The iconic 1980′s show Max Headroom is being released on DVD by Shout! Factory.

Max was really an actor wearing prosthetics, and that illusion epitomizes the television-mad future in the show. The series, to be released on DVD by Shout! Factory, follows Network 23’s star reporter, Edison Carter (Matt Frewer, who also played Max), through a corporate-ruled wasteland where new technology beget new forms of abuse. The show, datelined “20 minutes into the future,” stirs together future-shock speculation with contemporary influences: roving live broadcasts, cyberpunk, MTV, camera-ready Reagan-like artifice, television evangelism, video art and the thousand-channel universe.

Those are a few of the characters that John Hughes created through the numerous films that he wrote and/or directed during the 1980′s and 1990′s.  Sadly, John Hughes died today at age 59. So I thought I would take a second to acknowledge him.  The movies that he was responsible for, and the influence his movies had on those who grew up in the 1980′s and 1990′s, is beyond compare. Dare I say that Hughes was the most prolific and influential director of this era? Its not that far fetched. Lets take a look.

They may not have been Oscar winners, but their influence and cult like status is unmatched. Between 1984 and 1986 here are just a few of the movies he directed, produced, or wrote: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, Mr. Mom, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Some Kind of Wonderful, and National Lampoon’s Vacation/European Vacation.  To this day, these movies sill make me laugh. The characters he created were funny, quirky, unique, and more than anything, real. We lost a little bit of our youth today.

MTV has released an online video site that houses all the videos that have ever run on the network (we won’t talk about its name – MTV Music or Music Television Music – or the fact that these days MTV is anything but Music Television).

Check out the very first video ever played on MTV, The Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star or this Internet classic or Devo’s Whip It or one of my favorites, the Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl”.

The Most Popular area, which as of today looks like a retro 1980′s top video list with video “classics” like Dire Straits Money for Nothing, aHa’s Take on Me, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, or – wait for it – Toto’s Africa.

Big hair is back, kids.

I’ve been looking for this since I was in 7th Grade. Rubik’s Cube Solver

OK, so I am genuinely sad to hear of the passing of Ronald Reagan. In many ways, he was the great figurehead of the 1980′s, a time that was definitely an interesting period in my life. Don’t get me wrong, he was a very important figure in the history of the US and at the time, he was probably the best choice the country had as we were emerging out of the Vietnam and Watergate eras. But he was really not that great of a President IMHO and, similar to a certain current President, it was brutally obvious that there were people pulling the strings and he was the puppet. His tenure was marked by the Iran-Contra scandal, a scandal that for some reason did not nearly get the type attention and fallout on his Presidency that it deserved. And to say that Reagan ended the Cold War is just silly. All this talk about putting his bust on Mount Rushmore, or renaming something in every state for him, is just loony. Go ahead and name some streets, a river, and some place out in California that was important to him, but lets not get carried away here folks.

I was driving around yesterday and the seminal 1980′s one-hit-wonder song “I Ran” by A Flock of Seagulls came on the radio, and in seconds it sent me hurtling back to the teen angst of high school. Listening to this song and being exposed to all the recent retro stories about the 1980′s makes me realize what a unique period that was in the history of music.