80s News Today

February 8, 1980. Mark it down, folks, because that was the day the Silver Screen coughed up something truly, utterly, and gloriously American onto the unsuspecting public. Forget your grimacing anti-heroes, your tormented auteurs, your foreign-film gloom! This was something else entirely, a cinematic confection as bright and unapologetically earnest as a freshly starched shirt on a Sunday morning. We’re talking about Hero at Large , a motion picture that landed in theaters with the subtle grace of a bowling ball dropped from a skyscraper. And who, you might ask, was at the very epicenter of this particular cultural collision? None other than the gangly, grinning, rubber-faced maestro of physical comedy himself: John Ritter! Yes, that John Ritter, the man who, for the better part of a decade, had been tumbling and pratfalling and generally making a delightful spectacle of himself as Jack Tripper on "Three’s Company." This wasn't some Method-acting, inner-demon-wrestling p...

The year was 1989, and the Eighties, that decade-long fiesta of excess and ambition, was drawing its final, magnificent breaths. It was a time when the hemlines went up and the interest rates went down, when shoulder pads were architectural and cocaine was a business accessory. And into this glittering, grunting, acquisitive tableau, on the seventh day of February, dropped an album that would become not merely a record, but a cultural battlefield: 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be . It landed like a dirty bomb on the immaculate, manicured lawns of polite society. Nasty was not just "explicit"—it was a seismic event, a sonic middle finger, a raw, unvarnished, unapologetic eruption of what was, at the time, considered the absolute outer limits of indecency. This was not the coy suggestion of Madonna, nor the rebellious snarl of Guns N' Roses. No, this was Luther Campbell, a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, and his crew, bellowing about sex, about bodies, about acts—in excruciati...

It is an observational fact that most things simply do not happen in New Zealand. This is because New Zealand is primarily occupied with being green, being vertical, and being roughly twelve thousand miles away from anyone who might complain about the noise. A pair of islands that had drifted so far south they appeared to have been lost in the post, and then decided to stay lost on purpose. The inhabitants, a hardy breed of people who had learned to call sheep their closest relatives and rain their national anthem, had for many years produced films in much the same way they produced wine: in small quantities, with great earnestness, and frequently to the bemusement of everyone else. However, on February 6, 1981, something happened. And it happened with a yellow Mini and a spectacular lack of regard for the police. Goodbye Pork Pie was released to a public that had, until that point, largely assumed that "cinema" was a sophisticated export involving British people in drawing r...

Good Lord, people! Do you remember the sheer, unadulterated buzz? The hum of the VCR! The pristine, plastic clamshell case, hot off the factory floor, promising glory! Yes, on February 5, 1987, the very air itself crackled with a new, distinctly American energy. It was the day Top Gun , that shimmering, testosterone-fueled ode to speed, swagger, and the sheer, intoxicating power of the United States Navy, landed not in theaters, but right in your suburban living room. And it wasn’t just any landing. Oh no, my friends, this was no gentle taxi to the gate. This was a MACH 2 POWER DIVE into the very heart of how we consumed, how we owned, our cinematic dreams. This was a WATERSHED MOMENT so seismic it reshaped the very topography of Hollywood’s profit margins, sending shockwaves through every mom-and-pop video store from Bethesda to Burbank! Before this fateful day, buying a movie on VHS was an act of almost monastic devotion. These were not impulse buys, these were investments. A single ...

The Beverly Center mall opened its doors on February 4, 1982, and Los Angeles, that great chrome-plated dream factory, paused for a moment—only a moment—to witness the arrival of something new, something monumentally, unapologetically itself. Here was the future, or at least a version of it that cost $100 million and rose eight stories high on the old site of kiddie rides and cotton candy, where once the Ferris wheel spun lazy circles above Beverly Park and now the parking structure itself became the plinth for retail nirvana. Picture it: the intersection of La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard, that throbbing artery where the traffic never quite stops and the billboards scream in primary colors. Developers A. Alfred Taubman, Sheldon Gordon, and E. Phillip Lyon had taken the triangular plot—8.8 acres of former pony rides and mini-roller-coasters—and piled upon it a brown monolith, a great angular box wrapped in glass escalators that climbed like transparent veins toward the Hollywood Hill...

(The wind howls outside, a mournful, hungry sound. It rattles the windowpanes of this old house, sounding like the ghost of a thousand drowned men. And tonight, friends, tonight it brings to mind a story, a true story, of two ships, too much ambition, and the unforgiving maw of the Bering Sea. Pull up a chair, won't you? It gets cold out there, and some stories are best told with the chill of dread pressing at your back.) In the winter of '83, a cold, hard year that felt like the earth itself was holding its breath, two ships vanished. Not just any ships, mind you. These weren't rickety old trawlers held together with spit and baling wire. These were the Americus and the Altair , twin sisters, state-of-the-art beauties, the pride of Anacortes, Washington. Steel behemoths, designed to conquer the brutal, bottomless pockets of the Bering Sea and bring home the king's ransom in crab. They were strong, they were fast, and they were, everyone thought, damn near unsinkable. ...

The wind outside isn’t just cold; it’s the kind of cold that feels like a razor blade with an aftersplash of rubbing alcohol. It’s February 2, 1981, a Monday that feels like a Tuesday, and in the record stores, a certain vinyl disc is sliding out of its sleeve. It’s called Killers . And let me tell you, the name isn't just hyperbole. The cover art gives you the first jolt. There’s Eddie. You remember Eddie, don’t you? That skeletal, grinning mascot with the hair like a dry hayfield and eyes that have seen the inside of a furnace. This time, he’s standing under a streetlamp that casts shadows long enough to hide a dozen sins. He’s clutching a hatchet—dripping, of course—and his victim is reaching up, fingers clawing at Eddie’s shirt in a final, useless plea. It’s a nasty bit of business. It looks the way a scream sounds. The first rock band apparel I ever bought? A black Iron Maiden jacket with this album cover emblazoned on the back. It doesn't get any better than that. But wh...