As part of her anti-drug Just Say No campaign, First Lady Nancy Reagan made a guest appearance on the NBC sitcom Diff’rent Strokes (1978-1986) on March 19, 1983. In the episode, titled “The Reporter,” Arnold Drummond (Gary Coleman), a reporter for his school newspaper, breaks a story on drug pushers at his school and submits it to a major city newspaper…

In 1979, Israeli film industry giants (and cousins) Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus purchased tiny independent American film production house Cannon Group, Inc. Cannon had spent the ’70s producing B-movies with occasional surprise hits (like the 1970 “hardhat revenge” tale Joe starring Peter Boyle). Golan and Globus saw in Cannon a way to gain a foothold in an American market that they’d long eyed entering…

Released in 1978, Vladimir Tarasov’s Контакт (Contact) is a short Soviet animated film that attempts to tackle the question of how communication between two sentient species—one of them extraterrestrial—might occur…

Prior to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the fares, routes, schedules, and establishment of commercial airliners were controlled by the federal Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). While regulation meant smaller profits for the airliners, it also meant guaranteed profits: the result amounted to a monopoly that was “too big to fail.” The supposed “golden age” of air travel, as depicted in the commercial above, was actually the result of so many half-empty planes in the sky…

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)…

Before digital effects, directors depended exclusively on visual effects artists, and matte painters in particular, to convey the epic scope and grandeur of defining shots and scenes. Matthew Yuricich (1923-2012) was one of the greats…

The thunderous strains and spinning lozenges of this ITC ident preceded all kinds of disparate television programs from the 1960s to the early ’80s—from the surreal spy tales of The Prisoner, to the pre-Star Wars sci-fi of Space: 1999, to the beloved The Muppet Show. They were all distributed internationally by Incorporated Television Company (ITC), or ITC Entertainment, as the company was known in the States…

Escape from New York was John Carpenter’s most ambitious and biggest-budget film to date, and his first choices to handle visual effects were Jim Danforth (7 Faces of Dr. Lao) and John Dykstra, the latter the talk of the special effects world for his Academy Award-winning work on Star Wars…