Soft Illusions: The Bruton Music Library, 1977 – 1989

Alongside the industrial manufacture of popular music which characterised the second half of the twentieth century, another type of music aimed at a smaller group of consumers and offering another perspective on the humours of its day was also being recorded: production music, also called library music, was instrumental music recorded to evoke a certain mood or tone and licensed for use in other media (for example as background, incidental or theme music)…

Earth, Wind & Fire Panasonic Boombox Commercials, 1980 – 1983

At the dawn of the 1980s, soul-funk-disco orchestra Earth, Wind & Fire (EWF) were at the top of their game. They’d just released their LP I Am (1979), which featured hit single “After The Love Has Gone,” and double-album Faces (1980). Both albums came close to hitting number 1 on the US pop charts and solidified the band’s already-solid reputation as reliable hit-makers…

“The Right of All Sentient Beings”: The Transformers (Generation One)

Christmas, 1984. It was a hell of a time to be a kid. We’d reveled in seven years of Star Wars and Star Wars toys, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (also Hasbro) and Mattel’s Masters of the Universe franchises launched in 1982, using Lucas’s simplistic moral universe as a backdrop, and then Hasbro struck again with these diecast shape-shifting robots yanked from Japanese company Takara…

Metal Mickey, 1978 – 1983

After first appearing as a recurring character on British children’s TV show The Saturday Banana and scoring a hit record with his 1978 novelty cover of “Lollipop,” five-foot-tall remote-controlled robot Metal Mickey caught the eye of LWT producer Humphrey Barclay, who commissioned a self-titled spin-off series…

George Plimpton Advertisements for Intellivision, 1980 – 1983

The intersection of literary gadfly George Plimpton (1927-2003) with the Mattel Intellivision video game console (introduced in 1980) seems a very strange fit on the surface. Plimpton acted as Intellivision’s pitchman throughout the early 1980s in a series of print and television advertisements, his stentorian tones touting Intellivision’s superiority to industry juggernaut Atari…

Spaceport Employee Training Video, 1981

Spaceport was an East Coast mall arcade chain active in the early 1980s, competing with Time Out and Aladdin’s Castle. The interior was designed to resemble the inside of a spacecraft, with “escape hatches” protruding from the ceiling, cylindrical “E.V.A boosters” lining the walls, and various future-forward portals and struts…

Quickshot Joysticks, 1982 – 1988

As sophisticated new electronic entertainments entered the lives of increasing numbers of people during the 1980s, sophisticated new interfaces were designed to utilize these entertainments—and capitalize on them—to their fullest potential. The joystick was invented originally to satisfy the need to control movement in three dimensions following the invention of the aircraft in the early 20th century…

SNIKT: Comic Book Sound Effects, 1939 – 1985

Sequential art goes all the way back to cave paintings, and word balloons start to appear in political cartoons in the late 1700s, but the combination of the two in newspaper comic strips was a late 19th century development, spurred by the “circulation war” between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal…