Just Can't Get Enough

Author: Matthew Robinson
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 9780810994331
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Alf -- The baby-sitters club -- Back to school (scratch n' sniff stickers/trapper keeper) -- Cabbage Patch Kids -- Care Bears -- Choose your own adventure -- Crossbows & catapults -- Ewok Village -- Garbage Pail Kids -- G.I. Joe's U.S.S. Flagg -- Girl talk -- Guess who? -- He-Man and the Masters of the Universe -- Hit stix -- Hungry, Hungry Hippos -- Judy Blume -- Lite Brite -- M.A.S.K. -- Madballs -- Mall madness -- M.U.S.C.L.E. Men -- My Lttle Pony -- My Buddy/Kid Sister -- Pogo Ball -- Rainbow Brite -- Scary stories to tell in the dark -- She-Ra -- Strawberry Shortcake -- Thundercats -- Transformers -- Voltron -- World wrestling.

Fad Mania!

Author: Cynthia Overbeck Bix
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
ISBN: 1467710342
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 68

Book Description
College students crammed into phone booths. Couples dancing until they drop. Daredevils swallowing one live goldfish after another. Streakers dashing naked down the street. Planking and flash mobs and robotic pets. These are just some of the crazy fads that have caught hold in the United States over the last century. Where do these ideas come from and why do they catch people's imagination? Fads reflect the mood and spirit of a particular time, and they offer insight into a nation's culture. The 1950s, for example, was a time of economic prosperity and technological development. Americans expressed their delight in new inventions in many creative ways. One popular craze on college campuses was to stuff as many people as possible into a phone booth. On one campus, twenty-five people managed to squeeze into a single booth! In earlier decades, marked by the Depression and World War II, dance marathon frenzy caught on. Promoters lured couples with promises of fame and monetary prizes for those who could dance for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours. And great ideas never die. Almost one hundred years later, dance marathons came back. One creative variation, the flash mob dance, attracts spontaneous performances that range from flash mob wedding dances to ?Gangnam Style" K-Pop flash mobs in cities all over the world. Fad Mania! explores a century of American crazes, offering an entertaining and informative look at the major historical events of each decade and the fads that defined them. As you learn more about smiley buttons and Webkinz, you may just be able to predict this decade's next craze!

Entertainment Industries

Author: Alan McKee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317979184
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Entertainment Industries is the first book to map entertainment as a cultural system. Including work from world-renowned analysts such as Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, this innovative collection explains what entertainment is and how it works. Entertainment is audience-centred culture. The Entertainment Industries are a uniquely interdisciplinary collection of evolving businesses that openly monitor evolving cultural trends and work within them. The producers of entertainment – central to that practice– are the new artists. They understand audiences and combine creative, business and legal skills in order to produce cultural products that cater to them. Entertainment Industries describes the characteristics of entertainment, the systems that produce it, and the role of producers and audiences in its development, as well as explaining the importance of this area of study, and how it might be better integrated into Universities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

Ready Player One

Author: Ernest Cline
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307887456
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club “Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost “An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN “A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe “Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR “[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9

Just Can't Get Enough

Author: Simon Spence
Publisher: Jawbone Press
ISBN: 9781906002565
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Nobody who saw Depeche Mode in 1980 could have predicted that those four fresh-faced, synth-pop innocents would transform themselves into stadium-filling rock gods within a few years. Yet Depeche Mode went on to become one of the ten bestselling British acts of all-time, ranked alongside such exalted company as The Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, and David Bowie. And, after three decades together, the group continues to thrive, both critically and commercially. In Just Can't Get Enough, published to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the group's debut album, Speak & Spell, author Simon Spence charts that transformation. From a tiny nightclub residency in their native Essex to facing tens of thousands in huge stadiums in Europe and America in the mid 80s, Spence examines a musical journey that took the band from early 'ultra-pop' hit singles to the stark Black Celebration album. Hailing from Basildon, an experimental post-war New Town, the all-electronic Depeche Mode were, in the words of singer Dave Gahan, a "new sort of band from a new sort of town". And Basildon itself, Spence argues, defined them - its brutal Modernist architecture imposed on a rural landscape dotted with primitive shacks a mirror for the angular sound and dark loneliness of the band's music. Part musical odyssey, part cultural history, Spence draws on dozens of firsthand interviews to give us an inside view of one of the most unlikely stories in pop and rock.

The Impossible Fortress

Author: Jason Rekulak
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501144413
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
The year is 1987 and Playboy has just published scandalous photographs of Vanna White, from the popular TV game show Wheel of Fortune. For three teenage boys, Billy, Alf, and Clark, who are desperately uneducated in the ways of women, the magazine is somewhat of a Holy Grail: priceless beyond measure and impossible to attain. So, they hatch a plan to steal it.

Mad World

Author: Lori Majewski
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1613126662
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
A “hugely entertaining” history of the 1980s New Wave music scene told through new interviews with its biggest artists (Rolling Stone). Mad World is a compelling oral history that celebrates the New Wave music phenomenon of the 1980s via new interviews with 35 of the most notable artists of the period. Each chapter begins with a discussion of their most popular song and leads to stories of their history and place in the scene, ultimately painting a vivid picture of this colorful, idiosyncratic time. Mixtape suggestions, fashion sidebars, and quotes from famous contemporary admirers help fill out the fun. Participants include members of Duran Duran, New Order, The Smiths, Tears for Fears, Adam Ant, Echo, and the Bunnymen, Devo, ABC, Spandau Ballet, A Flock of Seagulls, Thompson Twins, INXS, and more. “One addictive chapter after another.” —Rob Sheffield, author of Talking to Girls About Duran Duran “Tells the tale of some of the decade’s most unforgettable songs . . . in fascinating detail, letting the architects of these memorable records shine a light on how the sound of a generation came to be.” —The Hollywood Reporter “The new wave era is often dismissed for its one-hit wonders and silly haircuts, but [Mad World] examines the period with a great deal of love and reverence.” —Buzzfeed “A really informative and insightful read.” —People

Billboard

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

Back to Our Future

Author: David Sirota
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345518802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could describe our current moment—or the vaunted iconography of three decades past. In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama). Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.

Genius

Author: Leopoldo Gout
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250045819
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Three teen geniuses from around the world must win a Game witht he highest of stakes in this action-packed novel.