Category: Blog

We sat with this one a while before writing it, so we are going to say it straight.

Phil Collins told The Sunday Times that he nearly died in 2024. Here is what happened to Phil Collins, in order: he stopped drinking in 2012 after a bout of acute pancreatitis, he started again in 2023, he was hospitalized at the end of that year, his organs began to fail, and the question of switching off his life support was raised. He spent seven months in hospital. He is 75. He has not had a drink since, and he is still here.

That is the news, and every outlet is running it today. What almost none of them are running is the part he has been telling us for ten years about why it happened. That part is about our decade, and it is not what you would guess.

What Phil Collins said

The interview ran in The Sunday Times, and the quotes are hard to read in a row.

On the drinking: “I’d have wine when I woke up,” he told the paper. “That was what I’d want for breakfast, a glass of wine.”

On how far it went: “My kidneys were packing up, my organs were just seizing up. People were coming to say goodbye.” He described what was being weighed around him as decisions to be made about “Do we keep Phil on life support?” kind of thing. He does not remember any of the visits. “But I don’t remember them coming,” he said. “They were all worried that they wouldn’t see me again. It could all have gone so terribly wrong.”

And on where he landed: “I was very lucky to have come out of that. Needless to say, I haven’t had a drink since.”

Two wire reports carrying the same interview place the worst of it in April 2024, when his children were called to his bedside. He has five.

How we got here: the timeline

This did not arrive out of nowhere, and it did not arrive today either.

Collins joined Genesis as its drummer in 1970 and took over singing after Peter Gabriel left in 1975. He launched the solo career with Face Value in 1981. He retired in 2011, came back to solo touring in 2017, came back again with Genesis in 2021, and retired for good in 2022 at the end of the farewell tour, singing from a chair while his son Nic played the drums.

The drinking he has written about himself. In his 2016 autobiography Not Dead Yet he put the start of it after the breakdown of his third marriage and his 2006 divorce, and he did not dress it up. “Night after night I find myself lying on the bed, staring out of a skylight at grey Swiss skies, rueing my life,” he wrote. “I’m all alone, save for my good friends Johnnie Walker and Grey Goose.” Somewhere in the 2010s his old friend Eric Clapton talked him into the Crossroads Centre in Antigua. He was booked for six weeks and left after a month because he had a tour waiting. The nurse who took him to the airport handed him a note to read on the plane. It said that if he had a drink, he would die. He had a glass of wine.

Then came the 2012 hospitalization with acute pancreatitis, and he stopped. He stayed stopped for years. By 2023 he had started again, and by the end of that year he was back in hospital, ending up in intensive care with doctors who did not think he would make it.

The 80s did not break him. Stopping almost did.

Here is the sentence that reframes the whole thing, and it is his, from Not Dead Yet, published a decade ago:

“It took me until the age of 55 to become an alcoholic,” he wrote. “I got through the heady 1960s, the trippy 1970s, the imperial 1980s, the busy 1990s. I was retired, content, and then I fell. Because I suddenly had too much time on my hands.”

Read that middle clause again. The imperial 1980s. He got through it.

Think about what getting through it actually meant for him. This is the man who, on July 13, 1985, played London and then got on a Concorde and played Philadelphia the same afternoon, because one hemisphere was not enough. Seven number one singles in the United States, three more in Britain. Fronting Genesis and running a solo career at the same time, so that on any given hour of Top 40 radio you could catch him twice under two different names. We have written the whole ridiculous run down elsewhere, if you want the seven number ones and the two-continent Live Aid day in full.

That decade should have been the thing that killed him. It is the thing he survived. What got him was the quiet on the other side of it.

He said the same thing again, in different words, on the BBC in January of this year: he had enjoyed coming off the road, he was going to do all the things he could not do before, and he started drinking during the day. “It all caught up with me,” he said, “and I spent months in hospital.”

Anyone who has watched a parent retire knows this shape. The schedule was holding the whole structure up, and when it goes, whatever was underneath it comes up for air. It is not a rock star story. It is the most ordinary story there is, and it happened to a man who spent our whole decade unable to sit still.

What is Phil Collins suffering from now?

He has been open about this since long before today. In January he sat down with Zoe Ball for a BBC Two special and said the line that got quoted everywhere: “everything that could go wrong with me did go wrong with me.”

The list, as he has described it: nerve damage dating to a 2007 spinal injury, which is what took the drumming away. Drop foot after a back operation, which makes walking difficult. Five separate operations on one knee. Type 2 diabetes. Kidney problems he ties directly to the drinking. He walks with crutches after spine and knee surgery, and he has a live-in nurse around the clock, in his words, “to make sure I take my medication as I should do.” He caught COVID while he was in hospital, on top of everything else.

By that January conversation he had recently marked two years sober. On the evidence of this week’s interview, that number keeps climbing.

If you searched his name this week you probably ran into something ugly, because this corner of the internet is thick with death hoaxes and AI slop headlines about announcements he never made. Every quote on this page is his own words, from coverage we read in full, which is how we sort what he actually said from what the internet invented about him.

Is Phil Collins going into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Yes, and this is where it turns into something better than a health bulletin.

On November 14 he will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, in a class with Iron Maiden, Oasis, Billy Idol, Wu-Tang Clan, Joy Division and New Order, Sade and Luther Vandross. It airs on ABC and Disney+ in December. It is his second induction. He went in with Genesis in 2010, which puts him in the small club of two-time inductees, and this one is for the solo career. NPR made the point plainly when the class was announced: it was the string of 80s hits that helped turn him into one of the most commercially successful artists of the decade.

He told SiriusXM he never saw it coming. “I’d kind of thought that that was it for me. I didn’t expect it.”

He will not be performing. Back in May he explained why. “They asked me if I would perform,” he told BBC Breakfast, “and I said, No, because you’ve got to be match fit to do something like that.” In the same conversation he said something that sounded modest in May and reads very differently now. “The last 18 months, say, has been fine,” he said. “Before that, not so good. Everything health-wise caught up with me at the same time, and whatever could go wrong did go wrong.”

In May that sounded like a man being careful about his voice. Read it today and the arithmetic lands differently: about two years before he said that, his children had been called in to say goodbye.

He does physio three times a week now. Asked whether he might ever play again, he left the door open a crack: “I can’t really see it happening, but I’m healthier now than I have been for quite a while.”

Why this one hit us

Because he was unavoidable, and we mean that as the compliment it never quite got treated as at the time. If you had a radio between 1981 and 1990 you did not choose Phil Collins, you simply received him. He was the drummer, the voice, the movie ballad, the charity single, the guy on MTV, sometimes in the same hour.

Being that famous that fast bought him a decade of jokes about overexposure. The backlash wrote itself, and some of it landed. But the drum break around three and a half minutes into “In the Air Tonight” still stops a room cold, and the man who built it spent seven months in a hospital bed while people filed in to say goodbye to him, and he does not remember a single one of them walking through the door.

He is 75, he is sober, he is going into the Hall of Fame in November, and he is not dead yet. He named a book that. It seemed like a joke in 2016.

Go put on Face Value. The whole way through.

Bobby and Jason

Frequently asked questions

What happened to Phil Collins?
He nearly died in 2024 from the effects of alcohol abuse. After relapsing in 2023 he was hospitalized at the end of that year, suffered organ failure, and spent seven months in hospital, during which his family was asked whether to keep him on life support. He recovered and has not had a drink since.

What is Phil Collins suffering from?
Nerve damage from a 2007 spinal injury that ended his drumming, drop foot that affects his walking, five knee operations, type 2 diabetes, and kidney problems he attributes to drinking. He uses crutches and has a 24 hour live-in nurse.

How long has Phil Collins been sober?
He stopped drinking after his hospitalization and said in January 2026 that he had recently marked two years sober. In the interview published on August 2, 2026 he said he has not had a drink since.

Why can’t Phil Collins play drums anymore?
A spinal injury in 2007 caused severe nerve damage that left him unable to drum. On the final Genesis tour he sang from a seated position while his son Nic Collins played drums.

Is Phil Collins in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Yes. He was inducted with Genesis in 2010 and will be inducted again as a solo artist on November 14, 2026 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. He has said he will not perform at the ceremony.

Sources

• Ultimate Classic Rock, “Phil Collins Reveals He Nearly Died in 2024,” August 2, 2026
• Louder, Dave Everley, “Phil Collins reveals that he nearly died in 2024,” August 2, 2026
• AOL UK, Gemma McCartney, “Phil Collins shares moment people came to ‘say goodbye,'” August 2, 2026
• BANG Showbiz via Yahoo News, “Phil Collins’ kids were summoned to say final goodbyes,” August 2, 2026
• Louder, Paul Brannigan, on Collins’ MOJO interview and his memoir Not Dead Yet, July 15, 2026
• Variety, Steven J. Horowitz, “Phil Collins Gives Rare Health Update,” January 21, 2026
• Louder, Paul Brannigan, on Collins declining to perform at his induction, May 27, 2026
• Rolling Stone, Andy Greene, “Phil Collins Rules Out Hall of Fame Performance,” May 22, 2026
• NPR, the 2026 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class, April 13, 2026

Related reading on this site: Phil Collins in the 80s, the drummer who became a solo superstar and Huey Lewis on losing his hearing.

Photos: Phil Collins live in Strasbourg, October 1981, by Philippe Roos, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Fly opened in theaters on August 15, 1986. That makes the 40th anniversary August 15, 2026. David Cronenberg directed it, Jeff Goldblum played the scientist who steps into a teleportation pod with a housefly, Geena Davis played the reporter who has to watch what happens next, and it won the Academy Award for Best Makeup.

Here is the part almost nobody says out loud, and it is the reason this one is ours. The Fly was not a weird little art film that found its people later on video. It opened at number one in America. It knocked Aliens off the top of the chart, and then it stayed up there a second week.

Was The Fly a hit when it came out?

It was the biggest movie in the country the weekend it opened.

On the weekend of August 15 to 17, 1986, The Fly took $7,007,423 from 1,195 theaters and finished first. Here is the top of that chart:

• 1. The Fly, $7,007,423, brand new
• 2. Armed and Dangerous, $4,348,276, brand new
• 3. Aliens, $4,303,173, fifth weekend
• 4. The Karate Kid Part II, $3,341,527, ninth weekend
• 5. Nothing in Common, $3,217,097
• 6. Top Gun, $3,117,183, fourteenth weekend

Look at number three. Aliens had been the number one movie in America the weekend before, and both films were released by 20th Century Fox, so the studio essentially knocked itself out of first place. Look at number six too: Top Gun was in its fourteenth weekend and still in the top ten. That is the shape of the summer The Fly walked into and won.

It was not a fluke, either. The following weekend, August 22 to 24, The Fly held number one with $4,725,970. That was the weekend Stand By Me broke wide, jumping from nineteenth place to second on 729 additional screens. It still did not catch The Fly.

By the end of its run the film had earned $40,456,565 in the United States and $20,172,594 overseas, for $60,629,159 worldwide, against a budget reported between $9 million and $15 million.

What is The Fly about, and who is in it?

Seth Brundle, played by Goldblum, is a scientist who has built a pair of telepods that can move matter from one to the other. He meets Veronica Quaife, a science journalist played by Geena Davis, at a press event, and she starts documenting his work. The pods handle objects fine and destroy living tissue, until Brundle cracks that too. Then, alone and convinced Veronica has gone back to her editor, he teleports himself. A housefly is in the pod with him. The computer, confused by two lifeforms, fuses them at the genetic level.

He feels wonderful for a while. Then his fingernails start coming off.

John Getz plays Stathis Borans, the editor, and the rest of the small cast includes Joy Boushel as Tawny, Leslie Carlson as Dr. Brent Cheevers, and George Chuvalo as Marky. Cronenberg himself turns up as a gynecologist. Howard Shore wrote the score, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra played it.

Goldblum and Davis were a couple by then, but they were not married yet. They married on November 1, 1987, more than a year after this film opened, and Davis filed for divorce in October 1990. She met him on the set of Transylvania 6-5000 in 1985. Two years after The Fly she was in Beetlejuice, and she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Accidental Tourist.

How did they make Brundlefly?

Chris Walas, Inc. designed and built the makeup over three months, with Walas leading and Stephan Dupuis as makeup artist. The trick that makes it work is the order they did it in: the finished Brundlefly creature was designed first, and then every earlier stage was worked backward from it, so each step was aimed at something that already existed.

There are seven stages. One and two are barely there, rash-like discoloration, small sores, tiny fly hairs on Goldblum’s face and the patch growing out of the wound on his back. Three and four bring prosthetics onto his face, then his arms, feet and torso, plus wigs with bald spots and crooked teeth. Stage four-B was cut from the film and required the first of two full-body foam latex suits. Stage five added a second suit and contact lenses that made one eye look bigger than the other. Stage six is the creature the crew called the “space bug,” played by cable and rod controlled puppets. Stage seven is a separate puppet for the final moments, which the crew called the “Brundlebooth” and then the “Brundlething.”

Cronenberg was after aging, not monsters. The transformation was designed as a metaphor for getting old, which is why Brundle loses his hair, his teeth and his fingernails before he loses his shape.

One more thing worth knowing about how careful they were: a rough cut screened at Toronto’s Uptown Theatre in the spring of 1986, and the audience reaction was strong enough that the “monkey-cat” sequence came out to keep people on Brundle’s side. A “butterfly baby” ending was previewed at a Fox screening and cut too.

What did The Fly win?

Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis won the Academy Award for Best Makeup at the 59th Academy Awards on March 30, 1987. They beat The Clan of the Cave Bear and Legend. It was the film’s only Oscar. At the same ceremony Platoon won Best Picture and four awards total, Aliens won two, and Top Gun won one.

At the Saturn Awards that May, The Fly did better: Best Horror Film, Best Make-up for Walas, and Best Actor for Jeff Goldblum.

Which brings up the sore spot. Goldblum got no Best Actor nomination from the Academy, and plenty of genre fans and critics at the time had expected one. Roger Ebert put the film on his top 20 of 1986 and said that “Goldblum, I think, deserves an Academy Award nomination.” Gene Siskel, who named it the tenth-best film of the year, said afterward that Goldblum most likely “got stiffed” because older Academy voters generally do not honor horror films.

The critics were mostly on board. Metacritic scores it 81 out of 100 from 12 reviews. Rotten Tomatoes has 93% of 89 reviews positive. Time called it a shocking horror film and the most touching romance of the year. Caryn James at The New York Times went the other way, and thought the gore was excessive and the tone all over the place. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B, which tells you something honest: a lot of people admired this movie more than they enjoyed sitting in it.

Is the 1986 Fly a remake?

Yes, and it is worth being precise about what it is remaking, because three different things share the name.

George Langelaan wrote a short story called “The Fly” in 1957, and it ran in Playboy. The 1958 film came from that story, directed and produced by Kurt Neumann with a screenplay by James Clavell, starring David Hedison, Patricia Owens, Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall. That is the one with the tiny voice in the spiderweb crying “Help me! Help me!” Hedison wore a fly head that weighed twenty pounds and later said that “Trying to act in it was like trying to play the piano with boxing gloves on.” Two sequels followed, Return of the Fly in 1959 and Curse of the Fly in 1965.

The 1986 film is loosely based on both the story and the 1958 movie, and it throws out the premise that made the original work. In 1958 the change is instant. In 1986 it is slow, and you watch a man argue with it. Charles Edward Pogue wrote the first version of the script and shares the screenplay credit with Cronenberg.

Cronenberg’s film got its own sequel, The Fly II, in 1989, directed by Chris Walas. Cronenberg had nothing to do with it, and John Getz was the only actor who came back.

What August 1986 actually looked like from where we were standing

August 15, 1986 sits right in the middle of our run. That was the stretch when we were taping Dance Party USA every week in Philadelphia.

And the same Friday The Fly opened, so did Manhunter, Michael Mann’s film, the first movie ever made from one of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, with Brian Cox playing him, spelled Lecktor in that one. It opened eighth, made $8.6 million in the United States, and was written off as a bomb. Nobody in 1986 knew what that character was going to become.

That is one August weekend: a Cronenberg body horror picture at number one, the first Hannibal Lecter movie dying at number eight, Aliens in its fifth week, and Top Gun refusing to leave. We have said before that 1986 might be the best single year the 80s produced. Here is a little more evidence.

There is a coda to the marketing, too. The producers hired Bryan Ferry to record a song called “Help Me” to promote the film. Cronenberg did not think it fit, and it ended up buried in the background of the bar scene and left off the soundtrack album entirely. It surfaced two years later on a Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry collection. Set that title next to the most famous moment in the 1958 picture: a tiny voice in a spiderweb, crying “Help me!”

The honest bottom line

Forty years later, some of it is dated. The lab set is very 1986. The arm-wrestling scene plays broader than it did. And the last stretch of the film is genuinely hard to sit through, which is the point, but it is still true.

What holds up completely is the thing the film was actually about. Cronenberg said he was surprised when some critics read it as being specifically about AIDS, because what he meant was bigger than any one disease. He called the story “much more universal: aging and death,” and “something all of us have to deal with.” Watch it at fifteen and it is the grossest movie you have ever seen. Watch it at fifty and it is about a man losing pieces of himself while the person who loves him has to decide how to help. That is a different film, and it is the same film.

The tagline was “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” It got repeated so many times in so many other movies and shows that many people who say it have no idea where it came from. It came from here. It came out on a Friday in August 1986, and it was the number one movie in America.

Put it on. Maybe not during dinner.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

When was The Fly released?
The Fly was released in theaters on August 15, 1986, which makes its 40th anniversary August 15, 2026.

Was The Fly a box office hit?
Yes. It opened at number one on the weekend of August 15 to 17, 1986 with $7,007,423, held number one the following weekend, and earned $60,629,159 worldwide.

Did The Fly win an Oscar?
Yes. Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis won the Academy Award for Best Makeup at the 59th Academy Awards on March 30, 1987. It was the film’s only Oscar.

Is the 1986 version of The Fly a remake?
Yes. It is loosely based on the 1958 film starring David Hedison, Patricia Owens and Vincent Price, and on George Langelaan’s 1957 short story of the same name.

Who starred in The Fly?
Jeff Goldblum played Seth Brundle, Geena Davis played Veronica Quaife, and John Getz played her editor Stathis Borans. David Cronenberg directed.

Sources

• Box Office Mojo: domestic weekend chart for August 15 to 17, 1986, with The Fly at number one
• Box Office Mojo: domestic weekend chart for August 8 to 10, 1986, with Aliens at number one
• Box Office Mojo: domestic weekend chart for August 22 to 24, 1986, The Fly’s second week on top
• Box Office Mojo: The Fly, release date, opening weekend and domestic total
• Wikipedia: The Fly (1986), production, makeup stages, awards and reception
• Wikipedia: The Fly (1958), the Kurt Neumann original and its sequels
• Wikidata Q468700: The Fly, publication dates by country
• Wikipedia: 59th Academy Awards, March 30, 1987, including the Best Makeup category
• Wikipedia: Manhunter, released the same day and the first Hannibal Lecter film
• Wikipedia: Geena Davis, filmography and marriage dates
• Wikipedia: Jeff Goldblum, filmography and marriage dates

Photos: Irina Petrova (CC BY 4.0), christopherharte (CC BY-SA 2.0), Alan Light (CC BY 2.0) and Alan Langford (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Forty years ago today, and we are still arguing about a duck.

Howard the Duck opened in American theaters on August 1, 1986, which makes today its 40th anniversary. You already know the reputation. Marvel’s first movie. George Lucas’s disaster. The punchline that outlived everybody in it. Here is the part the reputation leaves out: on its opening weekend it was the number 3 movie in America. Over five million dollars, in 1,554 theaters. People went. Then they stopped going, and you can watch it happen one weekend at a time.

What was actually playing the weekend Howard the Duck opened

Box Office Mojo still has the receipts for the domestic weekend of August 1 to 3, 1986, and the chart is a perfect little snapshot of that summer.

Number one was Aliens, in its third weekend, $7,060,101. Number two was Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, opening cold at $6,750,837, because Jason Voorhees was a growth industry. Number three, opening in 1,554 theaters, was Howard the Duck: $5,070,136, an average of $3,262 a theater.

Behind it, number four, The Karate Kid Part II in weekend seven. Down at number seven, Top Gun, in its twelfth weekend, still pulling three and a half million dollars a weekend and past $107 million total, because in 1986 Top Gun simply would not leave.

That was the summer of 1986 at your local multiplex, and Howard was right in the middle of it. Not ignored. Not buried. Third biggest movie in the country, one row of the marquee down from a xenomorph and a hockey mask.

That was our summer too. Bobby had been on Dance Party USA since 1985 and Jason came on as a regular in 1986, which means we were exactly the age this movie was built to sell to, and it was on every marquee we went past. You could not miss it. That is what 1,554 theaters bought you in 1986.

So why did Howard the Duck fail?

Because the audience did not build. It evaporated.

Weekend two: down 46.4 percent, to number 8. Weekend three: down 62.2 percent, to number 17, with the theater count cut from 1,563 to 914. Weekend four: down 65.9 percent, 349 theaters left standing. It finished its domestic run at $16,295,774 against a budget Box Office Mojo lists at $37 million. Overseas it actually did better, $21,667,000, which is 57.1 percent of a worldwide total of about $37.9 million. America is the market that turned on it.

That drop is what bad word of mouth looked like before the internet existed. Nobody posted a review from the parking lot. It moved person to person, at work, at the pool, on the phone cord stretched into the hallway, over three weekends, and by Labor Day it was over. The marketing campaign took its share of the blame too.

The critics were merciless and they got there first. Gene Siskel gave it one star out of four in the Chicago Tribune, called it a “stupid film,” and wrote that the special effects “are less impressive than a sparkler on a birthday cake.” Rotten Tomatoes, gathering up 158 reviews in the years since, has it at 14 percent, the lowest-rated Lucasfilm production there is. Metacritic sits at 28 out of 100.

At the Razzies it drew seven nominations and won four: Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Visual Effects, and Worst New Star, which was handed to “the six guys and gals in the duck suit.” The Worst Picture trophy was a tie, and the movie it tied with was Under the Cherry Moon, which is to say that in 1986 the two worst pictures in America were a Marvel duck comedy and Prince’s directorial debut. Nobody was safe that year.

And then there is the number nobody quotes. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore graded it a B minus. That is not a good grade. It is also not the grade you give the worst movie ever made. The distance between a B minus and forty years of being the punchline is the whole story here.

Is Howard the Duck really the first Marvel movie?

Not the way everybody says it, no. That line needs a qualifier to survive contact with the record.

Marvel characters had been on screens for decades by 1986. There was a Captain America serial in 1944. There were TV movies and TV series through the 70s. What the record actually supports is narrower: Howard the Duck was the first theatrical Marvel release since that 1944 serial. In a piece updated in July 2026, /Film pushed back on the claim entirely, making the case for Red Sonja in 1985 and lining up Toei’s Marvel features and the old theatrical Spider-Man compilations behind it.

So “the first Marvel movie” is shorthand. It is the kind of shorthand that gets repeated until it becomes furniture, and the anniversary coverage is full of it.

The soundtrack is the part nobody argues about

Here is the thing we genuinely cannot get over. Thomas Dolby wrote the songs for this movie. Not a song. The songs. He also picked the members of Cherry Bomb, the band Beverly fronts, and he shows up in the film himself as a bartender.

Lea Thompson sang her own vocals. She learned the choreography alongside the band so the whole thing would line up on camera, and the closing number was shot in front of a live audience at The Warfield in San Francisco. The title track was written by Dolby with Allee Willis and George Clinton, a sentence we still have trouble getting through out loud. Allee Willis. George Clinton. On a duck movie. John Barry wrote the score, with a few cues swapped in from Sylvester Levay.

The Razzies nominated that title song for Worst Original Song. They were wrong. If you ever go digging through the strangest corners of the 80s movie soundtrack shelf, this record is sitting right there near the top of the pile, and it does not sound like a disaster at all. One more for the pile: Pat Smear, later of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, is in this movie as an extra.

What it cost the people who made it

Lea Thompson had just come off Back to the Future. She won Beverly out of an audition round that included Tori Amos, and she turned up dressed, in her own description, as “a cross between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.” Then the reviews hit, and she took Some Kind of Wonderful, a part she had already turned down once. Her reason, plainly: “I had to get on another movie, I wouldn’t have done the movie if Howard wasn’t such a bomb.”

Tim Robbins had never made a film before this one. He remembers it as “a huge deal at the time,” and he remembers the overtime, because the shoot ran long and he “ended up getting paid twice for that movie because of all the overtime.” Ed Gale, who spent the shoot inside the suit, got hired for Spaceballs on the strength of it, after Mel Brooks said, “Anybody who’s in Howard the Duck can be in my movie.” Gale says he still gets more fan mail for Howard than he does for playing Chucky.

Universal took it in the teeth too. The September 17, 1986 issue of Variety ran a piece headlined “Duck Cooks Price’s Goose” and pinned production head Frank Price’s departure on the movie. Price had not even approved it.

And Robin Williams was in line to voice Howard. He worked a week and walked. “I can’t do this. It is insane. I can’t get the rhythm of this. I am being confined. I am being handcuffed to match the flapping duck’s bill.” Chip Zien got the job instead, and Zien’s voice is the one you have been doing at parties for forty years.

The Pixar story you have heard is not true

It comes back around every anniversary: Howard the Duck bombed so badly that George Lucas had to sell off his computer division, and that division became Pixar.

Check the calendar. Pixar was spun out of Lucasfilm and incorporated on February 3, 1986, in Richmond, California, with Steve Jobs putting up the money. Howard the Duck opened on August 1, 1986. The company had already existed for almost six months when the first ticket was sold.

Where Howard came from, and where he went

Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik created Howard for Marvel in 1973, in a comic called Adventure into Fear, issue 19, where he turned up as a side character in the Man-Thing feature. He got his own title in 1976, and that same year Gerber ran him for president under the banner of the All-Night Party, campaign slogan “Get Down, America!” The joke of the comic, according to Gerber, was that there was no joke: life’s most serious moments and its most incredibly dumb moments are often separated by nothing but a point of view.

That is not a movie Universal was ever going to release in the summer of 1986. Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who wrote it and who had written American Graffiti with Lucas, wanted it animated. A contract obligated Lucas to deliver a live-action picture, Universal wanted something for the summer slot, animation was judged too slow and too expensive, and so Lucasfilm started building duck suits and ILM took the effects. They also ran the design past Disney’s lawyers to make sure Howard did not look too much like Donald.

Gerber’s own verdict, offered in 1997: “What can I say? It sucks. In retrospect, though, after eleven years that have brought us so many worse films, it’s not quite as sucky as the reviews might have led you to believe.” He liked Jeffrey Jones, he liked Robbins, he liked Thompson.

Howard came back anyway. Somewhere in those forty years the film picked up a cult following, which is a very 80s way to end up. He has been turning up in Marvel movies since 2014 with Seth Green’s voice on him. Lea Thompson pitched Marvel Studios a new Howard picture she would direct herself, and they passed. And this year the film got a 40th anniversary 4K release, which is a genuinely funny place to land for the most-punished movie Lucasfilm ever put its name on.

Forty years later

Here is where we land, forty years on. Howard the Duck is not the worst movie ever made and it never was. It is a strange, expensive, badly aimed comedy with a great soundtrack, a real actress giving a real performance to a puppet, and a stretch in the middle where it almost works. What it actually was, on the first weekend of August 1986, was the third biggest movie in America, playing down the hall from Aliens and Jason Voorhees while Top Gun refused to go home. It was part of that summer. It just did not survive it.

So watch it. All the way through, sound up for the Cherry Bomb numbers. You have been told what to think about this movie for forty years, mostly by people who were not standing in that theater in 1986. Give it an hour and you will understand exactly why America turned up. Stay to the end and you will understand why they left.

Both of those things are true, and only one of them made it into the legend.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

When did Howard the Duck come out?
Howard the Duck was released in United States theaters on August 1, 1986, which makes August 1, 2026 its 40th anniversary. It reached some other countries later, including Germany on December 18, 1986, and it played the United Kingdom under the title Howard… A New Breed of Hero.

Why did Howard the Duck fail?
Its opening audience did not come back. It opened at number 3 in America with $5,070,136, then fell 46.4 percent in its second weekend, 62.2 percent in its third and 65.9 percent in its fourth. Reviews were savage, the marketing campaign took part of the blame, and it closed its domestic run at $16,295,774 against a budget Box Office Mojo lists at $37 million.

Is Howard the Duck the first Marvel movie?
Only with a qualifier. Marvel characters had appeared in a 1944 Captain America serial and in TV movies and series before 1986. Howard the Duck was the first theatrical Marvel release since that 1944 serial, and even that is disputed: /Film argues the honest answer is Red Sonja in 1985.

How much money did Howard the Duck make?
It grossed $16,295,774 in the United States and $21,667,000 internationally, for about $37.9 million worldwide. International was the larger share at 57.1 percent, so the film actually did better outside America than inside it.

Did Lea Thompson really sing in Howard the Duck?
Yes. Thompson performed her own vocals as Beverly Switzler and learned the band choreography so it would match on camera. Thomas Dolby wrote the songs and chose the members of Cherry Bomb, and the closing performance was filmed in front of a live audience at The Warfield in San Francisco.

Did Howard the Duck’s failure create Pixar?
No. Pixar was spun out of Lucasfilm and incorporated on February 3, 1986, with funding from Steve Jobs. Howard the Duck did not open until August 1, 1986, almost six months later.

Sources

• Box Office Mojo, “Domestic 1986 Weekend 31, August 1-3, 1986” (weekend chart)
• Box Office Mojo, “Howard the Duck” (weekend-by-weekend domestic performance)
• Box Office Mojo, “Howard the Duck” (budget, release date, domestic and international split)
• Wikipedia, “Howard the Duck (film)” (production, cast, soundtrack, reception, accolades, legacy)
• Wikipedia, “Howard the Duck” (the character, Gerber and Mayerik, the 1976 campaign)
• Wikidata Q1146570, “Howard the Duck” (publication dates by country)
• Lucasfilm, official production page for “Howard the Duck”
• /Film, “Howard The Duck Isn’t The First Marvel Comics Movie, The Real One Came Out One Year Earlier” (updated July 20, 2026)
• Wikipedia, “Pixar” (February 3, 1986 incorporation and the Steve Jobs investment)
• Wikipedia, “Under the Cherry Moon” (the tied Worst Picture Razzie)
• MovieWeb, “40 Years Later, Marvel’s First-Ever Comic Book Movie Sets New Release Date” (the 40th anniversary 4K release)

Photos: Lea Thompson at Atlanta Comic Con, 2018 by Thomson200, CC0. Lea Thompson, 2008 by Gregg Bond, CC BY 2.0. Thomas Dolby, 2006 by Arthur Mouratidis, CC BY 2.0. All via Wikimedia Commons.

Two names, one stage, and not a single note of music. We are still processing this one.

David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen are appearing together this Thursday, July 30, at TEDxFargo, at the Brewhalla entertainment space in Fargo, North Dakota. It is the first time the two of them have been in front of an audience together since Van Halen’s last concert on October 4, 2015. The Van Halen News Desk had it first, off an Instagram post from TEDxFargo and Robert Vargas, and Ultimate Classic Rock picked it up the next day. The internet did exactly what you would expect.

So let us take the air out of the balloon right now, gently. This is not a reunion. Nobody is playing. It is a conversation, and once you know what happened between these two men after Eddie died, the fact that it is only a conversation stops being a disappointment and starts being the entire point.

What is actually happening in Fargo

TEDxFargo is an independently run TED-style event, this year themed CHARGE. It runs two days with more than 40 speakers. Roth and Alex will sit down with the Los Angeles painter Robert Vargas, whose work includes a mural of Eddie Van Halen at the Guitar Center in Hollywood, and the whole thing is being sold with one line: “Three icons. One stage. One conversation you won’t want to miss.”

Alex was announced weeks ago. Roth got added late, which is the part that made everyone sit up. A musical performance is not expected. No tour, no album, and no reformed Van Halen has been announced by anybody.

The timing is its own story. On Thursday, July 23, Roth pulled almost all of his remaining 2026 dates, wiping stops in Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky and Illinois off the schedule and leaving exactly one, August 7 in Sturgis. Neither he nor his team gave a reason. One week after clearing his own calendar, he is turning up in North Dakota to talk. And if you cannot get to Fargo, TEDxFargo posts its talks to YouTube, so this one should surface in a few weeks.

How we got here: the tour that fell apart

Here is the part most of the coverage is skipping, and it is the part that actually explains Thursday.

They already tried to do this the loud way. Alex laid the whole thing out to Rolling Stone in October 2024, around his memoir Brothers. After Eddie died on October 6, 2020, Alex’s first phone call was to Dave. The two of them got into a room and started early rehearsals for a tour, with a couple of guys from Roth’s solo band filling chairs, and a plan to bring in Joe Satriani on guitar and maybe even Michael Anthony on bass. Alex had been calling Brian May to ask how Queen kept going after Freddie Mercury.

Then Alex asked for the one thing he needed the show to do.

“The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now,” he told Rolling Stone, “was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt, not a bowing, but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig. If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage.'” By Alex’s account, that ended it on the spot. “The vitriol that came out was unbelievable,” he said. Later in the same interview, still turning it over: “It’s just, my God. It’s like I didn’t know him anymore.”

That is Alex’s telling of it. Rolling Stone took it to Roth and noted plainly that Roth declined to comment.

The tour was finished anyway. In 2022 Alex went to a shooting range and his spine gave out. “The rifle kicked me on my ass,” he said, “and broke my back, instantly. And then I spent a year on the floor.” By the time he sat down with Rolling Stone in 2024 he had not been able to play drums for a couple of years, though he had started hitting practice pads again.

And here is the quote that makes Fargo make sense. Asked about the tour that never happened, Alex said he had few regrets: “It’s too bad on one hand, but it’s fine on the other. Because now, in retrospect, playing the old songs is not really paying tribute to anybody. That’s just like a jukebox, in my opinion.”

Read that again, then look at a panel discussion in North Dakota. A man who does not believe in the jukebox version, sitting next to the singer he fell out with over how to honor his brother, talking instead of playing. That is not a consolation prize. That is the only shape this was ever going to take.

What Van Halen meant to us in the 80s

Everything, and then it got complicated, which is very 80s of them.

1984 landed on January 9, 1984 and turned that band into something your parents had heard of. “Jump” went to No. 1 on the Hot 100, a guitar hero’s keyboard riff of all things, and the album stalled at No. 2 on the album chart for one reason only: Thriller was in the way. That is the kind of second place nobody should apologize for.

And then they blew up. Roth put out the Crazy from the Heat EP in January 1985, a pile of off-beat pop standards delivered with maximum grin, and by later that year he was out of the band. Sammy Hagar took the microphone. In March 1986 the Hagar lineup released 5150, and it did the thing the Roth lineup never managed: it went to No. 1 on the album chart. Three and a half months later Roth answered with Eat ‘Em and Smile, which went to No. 4.

Which means that in the summer of 1986, while we were on the Dance Party USA floor, you could not get through a week without both of those records coming at you, and everybody our age had to pick a side. Dave or Sammy. It was a real argument. People had positions. Some of you reading this still have a position, and honestly, so do we.

That is the thing about this band. They were never just a band, they were a running argument that happened to make incredible records, on MTV every twenty minutes, for the entire back half of the decade. Plenty of the bands from that era broke up and got back together three times over. Van Halen turned falling out and coming back into an actual operating system.

Dave said so himself, out loud, from the stage. On the Saturday night of that final Hollywood Bowl run in 2015, in the middle of “Dance the Night Away,” he stopped to mock Jon Bon Jovi’s onstage pose, then used it to pivot: “The difference is Edward and I agree to apologize every couple of summers and come out and share the good news with you.”

Every couple of summers. He was joking and he was not joking. Then he walked over to Eddie, and whatever the two of them said to each other, they said it off mic. That was the arrangement, right up until there was nobody left to apologize to.

Go listen to it today

The last time Alex and Dave were on a stage together, on October 4, 2015 at the Hollywood Bowl, the last song they ever played was “Jump.” Nobody in that building knew it was the end. Eddie stepped back from public life afterward and died five years later.

So Thursday is not a reunion, and we would ask you not to want it to be. Two guys who have been circling each other since before we were old enough to have opinions are going to sit in a room in Fargo and talk about the man they both lost. The apology cycle is running one more time, on schedule, without the guitar player.

Put on 1984 today, front to back, loud enough to annoy somebody. That is what it was built for.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

Are David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen reuniting?
Not as a band. They are appearing together at TEDxFargo on July 30, 2026 for a conversation alongside artist Robert Vargas. A musical performance is not expected, and no tour, album or Van Halen reunion has been announced.

When was the last time David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen appeared together?
October 4, 2015, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. It was the final night of Van Halen’s 41-show North American tour and the last concert the band ever played. Eddie Van Halen died on October 6, 2020.

Why did the Van Halen tribute tour never happen?
Alex Van Halen told Rolling Stone in 2024 that he and Roth began early rehearsals for a post-Eddie tour, with Joe Satriani penciled in on guitar, but that it collapsed when Alex said the show needed to openly acknowledge Eddie. Roth declined to comment to Rolling Stone. Alex also broke his back in 2022 and had not been able to play drums for a couple of years as of that interview.

Can you watch the David Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen conversation?
TEDxFargo posts its talks to YouTube after the event, so the conversation is expected online within a few weeks of July 30, 2026.

Sources

• Ultimate Classic Rock, “David Lee Roth to Join Alex Van Halen for First Time Since 2015” (July 28, 2026)
• Van Halen News Desk, “David Lee Roth Added to Alex Van Halen’s TEDxFargo Appearance This Thursday” (July 27, 2026)
• Rolling Stone, “My Brother, Eddie Van Halen: Alex Van Halen Tells All” by Brian Hiatt (October 15, 2024)
• Blabbermouth, “David Lee Roth Cancels Remaining Summer 2026 Tour Dates” (July 24, 2026)
• Ultimate Classic Rock, “The Night Eddie Van Halen Played His Last Van Halen Concert” (October 6, 2020)
• Ultimate Classic Rock, “David Lee Roth Thanks Eddie Van Halen, Mocks Other Rockers Onstage” (October 5, 2015)
• Wikipedia, “Van Halen 2015 North American Tour”
• Wikipedia, “5150” (album chart history)
• Wikipedia, “David Lee Roth” (solo releases and departure)
• Wikipedia, “Jump” (Billboard Hot 100 peak)

Photos: Van Halen promotional image, 1984, Warner Records, public domain. David Lee Roth by Abby Gillardi, CC BY 2.0. Alex Van Halen by Craig ONeal, CC BY 2.0. All via Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty years ago this summer, a documentary walked into theaters and accused an entire industry of murder.

Who Killed the Electric Car? opened on June 28, 2006, from Sony Pictures Classics, directed by Chris Paine and narrated by Martin Sheen. It asked why General Motors built a fast, clean, genuinely great electric car called the EV1, leased it to drivers who loved it, then took every one back and crushed most of them in the Arizona desert. The Hollywood Reporter marked the anniversary this week.

Here is the part almost nobody says out loud, and it is the reason this story is ours. That car was not a 90s idea. It started in 1987, with a solar racer crossing the Australian outback, and it got the green light from a GM chief executive in September 1988. The electric car this movie mourns was born in our decade.

What is Who Killed the Electric Car about?

It is a murder mystery where the victim is a car. Paine lines up suspects the way Agatha Christie lines up passengers, and the press kit says the quiet part right in the synopsis: “multiple suspects, each taking their turn with the knife.” Consumers, batteries, oil companies, carmakers, the California Air Resources Board, the federal government. Each one gets examined and each one gets a verdict. You can get the whole tone in about two and a half minutes: the original trailer is still up on the YouTube channel of Papercut Films, Chris Paine’s own production company.

Paine was not a neutral observer. He had one. His director’s statement opens with a line we love: “Here’s what happened: I fell in love with my car.” He leased an EV1 in 1997, meant it to be his second car, and within days it was his only car. “$3 to fill up on electricity and you charged it overnight.” When GM started taking the cars back, he considered keeping his by force. “I thought about stealing mine, but the prospect of a felony and legal fees gave me pause.” So he made this instead.

Sony Pictures Classics picked it up in November 2005, right before Sundance, and brought in Alex Gibney as a consulting producer off the back of his Enron film. It premiered at Sundance on January 23, 2006 and opened in theaters that June. Critics were with it: 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes across 105 reviews, a 70 on Metacritic. The Hollywood Reporter’s own review called it “highly charged [and] undeniably thought-provoking.” It made less than $2 million, which tells you it was never a hit. It just refused to go away.

What was the GM EV1?

GM’s production electric car, made available for consumer lease in December 1996 at $400 to $500 a month, starting with drivers in Southern California and Arizona.

Two details explain the whole fight. First, you could never buy one. All 660 first-generation cars went out “under a leasing agreement that explicitly prohibited purchase,” which meant GM never stopped owning them. A second generation added 457 more, some with nickel-metal hydride batteries good for 75 to 150 miles a charge.

Second, it was almost absurdly easy to live with. The press kit describes the routine service visit: top up the windshield washer fluid, rotate the tires. That is the entire list. No oil, no exhaust, no gas station, and brakes that barely wore out.

In April 2003 GM said it could no longer supply parts, announced it would not renew a single lease, and sent tow trucks after drivers who would not hand the cars over. The program was finished by the end of that year. By August 2004 every leased EV1 had been collected. About forty went to museums and universities. Most of the rest were sent to be crushed.

Where did the electric car actually come from? 1987

This is the part the anniversary coverage keeps skipping.

In November 1987, a car called the Sunraycer ran from Darwin to Adelaide in the World Solar Challenge. It was built by General Motors, AeroVironment and Hughes Aircraft, designed by a team under Paul MacCready. It qualified fastest of all twenty-four entries at 109 km/h, led the entire race, and covered 1,867 miles at an average of 41.6 mph. It finished in 5.2 days and it won.

Then it kept going. In the words of the record on the Sunraycer, it “led directly to the creation of the GM Impact.” And the film’s own timeline puts a date on the moment: September 1988, GM chief executive Roger Smith agrees to fund a prototype for a practical consumer electric car, engineered by the same AeroVironment crew that had just won in Australia.

You can follow it through the people. Alec Brooks led the Sunraycer’s development in 1987 and then led the Impact, which the press kit calls “the forerunner of the EV1.” Alan Cocconi built the Sunraycer’s drive system, then designed and built the controller for the Impact. Same engineers, same shop, one straight line from a solar racer in the outback to a car GM would crush.

Roger Smith showed the Impact at the Los Angeles Auto Show in January 1990 and announced on April 18, 1990 that it would go into production, aiming at 25,000 a year. That September, California adopted the mandate that made it real: 2 percent zero-emission vehicles by 1998, 10 percent by 2003.

So the sequence runs 1987, 1988, 1990, 1996. The car everyone argues about started as a decision made while the decade was still going.

What does this have to do with the 80s?

More than the date on the calendar.

Think about what the decade told us a car was supposed to become. We had a talking, thinking car on television every week, and we took it completely seriously, because that was exactly how the future was supposed to arrive: fast, sleek, and smarter than the driver. The joke of the whole EV1 story is that while KITT was the fantasy, a real car with no engine noise and no tailpipe was actually being built, and that is the one that got destroyed.

September 1988 also lands right in the middle of our run. That was the stretch when we were taping Dance Party USA every week, arguing about records. Nobody in that studio had the faintest idea that a car company had just signed off on something people would still be angry about decades later. That is usually how it works. The decade you are living in does not announce which parts of it are going to matter.

And there is one more coincidence we cannot leave alone. Who Killed the Electric Car? opened on June 28, 2006. Exactly twenty years earlier, on June 28, 1986, Wham! played “The Final” at Wembley in front of 72,000 people and walked away at the top. Same date, two decades apart, two goodbyes. One of them we all watched. The other one happened in a desert with nobody looking.

Which 80s stars are in Who Killed the Electric Car?

A lot of them, and they are not there as talking heads. They are there because they owned the cars.

Alexandra Paul is the one who got arrested. She was Leigh in Christine in 1983, Becky in American Flyers in 1985, and Connie Swail in Dragnet in 1987, years before Baywatch made her famous to everyone else. She bought her first electric car in 1990, a converted VW Rabbit that managed 25 miles a charge, and by the EV1 she was getting 120. On March 15, 2005, she and fellow actress Colette Divine blockaded a transport truck in Burbank carrying the last EV1s to the crusher. The press kit describes the scene plainly: “Twenty Burbank policemen took two hours to end the peaceful standoff, and Alexandra and Colette were arrested.” A judge fined them, ordered community service, and then suggested they serve it at environmental and electric car nonprofits. That same year the ACLU of Southern California named her its Activist of the Year.

Peter Horton is in it too, best known as Gary Shepherd on thirtysomething, with St. Elsewhere, The White Shadow, Dallas and Eight Is Enough behind him. Mel Gibson appears as an EV driver, which is a genuinely strange sentence to type about the man from Mad Max. Phyllis Diller turns up for the best reason in the movie: to talk about the electric cars that were already running on American roads before 1920. Ralph Nader and Ed Begley Jr. appear as well, and Martin Sheen narrates the whole thing.

The heart of it, though, is Chelsea Sexton, who joined the auto industry at seventeen and worked on GM’s EV1 program, married an EV1 technician, and left the company when GM wound the program down. She is the one who makes you understand that real people built this car and real people were told to stop.

What happened after the movie?

The film ends with a Tesla Roadster prototype on screen, which in 2006 was a hopeful little flourish and now reads like a prophecy.

Paine made a sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, in 2011. And twenty years on he has revised his own thesis. “The film asks the right question, but maybe not the complete one,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. The car was not murdered so much as postponed until somebody worked out how to make money on it.

The best ending, though, belongs to a single car. In October 2025 an EV1 known by VIN #212 was sold at auction for about $118,000 to Billy Caruso and a group of enthusiasts. It became the first EV1 ever legally sold to a member of the public, which GM’s lease terms were specifically written to prevent. It survived because it had been marked abandoned at Clark Atlanta University, towed away, and eventually sold off by court order from a tow pound.

Here is the turn. GM helped. Company president Mark Reuss told the restoration team: “Whatever you need, we’ll help. We will. And if we can’t, we’ll tell you we can’t.” GM supplied parts from a donor EV1 and hosted the team at its Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. The team is aiming to have it running in November 2026, on the car’s thirtieth anniversary.

The company that crushed them is helping fix one. Twenty years of a documentary asking who did it, and the defendant showed up with a wrench.

Go watch it

Not because it is a lecture. Because it is a good, angry, ninety-minute mystery about a thing our decade started and the next one buried, and because it will change what you see the next time a silent car pulls up next to you at a light. Start with the trailer the filmmakers cut back in 2005 and see if it does not get you.

That car has an ancestor. It crossed Australia on sunlight in 1987, and a GM chief executive said yes to it in September 1988, while we were all busy arguing about which single was better.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

What is the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car about?
It is a 2006 documentary directed by Chris Paine and narrated by Martin Sheen that investigates why General Motors built the EV1 electric car, leased it to drivers in Southern California and Arizona starting in December 1996, then reclaimed every car and had most of them crushed. The film examines consumers, batteries, oil companies, carmakers, the California Air Resources Board and the federal government as suspects, and delivers a verdict on each.

When did Who Killed the Electric Car come out?
It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2006 and Sony Pictures Classics released it in theaters on June 28, 2006, which makes 2026 its twentieth anniversary. It holds an 89 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes from 105 reviews and made less than $2 million at the box office.

Was the electric car really an 80s invention?
The GM EV1 traces directly to the 1980s. GM, AeroVironment and Hughes Aircraft built the solar-powered Sunraycer, which won the World Solar Challenge across Australia in November 1987. That project led directly to the GM Impact, and the film’s own timeline records GM chief executive Roger Smith agreeing to fund a consumer electric car prototype in September 1988, engineered by the same AeroVironment team. The Impact was shown in January 1990 and became the EV1 in 1996.

Why did GM crush the EV1?
GM announced in April 2003 that it could no longer supply parts for the EV1 and would not renew any leases. Because all 660 first-generation cars were leased under terms that explicitly prohibited purchase, drivers had no right to keep them. By the end of August 2004 every leased EV1 had been retrieved. About forty were donated to museums and universities and most of the remainder were sent to be crushed. Activists offered GM $1.9 million for 78 impounded cars in Burbank and got no answer.

Where can I watch Who Killed the Electric Car?
It is not on a free streaming service. It is available to rent or buy digitally, listed at $12.99 on Apple TV and Amazon Video and $13.99 on Fandango at Home.

Sources

• The Hollywood Reporter: Who Killed the Electric Car? turns 20 (July 26, 2026)
• Sony Pictures Classics: official Who Killed the Electric Car? press kit, with the film’s full timeline and contributor biographies (2006)
• Wikipedia: Who Killed the Electric Car?, release dates and critical reception
• Wikipedia: General Motors EV1, production numbers, lease terms and the end of the program
• Wikipedia: Sunraycer, the 1987 World Solar Challenge winner that led to the GM Impact
• Wikipedia: Alexandra Paul, 1980s filmography and the 2005 EV1 protest arrest
• Alexandra Paul’s official site: her EV1 activism and ACLU Activist of the Year award
• The Autopian: how the only GM EV1 ever sold escaped the crusher (October 30, 2025)
• AOL: GM is helping restore one of the only EV1s it does not own (March 19, 2026)
• Plex: current streaming and rental availability for Who Killed the Electric Car?

Photos: DestinationFearFan (CC BY-SA 4.0), Dshakes (CC BY-SA 3.0), and RightBrainPhotography, Rick Rowen (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

At 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, a cable channel nobody had heard of played a song called “Video Killed the Radio Star” and accidentally told the truth.

Here is the short version, because the MTV 45th anniversary arrives with an asterisk this year. MTV launched on August 1, 1981, so it turns 45 on August 1, 2026. The channel is still on the air. But on December 31, 2025, it shut down the last of its round-the-clock music channels, and the final video MTV Music played was “Video Killed the Radio Star.” The same song it opened with in 1981. First and last.

Forty-five years old this August, and the music part of it went out on the exact note it came in on. Nobody planned that as poetry. It just happened that way.

Wait, did MTV shut down or not?

This is the question everybody is actually asking, so let’s answer it flat.

MTV itself did not shut down. The main channel is still running. What went dark were the music-only channels, the ones that did nothing but play videos all day.

On December 31, 2025, Rolling Stone reported that MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live all went off the air in the UK, along with music channels in Australia, Poland, France and Brazil. The shutdown had been announced back in October, and it was cost cutting, part of the belt tightening after the Paramount Skydance merger. Vice put it plainly: “As of December 31, 2025, MTV has closed the book on a defining era of music television.” In the United States it has been less of a switch and more of a slow fade, with the channels rolling off as broadcast contracts expire.

To be clear about what survived, Vice notes that “MTV as a brand isn’t going anywhere, and its main channels will still broadcast reality and scripted television.” The network is fine. The videos are what left.

And then there is the detail that stopped us cold. Rolling Stone noted that MTV Music signed off with the Buggles, “the first visual to air when MTV launched in the United States in 1981.”

Forty-four years apart, the same song at both ends. If a writer handed you that ending you would tell them it was too neat.

August 1, 1981, 12:01 a.m.

If you weren’t there for early MTV, here’s what you have to understand: it wasn’t a channel, it was a place. You didn’t check it, you lived in it. School ended, the TV went on, and there it stayed, music videos around the clock, introduced by actual humans called VJs who felt like the five coolest babysitters in America. You watched for three hours because the video you wanted was always, mathematically, the next one. It never was. You stayed anyway.

The launch itself was pure nerve. Smithsonian magazine notes that before the Buggles video rolled, they ran footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. And the first words ever spoken on the channel: “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.” That was John Lack, one of the people who built the thing, and HISTORY has the receipt on it.

An astronaut planting a flag on the moon, and the flag says MTV. Subtle it was not. Correct it absolutely was.

Here is the part nobody remembers, and it is our favorite fact in this whole piece. Almost nobody could watch it. HISTORY notes the channel at launch “was available only to households in parts of New Jersey.” Smithsonian goes one better: MTV’s own staff “had to cross the Hudson to a New Jersey bar that got the channel” just to see what they had made.

The thing that we would argue changed music more than anything else in our lifetimes launched to a bar in Jersey.

The five people who ran our lives

VJs. Video jockeys. The word sounds ridiculous now and it sounded ridiculous then, and we did not care even a little.

The original five, per AARP, were Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, J.J. Jackson and Martha Quinn. That is the whole roster. Five people, and for a stretch there they were the most famous five people in any American teenager’s life, more familiar than most of our actual relatives.

They were not reading a script at us. That was the trick. They talked like the older sibling who had already figured out which records mattered, and you believed them, and you went and bought what they said.

J.J. Jackson deserves a paragraph on his own. Before MTV he was a radio guy who, AARP notes, had helped break Led Zeppelin in America. He brought the channel actual credibility at a moment when it had none to spare. He died in 2004 at 62. Mark Goodman got the David Bowie interview in 1983 that people still pull up and argue about. And when AARP caught up with the five of them for MTV’s 40th, Martha Quinn was still on the radio hosting an all-80s format, which feels less like nostalgia and more like a person who never saw a reason to stop.

“I want my MTV!”

By the end of the first year MTV was in trouble. Cable operators did not want it. No carriage, no channel, no matter how good the idea was.

So they called an adman. The Creative Hall of Fame records that in 1982 George Lois’s agency took the MTV account from Warner Amex. In his own account of it, Lois says he was brought in after “a zero year” and asked for “an emergency ‘trade’ campaign.”

He did not make a trade campaign. He went around the cable operators entirely. His plan, in his words, was “to go right to the rock-loving audience and shove MTV down the rock-hating cable operators’ throats.”

The spot ended with a voice saying: “If you don’t get MTV where you live, call your cable operator and say…” and then it cut to Mick Jagger hollering the four words into a telephone.

The first run of spots starred Jagger, Pete Townshend and Pat Benatar. Once it was obviously working, everybody turned up: Bowie, Madonna, Stevie Nicks, Lionel Richie, Sting, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson. Lois says that within months MTV was in 80 percent of all households. That is his own number about his own campaign, so hold the decimal point loosely, but the direction of it is not in dispute. It worked, and it worked fast.

Four words. A generation of kids yelling at their parents to call the cable company. We were some of those kids. We named an entire podcast episode after it, and fair warning, a few tears got shed at the end of that one.

What it did to the music

And the power of it! MTV took Michael Jackson from superstar to supernova. It made Duran Duran movie stars who happened to sing. It turned one perfect video into a career, and launched a hundred one-hit wonders who owed their entire hit to a channel that needed something to play at 2 a.m. It decided what we wore. We let it. We’d let it again.

It rewrote who got to be a star. Billy Idol had the sneer and the camera loved it. Madonna understood before almost anyone that the video was not an advertisement for the song, the video was the song. Cyndi Lauper made three minutes feel like a whole personality. Prince did not need any help, and got it anyway. Look at the artists who owned that decade and nearly every one of them is somebody the camera happened to like.

Then it drifted. Smithsonian has the numbers: from 1995 to 2000, MTV “slashed its music programming by nearly 40 percent,” and once YouTube arrived in 2005 offering music videos on demand, the argument for a channel that played them on a schedule got very hard to make.

That is the unglamorous answer to “what happened to MTV.” It did not betray anybody. It got outrun by a thing that did its job better, and it went and found something else to do.

What we were doing while MTV was doing that

We were on the other side of the same screen.

While MTV was turning music into television, we were on Dance Party USA, the teen dance show that ran on the USA Network from 1986 to 1992, filmed in Philadelphia. We were doing the local version of exactly what MTV had just made possible. Bobby came up through that studio starting in 1985 and ended up hosting it. Jason was a regular from 1986. Same years, same cable box, considerably smaller budget.

Here is a coincidence we enjoy more than we probably should. MTV’s first signal reached almost nobody outside parts of New Jersey. Our show’s production offices sat across the river in Camden, New Jersey. Two pieces of the same cable experiment, both of them working out of the same unglamorous corner of the map.

We are not going to tell you we were on MTV, because we weren’t. But we know what it felt like to be on the inside of that machine, and we know what it did to a room when a song broke. Dance Party USA turned 40 not long ago, which means we have now watched both halves of our teenage years turn into anniversaries. It is a strange thing to be a landmark.

The honest bottom line

We romanticize early MTV, and we know it. Plenty of those hours were filler, the playlist was narrow, and it took real pressure before the channel played the artists it should have been playing from day one. The magic was real anyway. Both things are true, which is about as 80s as it gets.

The moon man planting that flag was the whole decade announcing itself, one day into August 1981: this is going to look different now.

It did. It still does. Happy 45th, MTV. We still want you, the old you, but that’s our whole brand.

Go play a video today. A real one, the one you had to wait three hours for. You do not have to wait anymore, and that is either progress or the whole problem, and we genuinely cannot decide which.

– Bobby and Jason

FAQ

When did MTV launch?
MTV launched at 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981. It turns 45 on August 1, 2026.

Did MTV shut down?
No. The main MTV channel is still on the air. What closed were the music-only channels: MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live went dark in the UK on December 31, 2025, along with music channels in Australia, Poland, France and Brazil. In the United States they have been rolling off gradually as broadcast contracts expire.

What was the first video ever played on MTV?
“Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, the most on-the-nose opening statement in television history.

What was the last video played on MTV Music?
“Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, the same video that opened MTV in 1981, played as the channel signed off on December 31, 2025.

What were the first words spoken on MTV?
“Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,” the opening words of MTV’s first broadcast, spoken by John Lack, one of the channel’s creators.

Who were the original MTV VJs?
Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, J.J. Jackson and Martha Quinn. Video jockeys, the on-air hosts who introduced videos and became stars themselves. For a while they were the most famous five people in any American teenager’s life.

What was the “I Want My MTV” campaign?
An advertising campaign created by George Lois in 1982, after cable operators refused to carry the channel. It told viewers to call their cable company and demand MTV, with Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend and Pat Benatar delivering the line. It rescued the network.

Why did MTV stop playing music videos?
Gradually, then all at once. From 1995 to 2000 MTV cut its music programming by nearly 40 percent in favor of reality and animated shows, and YouTube’s arrival in 2005 made an on-demand video library available to everyone, which removed the reason to wait for a channel to play one.

Sources

• HISTORY, “MTV launches,” This Day in History (August 1)
• Smithsonian Magazine, Michelle Delgado, “At 40, MTV Is Officially Over the Hill” (August 31, 2021)
• Rolling Stone, Andy Greene, “Flashback: 19 Random Minutes of MTV From the Network’s First Month in 1981” (July 27, 2021)
• Rolling Stone, Jon Blistein, “MTV’s Music-Only Channels Are Officially Going Dark” (December 31, 2025)
• Vice, Lauren Boisvert, “The Day the Music Video Died” (January 2, 2026)
• AARP, “The Original MTV VJs: Where Are They Now?” (June 28, 2021)
• George Lois, “MTV,” georgelois.com (the campaign in his own words)
• Creative Hall of Fame (The One Club for Creativity), George Lois

Every year has a few good memories. 1986 has a résumé.

This year, everything 1986 gave the world turns forty, and since we spent that entire year on and around a certain dance floor in Philadelphia, we’re declaring ourselves the official tour guides. This page is the anniversary tour: every 1986-turns-40 story we’re telling this year, all in one place. We’ll keep adding to it as the anniversaries roll in, so bookmark it, or don’t, and just keep ending up here. That works too.

The year in question, from the inside:

April 12: Dance Party USA premieres on the USA Network. A half-hour show out of Philadelphia that would run six years and change our lives completely. We are not objective about this one and never will be.

June 11: Ferris Bueller takes the greatest day off in history. John Hughes hands the decade its motto: life moves pretty fast.

June 28: Wham! says goodbye to 72,000 people at Wembley. Meanwhile, two kids on basic cable refuse to accept it and keep the lip-syncs going all summer.

July 18: Aliens detonates in theaters. James Cameron proves sequels can outgrow originals, and “game over, man” enters the permanent record.

August 22: Stand By Me asks if anyone ever has friends like the ones they had at twelve, and every theater in America goes quiet.

September 13: Pee-wee’s Playhouse turns Saturday morning into an art form with a talking chair. Somehow an understatement.

December, two kids give “Last Christmas” everything they’ve got on national cable. More on that one when December gets here. The tape survived. Pray for us.

And that’s just the stuff with our fingerprints near it. 1986 also gave you Top Gun, Pretty in Pink, Karate Kid Part II, Labyrinth, Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way,” the Mets, and Halley’s Comet, which showed up once, looked around at what the year was doing, and won’t be back until 2061 because it knows it can’t compete.

Was 1986 the best year of the entire decade? We’re biased. We were sixteen-ish, the radio was perfect, and one of us was on television five days a week. But look at that list again and tell us we’re wrong.

Forty years. The music still plays. The tapes still exist. The party never actually stopped. You’re standing in it right now.

– Bobby and Jason

FAQ

What big movies came out in 1986?
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Aliens, Stand By Me, Top Gun, Pretty in Pink, Labyrinth, The Karate Kid Part II, and Big Trouble in Little China, among others. One year.

What happened in music in 1986?
Wham! played their farewell concert at Wembley, Run-DMC and Aerosmith merged rap and rock with “Walk This Way,” and MTV was at full power.

When did Dance Party USA start?
April 12, 1986, on the USA Network, which makes 2026 the show’s 40th anniversary year.

July 18, 1986. If you were a teenager anywhere near a movie theater that Friday, you already know exactly what this post is about.

Aliens turns 40 this month, and we’re still not entirely over it.

Here’s the thing you have to understand if you weren’t there: nobody expected it. The first Alien was a haunted house in space, slow, dark, one monster, pure dread. Perfect movie. Then James Cameron shows up seven years later and says “what if there were hundreds of them, and also Sigourney Weaver is now the greatest action hero of the decade?” And somehow, somehow, he was right on every count.

Ripley in the power loader. The Colonial Marines walking into that colony like the coolest people alive and coming out very much not. Bill Paxton inventing an entire personality type with “game over, man!” A little girl named Newt making 3,000 tough guys in theaters across America quietly tear up.

Summer 1986 was already stacked. We’ve said before that 1986 might be the single best year the 80s produced, but Aliens was the one that made you grab your friend’s arm in the theater. It took everything 80s sci-fi was doing and everything 80s action was doing and welded them together into something nobody’s really matched since. People have spent forty years trying. We’ve watched them try. Bless their hearts.

And it planted a flag for something else, too: the sequel that outgrows the original. Before 1986, “sequel” meant cash grab. After Aliens, it meant “maybe lightning strikes twice.” Every franchise you love owes this movie a royalty check.

Forty years on, put it on tonight and it still works, the sweat, the pulse rifles, the motion tracker beeping faster while nothing is visibly there. That sound alone is doing more with two notes than most horror movies manage in two hours.

They mostly come at night. Mostly. Still gives us the chills.

The honest bottom line

Forty years later: the first hour is slower than the legend says, the marine swagger is doing a lot of 1986 posturing, and a few miniatures show their seams on a modern TV. Then the motion tracker starts beeping and none of it matters, exactly like it didn’t in the theater. Very few movies from that summer earn their reputation this completely.

FAQ

When was Aliens released?
Aliens was released in theaters on July 18, 1986, its 40th anniversary is July 18, 2026.

Who directed Aliens?
James Cameron wrote and directed Aliens as the sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien.

Is Aliens better than Alien?
That’s the forty-year argument, and both sides are right: Alien is the better horror movie, Aliens is the better action movie. We refuse to choose and you can’t make us.

We were in the opening-summer audience for this one, at exactly the right age.

AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! You just screamed, didn’t you? That’s because somebody said the secret word.

And this year’s secret word is forty.

On September 13, 1986, Pee-wee’s Playhouse premiered on Saturday morning television, and an entire generation of kids, plus, let’s be honest, an entire generation of teenagers and adults who claimed they were “just watching it ironically”, never recovered. We’ve already gone deep on Pee-wee himself and what Paul Reubens built, but the Playhouse anniversary deserves its own party. Playhouses usually do.

Try to explain this show to someone who wasn’t there. Go ahead, we’ll wait. There’s a talking chair named Chairry. There’s a genie head in a jeweled box who grants wishes. There’s a pterodactyl, a talking globe, ants who do musical numbers, and the King of Cartoons, who arrives, with zero explanation, to show an actual vintage cartoon. A young Laurence Fishburne is there, as a cowboy. None of this is a fever dream. It was on network television, Saturday mornings, for four years, and it won a pile of Emmys because it was that good.

Here’s what we understood even then, sitting there in 1986: this wasn’t a kids’ show that adults tolerated. This was one of the most creative things on all of television, hiding in plain sight between the cartoons. The set design alone was somebody’s entire art career happening at 10 a.m. on a Saturday.

The Playhouse ran until November of 1990, and nothing has ever replaced it. Plenty of shows have been weird on purpose since then. But nobody has ever again been weird with that much love, every frame of that show was made by people having the time of their lives, and you could feel it right through the screen, right next to your cereal bowl.

Forty years later, we’d still take the Picture Phone over a smartphone. Connect the dots, la la la-la.

The honest bottom line

Some Saturday morning stuff from the 80s survives on pure nostalgia, and we cover enough of it to know the difference. This is not that. Put an episode on cold today and the design, the pace and the jokes still work with no childhood required. The only thing that dates it is everything around it.

FAQ

When did Pee-wee’s Playhouse premiere?
Pee-wee’s Playhouse premiered on Saturday morning, September 13, 1986, and ran until November 17, 1990.

What was the secret word on Pee-wee’s Playhouse?
It changed every episode, and whenever anybody said it, everybody screamed. Real ones screamed at home too.

Why was Pee-wee’s Playhouse important?
Beneath the chaos it was one of the most inventive shows of the decade, groundbreaking set design, animation, a diverse cast, and multiple Emmy awards.

Playhouse premiered the same year our own TV run was in full swing.

We hate writing these ones.

Sam Neill died on Monday, July 13, 2026, in Sydney, Australia. He was 78. His family announced it on his Instagram, in words that manage to be devastating and graceful at the same time: “It is with immense sadness that the whānau of Sam Neill share the news of his passing on Monday 13th July, in Sydney, Australia. The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free.” Whānau is the Māori word for family, and if you knew anything about the man, of course that is the word they used. CNN and NPR carried it within hours.

A few days later his longtime agent, Philip Grenz, put out one more statement to shut down the rumor mill, saying he wanted to end the “inaccuracies and outright falsehoods” floating around. The cause was pneumonia. That is the cruel part. He had just finished beating something much bigger.

How we got here: the cancer he beat

In 2022, Neill was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a serious blood cancer. He told the world about it in his 2023 memoir, “Did I Ever Tell You This?”, with the same shrug-and-a-grin he brought to everything: not a cancer book, he insisted, just a book that happened to have some cancer in it.

He fought it through chemotherapy and a newer treatment called CAR-T therapy, and it worked. In April of this year, he said publicly that he was cancer free. Three months later, pneumonia took him anyway, suddenly, in Sydney. His family made a point of saying he was still cancer free at the end. He beat the thing. It just was not the thing that mattered in the end, and there is something almost unbearably unfair about that.

What Sam Neill meant to the 80s

Start with the name, because the name is a very Sam Neill story. He was born Nigel John Dermot Neill in Omagh, Northern Ireland, on September 14, 1947, and raised in New Zealand. Somewhere along the way Nigel became Sam, and his old friend Taika Waititi still called him “sweet Nigel” this week, which tells you the people who loved him never fully let him get away with the switch.

By the time the 80s arrived he had already broken through at home with “Sleeping Dogs” and gotten the world’s attention opposite Judy Davis in “My Brilliant Career.” Then 1981 handed him the strangest double feature of the decade. In “Omen III: The Final Conflict” he took over the most famous evil child in movie history, playing a grown-up Damien Thorn with a purr that made the Antichrist weirdly good company. And in “Possession” he went to the absolute edge of what acting is allowed to be, in a movie so strange that 1981 mostly backed away from it and horror fans have spent the forty years since catching up.

Then came the tuxedo that almost was. In 1983 he played the title spy in “Reilly: Ace of Spies” on television, and he was so effortlessly suave that the James Bond producers came calling when Roger Moore hung it up. Neill screen-tested for “The Living Daylights.” Producer Michael G. Wilson later said, “All of us were impressed with Sam Neill and very much wanted to use him.” Neill’s own review of the experience was a little different. His agent, he said, “shoved me into a really embarrassing test,” and he called it “one of the most mortifying times of my life, because I really didn’t want to play James Bond.” Timothy Dalton got the tux. Neill got to keep being Sam Neill, and considering where that led, nobody should mourn the version of history where he is dodging lasers instead of dinosaurs.

The back half of the decade is where the world quietly figured out what he was. He stood across from Meryl Streep twice for director Fred Schepisi, in “Plenty” in 1985 and in “A Cry in the Dark” in 1988, and holding the screen next to Streep is the acting equivalent of keeping pace with an Olympic sprinter. Then in 1989 he carried “Dead Calm,” a three-person thriller on the open ocean opposite a very young Nicole Kidman, and showed everybody he could hold an entire movie’s worth of dread together with his bare hands.

Here is the honest version: Sam Neill never had a Marty McFly or an Axel Foley in the 80s. What he had was the longest slow burn of the decade. Every couple of years, another movie where you walked out saying “that guy was the best thing in it,” whether it was the horror shelf, the prestige stuff, or late-night cable. If you were an 80s kid, you knew his face long before you knew his name. Then the 90s arrived and paid off everything the 80s had set up: “The Hunt for Red October” in 1990, and in 1993 both “Jurassic Park” and “The Piano” in the same year. Dr. Alan Grant was not a star being born. It was a star finally getting the wide-open daylight he had earned the slow way.

The tributes are pouring in

Taika Waititi, who directed him in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” wrote: “You are so loved and will be sorely missed by us all,” signing off with “Love you and see you soon, sweet Nigel.”

Laura Dern, who spent thirty years as his screen partner in the “Jurassic Park” films, wrote: “Sam was my beloved lifetime friend. He showed me the depths of loyalty, protectiveness and love always with the driest of wit. A true and noble gentleman, who was wrapped up in my dream leading man.”

Jeff Goldblum kept it short: “The next great adventure begins. Love, always and forever.”

A knight who thought the title was too grand

One last story, because it is the whole man in miniature. New Zealand offered to make him a knight back in 2007, and he turned down the title, saying “Sir” was “just far too grand, by far.” He held out for fifteen years. In 2022 he finally gave in and let them pin the insignia on him at Government House, and even then he looked faintly amused by the whole thing.

That was Sam Neill. Four children, eight grandchildren, a vineyard in Central Otago called Two Paddocks that he was at least as proud of as any movie, and a farm full of animals he named after his famous friends. He spent his last years making videos from his paddocks, talking to his ducks, and generally acting like the least famous famous person alive. The whole world knew better.

So tonight, do it properly. Put on “Dead Calm” or, fine, “Jurassic Park,” we will allow it. Pour a glass of good pinot noir, because he would have insisted on the pinot. And when that face shows up on screen, the one you have known since before you knew his name, raise the glass.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

How did Sam Neill die?
Sam Neill died of pneumonia on July 13, 2026, in Sydney, Australia, at age 78. His agent, Philip Grenz, confirmed the cause of death after what he called inaccurate reports. His family said the loss was sudden and unexpected, and noted that he remained cancer free after beating stage 3 non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

What 80s movies was Sam Neill in?
His major 80s work includes “Omen III: The Final Conflict” (1981), where he played the adult Damien Thorn, the cult horror film “Possession” (1981), the acclaimed TV series “Reilly: Ace of Spies” (1983), “Plenty” (1985) and “A Cry in the Dark” (1988), both with Meryl Streep, and the thriller “Dead Calm” (1989) with Nicole Kidman.

Was Sam Neill almost James Bond?
Yes. He screen-tested for “The Living Daylights” after Roger Moore stepped away, and producer Michael G. Wilson said the team “very much wanted to use him.” The role went to Timothy Dalton. Neill later said he was relieved, calling the test mortifying because he never wanted to play Bond.

How old was Sam Neill when he died?
He was 78. He was born Nigel John Dermot Neill on September 14, 1947, in Omagh, Northern Ireland, and was raised in New Zealand.

Sources

• CNN: Sam Neill, star of “Jurassic Park,” has died, family says (July 13, 2026)
• NPR: Sam Neill, known for “Jurassic Park” and “The Piano,” dies at 78, his family says (July 13, 2026)
• Variety: Sam Neill, “Jurassic Park” star, dies at 78 (July 13, 2026)
• Fox News: New Zealand actor Sam Neill dies at age 78 after cancer recovery, family says (July 13, 2026)
• Deadline: Sam Neill’s cause of death revealed to end “outright falsehoods” (July 16, 2026)
• Cinemablend: Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Chris Pratt and more pen tributes to Sam Neill after his death (July 2026)
• JoBlo: Sam Neill almost played James Bond in The Living Daylights
• 1News: “Very grateful”: Veteran Kiwi actor Sam Neill knighted (October 11, 2022)

Photos: Sam Neill in the 1974 New Zealand film “Landfall – A Film About Ourselves,” Archives New Zealand, CC BY-SA 2.0. Sir Sam Neill at his 2022 investiture, Office of the Governor-General of New Zealand, CC0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.

Filmographies here get the full receipts treatment before publish.

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”

Forty years ago, August 22, 1986, a movie walked into theaters and asked that question, and every single person in the audience felt it land somewhere personal. Stand By Me turns 40 this month, and that line hasn’t aged a day. Neither have we, but that’s a different conversation.

Here’s what’s wild about this one: it’s a movie set in 1959, based on a Stephen King story, released in 1986, and somehow it belongs to us, the 80s kids, completely. Because Rob Reiner wasn’t really making a movie about 1959. He was making a movie about being twelve, whenever your twelve happened to be. Ours happened to be right around the corner from that theater.

Four kids walk down some train tracks to see a dead body. That’s the whole plot. And out of that Reiner got one of the great movies of the decade, Wil Wheaton carrying the weight, Corey Feldman going places child actors weren’t supposed to go, Jerry O’Connell getting laughs he still deserves credit for, and River Phoenix giving the performance that made everyone in America say “that kid is going to be a star.” He was. What happened later still hurts.

And can we talk about the title song? A Ben E. King record from 1961 came roaring back onto the radio in 1986 because of this movie, sitting right there in the countdown next to Wham! and Madonna like it had always been there. That’s the kind of thing a great soundtrack could do back then: bend time in both directions.

We were floor kids, not track-walking kids, our version of the journey had a camera pointed at it. But the feeling underneath is the same one this movie bottled: that stretch of being young when your friends are your whole world, and some part of you already knows it won’t stay that way.

Nobody’s made a better movie about it in forty years. We’re starting to think nobody will.

Watch it this month. Call the friend you watched it with the first time. That’s the whole assignment.

The honest bottom line

This one holds up almost too well. What changed is us. At sixteen we watched it as a movie about kids; now it plays as a movie about the narrator, the grown man doing the remembering, and that is a harder watch in the best way. If you loved it then, it will hit harder now, and it will not ask permission first.

FAQ

When was Stand By Me released?
Stand By Me was released in the United States on August 22, 1986. It turns 40 on August 22, 2026.

What is Stand By Me based on?
It’s based on “The Body,” a 1982 novella by Stephen King, proof that the scariest writer alive was also one of the warmest.

Who starred in Stand By Me?
Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell played the four boys, with Richard Dreyfuss narrating as the grown-up Gordie.

Bueller? Bueller? …Bueller?

Forty. The answer is forty. As in, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out on June 11, 1986, forty years ago this summer, and if that number just made you sit down, pull up a chair next to us.

We’ve already written the definitive love letter to Ferris himself, the philosophy, the fourth-wall genius, the Cameron of it all, so we won’t repeat ourselves here. This post is about the anniversary, and about what June of 1986 actually felt like from the inside.

Because here’s the thing: when Ferris was taking his day off, we were living ours. That exact month, both of us were a pair of dance show studio rats on a certain dance show in Philadelphia that had premiered eight weeks earlier. School was ending. The radio was unbelievable. Every John Hughes movie felt like it had been filmed inside our actual lives and mailed back to us as entertainment. Ferris wasn’t a fantasy. It was a dare.

And it’s the rare 80s movie that never needed a comeback, because it never left. Kids who weren’t born until the 2000s quote it. The parade scene still gets used in commercials. “Life moves pretty fast” has been printed on more graduation cards than any sentence in the English language, and you know what? It earned it.

John Hughes made a lot of perfect movies in about a five-year window, an absolutely unfair run, but this one is the only one that feels like summer. The Breakfast Club is winter. Pretty in Pink is spring. Ferris is June 11th, forever.

If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Forty years later, that’s still the whole truth, delivered by a teenager in a leopard vest.

Save Ferris.

The honest bottom line

Forty years on, does it hold up? Mostly, and we say that as witnesses. The pacing is slower than you remember, Rooney is cartoonier than you remember, and a kid with that much unsupervised freedom reads differently once you’re the parent. None of it matters when the parade starts. The movie’s argument was never really about skipping school anyway, and the argument still wins.

FAQ

When did Ferris Bueller’s Day Off come out?
June 11, 1986, its 40th anniversary was June 11, 2026.

Who wrote and directed Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?
John Hughes wrote and directed it, in the middle of the greatest hot streak any director ever had with teenagers.

What city is Ferris Bueller set in?
Chicago, the museum, the Sears Tower, Wrigley Field, and the famous Von Steuben Day parade are all real Chicago landmarks.

Some reunion news comes with a number attached, and the number does the talking. This one is 38.

On Tuesday, June 30, 2026, Thomas Dolby announced that he is putting The Lost Toy People back together and headlining this summer’s Totally Tubular Festival, the traveling 80s package tour that opens July 17 in Phoenix. It is the first time that band has played together since 1988, when they opened for Depeche Mode at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Nineteen eighty eight. Reagan was still president.

And yes, they are playing “She Blinded Me With Science.”

What Dolby announced

This is not a hologram tour and it is not one guy with a laptop and a hired band. Original guitarist Larry Treadwell is in. So is singer and percussionist Laura Creamer. Filling out the lineup are bassist Divinity Roxx, who spent years as Beyonce’s musical director, drummer Mat Hector, and trombonist Ethan Santos.

The set leans on the record that band made with him, “Aliens Ate My Buick,” which means “Airhead,” “The Ability to Swing,” “The Key to Her Ferrari,” and the deep cut the faithful actually want, “Pulp Culture.” Then, because he is not a cruel man, the hits.

Dolby’s own framing of the whole 80s revival is worth reading, because he is not sentimental about it. “The current ’80s music revival is more than just a walk down memory lane for those of us that were actually there,” he told Ultimate Classic Rock, pointing out that people born long after the decade ended are the ones digging up the ideas now.

He is right, and it is the least nostalgic thing anybody on a nostalgia tour has said all year.

Who else is on the bill

The Totally Tubular lineup is a fair chunk of a 1983 radio hour, with the lineups varying city to city: A Flock of Seagulls, Men Without Hats, Bow Wow Wow, Animotion, The Escape Club, Tommy Tutone, and The Producers. That is “I Ran,” “The Safety Dance,” “I Want Candy,” “Obsession,” “Wild Wild West,” and the most famous phone number in American history, all on one stage, in one night, in July.

We are not going to pretend to be above this. We are extremely not above this.

What Thomas Dolby meant to the 80s

Here is what people who were not there get wrong about Thomas Dolby. They file him under “one hit novelty guy in goggles,” and the goggles are right there in the video, so you can see how it happened.

But he was the opposite of a novelty. He was one of the first pop musicians who was genuinely a technologist, a guy who understood the machines instead of just renting them, and MTV in its hungry early years handed him a nationwide audience for exactly that. “She Blinded Me With Science” was funny and strange and it had a British scientist hollering on it, and for a stretch there you could not get away from that video, and suddenly every kid in America knew a synth record could be a comedy bit and a banger at the same time.

That was the trick of that whole moment, and it is why the Totally Tubular bill works. These were weird records. “The Safety Dance” is a weird record. “I Ran” is a weird record. And they were not filed away in some alternative corner. They came out of the same radio, at the same school dances and roller rinks, as the biggest mainstream pop in the country, and nobody thought twice about it. That was the last time in American pop when the strangest thing in the room was also the most popular thing in the room.

Dolby went on to be a real one in the tech world, too, but that is a different article. Come July 17, he is a man in goggles behind a wall of keyboards, and the Rose Bowl was 38 years ago, and the band is back.

Go see it

You will not get many more of these. That is not a scare tactic, it is arithmetic, and this week we have been reminded of it hard.

The tour opens July 17 in Phoenix. If it comes anywhere near you, go stand in a room full of people who are all mouthing the same nonsense chorus they were mouthing in the eighth grade. That is not nostalgia. That is just a good night out with better songs.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

Is Thomas Dolby touring in 2026?
Yes. Thomas Dolby is headlining the 2026 Totally Tubular Festival, a traveling 80s package tour that opens July 17 in Phoenix, Arizona, and he is performing with a reunited version of his 1980s band The Lost Toy People.

Who are The Lost Toy People?
They were Thomas Dolby’s late 1980s backing band, best known for the album “Aliens Ate My Buick.” The 2026 reunion lineup includes original guitarist Larry Treadwell and singer-percussionist Laura Creamer, along with bassist Divinity Roxx, drummer Mat Hector, and trombonist Ethan Santos. The band last performed together in 1988, opening for Depeche Mode at the Rose Bowl.

Who is playing the Totally Tubular Festival 2026?
Thomas Dolby and The Lost Toy People headline, with A Flock of Seagulls, Men Without Hats, Bow Wow Wow, Animotion, The Escape Club, Tommy Tutone, and The Producers also on the bill. Lineups vary by city.

Will Thomas Dolby play “She Blinded Me With Science”?
Yes. The set is built around material from “Aliens Ate My Buick,” including “Airhead,” “The Ability to Swing,” “The Key to Her Ferrari,” and “Pulp Culture,” plus his signature hits, with “She Blinded Me With Science” performed live with the full band.

Sources

• Pollstar: Thomas Dolby and The Lost Toy People headline Totally Tubular Festival (June 30, 2026)
• Parade via Yahoo Entertainment: Thomas Dolby reunites The Lost Toy People for 2026 tour with special guests (June 30, 2026)
• Ultimate Classic Rock: Thomas Dolby headlines Totally Tubular 2026 touring festival (April 20, 2026)

Photos: Thomas Dolby live by Stansell, public domain. Thomas Dolby performing by Rudi Riet, CC BY-SA 2.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.

We hate writing these ones.

Bonnie Tyler died on the night of Tuesday, July 8, 2026, in a hospital in Portugal. She was 75. Her family and her team announced it the next morning, and the wording tells you how fast it turned: “Bonnie’s family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of the illness that she was being treated for.” The Associated Press and Newsweek both carried it within hours.

She had been fighting since May. And that voice, that gorgeous wrecked voice, was the one thing about her nobody ever mistook for anybody else.

How we got here: the last two months

This was not a long goodbye. It was two months, and for a while it looked like she was winning.

Tyler was admitted to a hospital in Faro, Portugal in early May for emergency intestinal surgery, and doctors placed her in a medically induced coma to help her through it. On June 15 her family said she was out of the coma but not out of danger: “Bonnie is no longer in a coma but remains very unwell and in intensive care in hospital in Portugal.” In the same breath they cancelled or postponed every remaining show of her summer, right through the end of August.

Doctors were still hopeful. Her family was still hopeful. That is what makes the word “unexpectedly” in Wednesday’s statement land the way it does. Three weeks after she woke up, she was gone.

What Bonnie Tyler meant to the 80s

Start with the voice, because the voice is the whole story.

She was born Gaynor Hopkins in Wales in 1951, a coal miner’s daughter. In the mid 1970s she had surgery to remove nodules from her throat, and it came back wrong, or came back right, depending on how you look at it. The pretty voice was gone. What replaced it was that torn, smoke-and-gravel rasp, and it turned out the world had been waiting for exactly that. Her first big hit, “It’s a Heartache,” went to No. 3 in the States on the strength of a sound no producer would have designed on purpose.

Then came 1983, and Jim Steinman, and the song.

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” is not a pop song. It is a five and a half minute weather event. Steinman wrote it and produced it, brought in Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg from the E Street Band, and built the thing like a cathedral: the piano, the choirboy, the timpani, the whole sky opening up on “turn around, bright eyes.” It sat at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for four straight weeks, topped the charts in Britain, earned her a Grammy nomination, and sold north of six million copies. The album it came from, “Faster Than the Speed of Night,” went to No. 3 in the US.

Tyler always told the Steinman story with a laugh. “Jim liked to put down a basic rhythm track, do nine takes of the song, choose the best one and then put the kitchen sink on there,” she said. You can hear every dish in that sink, and that is the point.

The next year she did it again from a different angle. “Holding Out for a Hero” landed on the “Footloose” soundtrack in 1984, at roughly 200 miles an hour, and became the sound of every montage, every last-second rescue, every kid running down a hallway in a movie for the next forty years.

Here is where our corner of the story comes in. Both of those records were already a few years old by the time we got to that dance floor, and neither one had gone anywhere. That is what a monster does. It does not cycle out. “Total Eclipse” was on the radio in 1983, it was still on the radio in 1986, and it is on the radio this week, and if you were anywhere near a school gym, a roller rink, or a car with a working tape deck in that decade, it is welded into you. The whole Dance Party USA era ran on records built like that: songs too big to be embarrassed by, that everybody in the room knew all the words to, that you could not be too cool for even if you tried.

She never stopped, either. Eighteen albums. Three Grammy nominations. Eurovision for the UK in 2013 with “Believe in Me.” An MBE from the Queen for services to music. Her last record, “The Best Is Yet to Come,” came out in 2021, when she was 70 years old, and she meant the title.

The tributes are pouring in

Rod Stewart, one of the very few singers on earth who understood her instrument from the inside, wrote: “We shared similar styles of vocalizing. She was a good pal, a true soul stirrer.”

Catherine Zeta-Jones, a relative by marriage, posted that her “heart is broken,” and remembered that Tyler sang at her wedding. Cliff Richard called her a “wonderful friend gone too soon.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer called her “one of Britain’s greatest recording artists.” Her brother Paul Hopkins wrote five words on Facebook: “I will love you forever.”

Turn around, bright eyes

Here is the thing about a voice like that. It was never young. It came out of the surgery already sounding like it had been up all night, already sounding like it had lost something, which is why a 20 year old and a 60 year old could both put on “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and feel like it was written that afternoon about them.

So tonight, do the only thing there is to do. Put it on. Not the edit, the long one. Turn it up past the point where it is reasonable. Wait for the drums to come in, and when she gets to “turn around,” go ahead and sing it in whatever ruined voice you have got.

She would have loved that it was loud.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

How did Bonnie Tyler die?
Bonnie Tyler died on July 8, 2026, at age 75, in a hospital in Portugal, from complications of the illness she had been treated for since May. She had undergone emergency intestinal surgery in Faro in early May and was placed in a medically induced coma. Her family called her death unexpected.

How old was Bonnie Tyler when she died?
She was 75. She was born Gaynor Hopkins in Wales on June 8, 1951, and had celebrated her 75th birthday a month before she died.

What was Bonnie Tyler’s biggest hit?
“Total Eclipse of the Heart,” released in 1983, written and produced by Jim Steinman. It spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, topped the UK chart, and sold more than six million copies. Her other signature 80s song is “Holding Out for a Hero” from the 1984 “Footloose” soundtrack.

Why did Bonnie Tyler’s voice sound like that?
In the mid 1970s she had surgery to remove nodules from her vocal cords. The operation permanently changed her voice, replacing a conventional singing tone with the gravelly rasp that became her trademark and made her one of the most instantly recognizable singers of the 80s.

Sources

• Associated Press via ABC7: Bonnie Tyler, who topped charts with epic “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” dies at 75 (July 9, 2026)
• ABC News: Bonnie Tyler, singer of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” dies at 75 (July 9, 2026)
• Newsweek: Bonnie Tyler death, Catherine Zeta-Jones mourns singer among growing tributes (July 9, 2026)
• Yahoo Entertainment: Bonnie Tyler, singer of blockbuster No. 1 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” dies aged 75 (July 9, 2026)
• Indianapolis Star via Yahoo: “Total Eclipse of the Heart” singer Bonnie Tyler dead at 75, family and team mourn unexpected death (July 9, 2026)
• Good Morning America: Bonnie Tyler out of coma but “remains very unwell,” her family says (June 15, 2026)
• The Washington Times: Bonnie Tyler out of coma but still in ICU, summer tour canceled (June 16, 2026)

Photos: Bonnie Tyler live in 2016 by Stefan Brending (2eight), CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Bonnie Tyler at Eurovision 2013 by Albin Olsson, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bonnie Tyler 1977 promotional photo, Chrysalis Records, public domain. All via Wikimedia Commons.

This one hurts, so we are just going to say it straight.

Huey Lewis went on Michael Rosenbaum’s “Inside of You” podcast this week (July 7, 2026) and said the words nobody who grew up in the 80s ever wanted to hear: “At a certain point, you gotta face the music. I can’t hear music.” His hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, picked it up, and then everyone else did, because when the man who sang “The Heart of Rock & Roll” says music is no longer part of his life, that lands right in your chest.

Meniere’s disease took his hearing. It did not take his catalog, his place in our heads, or what he meant to every kid within reach of a radio between 1983 and 1988. So here is what he said, what led up to it, and why Huey Lewis and the News mattered so much to our corner of the decade. Consider this our thank-you card.

What Huey said this week

Talking to Rosenbaum just after his 76th birthday, Huey laid it out with the same no-nonsense delivery he always had. “Music is not part of my life anymore, which is a hard pill to swallow,” he said. He has a cochlear implant now, and it helps him follow conversation, but it distorts voices and music alike. “I can’t feel the warmth, you know?”

He said he is mildly dizzy all the time. He said he no longer plays the big band and New Orleans jazz records he loves around the house, because they do not sound like themselves anymore. He admitted he is a little envious of his bandmates, who still get to go out and play. And then, because he is Huey Lewis, he steered it back to gratitude: the fishing trips, the friendships, the whole unbelievable ride. His words: he has to look at the positive.

How we got here: the timeline

This did not happen overnight. Huey actually lost most of the hearing in his right ear decades ago, around the end of the 80s. He shrugged it off in public for years, and in a 2024 radio interview he summed up Meniere’s the way only he could: “You get vertigo and you lose your hearing, but what you gonna do?” That quote is the whole man in one sentence.

The left ear was the one carrying him. Then one night in Dallas in early 2018, right before showtime, it crashed. He described the lower frequencies distorting so violently that he could not find pitch, and you cannot sing if you cannot find pitch. In April 2018 he canceled all 40 remaining tour dates, telling fans he could no longer hear music well enough to sing. He has not played a full show since. He told Today back then that he spent months trying everything: doctors, diets, acupuncture, all of it.

The story did not stop there, though. The band released the album Weather in 2020, built from songs he recorded before Dallas. His jukebox musical The Heart of Rock and Roll made it all the way to Broadway in 2024. And in a 2025 interview with People he talked about the cochlear implant, hearing speech better, and refusing to slam the door shut: “I’m not going to give up.”

What Huey Lewis meant to the 80s

Everything. OK, here is the longer version.

Huey Lewis and the News were the American bar band that made it all the way to the top without ever pretending to be anything else. No costumes, no fog machines, no mystique. A Bay Area working band in sport coats, with a harmonica, a horn section, and songs your whole family agreed on. In a decade full of characters, Huey’s whole thing was being the regular guy, and it turned out the regular guy could go toe to toe with anybody.

Sports came out in September 1983 and simply refused to leave. It climbed all the way to No. 1 in 1984 and threw off four straight top-10 singles: “Heart and Soul,” “I Want a New Drug,” “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” and “If This Is It.” Seven times platinum, in the era of Thriller. Every one of those songs still starts a party.

Then came 1985. “The Power of Love” became his first No. 1 and got an Oscar nomination, welded forever to Back to the Future. Huey even has a cameo in the movie as the audition judge who rejects Marty McFly’s band for being “just too darn loud,” while the band is playing a Huey Lewis song. Still one of the great inside jokes of the decade. That same year he sang his line on “We Are the World,” standing shoulder to shoulder with every giant in American music.

Fore! landed in August 1986 and went to No. 1 too, with “Stuck with You,” “Hip to Be Square,” and “Jacob’s Ladder” all hitting the top of the charts. And that summer of 1986 is exactly where our story plugs in, because those records were everywhere while we were dancing on Dance Party USA. That run of songs was the air we breathed in that studio. You did not put on Huey Lewis to be cool. You put on Huey Lewis because it made the whole room happy, which we would argue is the harder trick.

We made a whole video about this band

We already made our feelings a matter of public record. We sat down and did an entire episode on what this band meant to us and to those 80s summers, and it is one of our favorite things we have ever put on YouTube:

Watch: “For the Love of Huey Lewis and the News” on our YouTube channel

Go watch it. It was true when we filmed it and it is even more true today.

Play it loud enough for both of you

Huey says he has to face the music. Fair enough. But somebody should tell him the music is doing just fine out here. “If This Is It” still works in three notes. “Stuck with You” still sounds like a summer with nothing to do and nowhere to be. The heart of rock and roll is, in fact, still beating, and he is the reason a few million of us can check.

So here is our prescription, and we are only half kidding: put on Sports today, front to back, loud. He cannot hear it anymore. Play it loud enough for both of you.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

What happened to Huey Lewis’s hearing?
Huey Lewis has Meniere’s disease, an inner-ear condition that causes vertigo and progressive hearing loss. He lost most of the hearing in his right ear around the end of the 80s, and his left ear failed suddenly before a show in Dallas in early 2018. He now describes his hearing as essentially gone, and a cochlear implant helps him with speech but distorts music.

Can Huey Lewis still hear music?
No. In a July 2026 appearance on the “Inside of You” podcast, Lewis said he can no longer hear music at all, and that music is not part of his life anymore. His cochlear implant lets him follow conversation but makes music sound distorted.

When did Huey Lewis stop performing?
In April 2018, Lewis canceled all 40 of his remaining tour dates after his hearing crashed before a Dallas show, saying he could no longer hear well enough to sing. He has not performed a full concert since.

What were Huey Lewis and the News’ biggest 80s hits?
The album Sports (1983) hit No. 1 and produced “Heart and Soul,” “I Want a New Drug,” “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” and “If This Is It.” “The Power of Love” from Back to the Future was a No. 1 hit in 1985, and Fore! (1986) delivered “Stuck with You,” “Hip to Be Square,” and “Jacob’s Ladder.”

Sources

• San Francisco Chronicle: Huey Lewis on his hearing loss and music (July 2026)
• Parade via Yahoo Entertainment: Huey Lewis opens up about losing his love for music (July 9, 2026)
• Billboard: Huey Lewis shares update on hearing loss (2025)
• MusicRadar: Huey Lewis opens up about hearing loss (May 2024)
• Billboard: Huey Lewis cancels 2018 tour due to hearing loss (April 2018)
• Today: Huey Lewis on his anguish over hearing loss (2018)

Related reading on this site: what happened to Phil Collins.

Photos: Tankboy from Chicago (CC BY-SA 2.0), Xnux (CC BY-SA 3.0), and PaulHamaker (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

April 12, 1986. A half-hour dance show taped in Philadelphia quietly premiered on the USA Network.

Nobody involved thought they were making history. We can say that with some authority, because we were there, and we can promise you that the main things on anyone’s mind were hair, clothes, and not looking at the camera at the wrong moment.

But Dance Party USA turned 40 this year, and forty years is the kind of number that makes you sit down for a second.

The short version, for the newcomers: the show ran from that April afternoon in 1986 all the way to June of 1992. It started as a half hour and got bumped to a full hour in 1987, because apparently America could not get enough of teenagers dancing in a Philadelphia TV studio, and honestly? America was right.

Bobby got there first, coming up through the Philly dance-show world in 1985, and ended up hosting the party from ’89 to ’91. Jason was the co-conspirator-in-chief in the studio from ’86 through ’88, back when the show was brand new and none of us knew what it would become. Between us we saw the whole arc, the regulars, the guest artists, the songs, the sunburns from Penns Landing remotes nobody warned us about.

What still gets us about that show isn’t the nostalgia, exactly. It’s that it was live-wire real in a way TV barely is anymore. Real teenagers. Real reactions. Somebody’s actual first heartbreak happening just off camera while the floor kept moving. You can’t write that. You could only point a camera at it, five days a week, and let it happen.

Forty years later, people still find the cast online, still send us their memories, still ask the same question: “was it as fun as it looked?”

It was more fun than it looked. And it looked like the most fun on television.

We talk about the show constantly on the Awesome 80s Podcast, the stories that never made air are half the reason the podcast exists. Forty years in, the party’s still going. It just has better parking now.

– Bobby and Jason

FAQ

When did Dance Party USA premiere?
Dance Party USA premiered on the USA Network on April 12, 1986, and ran until June 27, 1992.

Where was Dance Party USA filmed?
The show was taped in Philadelphia, at TV studios including WPHL-TV and WGBS, with famous remote shoots at spots like Penns Landing.

How long was each episode?
It began as a half-hour show in 1986 and expanded to a full hour in 1987.

Were Bobby and Jason really on Dance Party USA?
Yes: Bobby was part of the Philly dance-show scene from 1985 and hosted Dance Party USA from 1989 to 1991; Jason was a regular on the floor from 1986 to 1988.

Forty years. Say it out loud and it still doesn’t sound right.

On June 28, 1986, Wham! walked onto the stage at Wembley Stadium in front of 72,000 people and said goodbye. They called the show “The Final,” which was about as subtle as anything else in 1986, meaning not at all, and we loved it that way. Elton John showed up. Simon Le Bon showed up. George and Andrew went out on top, at the absolute peak, in the sunshine.

And here’s the part that still gets us: while all that was happening across the ocean, we were keeping the party going on our side of it. That same summer, “The Edge of Heaven” was in heavy rotation on the Dance Party USA floor, and yes, there is tape of us performing it, and no, we will never stop bringing it up.

Wham! breaking up made zero sense to us at sixteen. Nobody walks away at the top! But that was always the George Michael move. He knew exactly where he was going, and where he went turned out to be one of the great solo runs in pop history. Looking back at it now, “The Final” wasn’t an ending. It was a handoff.

What we remember about that summer:

The singles just kept coming. “Everything She Wants.” “I’m Your Man.” “The Edge of Heaven.” You couldn’t turn on a radio in Philadelphia, or anywhere else, without George’s voice falling out of it. The greatest hits album (also called The Final, because again, subtlety) landed right before the show, and it was basically the soundtrack of our entire year.

If you were anywhere near a teenager in 1986, Wham! wasn’t a band. Wham! was the weather.

We said our real goodbye back in 2016, and we still mean every word of it. But an anniversary like this one isn’t sad. Forty years later the songs do exactly what they did the first time, three notes in and you’re back, mixtape spinning, whole summer ahead of you.

Play something from The Final today. Loud. That’s an order from two guys who owe that band more than we can ever say.

– Bobby and Jason

The honest bottom line

The honest bottom line, forty years late: George was right. Walking away at the peak made no sense to us at sixteen and makes perfect sense from here; Wham! never got old, never got sad, never played a county fair twenty years past the expiration date. The goodbye preserved them in amber at their brightest. We hated it then. We understand it now. That is what forty years is for.

FAQ

When was Wham!’s final concert?
Wham! played their farewell concert, “The Final,” at Wembley Stadium in London on June 28, 1986, in front of about 72,000 fans.

Who appeared at Wham!’s farewell show?
Along with George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, the show featured guests including Elton John and Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon.

Why did Wham! break up in 1986?
The duo chose to end at their peak, with George Michael moving into the solo career that produced Faith the following year. They went out on top, on purpose.

If you’re like us you gotta be saying “Are you kidding me?”.

Every few years since 1989 we’ve been teased, toyed with and let down.

There’s some surprise reunion of some 80’s hair band. Or you’ll see a cool cameo of some greying 80’s tv star. You may even get a “poorly thought out remake”(we’re looking at you ‘Vacation’) to remind you that the powers that be today just don’t get it.

Over the past few months there has been an awakening. This time…it looks and feels real. Continue reading