Blade Runner, released in 1982, is one of the most influential sci-fi movies ever made and certainly an iconic 80s flick. Shortly after the film was released "The Blade Runner Sketchbook" - which compiled concept art for the film from Syd Mead, Mentor Huebner, Ridley Scott himself and others - was published as a companion piece, though it's print run wasn't remarkable and it disappeared from bookstore shelves pretty quickly.

Now, however, through the miracle of modern technology the entire book is available to view online; for free! Anyone who's a fan of this classic film will want to see this. The reproduction quality is generally excellent and the presentation first rate. If you love 80s films and Blade Runner in particular you owe it to yourself to take a look.

Here are a couple of samples from the online edition with a link after the pics to the full version.



View the entire online edition here.

The 1982 Klaus Von Bulow trial had all the makings of a classic murder tale: depressed heiress, distant husband, mistrusting stepchildren and was set in Newport's mansion district to boot. Klaus Von Bulow stood accused of murdering his wife Sunny by injecting her with a lethal dose of insulin. A long line of witnesses who inhabited the fringes of the Von Bulow life painted a picture of a man driven by a desire to get his hands on the fortune of his ailing wife. After a lengthy trial that was more media circus than judicial proceeding Klaus was convicted.

Immediately Von Bulow retained the services of Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz to represent him on his appeal. Dershowitz focused on how the prosecution had acquired the crucial piece of evidence used to convict his client in the first trial: the medical bag that contained the syringe the prosecution said Von Bulow had used to inject his wife.

After a lengthy investigation Dershowitz and his team discovered that private investigators hired by Sunny's children from her previous marriage (who were no fans of Klaus) had hired a locksmith to open a closet of Klaus' in order to find out what he may have been hiding in there. Because the closet was opened without a search warrant or Klaus Von Bulow's permission the medical bag that was found inside was thrown out as evidence and the prosecution's case collapsed. Nonetheless the state went ahead with a second trial in 1985 but without any truly compelling evidence Von Bulow was acquitted on all charges. Dershowitz went on to pen the best selling book "Reversal of Fortune" about the tragedy. That book was made into a successful major motion picture starring Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons.

Today Klaus Von Bulow lives in London where he does occasional theater and art reviews. Sunny Von Bulow died in 2008 after 28 years in a coma.

Klaus Von Bulow with his daughter (left) after his acquittal on attempted murder charges.

Vic Morrow was a Hollywood veteran of both the big and small screen. He was probably best known for starring in the hit 60s tv series "Combat". In 1982 he signed on to appear in a feature film version of the classic Rod Serling tv series "The Twilight Zone". The film would be comprised of four segments each with its own director. Morrow's segment title "Time Out" was to be directed by a rising newcomer named John Landis.

In the wee hours of July 23, 1982 while filming a scene which required Morrow to carry two children (in real life 7 year old Mcya Dihn Le and 6 year old Renee Shin-Yi Chen) across a shallow riverbed while a helicopter loomed over their heads and explosions were set off all around something went terribly wrong. According to the official report:

"The probable cause of the accident was the detonation of debris-laden high temperature special effects explosions too near a low flying helicopter leading to foreign object damage to one rotor blade and delamination due to heat to the other rotor blade, the separation of the helicopter's tail rotor assembly, and the uncontrolled descent of the helicopter."

Morrow and one of the children were decapitated by the helicopter's rotor blades as is crashed to the ground. The other child was crushed beneath it. The accident stunned Hollywood and brought to light the shady practices some producers and directors would use to get their movies made. The two children who died had no buisness being on any set at 2:30 in the morning never mind one where so many pyrotechnics were being utilized. Landis had smuggled them to the location and kept them hidden until it was time for their scene. He also was paying them under the table to avoid drawing any union or State of California attention to them.

Ultimately Landis and a score of others who were party to the accident were aquitted of manslaughter and child endangerment charges in 1987. In fact no one went to jail as a result of the accident in spite of the fact that the official report had made it pretty clear that someone had made some very serious errors in judgement which lead to the crash. The families of Morrow and the two children ultimately settled out of court for undisclosed amounts.

Vic Morrow (center) carries Mcya Dihn Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen seconds before fatal accident.

If it weren't for cable tv's insatiable need for content it never would have seen the light of day. But content is king and because of that on May 2, 1982 The Weather Channel made its debut in homes all over the country much to the underwhelmation (I made a new word!) of the general populace. Like nose hairs growing in the dark though this idea of showing blue screen weather maps 24/7/365 with people standing in front of them saying such hair raising things as "a small low pressure center over Des Moines shouldn't bring any significant precipitation to eastern Iowa over the weekend" gradually took root. Before you knew it TWC was on in the background in nearly every house or apartment you'd visit. People whose connection to the real world was already tenuous due to tv addiction began to meld with their furniture and mark out the passage of their lives to the beat of "local on the 8s".

Every once in a while an actual weather event would occur and TWC would go into full-fledged "release the horses and get everyone into the shelter" mode. It was never clear to me what was more pathetic; TWC's tendency to turn tropical breezes into the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know it or the public's (and I include myself here) willingness to tune into saturation coverage of end-of-the-world storms that never seemed to arrive.

But be that as it may it doesn't seem like TWC is going anywhere anytime soon. Though NBC bought it in 2008 and promptly canned all the original weather jockeys and started showing movies on Friday nights (they've subsequently stopped after enduring a perfect storm of protest from the multitude of blue screen weather map junkies) The Weather Channel enters its 4th decade firmly ensconced atop the meteorological tv pyramid.

Here's the first ever minute of programming from The Weather Channel back in 1982. Listen to the breathless enthusiasm in those voices!

"Late Night with David Letterman" debuted on NBC February 1, 1982 and represented a kind of blood transfusion into the moldering carcass of after hours television. Created by Johnny Carson's production company at the urging of then NBC boss Fred Silverman, Late Night's mandate was to give young men who had little or no interest in Carson's parade of old-school superstars something to watch in the wee hours. Carson, through his production company, made it clear that Letterman's new show had to break new ground; he didn't want it to be seen as simply the second hour of "The Tonight Show". To that end a representative of Carson's production company was a given the task of keeping an eye on the new show to make sure there wasn't any conceptual overlap. There wasn't.

Offbeat, irreverent, unpredictable and occasionally (though not intentionally) confrontational Late Night soon became must see viewing for young adults (especially college students) and grabbed itself a much larger audience share for NBC than they had had with its predecessor; "Tom Snyder Coast to Coast".

Though in his first monologue Letterman was obviously nervous and played down his prospects in time he'd become a fixture in the moonlit television landscape nearly rivaling his mentor Carson.

Here's the opening of the very first "Late Night with David Letterman Show" from February 1, 1982.

If you've ever seen Blade Runner one of the most indelible images from that amazing film is that of the building-sized electronic-billboard geisha seductively puffing away on a cigarette or popping happy pills (at least I assume they're happy pills). Ever wonder who that Japanese actress was? Well, in fact, she wasn't Japanese at all. She was/is Korean-American actress Alexis Rhee.

So what is everyone's favorite unknown cyber-noir icon doing these days?

After appearing in Blade Runner she waited almost six years for her next movie gig; a small part in the underwhelming 1988 film "Silent Assassins" which starred Linda Blair. A few other B-movies followed with tantalizing titles like "Gang Justice" and "The Visit" but nothing substantial. Then, 22 years after leaving her anonymous imprint on pop culture in Blade Runner, Ms Rhee found herself cast as Kim Lee in 2004's Academy Award winning film "Crash" and won herself a Screen Actor's Guild award for "Outstanding performance by a cast member". The recognition seems to have sparked interest in her from the powers-that-be in Hollywood as since then she's been working much more steadily and in higher visibility projects like the 2007 Eddie Murphy comedy "Norbit".

Not one to simply sit around and wait for the calls to come in from casting agents though, away from the movie set Ms Rhee is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, a classically trained violinist, a registered hypnotherapist and a certified Microsoft Systems Engineer.

(left) Alexis Rhee as iconic geisha in Blade Runner 1982 and (right) as Kim Lee about to go medieval in Crash 2004.

Remember the days before tamper-proof packaging? Neither do I. Seems like it's been around my whole life. But there was a time when protection from whack-jobs was not the primary purpose of putting a cap on something. That all changed in 1982 however following the still unsolved Chicago Tylenol murders. Between September 29 and October 1, 1982 seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Tylenol capsules for various reasons. It quickly became evident that it was not a manufacturing problem but that someone had removed Tylenol packages from shelves in various stores, introduced cyanide into the capsules themselves and then returned the poisoned products back to store shelves where the victims eventually bought them. Once it became clear what was going on Tylenol's maker, Johnson and Johnson, ordered a nationwide recall of all Tylenol products, a move that is said to have cost them some $100 million.

While law enforcement has had plenty of suspects over the years (including Ted Kazcynski aka: the unabomber) no one has ever been charged with the murders. At the time a man claiming to be responsible sent a letter to authorities demanding $1 million to stop the attacks. He was caught, identified as one James Lewis, and served 13 years in prison for his attempted extortion. Though he began denying he was involved the minute he was arrested the fact is that at the time he did claim in writing to be the killer and he remains a suspect to this day (though no solid evidence against him other than his extortion letter has surfaced).

It's impossible to say if anyone will ever be convicted of this crime but the lasting legacy of the Tylenol murders is with us every time we go to the store pretty much anywhere in the world in the form of the aforementioned tamper-proof packaging that we now take for granted on everything from prescription drugs to bottled water.

The seven victims of the unsolved Chicago Tylenol murders.

January 13, 1982 began as just another frigid winter's day for most people in the metro D.C. area. At Washington National Airport passengers and crew aboard Air Florida Flight 90 waited nearly an hour on the runway in heavy snow for their flight to take off. The plane had been de-iced while sitting at the gate but as it waited on the taxiway in heavy snow fresh ice began to accumulate on the wings. When they finally began their takeoff run the co-pilot recognized that things weren't right and alerted the captain, who dismissed his concerns and proceeded down the runway. He should have listened because only 30 seconds after barely getting airborne Flight 90 fell from the sky clipping the 14th Street Bridge before plunging into the ice-covered Potomac river. What followed was a human drama of extraordinary proportions.

As the accident occurred at the beginning of afternoon rush hour in Washington the bridge was packed with cars and there were hundreds of on-the-scene witnesses to the calamity. (4 people on the bridge lost their lives when their vehicles were struck by the falling aircraft.) Horrified onlookers could hear the cries of survivors coming from the water where only the tail section of the plane was visible above the ice. Someone had to do something.

First into the water was Roger Olian, a worker at a local hospital who had been on the bridge when the plane came down. He made two attempts to swim to the survivors near the tail section, aborting his second attempt just yards short when a Park Service Police helicopter manned by Donald Usher and Melvin Windsor arrived on the scene. (When Olian returned to shore he was unable to stand and verging on hypothermia, though he would make a full recovery.) The chopper's pilot, Usher, dropped their bird low over the river and Windsor dropped a rescue line toward the group clinging to the tail section wreckage. After successfully retrieving passenger Bert Hamilton they went back and attempted to drop a line to Arland Williams, who motioned for them to pass it on to the others instead. Flight attendant Kelly Duncan would eventually grab it and was lifted to the shore. After dropping Duncan the chopper returned and again attempted to drop a line to Williams, who again passed it on to someone else; this time to passenger Joe Stiley who grabbed hold of fellow passenger Priscilla Tirado with his broken arm. A second line was dropped and grabbed by Patricia Felch. On the way to shore both women lost their grip and fell back into the water. After depositing Stiley on the shore the chopper returned to pick up Tirado, now blinded by jet fuel and losing her battle to stay afloat in the sub-freezing water. When the chopper returned for her she was too numb to hold onto the life line and dropped back into water repeatedly. Finally, as Tirado began to sink below the surface some 20 yards from the shore, bystander Lenny Skutnik could take no more. He took off his coat and plunged into the river saving Tirado's life. Perhaps emboldened by witnessing Skutnik's heroics the chopper crew went back out for Felch and this time pushed things to the limit, dropping the chopper so close to the water that the landing skids were actually submerged. Windsor walked out onto one of the skids without protection, reached down and physically plucked Felch from the water. Moments later Felch, the fifth and final survivor of Flight 90, was dropped safely on the shore. When the chopper returned for Arland Williams he had gone under along with the tail section. The story of his unselfishness would not emerge until some time later when the chopper crew and survivors recalled events of that day.

In the end the NTSB concluded the accident was the result of numerous pilot errors; though it must be stressed that the co-pilot did attempt to warn his pilot of problems and was rebuffed. Had his warnings been heeded the accident probably never would have happened. The 14th Street Bridge was renamed "The Arland D. Williams Memorial Bridge" and Williams posthumously received the Coast Guard's Gold Lifesaving Medal in a White House ceremony. Roger Olian and Lenny Skutnik received the same honor and Skutnik was on hand to receive a standing ovation from a joint session of Congress two weeks later during the President's nationally televised State of the Union address. Donald Usher and Melvin Williams who were instrumental in the rescue of all of Flight 90's survivors received Silver Lifesaving medals from the Coast Guard, the Interior Department's Valor Award as well as the Carnegie Hero Fund Medal.

Lenny Skutnik swims toward Priscilla Felch before rescuing her from the freezing Potomac

Martha Davis had been in the music business since 1971 when she joined her first band in Berkeley California. That band eventually moved to LA in search of exposure but didn't have much luck at first. They were persistent though and over the next few years the band went through several name changes and began to attract a local following and the record company attention that comes with it. In 1977 the band, now known as The Motels, received a contract offer from Capital Records but instead of signing on the bottom line they turned it down and wound up disbanding.

The next year Davis decided to reform The Motels with different players and the band started playing clubs again. Once again Capital Records came knocking with a recording contract and this time the band signed. Their first couple of albums didn't attract much attention but their third album, "All Four One", released in 1982, did. The album had essentially been recorded twice. The first go around produced a record called "Apocalypso" that Capital rejected out of hand. The band then went back into the studio with a new producer who was given greater leeway to explore the commercial elements of the band's sound and basically redid the songs from "Apocalypso" with "All Four One" being the result.

"Only the Lonely" was the second single released from the album. It reached #9 on the charts and was accompanied by a hit video on the new MTV. It's a dreamy, melancholy ode to wandering spirits and lonely hearts with the title very consciously paying tribute to the great Roy Orbison single of the same name. A beautiful song that sounds as good today as it did nearly 30 years ago.

Trivial Pursuit debuted in 1982 and became an instant hit. Suddenly people all over America who had paid too much attention in school or whose brains were otherwise stuffed with arcane pop-culture related bits of information had a purpose: to demonstrate by dint of a board game their intellectual superiority to any and all doubters. The problem with Trivial Pursuit was that, unlike say Monopoly, a wanna be winner could spend hours going through the answer cards memorizing them when no one was around, which hardly made for a fair game. There were other problems with the game as well, most notably incorrect answers on the cards that really made for some heated arguments, and in recent years there have been complaints from many circles that the makers of Trivial Pursuit seem to have run out of worthwhile trivia. Instead of asking knowledge-based questions like "what constitutes hypersonic flight" (5 times the speed of sound or greater, in case you were wondering), newer versions of the game have gone in a slightly different direction. For instance: “Which Christina Aguilera fragrance was created to be ‘a special treat, fit for a queen?’” I kid you not, that is an actual question introduced this year. (If you know the answer to that question I fear for your soul, but that's just me.)

Heated arguments and charges of dumbing down aside though, Trivial Pursuit established itself pretty quickly as a decent night's diversion for most folks, as long as you didn't take things too seriously. The original Genus edition of the game has given way to dozens of specialized editions, everything from the Country Music edition to the Lord of the Rings DVD edition and the World Cup edition. All told over 88,000,000 copies of the game have been sold worldwide making it one of the best selling board games of all time.

Go ahead. You know you want to.

Michael Long (wink wink) was a Las Vegas police detective. Then he was shot in the face and nearly killed. Lucky for him billionaire Wilton Knight heard of his case and put up the money to save him and give him a new face via plastic surgery. The reborn crimefighter was christened Michael Knight, given a tripped-out, artificially intelligent Trans Am named KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) as a sidekick and sent forth to do battle with the forces of evil for the elder Knight's vigilante group FLAG (Foundation for Law And Government).

Knight Rider starring David Hasselhoff was launched on September 26, 1982 and became an immediate hit. The chicks liked that Hasselhoff dude and teen nerds all over the country got all pimply over KITT. The story lines were ridiculous, the acting hammy and KITT sounded like he'd swallowed C3P0 but nobody seemed to care. It was classic American escapist TV and was a ratings monster for the first couple of seasons. But after four seasons it was cancelled when those ratings began to decline and several attempts to resuscitate it have proven largely unsuccessful. Hasselhoff himself though went on to become quite a pop music sensation in several northern European countries and had a second hit series a few years later when silicone and sand were combined to create the even more ridiculous (and so of course more successful) Baywatch.

David Hasselhoff as Michael Knight with KITT. Isn't he dreamy? The guy isn't bad looking either.

From the album "Avalon". Roxy Music at their genre-bending, sophisticated, wry, seamless best. More about the album as a whole later.

The British had them. On April 2, 1982 Argentina decided they really wanted them. Later that day the British decided they really wanted to keep these dusty spits of rocky terrain in the middle of nowhere (but admittedly a hell of a lot closer to Argentina than England) and hence the Falklands War came to be.

In this corner you had a bunch of stiffs in uniform in charge in Argentina who needed to divert attention from the mess they'd made out of that country's economy. In the other corner you had people who had the habit of bowing to fantasy figures and who needed to divert attention from the mess they'd made of their country's economy. In the middle you had one Ron Reagan who agreed to help the tiara-lovers in London (which should have told the middle class in this country exactly what he had in store for them) in their war against a soverign nation in the Western Hemisphere, in direct violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

As anyone with a brain could tell this wasn't going to work out well for the army-types clinging desperately to power in Buenos Aires, and it didn't. After 74 days and the loss of more than 600 soldiers and sailors the Argentines surrendered. Some 350 or so British had died in taking back these largely worthless bolders in the sea but hey, the public had been hypnotized successfully and was now so mollified that they were willing to rubber stamp anything that old prune on a broomstick Maggie Thatcher would dangle in front of them. Basking in the light-by-association Reagan also was awarded special political capital points and would use them to help push his agenda to wipe out the middle class by century's end.

The big losers were the soldiers and sailors who were forced to participate in this exercise in futility and the people of Argentina who were forced to accept yet another humiliation brought upon by yet another in a long line of incompetent governments.

More than 300 sailors die after the ARA General Belgrano is heroically torpedoed by a British submarine.

 

Blade Runner is a grown up film of the highest order. Bold, thoughtful and visionary are just a few of the adjectives that come to mind when I think of Ridley Scott's masterpiece. Every viewing of Blade Runner seems to reveal something new and unexpected to me. Even the parts I know down to the last detail still have the ability to wow. Done without any cgi it is a marvel of old-school filmmaking that created an entirely new genre of film: sci-fi noir.

Ridley Scott's vision of Los Angeles as 21st century dystopia has influenced the look of innumerable movies of the decades since from James Cameron's "Terminator" to Tim Burton's "Batman", to "The Crow" to "The Matrix" and many others and remains the high water mark of Scott's long career. "Alien" was brilliant sci-fi and brilliant horror, but with Blade Runner Scott ventured into the deeper waters of the soul and produced a movie that has only grown more relevant as the years have passed. No one wants to think the future is going to be worse than the present but who can deny that Blade Runner's vision of a world gone horribly wrong isn't starting to look more than a little prescient? Overpopulated urban megacities? Check. Environmental degradation? Check. The rise of Asia as a cultural force in the West? Check. Increasingly powerful multinational corporate heads isolated from interaction with and responsibility toward the populations they exploit? Check. Technology that has in many ways surpassed our ability to understand it? Check. And it's that last point that is the heart and soul of the narrative here.

What is life if not a soup of feelings flavored with memories?
With that in mind: what happens if you give robots feelings and false memories as a way to control them? And what happens if they become emotionally attached to those memories, wake up one day and decide they don't want to die? Who's to say who lives and who dies? Who's to say who's alive and who's not?

These are heavy philosophical issues and Scott doesn't do us the disservice of trying to answer them himself. Instead he presents them to us in the form of a filmic meditation and leaves us to decide. It's been a long time since I first saw this film and I'm still thinking it over.

Ridley Scott's film, like the original Philip K. Dick novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) is, at it's core, a cautionary tale. Until we've worked out some of the complex philosophical, legal, societal and mostly moral questions that are arising as our knowledge and accompanying technological prowess take us into undefined territory we should be careful: we might wind up face to face with ourselves one day with a gun in our hand.

Notes: The original studio cut is a waste of time with it's dreadful and distracting voiceover and it's clumsily manufactured 'happy ending'. If you want to see the film the way Scott intended either see the 1992 Directors Cut or the recently released "Final Cut" with it's remastered sound and digitally placed new footage that corrects a few of the original's notable gaffs.

Speaking of sound: the score by Vangelis is nothing less than sublime. The composer paints a parallel story full of wonder, pain, joy, dread and resignation that is never intrusive and absolutely indispensible.

Blade Runner - "The Final Cut" Trailer

With JJ Abrams (and Steven Spielberg's) homage to Spielberg's films of the late 70s and early 80s "Super 8" about to his theaters it seemed like a good time to say a few words about the phenomenon that was ET The Extra-Terrestrial.

To me ET represents the high water mark for Spielberg when it comes to his 'give them wonder and they will come' credo. They certainly did. ET was a box office phenomenon as well as a marketing phenomenon. Among its many records are: most non-consecutive weeks at #1 (16 weeks), consecutive weekends in the top 5 (27 weeks) and consecutive weekends in the top 10 (35 weeks!). It grossed $359 million in its initial domestic run and $435 million overall domestically (after 2 re-releases). That's $1.1 BILLION (domestic) in 2011 dollars (take THAT Avatar)! It stayed the #1 movie of all-time for 11 years until it was displaced in 1993 by another Spielberg beast, Jurrasic Park.

Spielberg's ode to the joys of innocence was a welcome relief from the recession of the early 80s and the relentlessly downbeat height-of-the-Cold-War nightly news. It came and (eventually) went in theaters but stayed in the hearts and minds of those of us who were kids back then (or like my mom, kid's at heart) for many years to come.

Trailer for the 20th anniversary edition:

In the 80s a lot of former 60s lefties embraced the capitalist tide and moved from the commune into the marketplace. Perhaps no one typified this trend more than Jane Fonda.

The former "Hanoi Jane" of the 60s anti-war movement decided it was time to feel the burn and, in 1982, put her celebrity behind a series of aerobics tapes that became a sensation. Her initial tape "The Jane Fonda Workout" went on to sell a whopping 17 million copies and remains the highest selling exercise video of all-time. It seemed there wasn't an upwardly mobile yuppie female in any major metropolitan area of the US in the mid-80s that didn't own a copy.

Some people claim that the popularity of Ms. Fonda's video actually created a surge in the sale of then new-to-the-market VHS players, (and certainly it put wind in the sails of leg-warmer sales), but no matter how you look at it her videos helped stoke the fire of the workout craze that is still thriving day.

Billy Idol was lead singer of GenerationX before embarking on a solo career that made him a household name. I remember seeing this video when I was just a wee tot and thinking "That's what I want to be when I grow up!"
Well, it didn't quite work out that way, but hey, there can only be 1 Billy Idol anyway.