Perhaps taking its lead from Troubador Press’s 1969 Zodiac Coloring Book—and coming out the same year as Troubador’s Occult Coloring Book—the Occult Datebook‘s beautifully vivid images perfectly epitomize the occult’s shift into the mainstream…
San Francisco’s Troubador Press, under the direction of founder and owner Malcolm Whyte, published a long line of innovative (and beloved, to many) coloring books from 1967 through the early ’80s. Often contracting illustrators with ties to the counterculture and underground comix, Whyte chose subjects that were sometimes anodyne—horses, ballet, wildlife, the Bible, dinosaurs—but often daring for the time…
In the spirit of High Weirdness, this review will try to weave an impressionistic, magical spell exploring the commonalities Davis unveils between the respective life’s work and esoteric, drug-aided explorations of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick…
I still think it’s the ambiguity that makes Dredd electric, though—the friction between this nightmarish prison-city policed by walking lawbooks and the fact that who the drokk wouldn’t want to see some trigger-happy lowlife get Lawgivered in the face?
The ’70s was a decade of action figures. In 1972, the Mego Corporation bought toy manufacturing rights for both Marvel and DC comics, along with several popular TV and movie franchises, and two years later brought forth a cornucopia of “fully posable” figures (8-inch tall dolls, really), including lines such as World’s Greatest Super Heroes, Planet of the Apes, and Star Trek, plus many more in later years…
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-1968), the sixth television series produced by AP Films/Century 21 to be filmed in “Supermarionation,” is a blitzkrieg of old school science fiction action that touches upon moral and psychological ambiguity within the explosive, action-driven framework that was second nature to the production team at this point…
In late 1984 I encountered a film that would become, with the benefit of hindsight, the sine qua non experience of my 1980s sci-fi movie-going childhood. No, it wasn’t Dune or The Terminator or Ghostbusters, but a now little-remembered sequel to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s immortal cinematic classic 2001: A Space Odyssey…
By Evan Henry
When the “Marvel Age of comics” dawned in the early 1960s, the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Tsar Bomba, many of the new slew of superheroes embodied a politicized mutagenic anxiety surrounding the very real possibility of nuclear conflict. Throughout the decade, Lee, Kirby, Ditko, Heck, and others illustrated a bewildering array of physical monstrosities and curiosities…
By Louis Bayman
The five-part miniseries Chernobyl has become the popular television phenomenon of the year, and one of the most critically successful ever. Over thirty years since the explosion at the core of a nuclear reactor in 1986, the production has been praised for its fidelity both to the events around the disaster and to the look and feel of the Soviet 1980s. This has in turn prompted a backlash…
In 1969, pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome commissioned renowned modernist architect Paul Rudolph to design its new corporate headquarters and research facility in Durham, North Carolina. The result was a visionary modular complex whose geometries created a futuristic melding of spaces and forms…
In the 1970s, public belief in astrology and adherence to horoscopes rose to somewhere between a quarter and a third of Americans, but awareness of one’s own sun sign was quite high, at over 75%. Even those who did not believe Western astrology was in any way a predictive science enjoyed it as a pastime…
U.S. Space Camp was inspired by Saturn V designer Werner von Braun—a longtime advocate of a “public program for space science education”—and pioneered by Edward O. Buckbee, a NASA public relations specialist and director of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the location of Space Camp since its inaugural session in 1982…
In August of 1987, thousands of New Age believers, curious skeptics, and others in search of a weekend road trip gathered at dozens of famous destinations across the globe to celebrate the combination of rare astrological alignment and the (purported) end of a Mayan calendrical cycle…
By Tom G. Wolf
Lurking within the mire of modern UFO lore are the Men in Black—black-suited, mysterious agents of uncertain origin who reportedly intimidate witnesses and abductees into silence. Their presence has been controversial within the UFO community, and there is no doubt that they have had a significant impact in wider pop culture…
Bob Peak, who I’ve talked about before, did not become readily associated with science fiction until his work on Norman Jewison’s Rollerball, for which he illustrated the theatrical poster and at least six additional lithographs, the latter distributed in press kits and displayed at theaters…
