Like many folks my age, I first encountered crusading news photographer Carl Kolchak (played by the imminently charismatic and recognizable Darren McGavin) thanks to The X-Files creator Chris Carter’s repeated praise of the character as one of the biggest influences on his creation of Mulder and Scully…
O’Neill’s account of his two decades in a wilderness of conspiracies related to the Manson Family ultimately suggests some of the blame falls at the feet of a Cold War American intelligence/law enforcement/academic complex deeply compromised by its commitment to beating the Soviets at all costs…
I’ve written quite a bit about my broadcast-television-haunted childhood here at We Are the Mutants over the years; some might even call it a bit of an obsession, honestly. But this week we’ve been challenged to put together some of our memories of specifically local TV, and that’s something that I not only feel nostalgic about, but also tend to get a little political about…
The development of “light” beer came with a commensurate marketing challenge: how to persuade the traditionally masculine beer-drinking audience to try a lower-calorie version of their favorite brew. In essence, the lab wizards had to accede to the ad wizards…
Sitting here in 2019, I can confidently tell you where I was at 7pm on most weeknights between the years 1981 and 1986. I was sat in front of our living room TV, watching the adventures of the Doctor on my local PBS station…
Cash Box magazine was a music industry monthly that was in print from 1942 to 1996. Like its industry counterpart Billboard, Cash Box contained multiple weekly music charts based on music genres, from Pop to R&B to Jazz to Classical…
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…
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…
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…
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…
