The return of millions of American veterans in 1945 resulted in something of a dilemma: there were not enough homes for them and their rapidly expanding families. Spurred by low interest rates provided by the G.I. Bill, as well as low cost housing (a furnished home could be had for as little as $400 down)…
Together with Bob Newman’s perhaps better known 1970 typeface Data 70, the Westminster typeface represented a significant shift in the intrusion of the digital world into the real one, and still remains a potent and evocative symbol of futurist aspirations and fears…
Richard Amsel (1947-1985) was an American artist and illustrator whose professional career spanned only 16 years, from 1969 to 1985. But in that short time, he created some of the most iconic promotional images of the time in music, movies, and television…
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)…
In 1979, British artist Kit Williams published Masquerade, a picture book telling the story of a hare who loses the precious jewel entrusted to him by the sun. Masquerade contained clues to the location of a golden pendant in the form of a hare that had been buried at a secret location and was worth, at the time of the book’s release, £5,000…
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…
In the summer of 1950, Ray Bradbury chanced upon novelist and literary critic Christopher Isherwood in a Los Angeles bookstore, introduced himself, and gave Isherwood a copy of his first novel, The Martian Chronicles, which had been published earlier that year…
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…
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…
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…
We Are the Mutants 