You may not know the name Cirio H. Santiago, but, if you grew up in the United States in the 1980s or ‘90s, chances are his films made some kind of impression on your developing sensibilities. You didn’t have to be a sheltered, Midwestern pastor’s kid starved for mainstream popular culture, forced to glean your insights and knowledge of the offerings available to your less spiritually-minded neighbors and peers…
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…
Occasionally an artifact pops up that is such a perfect exemplar of the tropes we associate with a given historical period that it’s hard to believe it is real and not a bit of uncanny simulation designed to fuck with your brain. We’ve spoken about the phenomenon before, and Sounds Good is yet another such curio…
ONTV was a “subscription television” service that would “unscramble” UHF channels in participating markets, including Los Angeles County, where I grew up. If you’re not sure what it means to unscramble a channel, let me tell you…
In 1985, right around the time one Marty McFly made a “board with wheels” out of a 1955 scooter to escape Biff and his goons, the skateboarding industry exploded. Up to then, the unruly and ruleless sport had been dominated by vert skating (pools, half-pipes) and, to a lesser extent, freestyle, where skaters did lots of technical, stationary tricks across a relatively small surface area…
By the summer of 1976, I was a child steeped in animal terror. Well, steeped in loads of types of terror, really, seeing as I lived in mortal fear of UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts with tricorn hats, the Wirrn, Teddy Boys, the witches that lived near my nana’s house, fire, escalators, electrical substations…
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…
Broadcast on the evening of September 10, 1979, 40 years ago today, this was the British public’s introduction to the BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It was unlike any TV spy drama seen before…
By Andrew Nette
When things look bad—and globally, they look pretty bad at the moment—I take a strange consolation from the fact that this is not the first time in recent history that the end of the world has been seriously discussed. In 1982, when I was living in suburban Melbourne, a couple of years off finishing school, it was pretty much all I thought about…
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-1968), the sixth television series produced by AP Films/Century 21 to be filmed in “Supermarionation,” is a blitzkrieg of old school science fiction action that touches upon moral and psychological ambiguity within the explosive, action-driven framework that was second nature to the production team at this point…
