‘UFO Drawings From The National Archives’ by David Clarke, 2017

A recent spate of books have sought to analyze the visual culture of 20th-century ufology. 2016’s Flying Saucers Are Real!, which featured the archive of science fiction writer and amateur UFO material collector Jack Womack, offered richly-drawn, full-color images of UFO culture from every decade of the phenomenon. What Flying Saucers Are Real! did for American ufology, David Clarke’s UFO Drawings From The National Archives does for the United Kingdom…

One Step Beyond: ‘Alpha: Probing the Paranormal’, 1979 – 1980

In one of the first episodes of BBC Scotland’s epochal 1979 paranormal drama series The Omega Factor, the program’s psychic protagonist can be seen sitting in his modish Manchester flat, leafing through a magazine with an aquamarine cover. The cover illustration shows a trombonist, the tubes of his instrument drooping in an evocation of psychokinetic metal-bending. That magazine was Alpha…

“Fuck the Future”: John Badham’s ‘Saturday Night Fever’, 1977

I’m finding Saturday Night Fever a surprisingly slippery text to analyze in 2018. I rewatched it for this piece and it just seems like such an odd document. It’s not so much that it feels alien: the aspirational, ethnic, working-class swagger of Tony Manero is still with us in 2018, as cultural myth if nothing else…

‘Voyage (A Journey Into Discoid Funk)’ by Brian Bennett, 1978

Brian Bennett’s career started in grand fashion; while barely out of his teens, he became the drummer for one of the UK’s biggest pop groups, Cliff Richard’s backing band, The Shadows, taking over from original drummer Tony Meehan. Bennett’s 1978 solo effort, Voyage (A Journey Into Discoid Funk), marked his first solo effort…

To Boldly Boogie: A Terrestrial’s Guide to Space Disco

By The Mutants

As the end of the 1970s approached, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the space-age fantasies the West had been nurturing for twenty years led nowhere real, or at least nowhere permanent, and that terrestrials were seeking some kind of emotional repository for the dreams they had been dreaming, as well as a pressure valve for their multiplying tensions…

Unidentified Object Could Be Earthling: Dee D. Jackson’s ‘Cosmic Curves’

By Richard McKenna

In 1978, the stars were right. The previous year, the strange confluence of the artistic, political, esoteric, and scientific culture (and counterculture) that had been building up for over a decade was exploded by one George Lucas, who punctured a hole through the zeitgeist big enough to allow all manner of cosmic currents to flood through…

“This Shall Not Come to Pass”: ‘Atomic War!’ Comics, #1-2, 1952

The first issue of Atomic War! tells the story of a future America—the year is 1960—in which the embarrassingly gullible U.S. government and the bumbling United Nations are bamboozled by the “smiling conciliation” of the Russians and their seemingly “enthusiastic efforts for peace…”

“A Sloppy Machine, Like Me”: A History of Video Synthesizers

By Michael Grasso

In our contemporary media landscape, where consumers are surrounded by full-to-bursting computer-generated imagery, the wondrous has become drearily everyday. The thousands of hours of artists’ labor and computer programming time involved in creating visual effects often vanishes in the face of overwrought spectacle…

Ron Cobb’s Cartoons for the ‘Los Angeles Free Press’, 1965 – 1970

Although now best known for his design work on several films that defined the appearance of the future in the imagination of a generation, Ron Cobb was, for many years, a noted countercultural figure whose political cartoons appeared in the pages of influential underground newspaper The Los Angeles Free Press…

Quirky Ghosts and Marquee Gifts: Memories of Christmas Past

The memories of the love I had for these… things as a kid has largely faded. The memories that matter today all have to do with people: the family that gave me love and supported my interests and hobbies, the friends with whom I played these toys and games, and the shared memories with all of you who’ve commented and written to us in response to our articles…