• Economics: 99-year-old phone company AT&T (Ma Bell) agreed to break up into seven smaller regional companies (Baby Bells).
• The Top Song was I Love Rock and Roll by Joan Jett & The Blackhearts
• The Big Movies included E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Tootsie and An Officer and a Gentleman
• Price of Lincoln Towncar in 1982: $13,491.00
  Choc Full O’Nuts: $2.09/pound
  Price of a movie ticket: $3.00
  Sony Walkman: $129.00
• The World Population was ~ 4,556,000,000
• Illuminati (card game) was introduced.
• Trivial Pursuit was released in 1982.
• And… Michael Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace twice. During the second break-in, he made it into Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom.

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” is not a quote from some ancient philosopher or legal code.
It is a quote from the 1982 Star Trek film The Wrath of Khan.

“E.T. phone home”
– E.T. in E.T.

“They’re Here”
– Heather O’Rourke in Poltergeist

“RAID kills bugs dead.”
– RAID

“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”
– FedEx

Larry Walters, the man who flew 15,000 feet above LA in a lawn chair carried by weather balloons in 1982, said to the press after he landed- “It was something I had to do. I had this dream for twenty years, and if I hadn’t done it, I think I would have ended up on the funny farm.”

The screenplay for John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing was based on a 1938 science-fiction novella entitled Who Goes There? The character names and main plot points are almost identical, and the creature is called “the Thing” within the story.

The 2020 Olympics took place in Tokyo, as predicted in the manga Akira in 1982.

A Los Angeles man named Larry Walters used a lawn chair and weather balloons to ascend to 15,000ft above ground. On the way up, he lost his glasses and bb gun, which he planned to use to shoot balloons to descend. While landing, he caused a power outage and was fined $1500.

Disneyland dropped their ride tickets and went to a flat entrance fee.

The Man in the High Castle, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau, Screamers and Paycheck (among others) are all based on short stories by author Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982).

An ATARI game was released starring the band Journey, called Journey Escape. The game failed and caused the company, Data Age, to go under.

By 1982, Space Invaders had grossed $2 billion. 8 billion quarters!

His manager pressured Joe Strummer (frontman of The Clash) to go into hiding in Texas as a publicity stunt for the band’s upcoming tour. Strummer instead decided to genuinely disappear to France for months, where he ran the Paris Marathon.

Charanjit Singh made an album in what we now call the Acid House genre, in 1982. Some music commentators credit him as the pioneer of Acid House music.

Universal Studios sued Nintendo over alleged similarities between King Kong and Donkey Kong. Not only did they lose, but the court found a King Kong game that Universal licensed violated Nintendo’s copyrights.

In 1982, Susan Glines was the last telephone switchboard operator for a hand-crank phone. The town where she worked, Bryant Pond, Maine, converted to non-hand-cranked phones.

(Paul) Newman’s Own opened for business, profiting from year one, and donating all profits to charity.

Jackie Chan’s movie, Dragon Lord (1982), set a World Record for most takes for a single scene, reportedly totaling 2,900 before Jackie Chan got it right in his eyes

The lowest PGA score of 63 played by Ray Floyd.

On SNL, Eddie Murphy held Larry, a live lobster, aloft and declared that the show’s audience would determine whether he lived or died and that this is where Larry the Lobster from Spongebob got his name. Although he was initially saved in the telephone vote, Eddie ate the cooked Larry the following week.

A Hollywood screenwriter, Chuck Ross, retyped the script to Casablanca and submitted it to 217 agencies, titled Everybody Comes To Rick’s. Many agencies rejected it as not good enough to turn into a movie.

In 1982, Byron Preiss released the book The Secret: A Treasure Hunt (out of print last we checked), which contained 12 cryptic puzzles. You received a gem worth about $1000 if you solved the puzzle. The first was found in Chicago, Illinois; the second in Cleveland, Ohio; and the most recent treasure box in Boston, Massachusetts. The remaining nine treasure boxes have not yet been recovered.

Canaan Banana, the first president of Zimbabwe, passed a law in 1982 outlawing jokes about his name.

Wes Craven chose to make Freddy Krueger’s sweater colors red and green, after reading an article in Scientific American in 1982 that said this particular combination was the two most clashing colors to the human retina.

The spikes at the end of Stegosaurus’s tail are called “thagomizers” because of a Far Side comic, published in 1982, that featured a caveman pointing to a diagram of a Stegosaurus tail with the caption “Now this end is called the Thagomizer- after the late Thag Simmons.”

In honor of a 1982 The Far Side comic, the spiked end of a stegosaurus’s tail is referred to by paleontologists as the “Thagomizer.”
The 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville turned a profit of only $57.

The King of Swaziland, King Sobhuza II, married 70 wives, who gave him 210 children between 1920 and 1970. At his death in 1982, he had more than 1000 grandchildren.

The 1982 film Tron wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award for visual effects because the use of computers was considered “cheating.”

Atlanta Braves pitcher Pascual Perez, who just got his driver’s license, got lost on Interstate 285 (a loop) while driving to a game he was scheduled to start. He could not find his exit, and circled the city several times, before eventually running out of gas and missing the game.

Michael Jackson’s Thriller album was released on November 30th. Depending on who you talk to, up to 110,000,000 copies were sold.

Adobe was founded in California by Chuck Geschke and John Warnock in 1982.

Cost of a Superbowl ad in 1982: $324,000

It brought the following terms (Valspeak) into the American lexicon:

Like – Used as an interjection: “That was, like, the worst thing ever!” or to indicate speech: “And she was like ‘Get out of my way!'”

As if – lit. “yeah, right” or “as if” except it does not use a subject; expresses disbelief.

Bitchin’ – adj. slang for excellent; first-rate. Though a derivative of “bitch”, bitchin’ is sometimes not considered profane.

Whatever! – short for “whatever you say”; sarcastic interjection often emphasizing the final syllable.

Fer shur – lit. “For sure”, is often used in agreement.

Totally -“I agree” or “completely.”

Oh my God (later OMG!) – can be used in many ways; it expresses shock.

Tre – A synonym for “very” (derived from French “très”)

So – Very; used frequently and said with strong emphasis.

Seriously – Frequent interjection of approval.

Gnarly – an expression of seriousness. It can be a word for very intense or very pleasing

Are you serious?- an expression of surprise.

Anyways… – Substitute for the grammatically correct “Anyway…”

An onset accident took the lives of Vic Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Le, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie.

[SPOILER ALERT] was used as early as 1982, and it concerned the plot of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The movie Poltergeist used actual human remains as props because they were cheaper than the plastic alternative.

A 1982 Barbie commercial ends with the line, “Better make Ken a sandwich!”

John DeLorean, best known for developing the DeLorean DMC-12, also developed the Pontiac GTO, Firebird, Grand Prix, and Chevy Vega. He was arrested for drug trafficking in 1982, trying to raise money for his failing company, and successfully defended himself, proving entrapment by federal agents.

The subject of The Kinks 1982 hit Come Dancing, Ray Davies’ sister Rene died of a heart attack while dancing at a ballroom on his 13th birthday.

The 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, TN, made a total profit of $57- the city was left with $46M debt.

Madison Square Garden has not paid property taxes since 1982 because a 10-year tax abatement was inadvertently made perpetual due to a clerical error. This has cost New York City (and saved MSG) about $200M.

Someone laced Tylenol capsules with cyanide on store shelves across the Chicago area, killing seven. While the perpetrator of this crime was never found, it did usher in the development of tamper-proof packaging for over-the-counter drugs, which is now an industry standard.

The MPAA tried to outlaw VCRs (unsuccessfully) in 1982.

Press sensationalism influenced the 1982 conviction of an Australian woman for murdering her baby. After six years in prison, she was exonerated, yet her plaintive “a dingo ate my baby” became joke fodder among American comedians.

While wearing his future wife Sharon’s dress, Ozzy Osbourne drunkenly urinated on a cenotaph erected in honor of those who died at the Alamo in Texas. He was arrested and subsequently banned from San Antonio for ten years.

Movie Star Death: John Belushi (heroin & cocaine overdose)

Airplane Celebrity Death: Randy Rhodes

Arcadia 2001 Game Console, Colecovision, Vectrex Video Console, Atari 5200 SuperSystem, Coleco’s Gemini Console, Strawberry Shortcake, Smurfs, My Little Pony, BMX Bikes, Trivial Pursuit, Sequence

EA (Electronic Arts) was founded.

1982 was the year Kenneth Cole launched his shoe company.

GM introduced the General Motors’ Saturn car company.

The first documented use of emoticons 🙂 And 🙁 was in September 1982 at Carnegie Mellon University.

NASCAR Illustrated Magazine (1982-2016)

PC Magazine (1982-2009)

Details Magazine (1982-2015)

Comics Scene Magazine (1982-2000)

Reading E.T. the Extraterrestrial Storybook by William Kotzwinkle

(Data is compiled from charts, including Billboard’s Pop, Rock, Airplay, R&B/Dance, and Singles Charts. The Hot 100 is the primary chart used for this list.)

January 30, 1982 – February 5, 1982: Daryl Hall and John Oates – I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)

February 6, 1982 – March 19, 1982: The J. Geils Band – Centerfold

March 20, 1982 – May 7, 1982: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts – I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll

May 8, 1982 – May 14, 1982: Vangelis – Chariots of Fire

May 15, 1982 – July 2, 1982: Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder – Ebony and Ivory

July 3, 1982 – July 23, 1982: The Human League – Don’t You Want Me

July 24, 1982 – September 3, 1982: Survivor – Eye of the Tiger

September 4, 1982 – September 10, 1982: Steve Miller Band – Abracadabra

September 11, 1982 – October 1, 1982: Chicago – Hard to Say I’m Sorry

October 2, 1982 – October 29, 1982: John Cougar – Jack and Diane

October 30, 1982 – November 5, 1982: Men at Work – Who Can It Be Now

November 6, 1982 – November 26, 1982: Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes – Up Where We Belong

November 27, 1982 – December 10, 1982: Lionel Richie – Truly

December 11, 1982 – December 17, 1982: Toni Basil – Mickey

December 18, 1982 – January 14, 1983: Daryl Hall and John Oates – Maneater

(according to boxofficemojo)
1. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
2. Tootsie
3. An Officer And A Gentleman
4. Rocky III
5. Porky’s
6. Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Kahn
7. 48 HRS
8. Poltergeist
9. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
10. Annie

48 HRS., An Officer and a Gentleman, Annie, The Beastmaster, Best Friends, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, The Dark Crystal, Diner, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Firefox, First Blood, Friday the 13th Part III, Gandhi, Poltergeist, Porky’s, Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, The Road Warrior, Rocky III, The Secret of NIMH, Smokey and the Bandit Part III, Sophie’s Choice, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Tootsie, The Toy, Tron, The World According to Garp, The Verdict, Victor/Victoria, Young Doctor’s In Love