Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026, at 80. Four movies, two pop number ones, a theme park, and a trio album. What she gave the 80s and why it matters.
It’s showtime. Thirty-six years after Tim Burton unleashed the ghost with the most, the 2024 sequel put three of the original leads back on screen together. But the sequel is only part of the story. What happened to the full cast of that 1988 original is stranger, sadder, and more surprising than anything the Netherworld […]
In 1988, the Breakfast Club director picked up the phone with John Candy and talked about bringing the five kids back as adults. He never made it.
Forty years ago today, a New Jersey band put out a record with a garbage bag on the cover, and the 80s bent around it. Slippery When Wet was released on August 18, 1986 by Mercury Records, and today is its 40th anniversary. You know how this one ends. Two number one singles, a decade […]
The summer Slippery When Wet dropped, we were dancing on national TV. Here is what the record’s 40th anniversary means to two people who lived it.
Nobody in the 80s watched television alphabetically. You watched it by clock. There was the block after school, the block at eight when the whole house was in one room, the hour the shows got loud and somebody drove a car through something, and the daytime stuff that was simply always on, in the background, […]
The 80s symbols that instantly say “the eighties”: neon, boomboxes, Rubik’s Cubes, cassette tapes, geometric shapes, and the logos and looks that defined the decade.
You knew the aisle by smell. New plastic and cardboard, that particular fluorescent hum, and a wall of boxes at exactly kid eye level, each one promising something the box could not possibly deliver. You did not browse it. You worked it. You knew which end had the action figures and which end had the […]
Forty years ago today, a toy company killed off its own most beloved character on purpose, in a movie it paid for, in front of the kids who already owned him. The Transformers: The Movie opened in American theaters on August 8, 1986, which makes today its 40th anniversary. You know the part everybody knows: […]
Forty-five years on from the Sunset Strip. The four men who sold the 80s its own bad reputation are not a memory act, and 2026 has been the loudest year they have had in a while. One of them had to learn to walk again to get here. As of August 2026: Vince Neil is […]