Earlier this year, while on a YouTube nostalgia tear through NBA highlights from the late ’70s and early ’80s, I made the following observation on Twitter after watching a live performance of Grover Washington, Jr.’s “Let It Flow (For ‘Dr J.’)” set to vintage hoops footage: “The sound of my early childhood is ineluctably a Fender Rhodes electric piano”…
I remember vividly the rich variety of books that I was surrounded by in childhood that talked about the history of magic, or then-current trends in paranormal research, or how investigators were searching for the signs of the afterlife on magnetic audio tape. If you grew up in the ’70s and ’80s like me, and loved books like these, then go out and get yourself a copy of Peter Bebergal’s Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural…
By K.E. Roberts
During the 1970s, original, feature-length scares could be found on TV almost every night of the week. They were cheap to make and, after Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, we were trembling and defenseless. The best known of these quickie horrors, many of which dealt enduring trauma to a generation of children often home alone…
By Richard McKenna and K.E. Roberts
Before we start on this episode’s Progs, let’s talk about, in my mind, the definitive Dredd illustrator—inarguably a definitive comics illustrator—Carlos Ezquerra, who passed away this week at the age of 70…
Though sometimes dismissed as a disappointing compromise between the two phases of Chrome’s musical output—the delirious, expressionist SF punk cut-ups of Alien Soundtracks (1977) and Half Machine Lip Moves (1979) and the more “traditional” LPs that followed, like Blood on the Moon (1981) and 3rd From the Sun (1982)—Chrome’s fourth LP, 1980’s Red Exposure, could scarcely sound more uncompromising…
Legend of 20th century science fiction Nigel Kneale (1922-2006) would likely bristle to be described as such. Andy Murray’s terrific biography, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale, readily conveys Kneale’s sometime ambivalence at being pigeonholed as a genre writer. But the full parade of Kneale’s fascinating life gives perspective to the inseparability of the mundane and the fantastic…
By K.E. Roberts
As slasher franchises go, A Nightmare on Elm Street is certainly the most interesting conceptually: a former child murderer burned to death by the town’s vengeful parents returns years later to haunt and punish the community’s teenage children—by stalking their dreams…
In the early 1980s, French philosopher, media theorist, and cultural scholar Jean Baudrillard visited the United States several times, taking in the vastness of the continent-spanning nation, from Manhattan to Manhattan Beach. In 1986, his account of these trips, America, was published in France. Two years later, the book came to the US in a translated edition. In the work, Baudrillard ruminates upon Mormons and breakdancers, fitness nuts and canned laughter on television, on all of the sources of beauty and horror of American culture and society in the 1980s…
By Richard McKenna and K.E. Roberts
Surprisingly, Dredd still doesn’t appear on the cover of Prog 3, which contains the second appearance of Judge Dredd. Inside is the episode where they give Mega City One a name and start sketching in more of the details of the world Dredd inhabits…
A few years ago, I was at a New Year’s Eve party where the TV was tuned to a Cannon Films action movie marathon. The mindless gunfire and body blows became perfect New Year’s Eve party fodder as the crowd got more and more intoxicated…
We Are the Mutants 