Yeah, despite all the movies that suggested that Soviets, etc. envied Western freedom of expression, that really wasn't much of a motivator other than to a few intellectual dissidents. The fact that you could go to a Western supermarket without waiting in line for a couple of hours and that they actually had fresh…

He was also a superhero whose power was to make Metro stops appear in places like Georgetown whenever he needed them.

It's so bizarre that The Americans is mostly filmed in NYC, given that most shows *set* in NYC are filmed in Toronto. I'm just waiting for a series set in Toronto to be filmed in Washington DC in order to complete the cycle.

Phillip and Elizabeth are into clean kills. Not much hurting, at least not for long.

Basically he thought the Prague Spring of "socialism with a human face" was a good idea and the Soviets were wrong to have crushed it.

Well, Gorby was *very* popular in the US at the time. It was easy to believe that Brezhnev, or his rapidly dying elderly successors Gromyko and Andropov, would start WWIII, but not so much that funny stained-head guy. Even Ronald Reagan liked Gorby.

Jimmy Carter often said "nucular" and he had a degree in nuclear engineering!

Fifty thou a year still would buy a lot of beer, but maybe not so much of other things.

Or Blue Laser

Plus it saved a whole bunch of American lives - namely medical students at a third rate school in Grenada where Americans went if they really wanted to be doctors but couldn't get in to any US schools. Actually, maybe it might have saved more American lives in the long run if the school *had* been destroyed by the…

Not to be confused with Foxfire, which is about simple, wholesome Appalachian arts and crafts. Although a movie with Clint attacking his enemies with handcrafted whirlimagigs would be awesome.

First Spaceship on Venus is actually an East German movie, not a Soviet one. Yes, in the West people acted as if all Eastern Europe was just a part of the Soviet Union, but there was more diversity in cultures than people gave them credit for, just as places like West Germany weren't just extensions of the USA.

It kind of did, spookily enough. There's a reason the game adaptation takes place in the Chernobyl region. There actually were scavengers who went into the real life Zone.

Our school district got Apple IIs in 1981 when I was in sixth grade. And it wasn't even a particularly affluent school. Granted, it was only three or four computers for the whole school, but we played Lemonade Stand and learned Basic.

I don't think that was the bathroom being referred to. The bathroom being worked on I suspect was the bathroom on the ground floor where they were eating supper. The Monarch didn't even know the basement bathroom existed.

Maybe because in the US, that would be confusing because there was well known broadcaster named Paul Harvey "And now you know… the rest of the story".

No. It was some sort of text editor. Command lines like DOS/Unix wouldn't have any indents.

True, but "crazy person who turned out not to be so crazy after all" is a pretty common trope as well.

I was kind of hoping that nothing happened and the woman outside was actually part of an improv/LARP group.

Well, the movie that played that story straight (*Room*) was nominated for Best Picture, so there's that. It lost against the pedo priest picture — maybe that one could have used some aliens (Father O'brien only did those things because he was possessed by Martian emperor G'zul!)