Hey, R2D2 outlived Darth. Give the little droid credit. If he manipulated the living hunks of meat to do his bidding, so be it.

If only House of Leaves had been published then! Up to then, things bigger on the inside than the outside had positive connotations, like the TARDIS. Which maybe Nancy wouldn't have heard of, but the kids probably would — the early 1980s were when PBS started showing Dr. Who episodes (no "BBC America" back then or…

This is really showing how fragmented the TV watching audience is these days, due to cable networks and streaming services creating their own shows. I mean, I'm a fan of "The Americans" and "Better Call Saul", and recently watched and enjoyed "Stranger Things" entirely because the numerous articles about it on the AV…

Vic Morrow was a lot more than just Jennifer Jason Leigh's dad.

What about Birdie the Early Bird? She is/was the mascot for McDonald's egg-based breakfast products, and was shown hatching from an egg herself. It's disturbingly unclear whether it is supposed to be her eggs which are being sold and whether the eggs would hatch into talking anthropomorphic birds if so allowed.

Exactly. And some religions (like the ancient Roman cults of Isis and Dionysus, not to mention modern things like Scientology) work that way too — you "level up" and new "mysteries" are revealed to you. That sense of false accomplishment can be achieved by videogames these days.

"I knew this show would bring us to the heights of human drama more powerfully than literature ever dreamed!"

Yes. I in fact missed that in my initial reading.

With the vintage mustache and love of technology he reminds me of my sixth grade teacher circa 1981, who let kids stay after school to play with the couple of computers the school had.

Sensory deprivation tanks have a longer use in movies than just "Under the Skin". They were a major plot point in "Altered States" (1980). I also liked the use of the Lovecraftian idea that looking into alternate dimensions has the effect of allowing *things* there look at you as well, which rarely has good…

It's congressional pork barreling. If you don't spread the evil conspiracy money around various states, pretty soon politicians won't see the problem in cutting the budget.

What I love about that portrayal is how Rick is so offended by Satan's cursed item scam, not because of its evilness, but just how hokey and unoriginal it is: "Here you can use my phone. Don't worry, it won't make you deaf because I'm not a hack."

Unfortunately I did. It was often said that Lucas was a New Hollywood director like Bogdanovich. I don't think that it meant Lucas should have imitated Bogdanovich by creating another movie in the universe of his most famous work so inept as to wonder how he was responsible for the original.

In terms of years, yes. But in terms of culture the late 1960s and early 1980s were eons apart, with the 1980s being much more like today. We are still basically living in Reagan's America where even supposedly progressive politicians like Obama idolize "free trade" above all else. Except for the the brief, doomed…

At one level I feel sad for the decreasing educational content of Epcot — I was actually kind of impressed by it when I visited about five years ago. On the other hand, pavilions for fictional governments from Disney properties seems kind of neat when you realize they could include the Galactic Empire ("keeping the…

The scary thing about The Simpsons going on for so long is that throw-away jokes like that which were topical references at the time are as obscure as the Spiro Agnew jokes in 1970s MAD that The Simpsons itself mocks.

Although in a lot of rural areas, Bell didn't handle the phone service but other companies did. When I was growing up in the semi-rural Midwest in the 1970s-1980s, we had an offbrand phone service from a firm called GTE.

It's just so weird that they tried to be realistic by establishing Hawkins Lab as run by the DOE (the security guard says to the cops that they have contact the DOE to get access). They could have had the lab run by some secret fictional agency like how the NSA existed years before it was publicly acknowledged to…

Okay, but that's not how DOE National Labs (which Hawkins is established to be) work. Even the ones making nuclear bombs.

To be fair, in the ET rip off "Mac and Me", the creature *did* eat Skittles.