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…
The world of The Brady Bunch can be defined by a conspicuous style. After all, the setting is an architect father’s passion project, accoutered with what Carol Brady once described as Danish Modern furniture. The family’s fashion arc went from Ozzie and Harriet in season one to post-’60s extremes in season three. Yet the Brady’s choice of household artwork seems oddly uninspired…
As the 1970s drew to a close, the appetite for science fiction-related material of any type and in any form (though preferably of low price) was such that its effects were visible in every field: the post-Star Wars windfall admitted all comers…
Occultima, Ltd. produced at least three occult-themed “test” booklets in the early 1970s. This one encompasses palmistry, witchcraft, astrology, crystal ball gazing, graphology (handwriting analysis), mediumship, clairvoyancy, ESP, precognition, and telepathy, with a series of questions in each section meant to gauge your potential in each “mystic skill”…
By Richard McKenna and Michael Grasso
Not many books have actually changed my life, but The Uninvited is one of them. Somehow, it coalesced the long-accumulating supernatural- and UFO-related ephemera I had been cramming into my eyes and ears at every opportunity and weaponized it against me…
Edited by underground writer-cartoonist Leonard Rifas and published by Denis Kitchen’s Kitchen Sink Press, both issues of Corporate Crime Comics present a “collection of corporate atrocity stories” written and illustrated by a variety of prominent voices in the underground comics scene…
“Solo Me Muevo Por Dinero” is the work of Spanish brothers Xeno and Tucho Baladon, known collectively as Xalan. The Euro disco duo released only two 12” singles, this and 1987’s Revolution Without Solution. The acquisitive, upwardly-mobile young urban professionals who became known as Yuppies in the early 1980s made their appearance in Spain at the tail end of an explosion of popular creativity…
Two years ago at Christmas, I parlayed a then-recent obsession with the weird, haunted media of 1970s Britain and the field of hauntology into an Amazon Wish List. When my wife and I were in the UK visiting family, I found most of that list waiting for me under the tree. A king’s ransom, for me the Yank, of barely-remembered and never-seen British television series…
Of all the visual shorthand for a particular type of outmoded futurism, one of the most immediately recognizable—like the chrome lettering with which it is often paired—must be the light grid. Usually depicted as a network of glowing straight lines receding in perspective against a black background, occasionally with the outlines of mountains or the blush of dawn visible on the horizon…
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…
We Are the Mutants 