This 1977 TV commercial for Granada TV Rental opens a window onto an almost forgotten aspect of the relationship the British viewing public once enjoyed with their television sets...

Anyone who was watching TV in the late 1980s remembers the commercial: probing personal questions appear in white text on a black screen as a Tangerine Dream-esque synth riff pulsates in the backgroun...

The Sears catalog was, by the outset of the 1980s, an American institution nearly a century in the making, providing an A-to-Z inventory of mail-order household goods for even the most far-flung consu...

Jesus, 10 years. Launch date: August 29, 2016. Since then we’ve published almost 600 articles: many of them, in my opinion, are important contributions to cultural history and culture at large...

Grimy, esoteric capital of the ‘80s North of England, post-Thatcherism Leeds was a peculiarly dual-natured place. An increasingly moribund industrial economy still haunted by the atrocities...

The comic foregrounds Chick’s particularly virulent and extremist brand of Christianity—many of his tracts have been rightly classified as hate speech—and marks a very early foreshadowing of the Satan...

To interested observers in the 1970s, Ira Einhorn was the paragon of the bleeding-edge, Age of Aquarius thinker. He founded free classes on psychedelics, conducted one of the first "Be-ins" on the Eas...

By the summer of 1976, I was a child steeped in animal terror. Well, steeped in loads of types of terror, really, seeing as I lived in mortal fear of UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts with tricorn hats, the Wirrn...

Grimy, esoteric capital of the ‘80s North of England, post-Thatcherism Leeds was a peculiarly dual-natured place. An increasingly moribund industrial economy still haunted by the atrocities...

British folk-rockers Steeleye Span were arguably at the height of their powers and popularity in the mid-1970s, and their television series Electric Folk, broadcast on BBC2 in 1974 and 1975, shows …

Earlier HBO idents had been relatively simple affairs, the kind of simply animated and crudely soundtracked bumpers you might see on your local UHF station’s movie revue. But this bumper&#821…

The cinematic corpus of David Cronenberg is probably best known for its expertly uncanny use of body horror, but looming almost as large in the writer-director's various universes is the presence of f...

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 ...

Unlike most library music, Aquarius is a complete work in itself. It’s like a soundtrack to an imaginary film, and Williams uses both traditional and experimental arrangements to tell the story...

Fans of fraternal Scottish music duo Boards of Canada could be forgiven for being a little overexcited when news of the feverishly anticipated fifth LP, Inferno, the group’s first new music in 13 year...

The work of 24-year-old Sicilian musician Francesco Leprino, Integrati... Disintegrati is a suite of music and sound that constantly oscillates between euphoria and anxiety, blending the “organic” sou...

Unlike most library music, Aquarius is a complete work in itself. It’s like a soundtrack to an imaginary film, and Williams uses both traditional and experimental arrangements to tell the story...

By Jimmy Andreakos He-Man and the Masters of the Universe bubbled up from the depths of Mattel’s marketing hive mind and irradiated the toy and TV industry with a simple but ultimately revolutionar…

When Heavy Metal published 1979’s stand-alone Alien: The Illustrated Story to coincide with the release of Ridley Scott’s now-canonical sci-fi horror, no one knew what a “graphic …

By Richard McKenna In 1977, with von Däniken mania still thriving, Alfred Górny of Polish publishing house Sport i Turystyka—Sport and Tourism—made an agreement with Econ Verlag, the pu…

The 1980s saw the gradual ascendancy of cyberpunk narratives in popular science fiction. The genre projected Western societal trends seen in the decade---corporate conglomeration, the rise of computer...

By Richard McKenna Incredibly, it took only four years for the spectacle to regurgitate the absurdist nightmare future that George Miller had assembled in 1982’s Mad Max 2 as that most inane and tr…

By Michael Grasso A couple of years ago, a canny and intelligent friend referred to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms as “post-apocalyptic.” I thought …

By Michael Grasso A couple of years ago, a canny and intelligent friend referred to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms as “post-apocalyptic.” I thought …

By K.E. Roberts Star Wars and the Cola Wars collided, launching a series of futuristic, high concept TV ads that included all the major players. At the heart of it was one Ridley Scott…

By Richard McKenna Incredibly, it took only four years for the spectacle to regurgitate the absurdist nightmare future that George Miller had assembled in 1982’s Mad Max 2 as that most inane and tr…

By K.E. Roberts Star Wars and the Cola Wars collided, launching a series of futuristic, high concept TV ads that included all the major players. At the heart of it was one Ridley Scott…

By Richard McKenna Incredibly, it took only four years for the spectacle to regurgitate the absurdist nightmare future that George Miller had assembled in 1982’s Mad Max 2 as that most inane and tr…

There’s a lot going on here, but let’s start at the beginning: did Voyager I and II really collect sounds from the outer planets and their moons as they passed by? Yes, in a way. Each of the probes wa...

First released in 1978 by Archon, a publisher based in London’s Soho district, UFOs gains some added legitimacy from the fact that it was written by Brit Bob Rickard, who in 1973 founded what would ev...

By Michael Grasso I’m finding it oddly difficult to write about UFOs Are Real, a low-budget UFO documentary from 1979. Not because there’s not a lot to say about it, but instead, thanks…

The suggestive commonalities of these disparate MUFON presenters does seem to buttress the now-common view that the entire world of postwar American ufology was a giant blind alley meant to distract f...

There’s a lot going on here, but let’s start at the beginning: did Voyager I and II really collect sounds from the outer planets and their moons as they passed by? Yes, in a way. Each of the probes wa...

After Martin Scorsese burst onto the scene with the one-two social realist punch of 1973's Mean Streets and 1974's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, he produced an ode to the milieu from which he spran...

n the mid-1970s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was in a period of transition. The final manned Apollo mission to the Moon, Apollo 17, had returned to Earth in December 1972; no …

1983's Testament was produced by PBS and directed by National Education Television documentarian Lynne Littman, and shows the effects of a nuclear attack on a family who live in an idyllic small town.

At the dawning of the 1970s, Americans were more aware than ever of the great damage more than a century of unrestricted industry had done to their country. With the passing of Richard Nixon’…

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Last week, a story came across the We Are The Mutants news desk that inspired equal parts hope and dread: a reboot of the classic paranormal documentary series In Search of… is in the works, …

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 W...