More than perhaps any other example from the time, Soldier of Fortune is symptomatic of a white masculinity crisis that has poisoned the bloodstream of America—a wound untreated leads to sepsis—for almost 50 years…
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…
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…
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…
Mad Max 2 (released as The Road Warrior in the US) was a surprise international hit in 1982. Unlike 1979’s Mad Max, which was dubbed and poorly marketed to American audiences, the sequel became an instant action classic, and its post-apocalyptic punk aesthetic forged a sci-fi subgenre that has been mined (and crassly exploited) ever since…
The number of cruise passengers worldwide increased from half a million in 1970 to 3.8 million in 1990, the hike almost exclusively thanks to Aaron Spelling’s The Love Boat (1977-1986), a one-hour dramatic fantasy that portrayed a relatively diverse, generally middle-class group of passengers and the close-knit crew that tended to them (and often cavorted with them) during the voyage…
In 1982, video game cabinets could be found in almost every public business space that had room for them, and few sights were more prized by kids and young adults (provided quarters were handy)…
The Big Kitchen, one of the country’s first large-scale food courts, opened in 1977 in the underground concourse of the World Trade Center complex. Conceived by famed restaurateur Joe Baum and designed by Philip George and Milton Glaser, the Big Kitchen comprised 8,000 square feet and offered, among other things…
Japanese ambient music grew out of the 1980s “economic miracle” that saw the country undergo massive urban development and industrial expansion, with Tokyo emerging as a global financial and cultural mecca. Hiroshi Yoshimura, a sound designer by trade and a musician since age five, was the defining figure of a close-kept movement he and fellow pioneer Satoshi Ashikawa called “environmental music”…
From the early ’70s through the early ’90s, Canadian artist and activist Carl Chaplin produced and exhibited a series of paintings depicting the atomic destruction of major cities from around the world “to point out the horror of what would happen to all of mankind in a nuclear war.” The series was called Art Nuko, and it became quite controversial…
We Are the Mutants 