Ah, the 80s. If you wanted original programming you had your three networks (until Fox came along at the end of the decade and HBO jumped into original shows around the same time) plus PBS. Nowadays you’d have to go to the likes of the Sci-Fi Channel… oh excuse me, SyFy to see the level of cheese on display below.
What did you need to launch a show in the 80s? A cool vehicle (whether it be a motorcycle, car, helicopter, or boat) a slab of beef for a leading man with a name like Rex or Perry, a crusty lieutenant type, a woman with big hair and shoulder pads, and a kick ass theme song.
Automan
Automan was an early 80s view of high-tech which was like Tron turned inside out – picture the pitch meeting: “Instead of the guy getting sucked into the computer, the computer is a guy who gets sucked into our world!” Where he befriends charisma-free Desi Arnaz Jr. Quick, let me back in! Along for the ride is Cursor, a “special effect”that doesn’t quite earn the sobriquet “special” but does appear to be a bit of a digital horndog. Love the font. Bonus points for having their slab of beef be computer generated.
Was 1990 really the 90s, or was it just the hangover from the 80s? While you ponder that, consider that Nirvana and Tarantino were still a year away and a little show called Seinfeld was confusing a tiny audience before supplanting Cheers as NBC’s big sitcom property. There was also the little matter of Gulf War I, which bears the same relationship to Gulf War II as Caddyshack, Airplane!,Chinatown do to their respective sequels.
So, cast your mind back 20 years – here are the Best Movies of 1990:
The year 1980 marked the waning of the malaise era in America and the second year of Thatcher in the UK. The anything goes 70s was being supplanted by the glossy, go-go 80s where the shiny surface masked such travails as AIDS and a resurgent Cold War.
The first year of the decade catches music frozen in midstream – hip-hop is beginning to surface across singles and a few albums such as Kurtis Blow’s debut, disco still lived, post-punk was giving way to new wave, and classic rock wasn’t yet classic. Here then are the 40 best albums of 1980:
Malcolm McLaren was a bastard. There, I’ve said it. Yet he was one of the greatest impresarios of the 20th Century. The Sex Pistols as a concept were very much his creation, a “swindle” in his words that combined the nascent punk rock of his former charges The New York Dolls and bands like The Ramones with situationist sloganeering, social shock and awe, the bondage and fetish gear purveyed in the boutique operated by he and his then wife Vivienne Westwood, and a grand dose of P.T. Barnum-style showmanship.
Film and TV actor Robert Culp died today in Los Angeles at the age of 79. For a baby boomers he will always be best known for his role opposite Bill Cosby as a spy in I Spy, a show that broke down televisions race barriers. But to Generation Xies like myself it was his role as cynical FBI agent Bill Maxwell on The Greatest American Hero that made him an indelible part of our childhood. Then there were the film roles – Paul Mazursky’s brilliant first film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in which Culp played Natalie Wood’s husband – a man getting in touch with the swinging sixties sexual liberation in spite of his contradictory instincts, or as the venal mayor of New York in the silly Tim Hutton graffiti drama Turk 182, and in countless other parts large and small. He wasn’t an actor who disappeared into his roles, but the mannerisms that conveyed easy mastery in I Spy somehow were made to signal vulnerably swaggering libertinism in Bob & Carol, ill-at-ease conservatism in Hero, and waspy tweediness in his recurring role on Everybody Loves Raymond.
