When John Lennon told British journalist Maureen Cleave in March of 1966 that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now,” and that “Christianity… will vanish and shrink,” there was no controversy apart from a handful of letters sent in to the paper that ran the story, the London Evening Standard…
Disappointed with his cover art for their 1980 LP Point of Entry, British heavy metal band Judas Priest decided to part ways with the Polish designer and artist Rosław Szaybo. Szaybo, who had previously created artwork for bands as diverse as Soft Machine and The Clash, had supplied the group with a triptych of memorable album covers whose imagery, particularly that of British Steel, had helped consolidate Priest’s image…
Ronnie James Dio broke out in a big way in the spring of 1983 with the release of his solo debut LP, Holy Diver. Formerly the lead singer for heavy rock/metal pioneers Elf, Rainbow (Ritchie Blackmore’s followup project to Deep Purple), and Black Sabbath (joining the band after it parted ways with Ozzy Osbourne), Dio brought to his new eponymous project over a decade of experience as a foundational heavy metal vocalist and lyricist…
It sounds ludicrous now, but the neighborhood grocery store was once an exciting destination for kids. Along with a serviceable “toy section,” where you might find an overpriced Micronaut or Metal-Man, dinosaur and army man playsets, Presto Magix “dry transfers” (the paper had a distinctive and delicious smell), die-cast mean machines like Dyna-Flytes, and a host of other tangible pleasures…
Thirty-seven years ago this month, the 13-part television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, hosted by Cornell University planetary scientist Carl Sagan, began airing weekly on PBS. While I was likely a little too young to have watched that premiere broadcast, I definitely remember watching the entire uncut series during one of its many rebroadcasts in the early 1980s…
I’ve chosen to talk about the cutaways of the Thunderbirds from a Thunderbirds annual, but I could just as easily have chosen the ones of the vehicles from Captain Scarlet or Fireball XL5, because they’re all beautiful. Despite the fact that they’ve got practically nothing in common with each other, the Thunderbirds and pretty much all of the vehicles featured in the the Andersons’ TV shows somehow form a cohesive aesthetic whole which often transcends the programs themselves…
Sid Davis produced nearly 200 “social guidance films” between 1950 and 1975, beginning with The Dangerous Stranger (1950), which gave us the quintessentially American maxim: “Never take candy from strangers.” Davis worked as an extra and child actor in Hollywood until landing the gig of stand-in for actor-icon John Wayne, who befriended him…
In the Britain of the early 1970s, growing salaries meant that private car ownership was on the rise. Yet children were still often expected to circulate unsupervised, and worry was growing at the increasing numbers of them who were being hurt or killed on the roads…
With the first Earth Day in 1970, ecology and environmental protection entered the public consciousness in a way not seen since the 1962 release of biologist Rachel Carson’s investigation into the effects of DDT, Silent Spring. Earth Day tapped the nascent environmental movement among scientists and conservationists and gave it a public face…
Despite the Canute-like efforts of the BBC and the UK establishment to promote the home computer as a useful domestic tool and edifying source of instruction for the young, it was clear as soon as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum made its appearance in August of 1982 that the future of British home computing would revolve around video games…
The cover art featured on the boxes and cartridges of Atari games from the company’s heyday—1977 through the crash of ’83—has been much admired and discussed, and rightly so: video games were an upstart medium, and Atari president Nolan Bushnell felt that the packaging “needed all the care and attention that a record album did.”
In the early years of home video gaming, Pong reigned supreme. Released in its arcade cabinet incarnation in 1972, Pong became a sensation and inspired a revolution in computer gaming, headed by Sunnyvale, California’s Atari. As Atari’s programmers created more games for the lucrative arcade market, the race was on to create versions that could be played at home on a television set…
In Lesson Seven, we learned how to draw Space Assault’s title screen, complete with theme music generated by Atari BASIC’s SOUND statement, and through the course of this series, we’ve covered nearly the complete source code of the game. Appropriately, the last section of code to discuss is the “game over” screen, which uses yet another powerful feature of the Atari Home Computer to combine multiple graphics modes…
After returning from World War II, William Levitt, the son of an upscale real estate developer, set out to build affordable homes for the millions of veterans that needed one. Using mass production methods innovated at the beginning of the century by the Ford Motor Company and taught to him during his tour as a Navy Seabee—and by cutting out union workers and middlemen—Levitt did exactly that…
Collecting costly and obsessively detailed miniatures has long been a pastime of the wealthy, but the first known model village in Britain—and, if its claims are to be believed, in the world—was located in the verdant “stockbroker belt” populated by affluent upper-middle-class London commuters…
