80s News Today

Miami. The word hangs in the humid air like the promise of a particularly potent Cuban cigar. A place where the American Dream hadn't just arrived; it had hot-wired a speed boat and was doing donuts in the intercoastal waterway. And into this glittering, grimy tableau of excess and ambition, right on the precipice of Christmas consumerism, arrived a cinematic detonation: Scarface , opening nationwide on December 9, 1983. BAM! A visual and auditory assault that immediately separated the squares from those who understood that style is a moral imperative. Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone—those enfants terribles of cinema—had taken the relatively quaint, black-and-white 1930s gangster archetype and injected it with enough pure, unadulterated flesh, flash, and fury to make Howard Hawks spin in his grave, likely shouting for a proper tailor. It wasn't just a movie; it was a manifesto wrapped in a white linen suit, slightly tailored at the waist, worn by a man with the eyes of a shark ...

A decade of neon and pastel got off to a much darker start when America failed to get out of its first year without the shocking loss of John Lennon . The creative giant and political activist was gunned down outside his New York City apartment building on the evening of December 8, 1980, in an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a government conspiracy, complete with an unconvincing patsy pulling the trigger. Lennon had been hounded by the FBI, and illegally by the CIA, since moving to the United States. The powers-that-be feared his potential influence on elections, particularly among younger voters. Gunman Mark David Chapman remains in prison, serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, New York. He has been denied parole all fourteen times he has been eligible for it. His explanation for killing Lennon, who was only 40 at the time, doesn't add up. He claimed on the one hand that he was obsessed with what he thought was Lennon...

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...

Pull up a chair by the dying embers of the fireplace, because we're about to talk about a little something that slithered out from under a white house in December of 1980, a little something called Zork I: The Great Underground Empire . Or, at least it was great. Now this abandoned subterranean imperial realm was yours for the taking on your TRS-80 home computer, courtesy of RadioShack.  You’re eight, maybe nine, and it’s a Friday night in a suburban tract home where the snow is already knee-deep and the wind sounds like something trying to get in sideways. Your parents are downstairs watching The Love Boat or whatever the hell passes for entertainment when you’re born before color TV. Up in your room, the only light comes from the green glow of a TRS-80 Model I, its fan humming like a dying June bug trapped in a mason jar. Two guys in a lab at MIT had basically built their own private haunted house out of words. And now you're sliding it into the Trash 80: a floppy disk, thi...

It is a little-known fact that the Earth was very nearly destroyed on December 5, 1980. The instrument of this near-apocalypse was a motion picture called Flash Gordon , directed by a man named Mike Hodges who, one suspects, had been locked in a screening room with too many Saturday-morning serials and an industrial quantity of gin. The result was released upon an unsuspecting planet exactly forty-five years ago today, and the universe has never quite recovered. Picture the scene. Somewhere in the trackless depths of space, the rogue planet Mongo is being steered – by hand, apparently, because Emperor Ming the Merciless has strong opinions about power steering – directly toward Earth. Ming, played by Max von Sydow with the sort of gravitas normally reserved for reading the shipping forecast during an alien invasion, has decided that Earth is simply too cheerful and must be punished. His solution is to hurl hot hail, cold hail, tidal waves, and the occasional bit of erratic wind at us u...

Star Wars fans got their first taste of a dastardly phenomenon that would only accelerate over time on December 4, 1987. It's the phenomenon of new products based on the most quintessential American franchises and cultural touchstones being made available exclusively in foreign countries. One of the earliest and best examples was the Japanese-only release of Star Wars , a side-scrolling epic adventure title published by Namco for the Nintendo Famicom. A Star Wars game not available in the country where the franchise was born? Much cursing ensued among the few Americans who were even aware of this corporate cultural appropriation. The most criminal aspect of the denial is that the game was awesome for its time. It appears to have been the first side-scrolling platform Star Wars game for any system. Who needs Mario, when you can control Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars universe? The Force is strong with this one, with John Williams' iconic Star Wars theme providing players with an...

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...