The arraignment call came at 11 p.m. The judge was doing card tricks on the bench. The prosecutor was checking his hair in a compact mirror. The defendant was explaining, for the third time, that the goat was already in the taxi when he got in. And somewhere off to the side, the biggest bailiff […]
ALF premiered on NBC on September 22, 1986, and ran four seasons on one premise: an alien crashes into a suburban garage, and the Tanner family hides him. What made it work was the people doing the hiding. The Tanners were an ordinary California family who had to keep a sarcastic, cat-obsessed alien a secret […]
Ten people walk into a John Hughes movie, and four decades later you can still name most of them by their quirk alone. The sick kid. The nervous wreck. The economics teacher who never got an answer. That is how deep this cast got into a generation’s permanent memory. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a […]
You could walk into that bar any Thursday night for eleven years, and the same people would be sitting in the same seats, having the same arguments, nursing the same grudges, and greeting the same man at the door the same way. NORM! The Cheers characters are the staff and regulars of a basement bar […]
Who Played ALF? Three people played ALF: Paul Fusco (creator, voice, puppeteer), Michu Meszaros (the full-body suit), and a puppeteer crew under the set. None of them got to just show up and act. Paul Fusco co-created the character, provided the voice, and operated the puppet from underneath the set for four seasons on NBC […]
ALF stands for Alien Life Form. It is the nickname Willie Tanner gives the alien Gordon Shumway of Melmac in the 1986 pilot, and the family never calls him anything else again. That is the nickname Willie Tanner gives the furry, sarcastic alien who crashes into his family’s garage in the pilot episode of the […]
Somebody who was not there always asks it the same way: what was popular in the 80s? And the answer, every time, is everything at once. The decade did not take turns. The music, the movies, the television, the toys, the hair, the neon, the sneakers, the slang, the arcade, the arguments about all of […]
If you grew up in the 80s, you probably called somebody Maverick at least once. You probably called somebody Iceman, too. And if you were unlucky enough to be the clumsy one, you got Goose and it stuck. The call signs in Top Gun landed so hard they left the screen entirely and entered the […]
Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. Five kids walked into that library in 1985. Forty years later, all five sat on a stage in Chicago together for the first time in those forty years. But the question […]
Tim Curry died August 26, 2026 at 80. Frank-N-Furter, Pennywise, and three 80s cult classics. The man committed to every role like it was his last.