On October 10, 1985, Hollywood lost two giants within hours of each other. Orson Welles, director of Citizen Kane, died of a heart attack at his Los Angeles home at age 70, just hours after taping his final television interview. Yul Brynner, the Oscar-winning star of The King and I, died that same day in…
The Pogo Ball is a 1980s balance toy made of a rubber ball locked inside a plastic disc — you stand on the disc, grip the ball between your feet, and bounce. Two Belgian inventors patented it in 1969, but it didn’t become a hit until Hasbro relaunched it in America in 1986, where it…
The Phantom of the Opera officially opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on October 9, 1986, after two weeks of previews. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical starred Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Sarah Brightman as Christine Daaé, was directed by Harold Prince, and went on to become the longest-running show in Broadway history before…
The Rolling Stones released four studio albums in the 1980s — Tattoo You (1981), Undercover (1983), Dirty Work (1986), and Steel Wheels (1989) — while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards spent three of those years barely speaking to each other. Tattoo You is the decade’s high point, built mostly from 1970s outtakes; Dirty Work is…
On October 8, 1995, Edgar Martinez hit an 11th-inning double down the left field line to score Joey Cora and Ken Griffey Jr., giving the Seattle Mariners a 6-5 win over the New York Yankees in Game 5 of the ALDS at the Kingdome. The hit, known forever as “The Double,” won the franchise’s first…
Weebles wobble but never fall down — the real 1971 Hasbro story, the physics behind it, and why PlayMonster relaunched them in 2023.
On October 7, 1985, four Palestine Liberation Front gunmen hijacked the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean, holding roughly 400 passengers and crew hostage and murdering 69-year-old American tourist Leon Klinghoffer. Three days later, U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats forced the hijackers’ getaway plane down in Sicily, triggering a standoff with Italy that nearly…
From a Thanksgiving cake-pan game to a $300-million-disc toy empire: the true story of the Frisbee, Wham-O, and the inventor who became one after he died.
Elizabeth Taylor had been married seven times before, but nothing in her previous six weddings prepared the world for what happened at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch on October 6, 1991. The bride was 59. The groom, Larry Fortensky, was a 39-year-old construction worker she’d met in rehab. And the venue had a working Ferris wheel….
Craig Jones never asked for this life. All he wanted was a quiet Christmas with his family — and instead he got robbed by a man in a Santa suit, forced into a rent-a-cop uniform, and dragged into the strangest holiday heist comedy the hood ever produced. Friday After Next, released November 22, 2002, closed…
On October 5, 1984, Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 7:03 a.m. on the STS-41-G mission, carrying the largest crew ever flown at that point — seven astronauts, including the first two women to fly together in space and the first Canadian ever to leave Earth. Six days later, mission specialist…
Few bands defined the contradictions of the 1980s quite like KISS. They entered the decade as the self-proclaimed “hottest band in the world” — a pyrotechnic circus act in greasepaint and platform boots who had sold out stadiums across the globe. Then the decade got weird. The makeup came off. The hair got bigger, chasing…
