Guest Contributor

10 feel-good retro TV theme songs that will fix your mood

By Guest Contributor | January 18, 2024

Back in the ‘80s, TV music trained my dog. When the closing theme for LA Law played, the pup would find her leash, then wait near Dad’s cigar stash. She knew it was time for a walk! TV music has trained me too. The Twilight Zone theme song makes me double-check door locks, and the intro to the news makes me tense up. But sitcom theme songs get me smiling. With comedies in mind, join us as we revisit retro TV theme songs that add a little pep to our step — and maybe your dog’s too. “Movin'

The top 5 episodes of the original Quantum Leap — according to IMDB

By Guest Contributor | May 11, 2023

By Nicholas Yanes A few months ago, the Quantum Leap revival was renewed for a second season. With fans waiting for the continuation of the reboot to return, it’s a perfect time to look at the original series — focusing on its top five episodes. For those new to this franchise, the original Quantum Leap premiered on March 26, 1989, and ran until May 5, 1993. Following Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett and Dean Stockwell as Rear Admiral Albert "Al" Calavicci, the series went on for five seasons

WonderCon exclusive — X-men: The Animated Series director Larry Houston's secret cameos

By Guest Contributor | March 31, 2023

How the legendary animation producer and director snuck Thor, Spider-Man, and more into the '90s X-Men cartoon.

The top 10 Stephen King horror adaptations

By Guest Contributor | October 24, 2022

While he’ll probably never be regarded in the same literary echelon as H. P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe, you can’t deny Stephen King has commercialized horror on a scale that’s never been seen before him or since. He could take a sweatshirt and turn it into an instrument of evil that would have his readers walking around shivering in their T-shirts in the dead of winter. That’s been King’s modus operandi since day one: finding horror in the everyday. A dreamy hotel, a girl going through puber

The 10 most important lessons from '80s vampire movies

By Guest Contributor | August 1, 2022

Once seen as dusty, old dental cases in frilly shirts who’d lounge in their coffins and listen to baroque between victims, vampires received a major makeover in the ‘80s. They rocked out to Bauhaus. They invaded high schools and suburbia. They wore an absolute ton of sunglasses. The decade brought a true resurgence and reimagining of the cinematic bloodsucker. For some, these movies were mindless entertainment. But for others—you know, the sort who just might happen to have waterproof roll ca

Every dinosaur in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies — ranked

By Guest Contributor | June 4, 2022

Note: This list was written before and does not include new Dominion dinos. There’s something about dinosaurs that just takes you right back to childhood. Both Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg cited their own childhood fascinations with dinos as what sparked their passion for Jurassic Park. It is pretty incredible after all to think that these beasts—both the gentle giants and not so gentle giants—once ruled the Earth. This summer’s Jurassic World: Dominion explores the tantalizing quest

The top 10 John Hughes movies

By Guest Contributor | May 17, 2022

There are some directors you think of when certain movie genres come up: Alfred Hitchcock mastered the psychological thriller, Akira Kurosawa cornered the market on the samurai epic, Sergio Leone dominated the spaghetti western—and John Hughes wrote the book on movies about teens. Of course, Hughes branched out into other genres too, including films about the holidays and live-action movies where a dog is the main character (it’s a bigger genre than you might think). But he’s definitely best k

5 retro toys that had to be taken off the shelves for being too dangerous

By Guest Contributor | May 8, 2022

Absentee parents and stupid kids always spoil the fun for the rest of us. Case-in-point: Rad toys that met their demise because they were deemed too dangerous to our precious youth. Here, we’re breaking down some of the most infamous toys that met the banhammer in epic ways. Lawn Darts Ancient times-1980s There’s a mid-80s home video of my extended family having a Fourth of July cookout. Some folks are dancing, others are playing Badminton, a group are laughing and chatting — everyone is dr

The Cartoon Network shows you don't remember

By Guest Contributor | May 2, 2022

Since its debut in 1992, Cartoon Network has been host to a wide variety of animated shows. From the likes of The Powerpuff Girls to modern series like Craig of the Creek, the network has triumphed in its prolific history of entertaining kids and kids at heart. But for every Ed, Edd n Eddy or Steven Universe they put out, there's bound to be a program or 10 that have slipped through the public consciousness. If you remember any of these long-lost shows, you may just be among the most elite of

5 of the weirdest 80s sci-fi music videos

By Guest Contributor | April 25, 2022

The 1980s were a golden decade for sci-fi — one that lived out its dystopian Cold War-laced paranoia vicariously through futuristic David vs. Goliath stories on the silver screen. It all added up to some of the best sci-fi cinema ever made, in my humble opinion. Empire Strikes Back, Flash Gordon, and Battle Beyond the Stars kicked it all off that first year. Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, and Tron (all 1982) defined the next wave. That’s before we got revved up on E.T., The Last St

Every theatrical Star Wars film — ranked

By Guest Contributor | April 12, 2022

Across four decades, three trilogies, 12 theatrical films, seven animated series, countless theme park rides, a holiday special, all kinds of continuation novels, and enough merchandising deals to fill the belly of a Sarlacc, Star Wars has pervaded pop culture like no film franchise before or since. Like Luke Skywalker looking to the stars and wondering what it would be like to sit in the cockpit of an X-wing, it all began as the dream of one man who thought it would be neat to mash up Akira Ku

The Mario game you probably never played

By Guest Contributor | March 29, 2022

Every self-respecting Nintendo fan knows what Mario Party is. The four-player board/video game mashup that destroys friendships has seen tons of variations over the past couple decades since its debut on the Nintendo 64. But what if I told you that there was a Mario Party game that was not only an actual board game, but to get the most out of it, you’d need to have a Game Boy Advance peripheral that scans cards? Strange. Suddenly, the room has gotten very quiet. Released in 2001 in Japan (200

Every theatrical Batman film, ranked

By Guest Contributor | March 3, 2022

Whatever name you prefer to call him by—Batman, the Batman, Batsy, the Caped Crusader, the World’s Greatest Detective, the Dark Knight, the Dork Knight, Beloved—Bruce Wayne’s alter ego has taken many forms over the years in his efforts to protect Gotham from clowns, plant ladies, and that one guy who just likes to shoot ketchup and mustard at people. Sometimes he growls incomprehensibly. Sometimes he ice skates. Sometimes he’s actually just LEGO bricks. But he always stands for justice and absol

The top 10 live-action fantasy movies from the ’80s

By Guest Contributor | February 2, 2022

With new advancements in special effects and the success of Star Wars in particular, studios and filmmakers turned their attention as they headed into the 1980s towards a genre of storytelling that has been entertaining audiences since time immemorial: fantasy. With special effects wizards who could now build life-sized dragons and artists who could make actors disappear beneath genuinely organic-looking makeup, the time was ripe for fantasy films to flood the market. Of course, not every fanta

The top 10 representations of nerds in cinema

By Guest Contributor | January 20, 2022

The Nerd has a long history in the movies, one that probably dates back to silent comedian Harold Lloyd and the bespectacled klutz he played in films like Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925). The term “nerd” was apparently first popularized in the mid-seventies by Happy Days when it was applied to literally everyone in the cast who was not the Fonz. The ‘80s turned out to be a kind of heyday for the cinematic nerd, but that may just be because fashion itself was pretty polarizing at the