In 1972, actress Marlo Thomas, who’d made her name on the hit ’60s TV series That Girl, along with a team of entertainers and the support of the newly-founded Ms. Foundation for Women, of which Thomas and pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem were founding members, released an album of songs and skits titled Free to Be… You and Me…
In a few short years years following the end of World War II, a new showdown between the capitalist West and communist East gradually ossified. A cold war had begun. Certain leaders of the American armed forces in Europe in 1945 were disappointed that an anti-communist war in Europe did not immediately follow the fall of Hitler…
I was born in 1975, at the demographic nadir of the 1970s birth trough in America and before the mini Baby Boom of the early ’80s. My birth cohort is small; my grade school classes were the smallest they’d be for the next 30-some odd years. So, as a late Gen-Xer, my oldest pop culture memories are of the late 1970s. I was a kid in the 1980s. But I came of age at the end of history…
I honestly hadn’t thought about Ready Player One until the movie was announced. Even then, I tried to avoid it. But I finally saw the trailer, against my will, and dear God, what a hideous mess. But hey, I wasn’t going to see it, because I lost my virginity and I’m married to a good-looking man and can watch grown-up films because I’m a Big Girl. Then I read his poetry. And since then, I’ve been training, Linda-Hamilton-in-T2 style, to take this motherfucker down…
The Fall of Delta Green is a tabletop pen-and-paper role-playing game (RPG) in which the weird monsters, unknowable gods, and uncanny happenings of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos meet the American military, industrial, and scientific apparatus of the High Cold War period (the 1960s)…
Safari Cards were an English translation of a set of collectible zoological information facts first devised and published in Switzerland. Original publisher Éditions Rencontre in Lausanne, Switzerland specialized in subscription encyclopedias and other educational toys in the 1950s and ’60s. Intended explicitly from the very beginning to democratize learning and bring the classics of French-language literature to the public…
At the dawning of the 1970s, Americans were more aware than ever of the great damage more than a century of unrestricted industry had done to their country. With the passing of Richard Nixon’s Reorganization Plan Number 3 by Congress in 1970, the U.S. government welcomed the Environmental Protection Agency to the roster of federal agencies. The EPA was meant to consolidate federal efforts to protect America’s air, water, and soil, and to give environmental protection efforts a fiercer executive independence…
The Fontana Modern Masters series was conceived in the late 1960s at Scottish publishers William Collins & Company’s Fontana imprint. Fontana Books had spent its first decade publishing inexpensive paperback pulp and detective fiction, priced between two and three shillings. But, in May 1968, revolutionary theory and Situationist praxis caught fire in the streets of Paris, as students plastered walls and barricades with catchy slogans meant to détourne the mainstream postwar advertising culture around which they’d grown up…
The most famous and prominent fictional man-machine hybrid in 1970s pop culture was Colonel Steve Austin, as portrayed by Lee Majors in the television series The Six Million Dollar Man. Over the course of three television movies (all airing in 1973) and five seasons (1974-1978), Austin introduced the idea of a human “cybernetic organism” (cyborg) to the wider American public…
Those of us who grew up in the 1980s probably gave a lot of thought (and worry) to the depictions of the aftermath of nuclear war. Films like The Day After and Testament in the US (1983), and Threads (1984) and When the Wind Blows (book, 1982; animated film, 1986) in the UK graphically portrayed the results of a global thermonuclear war. But what about the stories where the Soviets actually, physically invade the West using conventional forces?
We Are the Mutants 