This two-minute television spot from 1985 promoted the Time-Life book series The Vietnam Experience, which was released serially from 1981 to 1988, perfectly bookending the Reagan years. Each of the 25 volumes covered subtopics about the Vietnam War from the American perspective, from military tactics to culture clashes…
In the rapidly changing, highly prosperous world in which they found themselves after the Second World War, American parents began to seek more modern sources of information regarding the best way to rear their offspring…
By K.E. Roberts
Rosemary’s Baby, both Ira Levin’s 1967 bestseller and Roman Polanski’s meticulously faithful film adaptation of 1968, seeded the American consciousness with infernal terror at precisely the moment the country was supposed to be suffering its most desperate crisis of faith…
The 1983 film WarGames, directed by John Badham and written by Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker, was a box office smash and eventually became a generational touchstone, offering mainstream audiences their first glimpse at the computer technology that would ineluctably become part of their lives in the next decade and beyond…
Maine schoolgirl Samantha Smith sent a momentous letter to Yuri Andropov, then General Secretary of the USSR, in autumn of 1982. She asked the Soviet leader, “Are you going to vote to have a war or not?” and “why [do] you want to conquer the world or at least our country?”
Originally designed by Douglas Malewicki, an American aerospace engineer and eclectic inventor, the object of this satirical simulation of cataclysmic nuclear war was to be sole survivor, although final retaliatory strikes often eliminated all players in a deadly chain reaction…
By Brother Bill
A wave of dark, violent horror films arrived in the early-to-mid 2000s, all set in the present-day real world and centered on people caught up in deranged systems or subcultures. It seemed as though the lone psycho supermen of earlier decades (Hannibal Lecter, Max Cady, endlessly respawning Freddies, Michaels, and Jasons) were being supplanted…
The International Radiation Symbol or Ionizing Radiation Trefoil Warning Symbol was created at the University of California Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in 1946…
“Brace yourself for an exciting, realistic sight and sound journey into another world…” Such was the promise emblazoned on the star-spangled blue packaging of the AudiSee titles, a series of “stereo dramatizations,” science-fiction audiobooks on cassette, each accompanied by a glossy, full-color illustrated booklet…
This advertisement for the 3rd Festival for Mind Body Spirit appeared in Alpha magazine (subtitled “Probes the Paranormal”) in 1979. Its promise of “Psychic phenomena, UFO’s [sic], Earth Mysteries and more” was a slight shift in emphasis from the event’s official poster…
We Are the Mutants 