Television advertising in the 1950s took a fairly staid and classic form: the advertising agency would spend 30 to 60 seconds presenting a domestic problem that its client’s product promised to alleviate. But the dawn of the 1960s introduced a more aggressive, hard-sell type of direct advertising, where the product’s manufacturer would sell a product directly to the TV viewer through product demonstrations…
Richard Amsel (1947-1985) was an American artist and illustrator whose professional career spanned only 16 years, from 1969 to 1985. But in that short time, he created some of the most iconic promotional images of the time in music, movies, and television…
At the dawn of the 1980s, soul-funk-disco orchestra Earth, Wind & Fire (EWF) were at the top of their game. They’d just released their LP I Am (1979), which featured hit single “After The Love Has Gone,” and double-album Faces (1980). Both albums came close to hitting number 1 on the US pop charts and solidified the band’s already-solid reputation as reliable hit-makers…
In the 1980s, everyone from World Heavyweight Champion Rocky Balboa to private investigators living on houseboats had a robot sidekick hanging around. The journey to this imaginary future-present seen on movie and TV screens—full of friendly, helpful household robots and artificial intelligences—reaches back through the utopian aspirations of postwar cyberneticians…
The intersection of literary gadfly George Plimpton (1927-2003) with the Mattel Intellivision video game console (introduced in 1980) seems a very strange fit on the surface. Plimpton acted as Intellivision’s pitchman throughout the early 1980s in a series of print and television advertisements, his stentorian tones touting Intellivision’s superiority to industry juggernaut Atari…
The BBC Handbook was published annually beginning in 1928 to inform the British public about the work being done by its national broadcaster. Under one cover and written in a straightforward prose style, a reader could find the Beeb’s technical broadcasting details (including the exciting new vistas opened up by Telstar and other communications satellites)…
Christopher Cross was faced with a tall order in trying to follow up his colossal hit debut LP, Christopher Cross (1979). The album spawned four Top 20 singles and dominated the 23rd Annual Grammys, and Cross hit again in the fall of 1981 with “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” from the Arthur soundtrack…
Boris Vallejo was at the height of his fame when he took on this commission for Chess King, an American retailer specializing in hip young men’s fashion, in 1986. Vallejo moved to the United States in 1964 from his native Peru to work in commercial art and pulp paperback covers in their ’60s and ’70s heyday, honing his skills painting the rippling thews of barbarian kings and the oiled curves of their female companions…
You could call this album a vanity project, a command-performance mixtape, a deeply personal tribute to lost youth—maybe even all three. It stands cloaked in darkness and mystery and captures a very special, even unique, time and place in musical history…
“Worldbuilding” has become a trendy word to throw around when it comes to fictional universes. Franchises with the luxury to build their worlds over multiple motion pictures costing billions and billions of dollars fill the media landscape. In David Keenan’s debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, we enter a world with a much more humble, much more homely set of concerns, but with a universe no less studded with outsized personalities…
We Are the Mutants 