By K.E. Roberts
The Shootist is one of the greatest Westerns ever made, although it is rarely named as such. It is John Wayne’s final film, and possibly his best performance. Wayne, of course, essentially invented the on-screen American cowboy: swaggering, gritty, terse, self-contained, charming, relentless, invincible…
The lure of eternal youth is itself seemingly eternal. Myths like the Philosopher’s Stone, the Fountain of Youth, the elixir vitae, and many others have lived with humanity for as long as there’s been an awareness of our own mortality. In the 1980s, several films in a row took on this idea of the elderly discovering a supernatural wellspring…
The Golden Girls premiered on American television’s NBC network in September of 1985. The sitcom features four women—Dorothy and Sophia Petrillo, Rose Nylund, and Blanche Devereaux—who are older, single, and living together as friends in the popular retirement locale of Miami, Florida…
By Tom G. Wolf
For the children of Westall High School in Victoria’s Clayton South, there was no indication that the day of April 6, 1966 would be among the most remarkable of their lives. Around 11:00 am, a group of students was returning to class from a sports lesson at the school oval when a number of them…
It’s hard for me to square the aesthetic of these friendly, vivid, hippie-lite cartoons with the messages they convey. The patriotic, even nationalistic approach to American history was nothing if not commonplace in K-8 schools even in the liberal Northeast as late as the 1980s. Plymouth Rock, 1620, taxation without representation, Bunker Hill, Lewis and Clark, Manifest Destiny, Civil War, women’s suffrage: the parade of America’s history presented as a series of easy-to-remember facts and figures…
In 1972, actress Marlo Thomas, who’d made her name on the hit ’60s TV series That Girl, along with a team of entertainers and the support of the newly-founded Ms. Foundation for Women, of which Thomas and pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem were founding members, released an album of songs and skits titled Free to Be… You and Me…
By Mandy Leetch
As a little girl in the 1980s, one of my favorite movies was the weird and wild animated adaptation of Harry Nilsson’s folk rock concept album The Point!. I had a well worn VHS copy that my mother had recorded off of the TV when she saw they were airing one of her favorites from the ’70s…
By Ben Schwartz
David Lindsay’s masterpiece A Voyage to Arcturus was first published in London in 1920 by Methuen & Co. It came dressed in a simple red cloth cover; no dust jacket, just the title and author’s name debossed into the front. This first printing sold less than 600 copies, and so Arcturus didn’t come to the US until Macmillan brought it out in 1964…
By Michael Grasso and Rob MacDougall
I wanted to talk about two tabletop role-playing games that explored the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. At first I was going to venture the thesis that Gamma World, which TSR released in 1978, and Paranoia, developed at West End Games in 1984, are very different visions of a post-apocalyptic future, but now I’m kind of wondering—are they really?
In 1989, almost a year after it was released in Japan, the Western world was given its first cinematic taste of anime with the sci-fi epic Akira. Acclaimed writer Katsuhiro Otomo’s vision of a post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo, a sea of concrete edifices laid waste by war, was adapted from the manga of the same name…
We Are the Mutants 