man once stared at fire—equal parts terror and the dawning realisation that this thing might be useful for keeping warm, cooking mammoths, or, in their case, keeping small boys quiet on a Saturday morning. They fill the sheet with Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, and the Bash Street Kids, whose collective IQ hovers somewhere around room temperature on the Kelvin scale. The comic is launched. Britain shrugs, buys a copy, and promptly forgets to cancel the subscrip...

November 8, 1988. The very air itself, brothers and sisters, was thick with it! Not just the usual whiff of stale ambition and light beer that hangs over every American election, no sir. This was the culmination, the apotheosis, the very zing! of the Age of Reagan, now metastasizing, transforming, elevating itself into something else. Something…Bush! Yes, George Herbert Walker Bush ! The man, the myth, the scion of privilege with the patrician grin, the tennis whites, the entire gestalt of New England rectitude mixed with a Texas drawl as authentic as a Hollywood stagecoach. And what a stage it was! The nation, awash in the glow of Morning in America, flush with material prosperity, high on the sheer, unadulterated chutzpah of eight years of Reaganomics!  The stock market was roaring, the Soviets were…well, they were still the Soviets, but they seemed to be doing it with a little less conviction, a little more glasnost! America felt good, damn good! And into this fertile, ego-stro...

The Blair Witch Project may be the most financially successful horror movie filmed in Maryland, but it's not the only one. November 7, 1980 saw the nationwide release of The Boogey Man , most of which was filmed in Southern Maryland. Many film critics dismissed it at the time because it arrived among a cacophony of Halloween knockoffs at the dawn of the 80s. And while Hollywood's burgeoning interest in the slasher genre certainly helped the movie get made and distributed widely, The Boogey Man took a much more novel approach than another lumbering stabber stalking teenagers. The choice of title was probably the biggest mistake, as it suggested exactly such a tired scenario, and was literally one of the descriptives applied to Michael Myers in the John Carpenter vehicle that started the whole damn thing in 1978. Because the true villain in The Boogey Man isn't a man at all. It's a mirror. A mirror that's seen things. And when that mirror is shattered twenty years l...

Two summer blockbuster martial arts movies and 17 months later, the homebound game player finally got a chance to slip into the gi and become Daniel LaRusso. The Karate Kid delivered a digital karate chop to owners of the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari ST computer in November 1987. The Karate Kid films had already woven themselves into the fabric of the culture, as the Rocky flicks of the Pepsi Generation. Now, its digital doppelgängers landed on our consoles and computers.  They were imperfect translations, certainly, but they were a testament to the irresistible pull of a good story, a compelling hero, and the boundless, sometimes bewildering, desire to step into the screen, however flat and pixelated that screen might be. The silicon sensei had arrived, and the kids were ready to wax on, wax off, and button-mash their way to glory. At the checkout counters of toy and neighborhood video stores, the sound most often heard was not hi-YA! but KA-CHING ! The lon...

It was November 1982 when a kid walked into the 7-Eleven in Aspen Hill, Maryland, and one of the greatest comic book issues of all time was just sitting there on the spinner rack: Arion: Lord of Atlantis #1, published by DC Comics. Now, there's no salesman or carnival barker in a comic book shop, much less a convenience store, to sell you on one title or another. The cover has to close the deal, and Arion #1 had one that could reach from the depths to reel in the pre-adolescent buyer hook, line, and sinker. Arion, Lord of Atlantis - that's enough right there, when you think about it...just the title alone captures the imagination of a child already enraptured with the legends and mysteries of that vanished civilization. But there he is, standing over a vanquished foe, crimson-lined midnight blue cape swirling around a superhero frame enrobed in intriguing Atlantean-by-way-of-the-Xavier-Institute garb, laser eyes burning with suggested god-like power, clenched fists glowing wit...

November 4, 1988. Mark that date in your calendars with a big red Sharpie, because that’s the day John Carpenter’s masterpiece THEY LIVE hit theaters and ripped the mask off the New World Order like a chainsaw through a copy of Das Kapital . The plot? Simple, and frankly, disturbing: A drifter named Nada, played by professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, a real guy in a fake world, finds a pair of sunglasses that expose the truth about who really runs the show. These aren't just any Ray-Bans, oh no. These are truth-seeing glasses. And when he puts them on, what does he see? He sees the world for what it truly is. He sees the subliminal messages plastered on billboards, on magazines, on television screens: "OBEY," "CONSUME," "DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY!" They're everywhere, folks, brainwashing you, programming you, turning you into compliant sheep. When Nada looks at the people in power with the glasses on, the ones pulling the strings,...

The year was 1980. People were still grappling with the notion of personal computers, nuclear war was a daily concern for those paying adequate attention, and the concept of "punk rock" was already becoming as quaint and historical as a Roman toga party. And then, precisely on November 3rd, 1980, a Monday, which in itself is an act of almost deliberate perversity for an album release, something rather extraordinary happened. I am, of course, referring to the release of The Damned 's sprawling, mausoleum-dark, magnificent, and utterly bonkers double album, The Black Album . Their magnum opus, The Black Album was a record that was, according to some highly unreliable sources, meant to sound like it had been recorded inside a very large, slightly damp, cathedral. Dave Vanian, the singer and master of ceremonies on this multidisc aural odyssey, delivers his vocals with the sort of theatrical gloom that suggests he has been practicing in front of a mirror with a candle and a c...