A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Bob Fosse.

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Bob Fosse was an American actor, choreographer, dancer, and film and stage director. He directed and choreographed musical works on stage and screen, including the stage musicals The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Sweet Charity, Pippin, and Chicago. He directed the films Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz, and Star 80. 

Fosse’s distinctive style of choreography included turned-in knees and “jazz hands”. He is the only person ever to have won Oscar, Emmy, and Tony awards in the same year. He was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning Best Director for Cabaret, and won the Palme D’Or in 1980 for All That Jazz. He won a record eight Tonys for his choreography, as well as one for direction for Pippin.

He was drawn to dance and took lessons. When he was 13 years old, Fosse performed professionally in Chicago with Charles Grass, as “The Riff Brothers”. They toured vaudeville and movie houses in Chicago, as well as USO theaters and Eagles Clubs. Many of these performances included shows at burlesque clubs, such as the Silver Cloud and Cave of Winds. Fosse himself is quoted with saying “I was sixteen years old, and I played the whole burlesque wheel.” However, many of the women and promoters did not care that Fosse was underage working in adult clubs or that he would be exposed to sexual harassment from the burlesque women. Much of the erotica he saw would inspire his future work. In 1943, at age 15. Fosse would come to choreograph his first dance number and earn his first full credit as a choreographer in a film, Hold Evry’thing! A Streamlined Extravaganza in Two Parts, which featured showgirls wearing strapless dresses and performing a fan dance, inspired by his time in burlesque houses.

After graduating from high school in 1945, Fosse was recruited into the United States Navy toward the end of World War II at Naval Station Great Lakes, where he was sent to be prepared for combat. Fosse petitioned his manager, Frederick Weaver, to advocate on his behalf to his superiors after his own failed attempts to be placed in the Special Services Entertainment Division. Fosse was soon placed in the variety show Tough Situation, which toured military and naval bases in the Pacific.

After his discharge, Fosse moved to New York City in 1947 with the ambition of being the new Fred Astaire. He began to study acting at the American Theatre Wing, where he met his first wife and dance partner, Mary Ann Niles. His first stage role was in Call Me Mister, along with Niles. Fosse and Niles were regular performers on Your Hit Parade in its 1950–1951 season. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis saw their act in New York’s Pierre Hotel and scheduled the couple to appear on The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1951.

In a 1986 interview Fosse told an interviewer, “Jerry started me doing choreography. He gave me my first job as a choreographer and I’m grateful for that.”

Fosse was signed to an MGM contract in 1953. His early screen appearances as a dancer included Give a Girl a Break, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis and Kiss Me Kate, all released in 1953. Fosse’s choreography of a short dance sequence in Kiss Me Kate and dance with Carol Haney brought him to the attention of Broadway producers.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fosse transitioned from film to theater. In 1948, Tony Charmoli danced in Make Mine Manhattan, but gave the part to Fosse when the show toured nationally. Charmoli also found Fosse work as a dancer on the TV shows he was working on when Fosse returned from the tour.

In 1953, Fosse appeared in the M-G-M musical Kiss Me Kate, starring Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, and Ann Miller. Fosse played Hortensio within The Taming of the Shrew dance sequences.

In 1954, Fosse choreographed his first musical, The Pajama Game, followed by My Sister Eileen and George Abbott’s Damn Yankees in 1955. It was while working on Damn Yankees that he first met rising star Gwen Verdon, whom he married in 1960. For her work in Damn Yankees, Verdon won her first Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1956. She had previously won a Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical for Can-Can. In 1957, Fosse choreographed New Girl in Town, also directed by Abbott, and Verdon won her second Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1958.

In 1957, Fosse choreographed the film version of The Pajama Game starring Doris Day. The next year, Fosse appeared in and choreographed the film version of Damn Yankees, in which Verdon reprised her stage triumph as the character Lola. Fosse and Verdon were partners in the mambo number “Who’s Got the Pain”.

In 1959, Fosse directed and choreographed the musical Redhead. For his work on Redhead, Fosse won the Tony Award for Best Choreography while Verdon won her third Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. Redhead won the Tony Award for best musical. Fosse’s next feature was supposed to be the musical The Conquering Hero based on a book by Larry Gelbart, but he was replaced as director/choreographer.

In 1961, Fosse choreographed the satirical Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying starring Robert Morse. The story revolves around an ambitious man, J. Pierrepont Finch (Morse), who, with the help of the book How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, rises from window washer to chairman of the board of the World Wide Wicket Company. The musical was an instant hit.

In 1963, Fosse was nominated for two Tony Awards for Best Choreography and Best Direction of a Musical for the musical Little Me, winning the former.

He choreographed and directed Verdon in Sweet Charity in 1966. Fosse directed five feature films. His first, Sweet Charity starring Shirley MacLaine, is an adaptation of the Broadway musical he had directed and choreographed.

In 1972, Fosse directed his second theatrical film, Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York and Joel Grey. The film is based on the 1966 musical of the same name. In the traditional manner of musical theater, called an “integrated musical”, every significant character in the stage version sings to express his or her own emotion and to advance the plot. In the film version, the musical numbers are entirely diegetic. The film focuses on a young romance between Sally Bowles (Minnelli), who performs at the Kit Kat Klub, and a young British idealist played by York. The story set at the backdrop of the rise of Nazi Germany. The film was an immediate success among audiences and critics alike. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director. Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey both won Oscars for their roles in Cabaret.

Also in 1972, Fosse and Minnelli joined once again to create her TV Special Liza with a Z, earning Fosse an Emmy Award for both direction and choreography.

In 1973, Fosse’s work on Pippin won him the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. He was director and choreographer of Chicago in 1975, which also starred Verdon.

In 1974, Fosse directed Lenny, a biographical movie about comedian Lenny Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman. Fosse was again nominated for Best Director, Hoffman also received a nomination for Best Actor.

Fosse performed a song and dance in Stanley Donen’s 1974 film version of The Little Prince. According to AllMusic, “Bob Fosse stops the show with a slithery dance routine.” In 1977, Fosse had a small role in the romantic comedy Thieves.

In 1979, Fosse co-wrote and directed a semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz, starring Roy Scheider, which portrayed the life of a womanizing, drug-addicted choreographer and director in the midst of triumph and failure. Ann Reinking appears in the film as the protagonist’s lover, protégée and domestic partner. All That Jazz won four Academy Awards, earning Fosse his third Oscar nomination for Best Director. It also won the Palme d’Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival. In 1980, Fosse commissioned documentary research for a follow-up feature exploring the motivations of people who become performers.

Fosse’s final film, Star 80, was a biographical movie about Dorothy Stratten, a Playboy Playmate who was murdered. The film is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning article. The film was screened out of competition at the 34th Berlin International Film Festival.

In 1986, Fosse wrote, choreographed and directed the Broadway production of Big Deal, which was nominated for five Tony awards, winning for best choreography, as well as five more for the revival of Sweet Charity at the nearby Minskoff Theater, winning a Tony for Best Revival.

Fosse began work on a film about gossip columnist Walter Winchell that would have starred Robert De Niro as Winchell. The Winchell script was written by Michael Herr. Fosse died before starting the Winchell project.

Notable distinctions of Fosse’s style included the use of turned-in knees, the “Fosse Amoeba”, sideways shuffling, rolled shoulders and jazz hands. With Astaire as an influence, Fosse used props such as bowler hats, canes and chairs. His trademark use of hats was influenced by his own self-consciousness, according to Martin Gottfried in his biography of Fosse, “His baldness was the reason that he wore hats, and was doubtless why he put hats on his dancers.” Fosse used gloves in his performances because he did not like his hands. Some of his most popular numbers include “Steam Heat” (The Pajama Game) and “Big Spender” (Sweet Charity). The “Rich Man’s Frug” scene (starring a young Ben Vereen) in Sweet Charity is another example of his signature style.

For Damn Yankees, Fosse was inspired by the “father of theatrical jazz dance”, Jack Cole. In 1957, Verdon and Fosse studied with Sanford Meisner to develop a better acting technique. According to Michael Joosten, Fosse once said: “The time to sing is when your emotional level is too high to just speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you ‘feel.'” In Redhead, Fosse used one of the first ballet sequences in a show that contained five different styles of dance: Fosse’s jazz, a cancan, a gypsy dance, a march and an old-fashioned English music hall number. During Pippin, Fosse made the first television commercial for a Broadway show.

Fosse married dance partner Mary Ann Niles (1923–1987) on May 3, 1947, in Detroit. In 1952, a year after he divorced Niles, he married dancer Joan McCracken in New York City; this marriage lasted until 1959, when it also ended in divorce.

His third wife was dancer and actress Gwen Verdon, whom he met choreographing Damn Yankees, in which she starred. In 1963, they had a daughter, Nicole Fosse, who later became a dancer and actress. Fosse’s extramarital affairs put a strain on the marriage and by 1971 they were separated, although they remained legally married until his death in 1987. Verdon never remarried.

Fosse met dancer Ann Reinking during the run of Pippin in 1972. According to Reinking, their romantic relationship ended “toward the end of the run of Dancin'” (1978).

In 1961, Fosse’s epilepsy was revealed when he had a seizure onstage during rehearsals for The Conquering Hero.

Fosse’s time outside of the rehearsal studio or theater was seldom spent alone. As stated in the biography Fosse by Sam Wasson, “nights alone were murder on Fosse”. To alleviate loneliness and insomnia brought on by his prescribed amphetamines, Fosse would often contact dancers he would work with and try to date them, making it hard for many to refuse his advances, but also giving him the affirmation of success he sought.

During their joint career, Fosse would continually take blame from critics while Gwen Verdon would get praise, no matter how much influence Verdon had on a production. However, Verdon always looked out for him and the Fosse family image, hosting grandiose cast parties and being Fosse’s personal press secretary throughout their marriage.

Fosse died of a heart attack on September 23, 1987, at George Washington University Hospital while the revival of Sweet Charity was opening at the nearby National Theatre. He had collapsed in Verdon’s arms near the Willard Hotel.

As he had requested, Verdon and Nicole Fosse scattered his ashes in the Atlantic Ocean off Quogue, Long Island, where Fosse had been living with his girlfriend of four years.

A month after his death, Verdon fulfilled Fosse’s request for his friends to “go out and have dinner on me” by hosting a star-studded, celebrity-filled evening at Tavern on the Green.

At the 1973 Academy Awards, Fosse won the Academy Award for Best Director for Cabaret. That same year he won Tony Awards for directing and choreographing Pippin and Primetime Emmy Awards for producing, choreographing and directing Liza Minnelli’s television special Liza with a Z. Fosse was the only person to win all three major industry awards in the same year.

Fosse was inducted into the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York on April 27, 2007. The Los Angeles Dance Awards, founded in 1994, were called the “Fosse Awards”, and are now called the American Choreography Awards. The Bob Fosse-Gwen Verdon Fellowship was established by their daughter, Nicole Fosse, in 2003 at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Reinking and Verdon kept Fosse’s unique choreography alive after his death. Reinking played the role of Roxie Hart in the New York revival of Chicago, which opened in 1996. She choreographed the dances in Fosse style for that revival. In 1999, Verdon served as artistic consultant on a Broadway musical designed to showcase examples of classic Fosse choreography. Called simply Fosse, the three-act musical revue was conceived and directed by Richard Maltby, Jr. and Reinking, and choreographed by Reinking and Chet Walker. Verdon and Fosse’s daughter, Nicole, received a special thanks credit. The show won a Tony for best musical.

Fosse/Verdon is an eight-part American miniseries starring Sam Rockwell as Fosse and Michelle Williams as Verdon. The series, which tells the story of the couple’s troubled personal and professional relationship, is based on the biography Fosse by Sam Wasson.  It premiered in eight parts on April 9, 2019, on FX. At the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards, Fosse/Verdon received seventeen nominations, including Outstanding Limited Series and acting nominations for Rockwell, Williams, and Qualley. Williams won the Emmy for Outstanding Actress in a Limited Series.

A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Bayard Rustin.

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Bayard Rustin was an African American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights.

Rustin worked with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement, in 1941, to press for an end to racial discrimination in employment. Rustin later organized Freedom Rides, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership and teaching King about nonviolence; he later served as an organizer for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Rustin worked alongside Ella Baker, a co-director of the Crusade for Citizenship, in 1954; and before the Montgomery bus boycott, he helped organize a group, called “In Friendship”, amongst Baker, Stanley Levison of the American Jewish Congress, and some other labor leaders. “In Friendship” provided material and legal assistance to those being evicted from their tenant farms and households in Clarendon County, Yazoo, and other places. Rustin became the head of the AFL–CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and promoted the unionization of African Americans. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. At the time of his death in 1987, he was on a humanitarian mission in Haiti.

Rustin was a gay man and, due to criticism over his sexuality, he usually acted as an influential adviser behind the scenes to civil-rights leaders. In the 1980s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay causes, speaking at events as an activist and supporter of human rights.

Later in life, while still devoted to securing workers’ rights, Rustin joined other union leaders in aligning with ideological neoconservatism, and President Ronald Reagan praised him. On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Rustin was born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to Florence Rustin and Archie Hopkins, but raised by his maternal grandparents, Julia and Janifer Rustin, as the ninth of their twelve children; growing up he believed his biological mother was his older sister. His grandparents were relatively wealthy local caterers who raised Rustin in a large house. Julia Rustin was a Quaker, although she attended her husband’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was also a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. NAACP leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson were frequent guests in the Rustin home. With these influences in his early life, in his youth Rustin campaigned against racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws.

One of the first documented realizations Rustin had of his sexuality was when he mentioned to his grandmother that he preferred to spend time with males rather than females. She responded, “I suppose that’s what you need to do”.

In 1932, Rustin entered Wilberforce College, a historically black college in Ohio operated by the AME Church. Rustin was active in a number of campus organizations, including the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. He was expelled from Wilberforce in 1936 after organizing a strike, and later attended Cheyney State Teachers College.    Cheyney honored Rustin with a posthumous “Doctor of Humane Letters” degree at its 2013 commencement.

After completing an activist training program conducted by the American Friends Service Committee, Rustin moved to Harlem in 1937 and began studying at City College of New York. There he became involved in efforts to defend and free the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men in Alabama who were accused of raping two white women. He joined the Young Communist League for a small period of time in 1936, before becoming disillusioned with the part. Soon after arriving in New York City, he became a member of Fifteenth Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. 

Rustin was an accomplished tenor vocalist, an asset that earned him admission to both Wilberforce University and Cheyney State Teachers College with music scholarships. In 1939, he was in the chorus of the short-lived Broadway musical John Henry that starred Paul Robeson. Blues singer Josh White was also a cast member and later invited Rustin to join his gospel and vocal harmony group Josh White and the Carolinians, with whom he made several recordings. With this opportunity, Rustin became a regular performer at the Café Society nightclub in Greenwich Village, widening his social and intellectual contacts. A few albums on Fellowship Records featuring his singing, such as Bayard Rustin Sings a Program of Spirituals, were produced from the 1950s through the 1970s.

At the direction of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party USA   and its members were active in supporting civil rights for African Americans. The CPUSA, at the time following Stalin’s “theory of nationalism”, favored the creation of a separate nation for African Americans to be located in the American Southeast where the greatest proportion of the black population was concentrated. In 1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Communist International ordered the CPUSA to abandon civil rights work and focus on supporting U.S. entry into World War II.

Disillusioned, Rustin began working with members of the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, particularly A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Another socialist mentor was the pacifist A. J. Muste, leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). FOR hired Rustin as a race relations secretary in the late summer of 1941

The three of them proposed a march on Washington, D.C., in 1941 to protest racial segregation in the armed forces and widespread discrimination in employment. Meeting with President Roosevelt in the Oval Office, Randolph respectfully and politely, but firmly told President Roosevelt that African Americans would march in the capital unless desegregation occurred. To prove their good faith, the organizers canceled the planned march after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802   which banned discrimination in defense industries and federal agencies. The leader of the organizers, Randolph, canceled the march against Rustin’s advisement. The armed forces, in which Black troops typically had white commanding officers, were not desegregated until 1948, under an Executive Order issued by President Harry S. Truman, although the various branches took years to abide by the order, with the U.S. Marines Corps in 1960 being the last to desegregated.

Randolph felt that FOR had succeeded in their goal and wanted to dissolve the committee. Again, Rustin disagreed with him and voiced his differing opinion in a national press conference, which he later said he regretted.

Rustin traveled to California to help protect the property of the more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans who had been imprisoned in internment camps. In the 6-3 Korematsu Decision, the Supreme Court upheld the forcible internment. Impressed with Rustin’s organizational skills, A.J. Muste appointed him as FOR’s secretary for student and general affairs.

Rustin was also a pioneer in the movement to desegregate interstate bus travel. In 1942, he boarded a bus in Louisville, bound for Nashville, and sat in the second row. A number of drivers asked him to move to the back, according to Southern practice of Jim Crow, but Rustin refused. The bus was stopped by police 13 miles north of Nashville and Rustin was arrested. He was beaten and taken to a police station but was released uncharged.

He spoke about his decision to be arrested, and how that moment also clarified his witness as a gay person, in an interview with the Washington Blade:

As I was going by the second seat to go to the rear, a white child reached out for the ring necktie I was wearing and pulled it, whereupon its mother said, “Don’t touch a [n-word].”

If I go and sit quietly at the back of that bus now, that child, who was so innocent of race relations that it was going to play with me, will have seen so many blacks go in the back and sit down quietly that it’s going to end up saying, “They like it back there, I’ve never seen anybody protest against it.” I owe it to that child, not only to my own dignity, I owe it to that child, that it should be educated to know that blacks do not want to sit in the back, and therefore I should get arrested, letting all these white people in the bus know that I do not accept that.

It occurred to me shortly after that that it was an absolute necessity for me to declare homosexuality because if I didn’t I was a part of the prejudice. I was aiding and abetting the prejudice that was a part of the effort to destroy me.

In 1942, Rustin assisted two other FOR staffers, George Houser and James Farmer, and activist Bernice Fisher as they formed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rustin was not a direct founder, but was later described as “an uncle of CORE”. CORE had been conceived as a pacifist organization based on the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, who used non-violent resistance against British rule in India. CORE was also influenced by his protégé Krishnalal Shridharani’s book War without Violence.

As declared conscientious objectors who refused induction into the military, Rustin, Houser, and other members of FOR and CORE were convicted of violating the Selective Service Act. From 1944 to 1946, Rustin was imprisoned in Ashland Federal Prison in Kentucky, and later the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, in Pennsylvania. At both, he organized protests against racially segregated housing and dining facilities. During his incarceration, he also organized FOR’s Free India Committee. After his release from prison, he was frequently arrested for protesting against British colonial rule, in both India and Africa.

Just before a trip to Africa while college secretary of the FOR, Rustin recorded a 10-inch LP for the Fellowship Records label. He sang spirituals and Elizabethan songs, accompanied on the harpsichord by Margaret Davison.

Rustin and Houser organized the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. This was the first of the Freedom Rides to test the 1946 ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel as unconstitutional. Rustin and CORE executive secretary George Houser recruited a team of fourteen men, divided equally by race, to ride in pairs through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The NAACP opposed CORE’s Gandhian tactics as too meek. Participants in the Journey of Reconciliation were arrested several times. Arrested with Igal Roodenko and Joe Felmet, Rustin served twenty-two days on a chain gang in North Carolina for violating state Jim Crow laws regarding segregated seating on public transportation. On June 17, 2022, Chapel Hill Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour, with full consent of the state, dismissed the 1947 North Carolina charges against the four Freedom Riders, with members of the exonerees’ families in attendance.

In 1948, Rustin traveled to India to learn techniques of nonviolent civil resistance directly from the leaders of the Gandhian movement. The conference had been organized before Gandhi’s assassination earlier that year. Between 1947 and 1952, Rustin also met with leaders of independence movements in Ghana and Nigeria. In 1951, he formed the committee to Support South African Resistance, which later became the American Committee on Africa.

Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California, in January 1953 for sexual activity with two men in their 20s, in a parked car. Originally charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct, he pleaded guilty to a single, lesser charge of “sex perversion”   The Pasadena arrest was the first time that Rustin’s homosexuality had come to public attention. He had been and remained candid in private about his sexuality, although homosexual activity was still criminalized throughout the United States. Rustin resigned from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) because of his convictions. They also greatly affected Rustin’s relationship with A. J. Muste, the director of the FOR. Muste had already tried to change Rustin’s sexuality earlier in their relationship with no success. Later in Rustin’s life, they continued their relationship with more tension than they had previously. Rustin became the executive secretary of the War Resisters League. Later, in Montana, an American Legion chapter made his conviction in Pasadena public to try to cancel his lectures in the state.

Rustin served as an unidentified member of the American Friends Service Committee’s task force to write “Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence”, published in 1955. This was one of the most influential and widely commented upon pacifist essays in the United States. Rustin had wanted to keep his participation quiet, as he believed that his known sexual orientation would be used by critics as an excuse to compromise the 71-page pamphlet when it was published. It analyzed the Cold War and the American response to it, and recommended non-violent solutions.

Rustin took leave from the War Resisters League in 1956 to advise minister Martin Luther King Jr. of the Baptist Church on Gandhian tactics. King was organizing the public transportation boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which became known as the Montgomery bus boycott. According to Rustin, “I think it’s fair to say that Dr. King’s view of non-violent tactics was almost non-existent when the boycott began. In other words, Dr. King was permitting himself and his children and his home to be protected by guns.” Rustin convinced King to abandon the armed protection, including a personal handgun. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Rustin also reflected that his integrative ideology began to differ from King’s. He believed a social movement “has to be based on the collective needs of people at this time, regardless of color, creed, race.

The following year, Rustin and King began organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Many African American leaders were concerned that Rustin’s sexual orientation and past Communist membership would undermine support for the civil rights movement. After the organization of the SCLC, Rustin and King planned a civil rights march adjacent to the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. This did not sit well with U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Powell threatened to leak to the press rumors of a fake affair between Rustin and King. King, acting in his interests, canceled the march, and Rustin left his position in the SCLC. King received criticism for this action from Harper’s magazine, which wrote about him, “Lost much moral credit … in the eyes of the young”. Although Rustin was open about his sexual orientation and his convictions were a matter of public record, the events had not been discussed widely beyond the civil rights leadership. Rustin did not let this setback change his direction in the movement.

Despite shunning from some civil rights leaders the moment came for an unprecedented mass gathering in Washington, Randolph pushed Rustin forward as the logical choice to organize it.

A few weeks before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond railed against Rustin as a “Communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual”, and had his entire Pasadena arrest file entered in the record. Thurmond also produced a Federal Bureau of Investigation photograph of Rustin talking to King while King was bathing, to imply that there was a same-sex relationship between the two. Both men denied the allegation of an affair.

Rustin became involved in the March on Washington in 1962 when he was recruited by A. Philip Randolph. The march was planned to be a commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred years earlier. Rustin was instrumental in organizing the march. He drilled off-duty police officers as marshals, bus captains to direct traffic, and scheduled the podium speakers. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Rachelle Horowitz were aides. Despite King’s support, NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins did not want Rustin to receive any public credit for his role in planning the march. Roy Wilkins said, “This march is of such importance that we must not put a person of his liabilities at the head.” Because of this conflict, Randolph served as the director of the march and Rustin as his deputy. During the planning of the march, Rustin feared his previous legal issues would pose a threat to the march. Nevertheless, Rustin did become well known. On September 6, 1963, a photograph of Rustin and Randolph appeared on the cover of Life magazine, identifying them as “the leaders” of the March.

At the beginning of 1964, Reverend Milton Galamison and other Harlem community leaders invited Rustin to coordinate a citywide boycott of public schools to protest their de facto segregation. Prior to the boycott, the organizers asked the United Federation of Teachers Executive Board to join the boycott or ask teachers to join the picket lines. The union declined, promising only to protect from reprisals any teachers who participated. More than 400,000 New Yorkers participated in a one-day February 3, 1964 boycott. Historian Daniel Perlstein notes that “newspapers were astounded both by the numbers of black and Puerto Rican parents and children who boycotted and by the complete absence of violence or disorder from the protesters.” It was, Rustin stated, and newspapers reported, “the largest civil rights demonstration” in American history. Rustin said that “the movement to integrate the schools will create far-reaching benefits” for teachers as well as students.

The protest demanded complete integration of the city’s schools, and it challenged the coalition between African Americans and white liberals. An ensuing white backlash affected relations among the black leaders. Writing to black labor leaders, Rustin denounced Galamison for seeking to conduct another boycott in the spring and soon abandoned the coalition.

Rustin organized a May 18 March which called for “maximum possible” integration. Perlstein recounts. “This goal was to be achieved through such modest programs as the construction of larger schools and the replacement of junior high schools with middle schools. The UFT and other white moderates endorsed the May rally, yet only four thousand protesters showed up, and the Board of Education was no more responsive to the conciliatory May demonstration than to the earlier, more confrontational boycott.”

When Rustin was invited to speak at the University of Virginia in 1964, school administrators tried to ban him, out of fear that he would organize a school boycott there.

In the spring of 1964, Martin Luther King was considering hiring Rustin as executive director of SCLC but was advised against it by Stanley Levison, a longtime activist friend of Rustin’s. He opposed the hire because of what he considered Rustin’s growing devotion to the political theorist Max Shachtman. “Shachtmanites” have been described as an ideologically cultish group with ardently anti-communist positions, and attachments to the Democratic Party and the AFL–CIO.

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, which followed Freedom Summer in Mississippi, Rustin became an adviser to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP); they were trying to gain recognition as the legitimate, non-Jim Crow delegation from their state, where blacks had been officially disenfranchised since the turn of the century (as they were generally throughout the South) and excluded from the official political system. DNC leaders Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey offered only two non-voting seats to the MFDP, with the official seating going to the regular segregationist Mississippi delegation. Rustin, following a line set by Shachtman   and AFL–CIO leaders, urged the MFDP to take the offer. MFDP leaders, including Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses, angrily rejected the arrangement; many of their supporters became highly suspicious of Rustin. Rustin’s attempt to compromise appealed to the Democratic Party leadership.

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Rustin advocated closer ties between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party, specifically the party’s base among the white working class, many of whom still had strong union affiliations. With Tom Kahn, Rustin wrote an influential article in 1964 called “From Protest to Politics”, published in Commentary magazine; it analyzed the changing economy and its implications for African Americans. Rustin wrote presciently that the rise of automation would reduce the demand for low-skill high-paying jobs, which would jeopardize the position of the urban African American working class, particularly in northern states. He believed that the working class had to collaborate across racial lines for common economic goals. His prophecy has been proven right in the dislocation and loss of jobs for many urban African Americans due to the restructuring of industry in the coming decades. Rustin believed that the African American community needed to change its political strategy, building and strengthening a political alliance with predominately white unions and other organizations (churches, synagogues, etc.) to pursue a common economic agenda. He wrote that it was time to move from protest to politics. Rustin’s analysis of the economic problems of the Black community was widely influential.

Rustin argued that since black people could now legally sit in the restaurant after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they needed to be able to afford service financially. He believed that a coalition of progressive forces to move the Democratic Party forward was needed to change the economic structure.

He also argued that the African American community was threatened by the appeal of identity politics, particularly the rise of “Black power”. He thought this position was a fantasy of middle-class black people that repeated the political and moral errors of previous black nationalists, while alienating the white allies needed by the African American community. Nation editor and Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy noted later that, while Rustin had a general “disdain of nationalism”, he had a “very different attitude toward Jewish nationalism” and was “unflaggingly supportive of Zionism”.

Commentary editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz had commissioned the article from Rustin, and the two men remained intellectually and personally aligned for the next 20 years. Podhoretz and the magazine promoted the neoconservative movement, which had implications for civil rights initiatives as well as other economic aspects of the society. In 1985, Rustin publicly praised Podhoretz for his refusal to “pander to minority groups” and for opposing affirmative action quotas in hiring as well as black studies programs in colleges.

Because of these positions, Rustin was criticized as a “sell-out” by many of his former colleagues in the civil rights movement, especially those connected to grassroots organizing. They charged that he was lured by the material comforts that came with a less radical and more professional type of activism. Biographer John D’Emilio rejects these characterizations, and “portrays the final third of Rustin’s life as one in which his reputation among his former allies was routinely questioned. After decades of working outside the system, they simply could not accept working within the system.” However, Randall Kennedy wrote in a 2003 article that descriptions of Rustin as “a bought man” are “at least partly true”, noting that his sponsorship by the AFL–CIO brought him some financial stability but imposed boundaries on his politics.

Kennedy notes that despite Rustin’s conservative turn in the mid-1960s, he remained a lifelong socialist, and D’Emilio argues that in the final phase of his life, Rustin remained on the left: “D’Emilio explains, even as Rustin was taking what appeared to be a more “conservative” turn, he remained committed to social justice. Rustin was making radical and ambitious demands for a basic redistribution of wealth in American society, including universal healthcare, the abolition of poverty, and full employment.”

Rustin increasingly worked to strengthen the labor movement, which he saw as the champion of empowerment for the African American community and for economic justice for all Americans. He contributed to the labor movement’s two sides, economic and political, through the support of labor unions and social-democratic politics. He was the founder and became the Director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which coordinated the AFL-CIO’s work on civil rights and economic justice. He became a regular columnist for the AFL-CIO newspaper.

On the political side of the labor movement, Rustin increased his visibility as a leader of the American movement for social democracy. In early 1972, he became a national co-chairman of the Socialist Party of America. In December 1972, when the Socialist Party changed its name to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) by a vote of 73–34, Rustin continued to serve as national co-chairman, along with Charles S. Zimmerman of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). In his opening speech to the December 1972 Convention, Co-Chairman Rustin called for SDUSA to organize against the “reactionary policies of the Nixon Administration”; Rustin also criticized the “irresponsibility and élitism of the ‘New Politics’ liberals”.  In later years, Rustin served as the national chairman of SDUSA.

During the 1960s, Rustin was a member of the League for Industrial Democracy. He would remain a member for years, and became vice president during the 1980s.

Like many liberals and some socialists, Rustin supported President Lyndon B. Johnson’s containment policy against communism, while criticizing specific conduct of this policy. In particular, to maintain independent labor unions and political opposition in Vietnam, Rustin and others gave critical support to U.S. military intervention in the Vietnam War, while calling for a negotiated peace treaty and democratic elections. Rustin criticized the specific conduct of the war, though. For instance, in a fundraising letter sent to War Resisters League supporters in 1964, Rustin wrote of being “angered and humiliated by the kind of war being waged, a war of torture, a war in which civilians are being machine-gunned from the air, and in which American napalm bombs are being dropped on the villages”

Along with Allard Lowenstein and Norman Thomas, Rustin worked with the CIA-sponsored Committee on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, which lent international credibility to a 1966 ballot effectively rigged against the socialist former president, Juan Bosch.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin worked as a human rights and election monitor for Freedom House.

In 1970, Rustin called for the U.S. to send military jets in the fight against Arab states by Israel; referring to a New York Times article he wrote, Rustin wrote to Prime Minister Golda Meir “…I hope that the ad will also have an effect on a serious domestic question: namely, the relations between the Jewish and the Negro communities in America.” Rustin was concerned about unity between two groups that he argued faced discrimination in America and abroad, and also believed that Israel’s democratic ideals were proof that justice and equality would prevail in the Arab territories despite the atrocities of war. His former colleagues in the peace movement considered it to be a profound betrayal of Rustin’s nonviolent ideals.

Rustin maintained his strongly anti-Soviet and anti-communist views later in his life, especially with regard to Africa. Rustin co-wrote with Carl Gershman (a former director of Social Democrats, USA and future Ronald Reagan appointee) an essay entitled “Africa, Soviet Imperialism & the Retreat of American Power”, in which he decried Russian and Cuban involvement in the Angolan Civil War and defended the military intervention by apartheid South Africa on behalf of the National Liberation Front of Angola   and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. “And if a South African force did intervene at the urging of black leaders and on the side of the forces that clearly represent the black majority in Angola, to counter a non-African army of Cubans ten times its size, by what standard of political judgment is this immoral?” Rustin accused the Soviet Union of a classic imperialist agenda in Africa in pursuit of economic resources and vital sea lanes, and called the Carter Administration “hypocritical” for claiming to be committed to the welfare of blacks while doing too little to thwart Russian and Cuban expansion throughout Africa.

In 1976, Rustin was a member of the anti-communist Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), founded by politician Paul Nitze. Nitze was a member of Team B, the independent analysts commissioned by George Bush to scrutinize the CIA’s assessments of the Soviet nuclear threat. CPD promoted Team B’s controversial intelligence claims about Soviet foreign policy, using them as an argument against arms control agreements such as SALT II.  This cemented Rustin’s leading role in the neoconservative movement.

The plight of Jews in the Soviet Union reminded Rustin of the struggles that blacks faced in the United States. Soviet Jews faced many of the same forms of discrimination in employment, education, and housing, while also being prisoners within their own country by being denied the chance to emigrate by Soviet authorities. After seeing the injustice that Soviet Jews faced, Rustin became a leading voice in advocating for the movement of Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel. He worked closely with Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, who introduced legislation that tied trade relations with the Soviet Union to their treatment of Jews. In 1966 he chaired the historic Ad hoc Commission on Rights of Soviet Jews organized by the Conference on the Status of Soviet Jews, leading a panel of six jurors in the commission’s public tribunal on Jewish life in the Soviet Union. Members of the panel included Telford Taylor, the Nuremberg war trial prosecutor and Columbia University professor of law, Dr. John C. Bennett, president of the Union Theological Seminary; Reverend George B. Ford, pastor emeritus of the Corpus Christi Church; Samuel Fishman representing United Automobile Workers; and Norman Thomas, veteran Socialist leader. The commission collected testimonies from Soviet Jews and compiled them into a report that was delivered to the secretary-general of the United Nations. The report urged the international community to demand that the Soviet authorities allow Jews to practice their religion, preserve their culture, and emigrate from the USSR at their will. The testimonies from Soviet Jews were published by Moshe Decter, the executive secretary of the Conference on the Status of Soviet Jews, in a book—Redemption! Jewish freedom letters from Russia, with a foreword by Rustin. Through the 1970s and 1980s Rustin wrote several articles on the subject of Soviet Jewry and appeared at Soviet Jewry movement rallies, demonstrations, vigils, and conferences, in the United States and abroad. He co-sponsored the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry. Rustin allied with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an outspoken advocate for Soviet Jewry, and worked closely with Senator Henry Jackson, informing the Jackson–Vanik amendment, vital legislation that restricted United States trade with the Soviet Union in relation to its treatment of Jews.

Davis Platt, Bayard’s partner from the 1940s   said “I never had any sense at all that Bayard felt any shame or guilt about his homosexuality. That was rare in those days. Rare.”

Rustin did not engage in any gay rights activism until the 1980s. He was urged to do so by his partner Walter Naegle, who has said that “I think that if I hadn’t been in the office at that time, when these invitations [from gay organizations] came in, he probably wouldn’t have done them.”

Due to the lack of marriage equality at the time, Rustin and Naegle took the then not unusual step to solidify their partnership and protect their union legally through adoption: in 1982 Rustin adopted Naegle, 30 years old at the time. Naegle explained that Bayard:

… was concerned about protecting my rights, because gay people had no protection. At that time, marriage between a same-sex couple was inconceivable. And so he adopted me, legally adopted me, in 1982.

That was the only thing we could do to kind of legalize our relationship. We actually had to go through a process as if Bayard was adopting a small child. My biological mother had to sign a legal paper, a paper disowning me. They had to send a social worker to our home. When the social worker arrived, she had to sit us down to talk to us to make sure that this was a fit home.

Rustin testified in favor of New York State’s Gay Rights Bill. In 1986, he gave a speech “The New [N-words] Are Gays” in which he asserted

Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new “[n-words]” are gays… It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change… The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.

Also in 1986, Rustin was invited to contribute to the book In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. He declined, explaining:

I was not involved in the struggle for gay rights as a youth … I did not “come out of the closet” voluntarily—circumstances forced me out. While I have no problem with being publicly identified as homosexual, it would be dishonest of me to present myself as one who was in the forefront of the struggle for gay rights … I fundamentally consider sexual orientation to be a private matter. As such, it has not been a factor which has greatly influenced my role as an activist.

Rustin died on August 24, 1987, of a perforated appendix. An obituary in The New York Times reported, “Looking back at his career, Mr. Rustin, a Quaker, once wrote: ‘The principal factors which influenced my life are   nonviolent tactics; constitutional means;  democratic procedures; respect for human personality;  a belief that all people are one.'” Rustin was survived by Walter Naegle, his partner of ten years.

Rustin’s personal philosophy is said to have been inspired by combining Quaker pacifism with socialism (as taught by A. Philip Randolph), and the theory of non-violent protest popularized by Mahatma Gandhi.

President Ronald Reagan issued a statement on Rustin’s death, praising his work for civil rights and “for human rights throughout the world”. He added that Rustin “was denounced by former friends, because he never gave up his conviction that minorities in America could and would succeed based on their individual merit”

According to journalist Steve Hendrix, Rustin “faded from the shortlist of well-known civil rights lions”, in part because he was active behind the scenes, and also because of public discomfort with his sexual orientation and former communist membership. In addition, Rustin’s tilt toward neo-conservatism in the late 1960s led him into a disagreement with most civil rights leaders. But, the 2003 documentary film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize nominee and the March 2012 centennial of Rustin’s birth have contributed to renewed recognition of his extensive contributions.

Rustin served as chairman of Social Democrats, USA, which, The Washington Post wrote in 2013, “was a breeding ground for many neoconservatives”. French historian Justin Vaïsse classifies him as a “right-wing socialist” and “second age neoconservative”, citing his role as vice-chair of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was involved in the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger.

According to Daniel Richman, former clerk for United States Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, Marshall’s friendship with Rustin, who was open about his homosexuality, played a significant role in Marshall’s dissent from the court’s 5–4 decision upholding the constitutionality of state sodomy laws in the later overturned 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick.

Several buildings have been named in honor of Rustin, including the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex located in Chelsea, Manhattan; Bayard Rustin High School in his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania; Bayard Rustin Library at the Affirmations Gay/Lesbian Community Center in Ferndale, Michigan; the Bayard Rustin Social Justice Center in Conway, Arkansas, and the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice in Princeton, New Jersey; the Bayard Rustin Room at Friends House, London, UK.

Rustin is one of two men who have both participated in the Penn Relays and had a school, West Chester Rustin High School, named in his honor that participates in the relays. In 1985, Haverford College awarded Rustin an honorary doctorate in law.

In 1995, a Pennsylvania State Historical Marker was placed at Lincoln and Montgomery Avenues, West Chester, Pennsylvania, on the grounds of Henderson High School, which he attended.

A 1998 anthology movie, Out of the Past, featured letters and archival footage of Rustin.

The West Chester Area School District voted in 2002 to approve the creation of Bayard Rustin High School in a 6–3 vote. Those in favor mentioned Rustin’s involvement in the civil rights movement, and opposition was tied to Rustin’s sexuality and political views. The school opened in 2006.

In July 2007 after a year’s collaboration starting in June 2006, a group of San Francisco Bay Area Black LGBT community leaders officially formed the Bayard Rustin Coalition (BRC), with the permission of the Estate of Bayard Rustin. The BRC promotes greater Black participation in the electoral process, advances civil and human rights issues, and promotes the legacy of Rustin.

In 2011, the Bayard Rustin Center for LGBTQA Activism, Awareness, and Reconciliation was announced at Guilford College, a Quaker school.] Formerly the Queer and Allied Resource Center, the center was rededicated in March 2011 with the permission of the Estate of Bayard Rustin and featured a keynote address by social justice activist Mandy Carter.

In 2012, Rustin was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBTQ history and people. In 2013, Rustin was selected as an honoree in the United States Department of Labor Hall of Honor.

On August 8, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. The citation in the press release stated:

Bayard Rustin was an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all. An advisor to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he promoted nonviolent resistance, participated in one of the first Freedom Rides, organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad. As an openly gay African American, Mr. Rustin stood at the intersection of several of the fights for equal rights.

At the White House ceremony on November 20, 2013, President Obama presented Rustin’s award to Walter Naegle, his partner of ten years at the time of Rustin’s death.

In 2014, Rustin was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have “made significant contributions in their fields”. In April 2018, the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland voted to name the Bayard Rustin Elementary School after Rustin.

Canadian writer Steven Elliott Jackson wrote a play that stages an imaginary meeting and one-night-stand between Rustin and Walter Jenkins of the Johnson administration called The Seat Next to the King. The play won the award for Best Play at the 2017 Toronto Fringe Festival. A full-length play with music, written by Steve H. Broadnax III, Bayard Rustin Inside Ashland, dramatizing Rustin’s World War II prison experience and its central role in his lifetime of activism, had its world premiere on May 22, 2022, at People’s Light and Theatre Company in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

In June 2019, Rustin was one of the inaugural fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City’s Stonewall Inn. The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history, and the wall’s unveiling was timed to take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

In 2018, the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice was established in Princeton, New Jersey, with Naegle acting as Board Member Emeritus.  It is a community activist center and safe space for LGBTQ kids, intersectional families, and marginalized people.

In January 2020, California State Senator Scott Wiener, chair of the California Legislative LGBT Caucus, and Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus, called for Governor Gavin Newsom to issue a pardon for Rustin’s 1953 arrest for having sex with a man in a car, citing Rustin’s legacy as a civil rights icon. Newsom issued the pardon on February 5 while also announcing a new process for fast-tracking pardons for those convicted under historical laws making homosexuality illegal.

In 2021, Higher Ground Productions, founded by Michelle and Barack Obama, announced production of Rustin, a biopic about Rustin’s life directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Colman Domingo in the titular role.

In 2022, a street in Nyack, New York was renamed “Bayard Rustin Way” to honor Rustin’s memory.

A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Andy Warhol.

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Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Warhol initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. He promoted a collection of personalities known as Warhol superstars, and is credited with inspiring the widely used expression “15 minutes of fame”. In the late 1960s he managed and produced the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine. He authored numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. He lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. In June 1968, he was almost killed by radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who shot him inside his studio. After gallbladder surgery, Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia in February 1987 at the age of 58 in New York City.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city of Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. Warhol has been described as the “bellwether of the art market”. Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. His works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold. In 2013, a 1963 serigraph titled Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold for $105 million. In 2022, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) sold for $195 million, which is the most expensive work of art sold at auction by an American artist.

By the beginning of the 1960s, pop art was an experimental form that several artists were independently adopting; some of these pioneers, such as Roy Lichtenstein, would later become synonymous with the movement. Warhol, who would become famous as the “Pope of Pop”, turned to this new style, where popular subjects could be part of the artist’s palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning.

From these beginnings, he developed his later style and subjects. Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating the handmade from the artistic process. Warhol frequently used silk-screening; his later drawings were traced from slide projections. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had several assistants who produced his silk-screen multiples, following his directions to make different versions and variations.

Warhol’s first pop art paintings were displayed in April 1961, serving as the backdrop for New York Department Store Bonwit Teller’s window display. This was the same stage his Pop Art contemporaries Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg had also once graced. It was the gallerist Muriel Latow who came up with the ideas for both the soup cans and Warhol’s dollar paintings. On November 23, 1961, Warhol wrote Latow a check for $50 which, according to the 2009 Warhol biography, Pop, The Genius of Warhol, was payment for coming up with the idea of the soup cans as subject matter.[99] For his first major exhibition, Warhol painted his famous cans of Campbell’s soup, which he claimed to have had for lunch for most of his life.

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American objects such as dollar bills, mushroom clouds, electric chairs, Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as newspaper headlines or photographs of police dogs attacking African-American protesters during the Birmingham campaign in the civil rights movement. His work became popular and controversial. 

In 1962, Warhol created his famous Marilyn series. The Flavor Marilyns were selected from a group of fourteen canvases in the sub-series, each measuring 20″ x 16″. Some of the canvases were named after various candy Life Savers flavors, including Cherry Marilyn, Lemon Marilyn, and Licorice Marilyn. The others are identified by their background colors.

Warhol produced both comic and serious works; his subject could be a soup can or an electric chair. Warhol used the same techniques—silkscreens, reproduced serially, and often painted with bright colors—whether he painted celebrities, everyday objects, or images of suicide, car crashes, and disasters, as in the 1962–63 Death and Disaster series.

In 1979, Warhol was commissioned to paint a BMW M1 Group 4 racing version for the fourth installment of the BMW Art Car project. He was initially asked to paint a BMW 320i in 1978, but the car model was changed and it didn’t qualify for the race that year. Warhol was the first artist to paint directly onto the automobile himself instead of letting technicians transfer a scale-model design to the car. Reportedly, it took him only 23 minutes to paint the entire car. Racecar drivers Hervé Poulain, Manfred Winkelhock and Marcel Mignot drove the car at the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Some of Warhol’s work, as well as his own personality, has been described as being Keatonesque. Warhol has been described as playing dumb to the media. He sometimes refused to explain his work. He has suggested that all one needs to know about his work is “already there ‘on the surface'”.

His Rorschach inkblots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be. His cow wallpaper (literally, wallpaper with a cow motif) and his oxidation paintings (canvases prepared with copper paint that was then oxidized with urine) are also noteworthy in this context. Equally noteworthy is the way these works—and their means of production—mirrored the atmosphere at Andy’s New York “Factory”. 

Warhol’s 1982 portrait of Basquiat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, is a silkscreen over an oxidized copper “piss painting.” After many years of silkscreen, oxidation, photography, etc., Warhol returned to painting with a brush in hand. In 1983, Warhol began collaborating with Basquiat and Clemente. Warhol and Basquiat created a series of more than 50 large collaborative works between 1984 and 1985. Despite criticism when these were first shown, Warhol called some of them “masterpieces,” and they were influential for his later work.

In 1984, Warhol was commissioned by collector and gallerist Alexander Iolas to produce work based on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper for an exhibition at the old refectory of the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan, opposite from the Santa Maria delle Grazie where Leonardo da Vinci’s mural can be seen. Warhol exceeded the demands of the commission and produced nearly 100 variations on the theme, mostly silkscreens and paintings, and among them a collaborative sculpture with Basquiat, the Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper). The Milan exhibition that opened in January 1987 with a set of 22 silk-screens, was the last exhibition for both the artist and the gallerist. The series of The Last Supper was seen by some as “arguably his greatest,” but by others as “wishy-washy, religiose” and “spiritless”. It is the largest series of religious-themed works by any U.S. artist.

In the period just before his death, Warhol was working on Cars, a series of paintings for Mercedes-Benz.

The value of Andy Warhol’s work has been on an endless upward trajectory since his death in 1987. In 2014, his works accumulated $569 million at auction, which accounted for more than a sixth of the global art market. However, there have been some dips. According to art dealer Dominique Lévy, “The Warhol trade moves something like a seesaw being pulled uphill: it rises and falls, but each new high and low is above the last one.” She attributes this to the consistent influx of new collectors intrigued by Warhol. “At different moments, you’ve had different groups of collectors entering the Warhol market, and that resulted in peaks in demand, then satisfaction and a slow down,” before the process repeats another demographic or the next generation.

In 1998, Orange Marilyn (1964), a depiction of Marilyn Monroe, sold for $17.3 million, which at the time set a new record as the highest price paid for a Warhol artwork. In 2007, one of Warhol’s 1963 paintings of Elizabeth Taylor, Liz (Colored Liz), which was owned by actor Hugh Grant, sold for $23.7 million at Christie’s.

In 2007, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson sold Warhol’s Turquoise Marilyn (1964) to financier Steven A. Cohen for $80 million. In May 2007, Green Car Crash (1963) sold for $71.1 million and Lemon Marilyn (1962) sold for $28 million at Christie’s post-war and contemporary art auction. In 2007, Large Campbell’s Soup Can (1964) was sold at a Sotheby’s auction to a South American collector for 7.4 million. In November 2009, 200 One Dollar Bills (1962) at Sotheby’s for $43.8 million.

In 2008, Eight Elvises (1963) was sold by Annibale Berlingieri for $100 million to a private buyer. The work depicts Elvis Presley in a gunslinger pose. It was first exhibited in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Warhol made 22 versions of the Elvis portraits, 11 of which are held in museums. In May 2012, Double Elvis (Ferus Type) sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $37 million. In November 2014, Triple Elvis (Ferus Type) sold for $81.9 million at Christie’s.

In May 2010, a purple self-portrait of Warhol from 1986 that was owned by fashion designer Tom Ford sold for $32.6 million at Sotheby’s. In November 2010, Men in Her Life (1962), based on Elizabeth Taylor, sold for $63.4 million at Phillips de Pury and Coca-Cola (4) (1962) sold for $35.3 million at Sotheby’s. In May 2011, Warhol’s first self-portrait from 1963 to 1964 sold for $38.4 million and a red self-portrait from 1986 sold for $27.5 million at Christie’s. In May 2011, Liz #5 (Early Colored Liz) sold for $26.9 million at Phillips.

In November 2013, Warhol’s rarely seen 1963 diptych, Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), sold at Sotheby’s for $105.4 million, a new record for the artist. In November 2013, Coca-Cola (3) (1962) sold for $57.3 million at Christie’s. In May 2014, White Marilyn (1962) sold for $41 million at Christie’s. In November 2014, Four Marlons (1964), which depicts Marlon Brando, sold for $69.6 million at Christie’s. In May 2015, Silver Liz (diptych), painted in 1963, sold for $28 million and Colored Mona Lisa (1963) sold for $56.2 million at Christie’s. In May 2017, Warhol’s 1962 painting Big Campbell’s Soup Can With Can Opener (Vegetable) sold for $27.5 million at Christie’s. In 2017, billionaire hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin purchased Orange Marilyn privately for around $200 million. In March 2022, Silver Liz (Ferus Type) sold for 2.3 billion yen ($18.9 million) at Shinwa Auction, which set a new record for the highest bid ever at auction in Japan. In May 2022, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) sold for $195 million at Christie’s, becoming the most expensive American artwork sold at auction.

Among Warhol’s early collectors and influential supporters were Emily and Burton Tremaine. Among the over 15 artworks purchased, Marilyn Diptych (now at Tate Modern, London) and A boy for Meg (now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC), were purchased directly out of Warhol’s studio in 1962. One Christmas, Warhol left a small Head of Marilyn Monroe by the Tremaine’s door at their New York apartment in gratitude for their support and encouragement.

In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service issued an 18-cent stamp commemorating Warhol. Designed by Richard Sheaff of Scottsdale, Arizona, the stamp was unveiled at a ceremony at The Andy Warhol Museum and features Warhol’s painting “Self-Portrait, 1964”. In March 2011, a chrome statue of Andy Warhol and his Polaroid camera was revealed at Union Square in New York City.

A crater on Mercury was named after Warhol in 2012. In 2013, to honor the 85th anniversary of Warhol’s birthday, The Andy Warhol Museum and EarthCam launched a collaborative project titled Figment, a live feed of Warhol’s gravesite.

Warhol’s will dictated that his entire estate—with the exception of a few modest legacies to family members—would go to create a foundation dedicated to the “advancement of the visual arts”. Warhol had so many possessions that it took Sotheby’s nine days to auction his estate after his death; the auction grossed more than US$20 million.

In 1987, in accordance with Warhol’s will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts began. The foundation serves as the estate of Andy Warhol, but also has a mission “to foster innovative artistic expression and the creative process” and is “focused primarily on supporting work of a challenging and often experimental nature”.

The Artists Rights Society is the U.S. copyright representative for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for all Warhol works with the exception of Warhol film stills. The U.S. copyright representative for Warhol film stills is the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Additionally, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has agreements in place for its image archive. All digital images of Warhol are exclusively managed by Corbis, while all transparency images of Warhol are managed by Art Resource.

The Andy Warhol Foundation released its 20th Anniversary Annual Report as a three-volume set in 2007: Vol. I, 1987–2007; Vol. II, Grants & Exhibitions; and Vol. III, Legacy Program.

The Foundation is in the process of compiling its catalog raisonné of paintings and sculptures in volumes covering blocks of years of the artist’s career. Volumes IV and V were released in 2019. The subsequent volumes are still in the process of being compiled.

The Foundation remains one of the largest grant-giving organizations for the visual arts in the U.S.

Many of Warhol’s works and possessions are on display at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The foundation donated more than 3,000 works of art to the museum.

From November 19, 2021 – June 19, 2022, the Brooklyn Museum displayed the Andy Warhol: Revelation exhibition. Revelation examines themes such as life and death, power and desire, the role and representation of women, Renaissance imagery, family and immigrant traditions and rituals, depictions and duplications of Christ, and the Catholic body and queer desire. Among the more than one hundred objects on view were rare source materials and newly discovered items that provide a fresh and intimate look at Warhol’s creative process, as well as major paintings from his epic Last Supper series (1986), the experimental film The Chelsea Girls (1966), an unfinished film depicting the setting sun commissioned by the de Menil family and funded by the Roman Catholic Church, and drawings created by Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola, when she lived with her son in New York City.

​​Warhol founded Interview magazine, a stage for celebrities he “endorsed” and a business staffed by his friends. He collaborated with others on all of his books (some of which were written with Pat Hackett.) One might even say that he produced people (as in the Warholian “Superstar” and the Warholian portrait). Warhol endorsed products, appeared in commercials, and made frequent celebrity guest appearances on television shows and in films (he appeared in everything from Love Boat to Saturday Night Live and the Richard Pryor movie Dynamite Chicken).

In this respect Warhol was a fan of “Art Business” and “Business Art”—he, in fact, wrote about his interest in thinking about art as business in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again.

Warhol (right) with director Ulli Lommel on the set of Cocaine Cowboys (1979), in which Warhol appeared as himself. Warhol appeared as himself in the film Cocaine Cowboys (1979) and in the film Tootsie (1982).

After his death, Warhol was portrayed by Crispin Glover in Oliver Stone’s film The Doors (1991), by Jared Harris in Mary Harron’s film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), and by David Bowie in Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat (1996). 

Warhol appears as a character in Michael Daugherty’s opera Jackie O (1997). Actor Mark Bringleson makes a brief cameo as Warhol in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). Many films by avant-garde cineast Jonas Mekas have captured the moments of Warhol’s life. Sean Gregory Sullivan depicted Warhol in the film 54 (1998). Guy Pearce portrayed Warhol in the film Factory Girl (2007) about Edie Sedgwick’s life. Actor Greg Travis portrays Warhol in a brief scene from the film Watchmen (2009). Comedian Conan O’Brien portrayed Warhol in the film Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022).

In the movie Highway to Hell a group of Andy Warhols are part of the Good Intentions Paving Company where good-intentioned souls are ground into pavement. In the film Men in Black 3 (2012) Andy Warhol turns out to really be undercover MIB Agent W (played by Bill Hader). Warhol threw a party at The Factory in 1969, where he was looked up by MIB Agents K and J (J from the future). Agent W is desperate to end his undercover job (“I’m so out of ideas I’m painting soup cans and bananas, for Christ sakes!”, “You gotta fake my death, okay? I can’t listen to sitar music anymore.” and “I can’t tell the women from the men.”).

Andy Warhol (portrayed by Tom Meeten) is one of main characters of the 2012 British television show Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy. The character is portrayed as having robot-like mannerisms. In the 2017 feature The Billionaire Boys Club Cary Elwes portrays Warhol in a film based on the true story about Ron Levin (portrayed by Kevin Spacey) a friend of Warhol’s who was murdered in 1986. In September 2016, it was announced that Jared Leto would portray the title character in Warhol, an upcoming American biographical drama film produced by Michael De Luca and written by Terence Winter, based on the book Warhol: The Biography by Victor Bockris.

Absolut Warhola (2001) was produced by Polish director Stanislaw Mucha, featuring Warhol’s parents’ family and hometown in Slovakia.

Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006) is a reverential, four-hour movie by Ric Burns that won a Peabody Award in 2006.

Andy Warhol: Double Denied (2006) is a 52-minute movie by Ian Yentob about the difficulties authenticating Warhol’s work. Andy Warhol’s People Factory (2008), a three-part television documentary directed by Catherine Shorr, features interviews with several of Warhol’s associates. The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022), a six-part docuseries directed by Andrew Rossi, was released on Netflix chronicling Warhol’s life from the vantage point of his diaries.

Warhol appeared as a recurring character in TV series Vinyl, played by John Cameron Mitchell. Warhol was portrayed by Evan Peters in the American Horror Story: Cult episode “Valerie Solanas Died for Your Sins: Scumbag”. The episode depicts the attempted assassination of Warhol by Valerie Solanas (Lena Dunham).

In early 1969, Andy Warhol was commissioned by Braniff International to appear in two television commercials to promote the luxury airlines “When You Got It – Flaunt It” campaign. The campaign was created by the advertising agency Lois Holland Calloway, which was led by George Lois, creator of a famed series of Esquire Magazine covers. The first commercial series involved pairing unlikely people who shared the fact that they both flew Braniff Airways. Warhol was paired with boxing legend Sonny Liston. The odd commercial worked as did the others that featured unlikely fellow travelers such as painter Salvador Dalí and baseball legend Whitey Ford.

Two additional commercials for Braniff were created that featured famous persons entering a Braniff jet and being greeted by a Braniff hostess while espousing their like for flying Braniff. Warhol was also featured in the first of these commercials that were also produced by Lois and were released in the summer of 1969. Lois has incorrectly stated that he was commissioned by Braniff in 1967 for representation during that year, but at that time Madison Avenue advertising doyenne Mary Wells Lawrence, who was married to Braniff’s chairman and president Harding Lawrence, was representing the Dallas-based carrier at that time. Lois succeeded Wells Rich Greene Agency on December 1, 1968. The rights to Warhol’s films for Braniff and his signed contracts are owned by a private trust and are administered by Braniff Airways Foundation in Dallas, Texas.

Warhol strongly influenced the new wave/punk rock band Devo, as well as David Bowie. Bowie recorded a song called “Andy Warhol” for his 1971 album Hunky Dory. Lou Reed wrote the song “Andy’s Chest”, about Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Warhol, in 1968. He recorded it with the Velvet Underground, and this version was released on the VU album in 1985. The band Triumph also wrote a song about Andy Warhol, “Stranger In A Strange Land” off their 1984 album Thunder Seven.

A biography of Andy Warhol written by art critic Blake Gopnik was published in 2020 under the title Warhol.

A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a notable obituary from 1987 — Alf Landon.

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Alf Landon was an American oilman and politician who served as the 26th governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937. A member of the Republican Party, he was the party’s nominee in the 1936 presidential election, and was defeated in a landslide by incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Born in West Middlesex, Pennsylvania, Landon spent most of his childhood in Marietta, Ohio, before moving to Kansas. After graduating from the University of Kansas, he became an independent oil producer in Lawrence, Kansas. His business made him a millionaire, and he became a leader of the liberal Republicans in Kansas. Landon won election as Governor of Kansas in 1932 and sought to reduce taxes and balance the budget in the midst of the Great Depression. He supported many components of the New Deal but criticized some aspects that he found inefficient.

The 1936 Republican National Convention selected Landon as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. He proved to be an ineffective campaigner and carried just two states in the election. After the election, he left office as governor and never sought public office again. Later in life, he supported the Marshall Plan and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs. He gave the first in a series of lectures, now known as the Landon Lecture Series, at Kansas State University. Landon lived to the age of 100 and died in Topeka, Kansas, in 1987. His daughter, Nancy Kassebaum, represented Kansas in the United States Senate from 1978 to 1997.

Landon supported Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912, and by 1922, was private secretary to the governor of Kansas. He later became known as the leader of the liberal Republicans in the state. He was elected chairman of the Republican state central committee in 1928 and directed the successful Republican presidential and gubernatorial campaigns in Kansas in that year.

In 1930, however, incumbent Republican Kansas governor Clyde M. Reed failed to gain renomination, as he was defeated by challenger Frank Haucke, who would later go on to lose the general election to Harry H. Woodring. The election left the Kansas Republican Party damaged and divided. Landon decided to run in 1932 as a candidate who would reunite the Kansas GOP, and he won the nomination.

Landon was elected Governor of Kansas in the general election, where he defeated both the incumbent Democrat Woodring and independent challenger John R. Brinkley in a closely contested race. He was re-elected governor in 1934, over Democrat Omar B. Ketchum; Gov. Frank Merriam of California and Landon were the only Republican governors in the nation to be re-elected that year. As governor, Landon gained a reputation for reducing taxes and balancing the budget. Landon is often described as a fiscal conservative who nevertheless believed that the government must also address certain social issues. He supported parts of the New Deal and labor unions.

During the 1932 presidential campaign, a degree of animosity developed between Landon and then U.S. President Herbert Hoover. Osro Cobb of Arkansas, a friend of both men, tried to bring about a reconciliation, as he explains in his memoirs:

“For reasons I never understood, some friction developed between President Hoover and my friend, Governor Landon, who had a summer place in Evergreen, Colorado … I was in and out of Colorado during the summers and visited frequently with Governor Landon. I was eager to get him and the President together in hopes of bringing about a reconciliation that would benefit them personally and the Republican Party. All of us were at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs for a meeting, which I saw as an opportunity to get them together … for dinner, but whatever undercurrent existed remained, and they continued to be cool toward each other. President Hoover was one of the great Americans of this century. He was competent, compassionate, and a man of unequaled qualifications. The country paid an awful price when he was sacrificed by political caprice.”

During his gubernatorial years, Landon attempted to address the needs of his Depression-battered state while still advancing the Republican Party. After his speech at the Cleveland convention in 1936, Landon stated, “My chief concern in this crisis is to see the Republican Party name its strongest possible candidate and a man that would be a good president.” During the election year, Landon called for a “special session of the Legislature to enact measures to bring Kansas within the requirements of the federal social security program.”

In 1936, Landon sought the Republican presidential nomination opposing the re-election of Roosevelt. At the 1936 Republican National Convention, Landon’s campaign manager John Hamilton mobilized the younger elements of the party against the faction led by Herbert Hoover. Landon won the nomination on the first ballot; the convention selected Chicago newspaper publisher Frank Knox as his running mate.

Landon proved to be an ineffective campaigner who rarely traveled. Most of the attacks on Roosevelt and Social Security were developed by Republican campaigners rather than Landon himself. In the two months after his nomination he made no campaign appearances. As columnist Westbrook Pegler lampooned, “Considerable mystery surrounds the disappearance of Alfred M. Landon of Topeka, Kansas … The Missing Persons Bureau has sent out an alarm bulletin bearing Mr. Landon’s photograph and other particulars, and anyone having information of his whereabouts is asked to communicate direct with the Republican National Committee.”

Landon respected and admired Roosevelt and accepted much of the New Deal but objected that it was hostile to business and involved too much waste and inefficiency. Late in the campaign, Landon accused Roosevelt of corruption – that is, of acquiring so much power that he was subverting the Constitution. Landon said:

“The President spoke truly when he boasted … ‘We have built up new instruments of public power.’ He spoke truly when he said these instruments could provide ‘shackles for the liberties of the people … and … enslavement for the public.’ These powers were granted with the understanding that they were only temporary. But after the powers had been obtained, and after the emergency was clearly over, we were told that another emergency would be created if the power was given up. In other words, the concentration of power in the hands of the President was not a question of temporary emergency. It was a question of permanent national policy. In my opinion the emergency of 1933 was a mere excuse … National economic planning—the term used by this Administration to describe its policy—violates the basic ideals of the American system … The price of economic planning is the loss of economic freedom. And economic freedom and personal liberty go hand in hand.”

The 1936 presidential election was extraordinarily lopsided. Although Landon accrued nearly seventeen million votes and obtained the endorsement of track star Jesse Owens, he lost the popular vote by more than 10 million votes. He lost his home state of Kansas and carried only Maine and Vermont for a total of eight electoral votes to Roosevelt’s 523. On the same day, Republicans lost control of the Kansas governorship, as Democrat Walter A. Huxman was elected as his successor as governor. FDR’s win was the most lopsided electoral victory since the 1820 election. The overwhelming Roosevelt victory prompted Democratic National Committee chair James Farley to jokingly update the political maxim “As Maine goes, so goes the nation” to “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”.

Following his defeat, Landon finished out his term as Governor of Kansas and returned to the oil industry. Landon did not seek elected office again.

The Republicans’ defeats in 1932 and 1936 plunged their party into a period of bitter intra-party strife. Landon played an important role in ending this internal bickering in 1938 by helping to prepare a new group of leaders for the presidential campaign of 1940, and in trying to bring about a compromise between the isolationist and internationalist viewpoints in foreign policy. Landon declined a position in Franklin Roosevelt’s Cabinet because he made his acceptance contingent upon the President’s renunciation of a third term.

After war broke out in Europe in 1939, Landon fought against isolationists such as America First Committee who supported the Neutrality Act; he feared it would mislead Nazi Germany into thinking the United States was unwilling to fight. In 1941, however, he joined isolationists in arguing against lend-lease, although he did urge that the United Kingdom be given $5 billion outright instead.

After the war, he backed the Marshall Plan, while opposing high domestic spending. After the communist revolution in China, he was one of the first to advocate recognition of Mao Zedong’s communist government, and its admission to the United Nations, when this was still a very unpopular position among the leadership and followers of both major parties.

In 1961, Landon urged the United States to join the European Common Market. In November 1962, when he was asked to describe his political philosophy, Landon said: “I would say practical progressive, which means that the Republican party or any political party has got to recognize the problems of a growing and complex industrial civilization. And I don’t think the Republican party is really wide awake to that.” Later in the 1960s, Landon backed President Lyndon Johnson on Medicare and other Great Society programs.

On December 13, 1966, Landon gave his first “Landon Lecture” at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Landon’s lecture, titled “New Challenges in International Relations” was the first in a series of public issues lectures that continues to this day and has featured numerous world leaders and political figures, including seven U.S. presidents.

President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy attended Landon’s hundredth birthday party at his home in Topeka. Describing Landon as “the living soul of Kansas”, the 76-year old-Reagan remarked, “You don’t know what a joy it is for a fella like me to go to a birthday party for someone who can, in all honesty, call me a kid.” Landon, standing with the use of a walking stick, told the President and well-wishers at the party, “It’s a great day in my life. And it’s a great day in the lives of all of us to have had the privilege that we have today of meeting with the President of the United States and Mrs. Reagan.” White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker married Landon’s daughter Nancy nine years later.

Landon died in Topeka on October 12, 1987, thirty-three days after celebrating his hundredth birthday, and is interred at Mount Hope Cemetery in Topeka. At the time of his death, he was survived by his second wife, Theo Cobb.

Landon’s daughter, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, was a United States Senator from Kansas. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1978, she was re-elected in 1984 and 1990. Her second husband was her former Senate colleague Howard Henry Baker, Jr., of Tennessee (1925–2014). His nephew was actor Hal Landon.

A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a quick look at the pop culture events that occurred in 1987.

January Beverage brand 7 Up released 7 Up Gold, but it was eventually pulled from the shelves due to poor sales and reviews.

January The first Trojan and Lifestyles Condom campaigns aired. They each expanded their campaigns to 6 more markets.

January 31 The last Ohrbach’s department store closes in New York City after 64 years of operation.

March The Human JukeBox was ticketed on the San Francisco Wharf for playing a song 13 decibels over the legal limit. He quit his gig after being ticketed.

March 1 The first Starbucks outside of the US is opened in Vancouver, Canada.

March 2 American Motors Corporation is acquired by the Chrysler Corporation.

March 19 In Charlotte, North Carolina, televangelist Jim Bakker, head of PTL Ministries, resigns after admitting an affair with church secretary Jessica Hahn.

March 24 Michael Eisner, CEO of The Walt Disney Company, and French Prime Minister and future President of France, Jacques Chirac, sign an agreement to construct the 4,800 acres (19 km²) Euro Disney Resort (now called Disneyland Paris) and to develop the Val d’Europe area of the new town Marne-la-Vallée in Paris, France.

March 29 The World Wrestling Federation (later WWE) produces WrestleMania III from the Pontiac Silverdome In Pontiac, Michigan. The event is particularly notable for the record attendance of 93,173, the largest recorded attendance for a live indoor sporting event in North America until February 14, 2010, when the 2010 NBA All-Star Game has an attendance of 108,713 at AT&T Stadium.

March 29 A hybrid solar eclipse was the second hybrid solar eclipse in less than one year, the first being on October 3, 1986. It was annular visible in southern Argentina, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Sudan (part of the path of annularity crossed today’s South Sudan), Ethiopia, Djibouti and northern Somalia and totally visible in the Atlantic Ocean, lasting just 7.57 seconds.

April 5 The Fox Network makes its primetime debut.

May 21 Andrew Wyeth, with his “Helga Pictures,” becomes the first living American painter to have a one-man show of his work in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

May 30 DVD is introduced.

June 17 With the death of the last known dusky seaside sparrow, native to the US state of Florida, the subspecies becomes extinct.

June 19 Teddy Seymour is officially designated the first black man to sail around the world, when he completes his solo sailing circumnavigation in Frederiksted, St. Croix, of the United States Virgin Islands.

June 28 An accidental explosion at Hohenfels Training Area in West Germany kills 3 U.S. troopers.

June 30 Canada introduces a one-dollar coin, nicknamed the “Loonie”.

July 3 Richard Branson and Per Lindstrand pilot aHot Air Balloon crosses the Atlantic Ocean.

July 21 Mary Hart’s legs get insured for 2 million dollars.

July 25 The East Lancashire Railway, a heritage railway in the North West of England, is opened between Bury and Ramsbottom.

July 30 PowerPoint is bought by Microsoft.

July 31 Docklands Light Railway in London, the first driverless railway in Great Britain, is formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II.

August Starbucks is bought by Howard Shultz and a group of investors from Jerry Baldwin.

August 7 The Colombian frigate Caldas enters Venezuelan waters near the Los Monjes Archipelago, sparking the Caldas frigate crisis between both nations.

August 7 American Lynne Cox becomes the first person to swim the Bering Strait, crossing from Little Diomede Island to Big Diomede in 2 hours and 5 minutes.

August 16 The followers of the Harmonic Convergence claim it was observed around the world.

August 19 The Order of the Garter is opened to women.

September 7–21 The world’s first conference on artificial life is held at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.

September 15 Pope John Paul II arrives in Los Angeles for a two-day papal visit, his first one ever to the city, where he makes an arrival day speech to local leaders of the U.S. entertainment industry.

September 17 Pope John Paul II arrives in San Francisco for his first visit to the city, in which he embraces several AIDS sufferers, including an infected child, and proclaims abstinence from illicit sex and drugs are the two main ways to avoid infection.

October 14 A young child, Jessica McClure, falls down a well in Midland, Texas, and is later rescued.

October 22 The pilot of a British Aerospace BAE Harrier GR5 registered ZD325 accidentally ejected from his aircraft. The jet continues to fly until it runs out of fuel and crashes into the Irish Sea.

October 22 Dolphins are deployed to the Persian Gulf to locate mines.

October 23 British champion jockey Lester Piggott is jailed for three years after being convicted of tax evasion.

November 1 The InterCity 125 breaks the world speed record for a diesel-powered train, reaching 238 km/h (147.88 mph).

November 7 Lynne Cox swims between the Diomede Islands from the American Little Diomede Island to the Soviet Big Diomede Island.

November 12 The first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Mainland China opens in Beijing, near Tiananmen Square.

November 22 The Max Headroom Incident: An unidentified person hijacks two television stations in Chicago, Illinois, and broadcasts video of them wearing a mask in the likeness of the character Max Headroom.

December 1 NASA announces the names of 4 companies awarded contracts to help build Space Station Freedom: Boeing Aerospace, General Electric’s Astro-Space Division, McDonnell Douglas, and the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell.

December 10 A squirrel closes down the Nasdaq Stock Exchange when it burrows through a telephone line.

December 18 “Final Fantasy” debuts.

December 23 Squeaky Fromme Escapes prison. She was captured 2 days later.

December 30 Pope John Paul II issued the encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis (On Social Concern).

December 31 An invasive parasite of honeybees is found in the United States.

A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a quick look at the notable sporting events that occurred in 1987.

November 1, 1986 The 1986-1987 NBA season was the final NBA season for Philadelphia’s Julius Erving who announced his retirement that year. NBA arenas paid tribute to Erving’s retirement by staging special events for him. The New Jersey Nets, in particular, retired Erving’s No. 32 jersey for his contributions with the franchise. Thus Erving became the only player to have his number retired by a team while still an active player.

November 26, 1986 During the 1986-1987 NHL season, Toronto’s Borje Salming was accidentally cut in the face by a skate, requiring more than 200 stitches. It was the third injury to his face and Salming returned to play wearing a visor.

January 12 – January 25 The 1987 Australian Open was a tennis tournament played on grass courts at the Kooyong Stadium in Melbourne in Victoria in Australia. It was the 75th edition of the Australian Open; the first tournament to be held after New Year’s Day since the late 1960s and also the last tournament to be played on grass before the change of surface.  In the Men’s category, Stefan Edberg defeated Pat Cash 6–3, 6–4, 3–6, 5–7, 6–3. It was Edberg’s 2nd career Grand Slam title and his 2nd Australian Open title. In the women’s category, Hana Mandlíková defeated Martina Navratilova 7–5, 7–6(7–1). It was Mandlíková’s 4th career Grand Slam title and her 2nd and last Australian Open title.

January 22 A massive blizzard resulted in only 334 spectators attending the game between the New Jersey Devils and the Calgary Flames at the Brendan Byrne Arena, leading to the Devils dubbing the spectators the “334 Club”.

February 6 SMU’s faculty athletics representative, religious studies professor Lonnie Kliever, delivered a report to the NCAA which recommended an extension of the school’s probation an additional four years, until 1990. During this period, SMU would be allowed to hire only six assistant coaches, and only four of them would be allowed to participate in off-campus recruiting. It also recommended that SMU’s ban from bowl games and live television be extended until 1989. During those two seasons, SMU proposed dropping two non-conference games from its schedule. SMU’s cooperation so impressed the enforcement staff, led by assistant executive director of enforcement and compliance David Berst, that it recommended that the Infractions Committee accept SMU’s proposed penalties, with the exception of a ban on non-conference play for two years.

It soon became apparent, however, that the infractions committee was not willing to let SMU off lightly, even though both the enforcement staff and SMU had agreed on the above proposed sanctions. Not only did the members subject Kliever to stern questioning after he and Berst delivered their presentations, but the committee stayed in session longer than usual. On February 20, Berst told Kliever that SMU would indeed get a “death penalty. “Ultimately, the committee voted unanimously to cancel SMU’s entire 1987 football season and all four of SMU’s scheduled home games in 1988.

February 8 The 1987 NBA All-Star Game was played at the Kingdome in Seattle, with the West defeating the East 154–149 in overtime. To the delight of the Seattle crowd, the SuperSonics’ Tom Chambers won the game’s MVP award. Michael Jordan won his first Slam Dunk Contest.

March 7 in Las Vegas, Nevada, Mike Tyson adds the WBA heavyweight title to his WBC belt when he beats James Smith in a 12-round decision. Mike Tyson was coming off a dominating victory over Trevor Berbick in which he captured the WBC Heavyweight championship after knocking out Berbick in the second round. Tyson’s next opponent would be the WBA Heavyweight champion James “Bonecrusher” Smith, who had knocked out Tim Witherspoon in the first round to capture the title four months earlier. The stakes for the fight were high as not only would the winner unify the WBA and WBC titles, but they would also get to face undefeated IBF Heavyweight champion Michael Spinks to determine the next Undisputed Heavyweight champion. However, only a month before the fight, Spinks would vacate his IBF title, instead choosing to defend his remaining Lineal Heavyweight championship against Gerry Cooney, temporarily putting plans to find the next Undisputed Heavyweight Champion on hold.

Though Smith became one of the few men to last the entire 12 rounds with Tyson, he offered little offense during the fight, instead constantly grappling with Tyson in an effort to reduce the effectiveness of Tyson’s punches. Because of the excessive holding, referee Mills Lane twice took a point away from Smith, first in the second round, and then again in the eighth. Smith’s best offensive pressure arguably was during the fight’s final seconds in which he was able to land a right hand to the head of Tyson. Tyson would earn the victory by way of unanimous decision, winning every round on all three of the judges’ scorecards. Afterwards, Tyson was critical of Smith’s tactics, “When I was trying to put the punches together he grabbed. This hurts boxing. This is show business. People expect a performance.”

March 12 – March 30 The 1987 NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament involved 64 schools playing in single-elimination play to determine the national champion of men’s NCAA Division I college basketball. A total of 63 games were played in New Orleans, Louisiana Indiana, coached by Bob Knight, won the national title with a 74–73 victory in the final game over Syracuse, coached by Jim Boeheim. Keith Smart of Indiana, who hit the game-winner in the final seconds, and intercepted the full court pass at the last second, was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player. The tournament also featured a “Cinderella team” in the Final Four, as Providence College, led by a then-unknown Rick Pitino, made their first Final Four appearance since 1973. One year after reaching the Final Four, LSU made another deep run in the Midwest region. The Tigers ousted Temple in the second round and DePaul in the Sweet 16 before losing 77-76 to top seeded Indiana in the Elite Eight. This was the last tournament in which teams were allowed to have home court advantage: national runner-up Syracuse, DePaul, Arizona and UAB all opened the tournament playing on their home courts. UAB and Arizona each lost in the first round, while DePaul won twice at the Rosemont Horizon. Under rules adopted in 1988, teams cannot play in a facility in which they play four or more regular season games. The 1987 NCAA men’s basketball tournament was also the first tournament to use the three-point shot.

April 4 The Islanders’ captain Denis Potvin became the first NHL defenseman to reach 1000 points. A shot by the Islanders’ Mikko Makela deflected off Potvin’s arm in a 6–6 shootout between the Islanders and Sabres.

April 6 Sugar Ray Leonard beats Marvin Hagler for boxing’s world Middleweight championship. In the late summer of 1986, negotiations began for a proposed super fight between long-reigning undisputed middleweight champion Marvelous Marvin Hagler and former two-weight champion Sugar Ray Leonard. Leonard had fought only once since his first professional retirement in 1982, defeating Kevin Howard in 1984, retiring again immediately following the fight after being dissatisfied with his performance. In March 1986, Hagler defeated John Mugabi via 11th round knockout, though Mugabi gave Hagler a tough fight and swelled his right eye. Leonard was in attendance at the Hagler–Mugabi fight and after seeing Hagler having slower speed than usual against Mugabi, thought he could beat Hagler, and in May 1986, Leonard announced that he would come out of retirement only to fight Hagler.

In what would go down to be among the most controversial fights in boxing history, Leonard would ultimately earn a split decision victory. Hagler started the fight abandoning his usual southpaw stance in favor of an orthodox stance, which would prove costly as he lost the first two rounds on all three judges’ scorecards. By round three, Hagler switched to starting rounds in his normal southpaw stance. Hagler would spend most of the fight as the aggressor, while Leonard would pepper Hagler with combinations before retreating away. During the last 30 seconds of each round, Leonard would attack Hagler with a flurry of punches in an effort to “steal” the rounds on the scorecards. Overall, Leonard landed 306 of his 629 thrown punches (49%) compared to Hagler’s 291 out of 792 (37%).

April 8 General Manager, Al Campanis, of the LA Dodgers is fired as a result of controversial remarks regarding blacks in baseball made during an interview on Nightline two days earlier.

April 9 – April 12 The 1987 Masters Tournament was the 51st Masters Tournament, held at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. Augusta native Larry Mize won his only major championship in a sudden-death playoff over Seve Ballesteros and Greg Norman. Norman had barely missed a 20-foot birdie opportunity on the 72nd hole which would have won him the tournament in regulation. The Masters Champions include, Tommy Aaron, Seve Ballesteros (3,8), Gay Brewer, Billy Casper, Charles Coody, Ben Crenshaw (8,9,11,12), Raymond Floyd (2,4,9,11,12,13), Doug Ford, Bernhard Langer (8,9,12), Jack Nicklaus (8,9), Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Craig Stadler (9,13), Art Wall Jr., Tom Watson (2,3,8,12), and Fuzzy Zoeller (2,8,9,11,12,13).

April 13 At Jack Murphy Stadium, the San Diego Padres set a major league record when the first three batters in the bottom of the first inning hit home runs off San Francisco Giants starter Roger Mason in their home opener. The Padres, trailing 3–0, got homers from Marvell Wynne, Tony Gwynn and John Kruk.

April 15 Juan Nieves of the Milwaukee Brewers pitches a no-hitter against the Baltimore Orioles. Nieves becomes the second-youngest pitcher in major league history to accomplish the feat (22 years, 4 months, 10 days), as well as the first Brewer to do it.

April 17 Mike Schmidt of the Philadelphia Phillies hits the 500th home run of his career. It comes in the ninth inning against the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Don Robinson, giving the Phillies an 8–6 win at Pittsburgh. Schmidt is an American former professional baseball third baseman who played his entire 18-season career in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Philadelphia Phillies. Schmidt was a 12-time All-Star and a three-time winner of the National League (NL) Most Valuable Player award (MVP), and he was known for his combination of power hitting and strong defense. As a hitter, he compiled 548 home runs and 1,595 runs batted in (RBIs), and led the NL in home runs eight times and in RBIs four times. As a fielder, Schmidt won the National League Gold Glove Award for third basemen ten times. Schmidt was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1995 and is widely considered to be the greatest third baseman in baseball history.

April 19 Michael Jordan joined Wilt Chamberlain as only the second player in NBA history to score 3000 points in a season. With a 37.1 ppg, Jordan also began a seven-year reign as the NBA’s scoring champion, tied with Chamberlain for the league record.

April 19 Los Angeles Clippers become the second team in NBA history to lose 70 or more games joining the 1972–73 76ers, the latter was (1992–93 Mavericks, 1997–98 Nuggets, 2009–10 Nets (including losing 18 straight games to start the season), and the 2015–16 76ers (including a record–tying 26–game losing streak also including losing 18 straight games to start the season).

April 28 Rod Woodson is drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers. He is an American former professional football player who was a defensive back in the National Football League (NFL) for 17 seasons. He is currently the head coach of the XFL’s Vegas Vipers. He played his first ten years with the Steelers, and was a key member of the Baltimore Ravens’ Super Bowl XXXV championship team. He also had two shorter stints for the San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders. Widely considered one of the greatest all-time defensive players ever, Woodson holds the NFL record for fumble recoveries (32) by a defensive player, and interceptions returned for touchdown (12), and was named the NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1993. His 71 career interceptions is the third-most in NFL history. He was an inductee of the Class of 2009 of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio on August 8, 2009. Woodson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2016. Rod played most of his career as a cornerback then switched to safety during the later part of his career.

April 30 NASCAR driver Bill Elliott sets the record for the all-time fastest lap at Talladega Superspeedway at 212.8 miles per hour (342.5 km/h).

May 2 The 113^th Kentucky Derby took place.

May 16 The 1987 Preakness Stakes was the 112^th running of the Preakness Stakes thoroughbred horse race. Alysheba won first place.

May 17 – May 31 The 1987 Stanley Cup Finals was the championship series of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) 1986–87 season, and the culmination of the 1987 Stanley Cup playoffs. It was contested between the Edmonton Oilers and the Philadelphia Flyers. The Oilers won the series 4–3, for their third Stanley Cup victory. This was the sixth of nine consecutive Finals contested by a team from Western Canada, the fifth of eight consecutive Finals contested by a team from Alberta (the Oilers appeared in six, the Calgary Flames in two, the Vancouver Canucks in one), and the fourth of five consecutive Finals to end with the Cup presentation on Alberta ice (the Oilers won four times, the Montreal Canadiens once). Game 7 of this series was played on May 31, which at the time was the latest finishing date for an NHL season. The record would be broken five years later when that series ended on June 1.

May 22 The first ever Rugby World Cup kicks off with New Zealand playing Italy at Eden Park, Auckland.

May 24 Five days before his 48th birthday, Al Unser became the oldest winner of the Indianapolis 500 and only the second driver to win the event four times.

May 25 – June 7 The 1987 French Open was a tennis tournament that took place on the outdoor clay courts at the Stade Roland Garros in Paris, France. It was the 91st staging of the French Open, and the second Grand Slam tennis event of 1987. In the men’s category, Van Lendl defeated Mats Wilander, 7–5, 6–2, 3–6, 7–6(7–3). It was Lendl’s 2nd title of the year, and his 64th overall. It was his 5th career Grand Slam title, and his 3rd French Open title. In the women’s category, Steffi Graf defeated Martina Navratilova, 6–4, 4–6, 8–6. It was Graf’s 1st career Grand Slam title.

May 27 At the Prater Stadium of Vienna, Porto of Portugal defeats Bayern München of West Germany 2–1 and wins its first European Cup.

June 2 – June 14 The 1987 NBA Finals was the championship round of the National Basketball Association (NBA)’s 1986–87 season, and the culmination of the season’s playoffs. The Western Conference champion Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Eastern Conference and defending NBA champion Boston Celtics 4 games to 2. The key moment of the series was Magic Johnson’s Junior sky hook in Game 4. This was the tenth time that the Celtics and Lakers met in the NBA Finals (more than any other Finals matchup). It would be the Celtics’ last Finals appearance until the two teams met in 2008.

June 18 – June 21 The 1987 U.S. Open was the 87th U.S. Open, held at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, California. Scott Simpson passed and held off 1982 champion Tom Watson on the Lake Course to win his only major title by one stroke. Eleven former champions were in the field and only four made the 36-hole cut. This was the third U.S. Open at the Lake Course of the Olympic Club, the previous two in 1955 and 1966 ended in playoffs. The U.S. Open returned in 1998 and 2012; both were won by one stroke.

June 22 – July 5 The 1987 Wimbledon Championships was a tennis tournament played on grass courts at the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon, London in the United Kingdom. It was the 101st edition of the Wimbledon Championships. In the men’s category, Pat Cash defeated Ivan Lendl, 7–6(7–5), 6–2, 7–5. It was Cash’s only career Grand Slam title. In the women’s category, Martina Navratilova defeated Steffi Graf, 7–5, 6–3. It was Navratilova’s 45th career Grand Slam title and her 8th Wimbledon title.

June 22 The NBA draft is held. David Robinson was the first pick of the first round. Robinson is an American former professional basketball player who played for the San Antonio Spurs in the National Basketball Association (NBA) from 1989 to 2003, and is a minority owner of the Spurs. Nicknamed “the Admiral” for his service with the U.S. Navy, Robinson was a 10-time NBA All-Star, the 1995 NBA MVP, a two-time NBA champion (1999 and 2003), a two-time Olympic Gold Medal winner (1992, 1996), a two-time Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee (2009 for his individual career, 2010 as a member of the 1992 United States men’s Olympic basketball team), and a two-time U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame inductee (2008 individually, 2009 as a member of the 1992 Olympic team). He was honored as one of the league’s all-time players by being named to the NBA 50th Anniversary (1996) and 75th Anniversary Teams (2021). He is widely considered one of the greatest centers in both college basketball and NBA history

Scottie Pippen was also a first round pick in the 1987 NBA draft. Pippen is an American former professional basketball player. He played 17 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA), winning six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls. Considered one of the greatest small forwards of all time, Pippen, along with Michael Jordan, played an important role in transforming the Bulls into a championship team and in popularizing the NBA around the world during the 1990s.

Pippen was named to the NBA All-Defensive First Team eight consecutive times and the All-NBA First Team three times. He was a seven-time NBA All-Star and was the NBA All-Star Game MVP in 1994. He was named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History during the 1996–97 season, and is one of four players to have his jersey retired by the Chicago Bulls (the others being Jerry Sloan, Bob Love, and Jordan). He played a main role on both the 1992 Chicago Bulls Championship team and the 1996 Chicago Bulls Championship team, which were selected as two of the Top 10 Teams in NBA History. His biography on the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame’s website states that “the multidimensional Pippen ran the court like a point guard, attacked the boards like a power forward, and swished the nets like a shooting guard”. During his 17-year career, he played 12 seasons with the Bulls, one with the Houston Rockets and four with the Portland Trail Blazers, making the postseason 16 straight times. In October 2021, Pippen was again honored as one of the league’s greatest players of all-time by being named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team.

Reggie Miller was also a first round draft pick in the 1987 NBA draft.  Miller is an American former professional basketball player who played his entire 18-year NBA career with the Indiana Pacers. Miller was known for his precision three-point shooting, especially in pressure situations and most notably against the New York Knicks, for which he earned the nickname “Knick Killer.” When he retired, he held the record for most career 3-point field goals made. He is currently fourth on the list behind Stephen Curry, Ray Allen, and James Harden. A five-time All-Star selection, Miller led the league in free throw percentage five times and won a gold medal in the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Miller is widely regarded as the Pacers’ greatest player of all time. His No. 31 was retired by the team in 2006. Currently, he works as an NBA commentator for TNT and college basketball analyst for CBS Sports. Miller was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012 and named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team in 2021.

July 16 – July 19 The 1987 British Open Championship was a men’s major golf championship and the 116th British Open Championship held at Muirfield Golf Links in Gullane, Scotland. Nick Faldo won the first of his three Open Championships, one stroke ahead of runners-up Paul Azinger and Rodger Davis.  It was the first of Faldo’s six major championships. It was the first win at The Open by an Englishman since Tony Jacklin in 1969. This was the thirteenth Open Championship held at Muirfield; the previous was in 1980 and the next in 1992.

July 18 New York Yankees first baseman Don Mattingly home runs in his record-tying eighth straight game, in a 7–2 Texas Rangers win over the Yankees. He tied the record set by Dale Long in 1956.

August 3 Minnesota Twins pitcher Joe Niekro is suspended for 10 days for possessing a nail file on the pitcher’s mound. Niekro claimed he had been filing his nails in the dugout and put the file in his back pocket when the inning started.

August 6 – August 9 The 1987 PGA Championship was the 69th PGA Championship, held at the Champion Course of PGA National Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. In hot and windy conditions, Larry Nelson won his second PGA Championship in a sudden-death playoff over 1977 champion Lanny Wadkins. It was Nelson’s third and final major title. D.A. Weibring, a 54-hole co-leader, shot 76 (+4) and finished a stroke back at even-par 288. The other co-leader, Mark McCumber, posted 77 and finished in a tie for fifth. Two major champions in contention shot high scores and fell back: Seve Ballesteros (78) and Raymond Floyd (80). In the August heat of Florida, the attendance was low. A record high temperature for the day of 97 °F (36 °C) was recorded on Sunday. It was the second major played in Florida, following the PGA Championship in 1971, played in February at the old PGA National. Through 2021, this is the last major tournament played in the state. The purse was the last under $1 million at the PGA Championship. With the win, Nelson gained an automatic bid to the Ryder Cup team in 1987, his third, bumping Don Pooley. Nelson’s record in that competition in late September was 0–3–1, as the U.S. lost the Cup for the first time on home soil. He lost all three pairs matches and halved his singles match. The Champion Course hosted the Ryder Cup in 1983 and the Senior PGA Championship for 19 years (1982–2000). Since 2007, it has been the venue of The Honda Classic on the PGA Tour, played in March.

August 7 Pan American Games are held in Indianapolis.

August 11 Mark McGwire of the Oakland Athletics breaks Al Rosen’s American League rookie record by hitting his 38th home run in an 8–2 loss to the Mariners.

August 16 The Miami Dolphins began playing at their new home, Joe Robbie Stadium, moving from the Miami Orange Bowl. This was also the NFL Saint Louis Cardinals’ final season at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis; the team relocated to Tempe, Arizona, the following season.

August 26 Paul Molitor of the Milwaukee Brewers goes hitless, and ends his 39-game hitting streak. It is the longest American League hitting streak since Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game streak (a major league record) in 1941.

September 1- September 14 The 1987 US Open was a tennis tournament played on outdoor hard courts at the USTA National Tennis Center in New York City. It was the 107th edition of the US Open. As of 2021 it is the last time any player, male or female, has won the Triple Crown as Martina Navratilova won the Women’s Singles, Women’s Doubles and Mixed Doubles events. In the men’s category, Ivan Lendl defeated Mats Wilander 6–7(7–9), 6–0, 7–6(7–4), 6–4. It was Lendl’s 6th career Grand Slam title and his 3rd and final US Open title. In the women’s category, Martina Navratilova defeated Steffi Graf 7–6(7–4), 6–1. It was Navratilova’s 46th career Grand Slam title and her 11th US Open title.

September 9 Nolan Ryan strikes out 16 to pass 4,500 for his career as the Houston Astros beat the San Francisco Giants 4–2. Ryan strikes out 12 of the final 13 batters and fans Mike Aldrete to complete the seventh inning for his 4,500th strikeout.

September 14 In the midst of the Toronto Blue Jays’ 18–3 drubbing of the Baltimore Orioles at Exhibition Stadium, Cal Ripken Jr. is lifted from the lineup and replaced by Ron Washington, stopping Ripken’s consecutive innings played streak at 8,243. In this same game, Toronto hit ten home runs to set a Major League single-game record. Ernie Whitt connects on three of the home runs, Rance Mulliniks and George Bell two each, and Fred McGriff, Lloyd Moseby and Rob Ducey one each.

September 21 Darryl Strawberry steals his 30th base of the season to join the 30–30 club. With teammate Howard Johnson already having joined, it marks the first time that two teammates achieve 30–30 seasons in the same year.

September 22 Wade Boggs of the Boston Red Sox reaches the 200-hit mark for the fifth straight season in an 8–5 loss to the Detroit Tigers.

September 22 A 24-day players’ strike was called in the NFL after Week 2. The games that were scheduled for the third week of the season were canceled, reducing the 16-game season to 15, but the games for Weeks 4, 5 and 6 were played with replacement players. The NFLPA actually ended the strike before the Week 6 slate of games, but the NFL owners’ unanimously nixed their return that week because the union had missed an owner-mandated deadline that week to be eligible to return, and would have to wait until Week 7 to resume playing.

September 25 – September 27 The 27th Ryder Cup Matches were held at Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio, a suburb north of Columbus. The European team won their second consecutive competition by a score of 15 to 13 points in probably the most historic Ryder Cup. After an unbeaten record of 13–0 spanning sixty years, the U.S. team lost for the first time on home soil. Europe took a lead of 5 points into the Sunday singles matches, but the U.S. fought back strongly to narrow the deficit. Eamonn Darcy, who previously had a very poor Ryder Cup record, defeated Ben Crenshaw at the last hole to get Europe to 13 points. Crenshaw had broken his putter in a moment of frustration after the sixth hole and putted with his 1 iron for the last dozen holes. Bernhard Langer then halved his match with Larry Nelson and when Seve Ballesteros defeated Curtis Strange 2 & 1 to total 141/2  points, the European victory was secured. This was the last Ryder Cup in which the U.S. team did not employ captain’s selections. Europe used captain’s picks in 1979, 1981, 1985, and this year. Muirfield Village, founded and designed by U.S. captain Jack Nicklaus, has hosted the Memorial Tournament on the PGA Tour since 1976. The 2013 Presidents Cup was held at the same course.

October 17 – October 25 The 1987 World Series was the championship series of Major League Baseball’s (MLB) 1987 season. The 84th edition of the World Series, it was a best-of-seven playoff played between the American League (AL) champion Minnesota Twins and the National League (NL) champion St. Louis Cardinals. The Twins defeated the Cardinals four games to three to win the Series, their first in Minnesota and the first since last winning as the Washington Senators in 1924. Twins pitcher Frank Viola was named as the 1987 World Series MVP. This was the first World Series to feature games played indoors, and the first in which the home team won every game; this happened again in 1991 (also a Twins championship, over the Atlanta Braves) and in 2001 with the Arizona Diamondbacks defeating the New York Yankees. This was the third of four World Series played entirely on artificial turf, with the others in 1980, 1985, and 1993. This is the first World Series in which the series logo appeared on the jerseys; only the Cardinals wore it. Both contestants in the following year’s World Series wore a patch.

October 31 After playing just three games for the Rams during the strike-shortened 1987 NFL season, Eric Dickerson was traded to the Indianapolis Colts in one of the NFL’s biggest trades ever at that time. In a three-team deal, the Colts traded linebacker Cornelius Bennett, whom they drafted but were unable to sign to a contract, to the Buffalo Bills for their first-round pick in 1988, first- and second-round picks in 1989, and running back Greg Bell. The Colts in turn traded Bell and the three draft choices from Buffalo plus their own first- and second-round picks in 1988, their second-round pick in 1989, and running back Owen Gill to the Rams for Dickerson. With the picks the Rams took running back Gaston Green, wide receiver Aaron Cox, linebacker Fred Strickland, running back Cleveland Gary, linebacker Frank Stams, and defensive back Darryl Henley. The trade reunited Dickerson with Ron Meyer, who had left SMU after Dickerson’s junior season to take the head coaching position in New England and who was hired by the Colts in 1986 following Rod Dowhower’s firing.

November 30 Raiders/Seahawks game marked the memorable Monday Night Football debut of Bo Jackson, with his 91-yard touchdown run. Prior to that, he ran over Seahawks linebacker Brian Bosworth for another score.

January 2, 1988 The 1987 NCAA Division I-A football season ended with Miami winning its second national championship of the 1980s in an Orange Bowl game featuring a rare No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup between the top ranked Oklahoma Sooners and the Hurricanes. Miami’s first three games were against ranked opponents in what was labeled a rebuilding year. After some late game theatrics by Michael Irvin against rival Florida State, the Hurricanes were 3–0, the national media started to take notice. Oklahoma was also seen as quite the juggernaut, averaging 428.8 yards rushing per game with their potent wishbone offense. Miami was able to hold Oklahoma to just 179 yards on the ground, winning the game 20–14. Also having notable seasons were Syracuse, LSU and Florida State. Syracuse finished the season 11–0–1 and ranked No. 4 after a controversial Sugar Bowl game in which Auburn kicked a late field goal to end the game in a tie. LSU went 10–1–1, ending the season ranked No. 5. This was LSU’s first ten-win season in 26 years and their highest ranking since 1961. Florida State finished ranked No. 2, their only loss to Miami, and began a streak of 14 years where FSU finished in the top 5. The Seminoles beat Rose Bowl champion Michigan State and SEC champion Auburn on the road and beat Nebraska in the Fiesta Bowl. This would be the first of two years SMU would not field a team due to the NCAA’s death penalty.

January 31, 1988 Super Bowl XXII was an American football game between the National Football Conference (NFC) champion Washington Redskins and American Football Conference (AFC) champion Denver Broncos to decide the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 1987 season. The Redskins defeated the Broncos by the score of 42–10, winning their second Super Bowl. The game was played at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, California, which was the first time that the Super Bowl was played there. It was the second consecutive Super Bowl loss for the Broncos, who had lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl the year before.

A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a quick look at the notable music that was published in 1987.

January 3 Aretha Franklin becomes the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was the first woman to make it into The Hall. The other inductees this year consist of The Coasters, Eddie Cochran, Bo Diddley, Marvin Gaye, Bill Haley, Clyde McPhatter, Ricky Nelson, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Smokey Robinson and Jackie Wilson.

January 5 Elton John, after several months of voice problems, undergoes throat surgery in an Australian hospital. The outcome would hinder his voice permanently and he would soon start singing in a deep register.

February 14 Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” reaches #1 in the USA. It would be 1987’s biggest hit song worldwide.

February 14 Los Angeles radio station KMET signs off after nineteen years on the air. The station had been a pioneer of underground progressive rock programming.

March 9 U2 releases The Joshua Tree, an album that launches them into superstar status in the music world. The album would sell over 14 million copies worldwide in 1987 alone and would win the Grammy for “Album of the Year” (at the 1988 ceremony). U2 have two #1 hit songs from this album on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 charts.

March 9 The career that would end in an infamous appearance at The Brit awards and the burning of a million pounds began in Britain, as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu released their debut single, “All You Need Is Love”.

April 23 Carole King sues the owner of her record company, Lou Adler, claiming that she is owed more than $400,000 in royalties. King also asks for rights to her old recordings.

May 2 “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” was released by American singer Whitney Houston for her second studio album, Whitney (1987). It was released as the lead single by Arista Records. It became the 3rd biggest hit single of 1987. It was produced by Narada Michael Walden, and written by George Merrilland Shannon Rubicam, of the band Boy Meets Girl, who had previously collaborated with Houston on “How Will I Know.” “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” received mixed reviews from music critics, who praised Houston’s vocal performance but critiqued its musical arrangement, comparing it to “How Will I Know” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Despite the mixed critical response, the song became a worldwide success, topping the charts in eighteen countries including Australia, Italy, Germany and the UK. In the US, it became Houston’s fourth consecutive chart topper and is certified 6× platinum with sales of over 6 million copies. At the 30th Annual Grammy Awards, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, marking Houston’s second win in the category.

May 30 Beastie Boys performed at their concert in England that erupted into a riot approximately 10 minutes after the group hit the stage and the arrest of Adam Horovitz by Merseyside Police. He was charged with assault causing grievous bodily harm.  Years later, Horovitz stated that he took the blame for another band member that had actually thrown the beer can.

June 15 “It’s a Sin” is released by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys from their second studio album, Actually (1987). The song became the fourth biggest hit single of 1987. Written by Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, the song was released as the album’s lead single. It became the duo’s second number-one single on the UK Singles Chart, spending three weeks atop the chart. Additionally, the single topped the charts in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, while reaching number nine on the US Billboard Hot 100. A demo of the track was first cut in 1984 with Bobby Orlando, and the song’s form in the demo remained intact to the final version, although the released production is far more dramatic.

June 23 “Who’s That Girl” is released by American singer Madonna from the soundtrack album of the 1987 film, Who’s That Girl. It was released by Sire Records as the first album single. While shooting for the film, then called Slammer, Madonna had requested Patrick Leonard to develop an up-tempo song that captured the nature of her film persona. She later added the lyrics and vocals to the demo tape developed by Leonard, and decided to rename the song as well as the film to “Who’s That Girl”. Featuring instrumentation from drums, bass, and stringed instruments, “Who’s That Girl” continued Madonna’s fascination with Hispanic culture by incorporating Spanish lyrics and using the effect of double vocals. Critical reception was mixed to positive; some critics compared it to Madonna’s previous single, “La Isla Bonita”, while others found it forgettable. “Who’s That Girl” became Madonna’s sixth single to top the Billboard Hot 100, while peaking atop the charts in countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Ireland and Belgium. It was also nominated for “Best Song Written for Visual Media” at the 1988 Grammy Awards and “Best Original Song” at the 1988 Golden Globe Awards. The music video portrayed a different persona of Madonna, rather than her film character for which it was released. She’s seen as a young boyish lady in search of treasure. Madonna has performed the song on her Who’s That Girl (1987) and Rebel Heart (2015–2016) tours. The song has been covered by many artists and has appeared in compilations and tribute albums. Despite being a worldwide number-one hit, the song was not included in Madonna’s 1990 greatest hits album The Immaculate Collection, but was later included on her 2009 greatest hits album Celebration. The song became the fifth biggest hit single in 1987.

July 4 Kylie Minogue’s recording career begins with the release of her cover version of the Little Eva hit The Loco-Motion; the single spends seven weeks at number one in her native Australia and leads to a contract with UK-based record producers Stock Aitken Waterman.

July 4 The first joint rock concert between the United States and the Soviet Union is held in Moscow to promote peace. The Doobie Brothers, James Taylor, Santana and Bonnie Raitt share the bill with Soviet rock group Autograph.

July 21 American rock group Guns N’ Roses release Appetite for Destruction which, after initial slow sales, will become the best-selling debut album of all time, with more than 18 million copies sold in the US alone to date.

July 27 “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley is released and ends up becoming the second biggest hit single of 1987. It is Astley’s most famous song. It was written and produced by Stock Aitken Waterman, and was released as the first single from Astley’s debut album, Whenever You Need Somebody (1987). The song was a worldwide number-one hit, initially in the United Kingdom in 1987, where it stayed at the top of the chart for five weeks and was the best-selling single of that year. It eventually topped the charts in 25 countries, including the United States and West Germany and won Best British Single at the 1988 Brit Awards. The song is considered to be Astley’s signature song and it is often played at the end of his live concerts.  The music video for the song surged in popularity beginning in 2007 due to the “Rickroll” internet meme, in which a user expecting entirely unrelated content is shown the video. In 2008, Astley won the MTV Europe Music Award for Best Act Ever with the song, as a result of a collective campaign from thousands of people on the Internet. In 2019, Astley recorded and released a ‘Pianoforte’ version of the song for his album The Best of Me, which features a new piano arrangement.

August 27 The Jello Biafra criminal trial is dismissed after ending in a hung jury in Los Angeles court. Biafra and his manager had been charged with distributing harmful material to minors due to a poster included in the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist album of a painting depicting rows of sexual organs.

August 31 Michael Jackson releases Bad, his first studio album since Thriller, the best-selling album of all time. The album would produce five number one singles in the US, a record which has not been broken.

September 7 Pink Floyd released A Momentary Lapse of Reason, their first album after the departure of, and legal battle with, bassist Roger Waters. The subsequent tour grossed around $135 million worldwide, a sum that was only equaled by the earnings of Michael Jackson and U2 combined.

September 11 Reggae musician Peter Tosh is murdered during a robbery in his home.

October 19 Mötley Crüe released the song “You’re All I Need” as a single. MTV refused to play its video because of the level of violence.

October 19 INXS releases KICK.

October 27 White Snakes “Is this love?” is released. The song made it to number 9 on British UK charts and number 2 in the US, blocked by the number 1 spot “Faith” by George Michael.

October 30 George Michael releases his first solo studio album, Faith, which would win the Grammy Award for album of the year and sell 11 million copies in the USA alone.

October 31 The Zorros headline on Halloween for the last-ever show at the Crystal Ballroom, Melbourne’s premier Punk/New Wave venue. The Crystal Ballroom has seen almost ten years of intense musical evolution. The venue has chandeliers, stained glass windows, paisley wallpaper and a tiled foyer.

November 15“La Bamba” by Los Lobos is released and becomes the biggest hit single of the year. “La Bamba” is a Mexican folk song, originally from the state of Veracruz, also known as “La Bomba”.The song is best known from a 1958 adaptation by Ritchie Valens, a Top 40 hit in the U.S. charts. Valens’s version is ranked number 345 on Rolling Stone magazine′s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. “La Bamba ” has been covered by numerous artists, notably by Los Lobos whose version was the title track of the 1987 film La Bamba, a biopic about Valens; their version reached No. 1 in many charts in the same year. The Belgian Electronic band “Telex”, the trio who made the worldwide successful “Moskow Diskow,” also created a downbeat electronic cover of it, which is the final track in their final album “How Do You Dance?”.

November 18 CBS Records was sold to the Sony Corporation in a deal worth about $2 billion; the company was renamed Sony Music Entertainment in 1991.

November 19 Cher returns to the music after five years of absence – time that she took to dedicate herself to the filmmaking business – with the lead single of her second self-titled album (and eighteenth overall), “I Found Someone”, which peaked at number five in UK and number ten in US.

December 23 Nikki Sixx of the rock band Mötley Crüe suffers a heroin overdose, but is revived shortly thereafter.

December 23 Roger Waters finalizes his departure from British progressive rock band Pink Floyd, after a two-year-long legal dispute over the rights to the band’s name and assets.

A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a quick look at the notable books that were published in 1987.

Watchmen
by Alan Moore

Watchmen is an American comic book maxiseries by the British creative team of writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins. It was published monthly by DC Comics in 1986 and 1987 before being collected in a single-volume edition in 1987. Watchmen originated from a story proposal Moore submitted to DC featuring superhero characters that the company had acquired from Charlton Comics. As Moore’s proposed story would have left many of the characters unusable for future stories, managing editor Dick Giordano convinced Moore to create original characters instead.

Moore used the story as a means to reflect contemporary anxieties, to deconstruct and satirize the superhero concept and political commentary. Watchmen depicts an alternate history in which superheroes emerged in the 1940s and 1960s and their presence changed history so that the United States won the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal was never exposed. In 1985, the country was edging toward World War III with the Soviet Union, freelance costumed vigilantes were outlawed and most former superheroes were retired or working for the government. The story focuses on the protagonists’ personal development and moral struggles as an investigation into the murder of a government-sponsored superhero pulls them out of retirement.

Gibbons used a nine-panel grid layout throughout the series and added recurring symbols such as a blood-stained smiley face. All but the last issue feature supplemental fictional documents that add to the series’ backstory, and the narrative is intertwined with that of another story, an in-story pirate comic titled Tales of the Black Freighter, which one of the characters reads. Structured at times as a nonlinear narrative, the story skips through space, time and plot. In the same manner, entire scenes and dialogue have parallels with others through synchronicity, coincidence and repeated imagery.

A commercial success, Watchmen has received critical acclaim both in the comics and mainstream press. Watchmen was recognized in Time’s List of the 100 Best Novels as one of the best English language novels published since 1923. In a retrospective review, the BBC’s Nicholas Barber described it as “the moment comic books grew up”. Moore opposed this idea, stating, “I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.”

After a number of attempts to adapt the series into a feature film, director Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was released in 2009. A video game series, Watchmen: The End Is Nigh, was released in the same year to coincide with the film’s release.

DC Comics published Before Watchmen, a series of nine prequel miniseries, in 2012, and Doomsday Clock, a 12-issue limited series and sequel to the original Watchmen series, from 2017 to 2019 – both without Moore’s or Gibbons’ involvement. The second series integrated the Watchmen characters within the DC Universe, home to more recognizable DC superheroes like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. A television continuation to the original comic, set 34 years after the comic’s timeline, was broadcast on HBO from October to December 2019 with Gibbons’ involvement. A comic continuation of the HBO series, titled Rorschach and written by Tom King, began publication in October 2020. Moore has expressed his displeasure with later adaptations and asked that Watchmen not be adapted for future works

Madame Doubtfire
by Anne Fine

Madame Doubtfire, known as Alias Madame Doubtfire in the United States, is a 1987 novel written for teenage and young adult audiences. The novel is based on a family with divorced parents. Well received upon its publication in the UK, it was shortlisted for awards, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and Whitbread Children’s Book Award. In November 1993, six years after its publication, the novel was adapted into Mrs. Doubtfire, a film starring Robin Williams and Sally Field.

The Whale Rider
by Witi Ihimaera

Set in the 1980s in Whangara, a Māori community on the eastern edge of New Zealand’s North Island, the novel The Whale Rider is a retelling of the myth of Paikea. Kahu is the eldest great-grandchild of chieftain Koro Apirana; had she been a boy, she would have been the natural future leader of the tribe. She is attuned to the traditional Māori way of life, and may have inherited the ability to speak to whales. In 2002 it was adapted into a film, Whale Rider, directed by Niki Caro.

The Z was Zapped
by Chris Van Allsburg

The Z Was Zapped is a picture book published by Houghton Mifflin. The book tells the story “in 26 acts”, each showing how each letter in the alphabet caught some bad luck. The artwork has a stark look by using black and white pencil drawings. Each destruction of the letters takes place on a proscenium theater stage. Examples include: The A was in an avalanche, The B was badly bitten, The C was cut to ribbons, The Z was zapped.

The Runaways
by Ruth Thomas

The Runaways is a children’s novel published by Hutchinson. It features eleven-year-old Julia and Nathan who find “an enormous sum of money”, do not report it, and flee the city when they are threatened with punishment. Opening in the East End of London where Thomas was a primary school teacher, the story moves to places including Brighton and Exmoor. Thomas and The Runaways won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children’s writers. It drew critical acclaim, with The Guardian declaring it “A first rate novel”. Lippincott published the first U.S. edition in 1989.

Steel Magnolias
by Robert Harling

Steel Magnolias is a stage play by Robert Harling, based on his experience with his sister’s death. The play is a comedy-drama about the bond among a group of Southern women in northwest Louisiana. The title suggests the “female characters are as delicate as magnolias but as tough as steel”. The magnolia specifically references a magnolia tree they are arguing about at the beginning.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
by Randy Shilts

This book chronicles the discovery and spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) with a special emphasis on government indifference and political infighting—specifically in the United States—to what was then perceived as a specifically gay disease. Shilts’s premise is that AIDS was allowed to happen: while the disease is caused by a biological agent, incompetence and apathy toward those initially affected allowed its spread to become much worse.

The book is an extensive work of investigative journalism, written in the form of an encompassing timeline; the events that shaped the epidemic are presented as sequential matter-of-fact summaries. Shilts describes the impact and the politics involved in battling the disease on particular individuals in the gay, medical, and political communities. Shilts began his discussion in 1977 with the first confirmed case of AIDS, that of Grethe Rask, a Danish doctor working in Africa. He ends with the announcement by actor Rock Hudson in 1985 that he was dying of AIDS, when international attention on the disease exploded.

And the Band Played On was critically acclaimed and became a best-seller. Judith Eannarino of the Library Journal called it “one of the most important books of the year”, upon its release. It made Shilts both a star and a pariah for his coverage of the disease and the bitter politics in the gay community. He described his motivation to undertake the writing of the book in an interview after its release, saying, “Any good reporter could have done this story, but I think the reason I did it, and no one else did, is because I am gay. It was happening to people I cared about and loved.” The book was later adapted into an HBO film of the same name in 1993. Shilts was tested for HIV while he was writing the book; he died of complications from AIDS in 1994.

Paco’s Story
by Larry Heinemann

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on FireBase Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off the bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed—but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco’s Story—winner of a National Book Award—plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.

Misery
by Stephen King

Misery is an American psychological horror thriller novel. The novel’s narrative is based on the relationship of its two main characters – the romance novelist Paul Sheldon and his deranged self-proclaimed number one fan Annie Wilkes. When Paul is seriously injured following a car accident, former nurse Annie brings him to her home, where Paul receives treatment and doses of pain medication. Paul realizes that he is a prisoner and is forced to indulge his captor’s whims.

The novel’s title has two meanings: it is the name carried by the central heroine of Paul’s book series, and King described such a state of emotion during the novel’s writing. He has stated that Annie is a stand-in for cocaine. King has outlined the creation of Misery in his memoirs, and mentioned that the image of Annie Wilkes came to him in a dream. King planned the book to be released under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, but his identity was discovered before the book’s release.

Misery won the first Bram Stoker Award for Novel in 1987 and was nominated for the 1988 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Critical reception of Misery was positive – reviewers praised King for avoiding the fantasy elements of his past works, and noted the novel’s parallels with King’s personal life and the study of the relationship between celebrities and their fans. The novel, which took fourth place in the 1987 bestseller list, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film directed by Rob Reiner in 1990, and into a theatrical production starring Laurie Metcalf and Bruce Willis in 2015.

Patriot Games
by Tom Clancy

Patriot Games is a thriller novel. Without Remorse, released six years later, is an indirect prequel, and it is chronologically the first book featuring Jack Ryan, the main character in most of Clancy’s novels. The novel focuses on Ryan being the target of Irish terrorist group Ulster Liberation Army for thwarting their kidnapping attempt on the Prince and Princess of Wales in London. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. A film adaptation, starring Harrison Ford as Ryan, premiered on June 5, 1992.

Presumed Innocent
by Scott Turrow

Presumed Innocent is Scott Turow’s first novel. It is about a prosecutor charged with the murder of his colleague, an attractive and intelligent prosecutor named Carolyn Polhemus. It is told in the first person by the accused, Rožat “Rusty” Sabich. A motion picture adaptation starring Harrison Ford was released in 1990.

The Black Dahlia
by James Ellroy

The Black Dahlia is a crime fiction novel. Its subject is the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, California, which received wide attention because her corpse was horrifically mutilated and discarded in an empty residential lot. The investigation ultimately led to a broad police corruption scandal. While rooted in the facts of the Short murder and featuring many real-life people, places and events, Ellroy’s novel blends facts and fiction, most notably in providing a solution to the crime when in reality it has never been solved.

This book is considered the one that gained Ellroy critical attention as a serious writer of literature, expanding his renown beyond the crime novels of his early career. The Black Dahlia is the first book in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, a cycle of novels set in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles. He portrays the city in this period as a hotbed of political corruption and depravity. The Quartet continues with The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.

Beloved
by Toni Morrison

Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel Beloved tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of Beloved derives from the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856.

Garner was subject to capture under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and when U.S. marshals broke into the cabin where she and her husband had barricaded themselves, she was attempting to kill her children—and had already killed her youngest daughter—in hopes of sparing them from being returned to slavery. Morrison’s main inspiration for the novel was an account of the event titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child” in an 1856 newspaper article initially published in the American Baptist and reproduced in The Black Book, an anthology of texts of Black history and culture that Morrison had edited in 1974.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a year after its publication, and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. A survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey.

The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics, and greed in 1980s New York City, and centers on three main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, and British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow.

The novel was originally conceived as a serial in the style of Charles Dickens’ writings: it ran in 27 installments in Rolling Stone starting in 1984. Wolfe heavily revised it before it was published in book form. The novel was a bestseller and a phenomenal success, even in comparison with Wolfe’s other books. It has often been called the quintessential novel of the 1980s, and in 1990 was adapted into a critically maligned film of the same name by Brian De Palma.

World’s End
by T. C. Boyle

World’s End is a historical fiction novel. The novel, characterized by dark satire, tells the story of several generations of families in the Hudson River Valley. It was the winner of the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction.

Trump: The Art of the Deal
by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz

Part memoir and part business-advice book, The Art of the Deal was the first book credited to Trump, and helped to make him a household name. It reached number 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list, stayed there for 13 weeks, and altogether held a position on the list for 48 weeks. The book received additional attention during Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency of the United States. Trump cited it as one of his proudest accomplishments and his second-favorite book after the Bible. Schwartz called writing the book his “greatest regret in life, without question,” and both he and the book’s publisher, Howard Kaminsky, alleged that Trump had played no role in the actual writing of the book. Trump has personally given conflicting accounts on the question of authorship

Mort
by Terry Pratchet

Mort is a fantasy novel, it is the fourth Discworld novel and the first to focus on the character Death, who only appeared as a side character in the previous novels. The title is the name of its main character, and is also a play on words: in French and Catalan, mort means “death”. The French language edition is titled Mortimer, and the Catalan language edition is titled Morth.

In the BBC’s 2003 Big Read contest, viewers voted on the “Nation’s Best-loved Book”; Mort was among the Top 100 and chosen as the most popular of Pratchett’s novels.

In 2004, Pratchett stated that Mort was the first Discworld novel with which he was “pleased”, stating that in previous books, the plot had existed to support the jokes, but that in Mort, the plot was integral.

A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a quick look at the other notable TV shows that premiered in 1987.

Unsolved Mysteries

Unsolved Mysteries is an American mystery documentary television show, created by John Cosgrove and Terry Dunn Meurer, documenting cold cases and paranormal phenomena. It became a full-fledged series on October 5, 1988, hosted by Robert Stack. After nine seasons on NBC, the series moved to CBS for its 10th season on November 13, 1997. After adding Virginia Madsen as a co-host during season 11 failed to boost slipping ratings, CBS canceled the series after only a two-season, 12-episode run on June 11, 1999. The series was revived by Lifetime in 2000, with season 12 beginning on July 2, 2001. Unsolved Mysteries aired 103 episodes on Lifetime, before ending on September 20, 2002, an end that coincided with Stack’s illness and eventual death.

After a six-year absence, the series was resurrected by Spike in 2007, and began airing on October 13, 2008. This new, revived version was hosted by Dennis Farina, who mainly tied together repackaged segments from the original episodes. Farina hosted 175 episodes before the series ended again on April 27, 2010. On January 18, 2019, Netflix picked up a reboot of the series which premiered on July 1, 2020. The first season of the reboot was split into two volumes containing six episodes each. In September 2022, Netflix announced that a third volume of new episodes would begin streaming in October 2022.

Eyes on the Prize

Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement is an American television series and 14-part documentary about the 20th-century civil rights movement in the United States. The documentary originally aired on the PBS network, and it also aired in the United Kingdom on BBC2. Created and executive produced by Henry Hampton at his film production company Blackside, and narrated by Julian Bond, the series uses archival footage, stills, and interviews by participants and opponents of the movement. The title of the series is derived from the title of the folk song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize”, which is used as the opening theme music in each episode.

The series won a number of Emmy Awards, Peabody Awards, and was nominated for an Oscar.

A total of 14 episodes of Eyes on the Prize were produced in two separate parts. The first part, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954–1965, chronicles the time period between the United States Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965. It consists of six episodes, which premiered on January 21, 1987, and concluded on February 25, 1987. The second part, Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965–1985, chronicles the time period between the national emergence of Malcolm X during 1964 to the 1983 election of Harold Washington as the first African-American mayor of Chicago. It consists of eight episodes, which aired on January 15, 1990 and ended on March 5, 1990.

Amerika

Amerika is an American television miniseries that was broadcast in 1987 on ABC. The miniseries inspired a novelization entitled Amerika: The Triumph of the American Spirit. Amerika starred Kris Kristofferson, Mariel Hemingway, Sam Neill, Robert Urich, and a 17-year-old Lara Flynn Boyle in her first major role. Amerika was about life in the United States after a bloodless takeover engineered by the Soviet Union. Not wanting to depict the actual takeover, ABC Entertainment president, Brandon Stoddard, set the miniseries ten years after the event, focusing on the demoralized U.S. people a decade after the Soviet conquest. The intent, he later explained, was to explore the U.S. spirit under such conditions, not to portray the conflict of the Soviet coup.

Described in promotional materials as “the most ambitious American miniseries ever created”, Amerika aired for 14 and a half hours (including commercials) over seven nights and reportedly cost $40 million to produce. The miniseries was filmed in the Golden Horseshoe and southwestern Ontario Canadian cities of Toronto, London, and Hamilton, as well as various locations in Nebraska – most notably the small town of Tecumseh, which served as “Milford”, the fictional setting for most of the series. Donald Wrye was the executive producer, director, and writer of Amerika, while composer Basil Poledouris scored the miniseries, ultimately recording (with the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra) eight hours of music – the equivalent of four feature films.

The Bold and the Beautiful

The Bold and the Beautiful (often referred to as B&B) is an American television soap opera created by William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell for CBS. It premiered as a sister show to the Bells’ other soap opera The Young and the Restless; several characters from each of the two shows have crossed over to the other since the early 1990s. Set in Los Angeles, California, the show centers upon the Forrester family and their haute couture business.

The program features an ensemble cast, headed by its longest-serving actors John McCook as Eric Forrester and Katherine Kelly Lang as Brooke Logan. Since its premiere, the show has become the most-watched soap in the world, with an audience of an estimated 26.2 million viewers. As of 2010, it continued to hold on to the second-place position in weekly Nielsen Ratings for daytime dramas. The Bold and the Beautiful has also won 77 Daytime Emmy Awards, including three for Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, in 2009, 2010, as well as 2011.

On September 7, 2011, the series switched to high-definition television, making it the second-to-last American soap to make the switch, at the time. B&B was the last American soap opera to make the transition due to the cancellation of ABC’s One Life to Live before it returned along with All My Children on April 29, 2013. It is the youngest airing daytime soap opera in the United States, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary on March 23, 2017. The serial aired its 8,000th episode on January 4, 2019. Currently, the series has been renewed by CBS to run through the 2023–2024 television season.

Married… with Children

Married… with Children is an American television sitcom created by Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt for Fox. Originally broadcast from April 5, 1987 to June 9, 1997, it is the longest-lasting live-action sitcom that aired on Fox. Married… with Children was the first series to be broadcast in the primetime slot of the then-new fourth network, Fox. In addition to the show’s original run, one episode that was not aired after filming on January 6, 1989, was aired on FX on June 18, 2002, five years after the series’ conclusion.

The show follows the Chicago lives of Al Bundy, a once-glorious high school football player turned hard-luck women’s shoe salesman; his lazy wife, Peggy; their pretty and dim-witted daughter, Kelly; and their smart-aleck son, Bud. The show also prominently features their neighbors, the stuffy Steve and Marcy Rhoades, both of whom Al finds somewhat annoying, although the feeling is mutual from the Rhoades; and later, Marcy’s second husband Jefferson D’Arcy, a white-collar criminal who becomes her “trophy husband” and Al’s sidekick.

The series is one of the longest running sitcoms in television history, comprising eleven seasons with 259 episodes during its run. Its theme song is “Love and Marriage” by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Frank Sinatra from the 1955 television production Our Town.

In 2008, the show made the top 100 on Entertainment Weekly’s “New TV Classics” list, placing number 94. In May 2022, it was announced that an animated revival of the series was currently in the works.

The Tracey Ullman Show

The Tracey Ullman Show is an American television variety show starring Tracey Ullman. It debuted as the network’s second original primetime series to air following Married… with Children, and ran until May 26, 1990. The show was produced by Gracie Films. The show blended sketch comedy with musical numbers and dance routines, choreographed by Paula Abdul, along with animated shorts. The format was conceived by creator and executive producer James L. Brooks, who was looking to showcase the show’s multi talented star. Brooks likened the show to producing three pilots a week. Ullman was the first British woman to be offered her own television sketch show in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

The show is also known for producing a series of shorts featuring the Simpson family, which was later adapted into the longest-running American scripted primetime television series, The Simpsons. The Tracey Ullman Show was the first Fox primetime show to win an Emmy Award, winning a total of 10 over its run.

Rolling Stone ranked The Tracey Ullman Show as the 25th-best sketch comedy show in its “40 Greatest Sketch-Comedy TV Shows of All Time” list.

21 Jump Street

21 Jump Street is an American police procedural television series that aired on the Fox network and in first run syndication from April 12, 1987, to April 27, 1991, with a total of 103 episodes. The series focuses on a squad of youthful-looking undercover police officers investigating crimes in high schools, colleges, and other teenage venues. It was originally going to be titled Jump Street Chapel, after the deconsecrated church building in which the unit has its headquarters, but was changed at Fox’s request so as not to mislead viewers into thinking it was a religious program.

Created by Patrick Hasburgh and Stephen J. Cannell, the series was produced by Patrick Hasburgh Productions and Stephen J. Cannell Productions in association with 20th Century Fox Television. Executive Producers included Hasburgh, Cannell, Steve Beers and Bill Nuss. The show was an early hit for the fledgling Fox network, and was created to attract a younger audience. The final season aired in first-run syndication mainly on local Fox affiliates. It was later rerun on the FX cable network from 1996 to 1998.

The series provided a spark to Johnny Depp’s nascent acting career, garnering him national recognition as a teen idol. Depp found this status irritating, but he continued on the series under his contract and was paid $45,000 per episode. Eventually he was released from his contract after the fourth season.

A spin-off series, Booker, was produced for the character of Dennis Booker (Richard Grieco); it ran only one season, from September 24, 1989, to May 6, 1990.

A film adaptation directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller was released on March 16, 2012. The film is set in the same continuity as the series, with Johnny Depp, Holly Robinson and Peter DeLuise reprising their characters in cameo appearances. Richard Grieco and Dustin Nguyen also have cameos in the 2014 film sequel 22 Jump Street.

Good Morning, Miss Bliss

Good Morning, Miss Bliss (also retroactively known as Saved by the Bell: The Junior High Years) is an American teen sitcom that aired on the Disney Channel from 1988 to 1989 (and later in syndication as part of the Saved by the Bell rerun package), starring Hayley Mills as a teacher at John F. Kennedy Junior High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. After one season on the air on the Disney Channel, the show was retooled as Saved by the Bell, which aired on NBC. The show was the first program produced by a Big Three network for cable television – in this case, NBC produced it for the Disney Channel.

Showtime at the Apollo

Showtime at the Apollo (formerly It’s Showtime at the Apollo and Apollo Live) is an American variety show that first aired in syndication from September 12, 1987 to May 24, 2008. In 2018, the series returned on Fox with Steve Harvey hosting. Filmed at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem, the show features live performances from both professional and up-and-coming artists, and also features the Amateur Night competition. In many cities such as New York (where it aired on WNBC), it often aired after Saturday Night Live during the late Saturday night/early Sunday morning hours, and was often paired with the similarly-syndicated Soul Train. A live non-televised version of the show takes place every Wednesday (which is the original Apollo Amateur Night competition that has been running for over seventy years), with the taped version of the show for television being recorded in advance on other nights for later airing.

Wiseguy

Wiseguy is an American crime drama television series that aired on CBS until December 8, 1990, for a total of 75 episodes over four seasons. The series was produced by Stephen J. Cannell and was filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, to avoid the higher studio costs associated with filming in Los Angeles.

Wiseguy originally starred Ken Wahl as Vinnie Terranova, a Brooklyn native and Fordham University graduate who was a deep cover operative for the FBI under the supervision of senior agent Frank McPike, played by Jonathan Banks. The primary cast was rounded out by Jim Byrnes, who played an information operative known as Lifeguard (real name Daniel Burroughs) who assisted Vinnie in the field.

After the third season, Wahl departed from the series. Steven Bauer was brought in to replace Wahl as the lead, with Cecil Hoffman joining as a fourth regular cast member alongside Bauer and the returning Banks and Byrnes. Wiseguy ended its run midway through the 1990–1991 television season with three produced episodes left unaired.

DuckTales

DuckTales is an American animated television series produced by Disney Television Animation. The original cartoon series premiered on syndication and on Disney Channel for a total of 100 episodes over four seasons, with its final episode airing on November 28, 1990. Based upon Uncle Scrooge and other Duck universe comic books created by Carl Barks, the show follows Scrooge McDuck, his three grandnephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and close friends of the group, on various adventures, most of which either involve seeking out treasure or thwarting the efforts of villains seeking to steal Scrooge’s fortune or his Number One Dime.

DuckTales has inspired video games, merchandise, and comic books, along with an animated theatrical spin-off film entitled DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, that was released to theaters across the United States on August 3, 1990. The series is notable for being the first Disney cartoon to be produced for weekday syndication, with its success paving the way for future Disney cartoons, such as Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers and TaleSpin, creating the syndication block The Disney Afternoon. The show’s popular theme song was written by Mark Mueller. Also, Launchpad McQuack later returned to appear in another Disney animated series, becoming a main character in Darkwing Duck.

In February 2015, Disney XD announced the revival of the show, with the intention of rebooting the series. The rebooted series premiered on August 12, 2017 and concluded on March 15, 2021.

A Different World

A Different World is an American sitcom television series and a spin-off of The Cosby Show. It aired for six seasons until July 9, 1993. The series originally centered on Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet) and the life of students at Hillman College, a fictional historically black college in Virginia. It was inspired by student life at historically black colleges and universities. After Bonet’s departure in the first season, the remainder of the series primarily focused more on Southern belle Whitley Gilbert-Wayne (Jasmine Guy) and math whiz Dwayne Cleophus Wayne (Kadeem Hardison).

Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast is an American fantasy-drama television series that aired on CBS until August 4, 1990. Creator Ron Koslow’s updated version of the fairy tale has a double focus: the relationship between Vincent (Ron Perlman), a mythic, noble man-beast, and Catherine (Linda Hamilton), a savvy Assistant District Attorney in New York, and a secret utopian community of social outcasts living in a subterranean sanctuary. Through an empathetic bond, Vincent senses Catherine’s emotions, and becomes her guardian.

ALF: The Animated Series

ALF: The Animated Series (also known as ALF on Melmac) is a 30-minute Saturday morning animated series that aired on NBC for 26 episodes until January 7, 1989.

ALF: The Animated Series was a prequel and animated spinoff of the primetime series ALF, which had also aired on NBC from 1986 to 1990. Paul Fusco, the creator and puppeteer of ALF in the live-action series, was the only cast member to reprise his role in voice form; none of the human characters from the primetime ALF appeared in the animated series, due to the show’s premise revolving around ALF (Gordon Shumway) traveling to various places on his home-world of Melmac. ALF Tales was a spin-off from the series that also ran on NBC on Saturdays from September, 1988 to December, 1989. The two ALF animated series ran concurrently during the 1988–89 season as the ALF & ALF Tales Hour.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) is an American science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry. It originally aired until May 23, 1994, in syndication, spanning 178 episodes over seven seasons. The third series in the Star Trek franchise, it was inspired by Star Trek: The Original Series. Set in the latter third of the 24th century, when Earth is part of the United Federation of Planets, it follows the adventures of a Starfleet starship, the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D), in its exploration of the Alpha quadrant in the Milky Way galaxy.

In the 1980s, Roddenberry—who was responsible for the original Star Trek, Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973–1974), and the first of a series of films—was tasked by Paramount Pictures with creating a new series in the franchise. He decided to set it a century after the events of his original series. The Next Generation featured a new crew: Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Jonathan Frakes as William Riker, Brent Spiner as Data, Michael Dorn as Worf, LeVar Burton as Geordi La Forge, Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi, Gates McFadden as Dr. Beverly Crusher, Denise Crosby as Tasha Yar, Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher, and a new Enterprise.

Roddenberry, Maurice Hurley, Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor served as executive producers at various times throughout its production. The series was broadcast in first-run syndication with dates and times varying among individual television stations. Stewart’s voice-over introduction during each episode’s opening credits stated the starship’s purpose:

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

The show was very popular, reaching almost 12 million viewers in its 5th season, with the series finale in 1994 watched by over 30 million viewers. Due to its success, Paramount commissioned Rick Berman and Michael Piller to create a fourth series in the franchise, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which launched in 1993. The characters from The Next Generation returned in four films: Star Trek Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), and in the television series Star Trek: Picard (2020–2023). The series is also the setting of numerous novels, comic books, and video games. It received many accolades, including 19 Emmy Awards, two Hugo Awards, five Saturn Awards, and a Peabody Award.

Thirtysomething

Thirtysomething is an American drama television series created by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz for United Artists Television (under MGM/UA Television) and aired on ABC until May 28, 1991. It focuses on a group of baby boomers in their thirties who live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and how they handle the lifestyle that dominated American culture during the 1980s given their involvement in the early 1970s counterculture as young adults. It lasted four seasons. It was canceled in May 1991 because the ratings had dropped. Zwick and Herskovitz moved on to other projects. The series won 13 Primetime Emmy Awards, out of 41 nominations, and two Golden Globe Awards.

On January 8, 2020, ABC confirmed that a television pilot, which would serve as a sequel to the series, had been ordered. The pilot was never filmed, but was set to be directed by Zwick, written by Zwick and Herskovitz, and have four members of the original cast (Olin, Harris, Busfield and Wettig) reprising their roles. In June 2020, ABC passed on the series.

Friday the 13th: The Series

Friday the 13th: The Series is a fantasy horror television series that ran for three seasons, until May 26, 1990, in first-run syndication. The series follows Micki and Ryan, cousins who inherit an antiques store; after selling all the antiques, they learn from Jack Marshak that the items are cursed. The trio then work together to recover the objects and return them to the safety of the shop’s vault.

Originally, the series was to be titled The 13th Hour, but producer Frank Mancuso Jr. thought this would turn away viewers and instead took the name Friday the 13th to deliberately draw in audiences. Despite this title, the series has no story connections to the film series of the same title, as Jason Voorhees does not make an appearance, nor does any character connected to the films.

The series and the films have several cast and crew ties, however. The show’s producer, Frank Mancuso Jr., was producer of the film series from Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) until the final installment distributed by Paramount (Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan in 1989, a year before the TV series ended). One of the show’s stars, John D. LeMay, went on to star in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, guest star John Shepherd played Tommy Jarvis in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and episode director David Cronenberg appeared in Jason X. Fred Mollin, Rob Hedden, and Tom McLoughlin worked behind the scenes of both series.

CBS This Morning

CBS This Morning (CTM) is an American morning television program that aired on CBS until October 29, 1999, and again from January 9, 2012, to September 6, 2021. The program aired from Monday through Saturday. It aired live from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. in the Eastern Time Zone. On weekdays, it aired on a tape-delay in the Central and Mountain Time Zones; stations in the Pacific, Alaska and Hawaii Time Zones received an updated feed with a specialized opening and updated live reports. Stations outside the Eastern Time Zone carried the Saturday broadcast at varied times. It was the tenth distinct morning news-features program format that CBS has aired since 1954, having replaced The Early Show on January 9, 2012.

The program emphasized general national and international news stories and in-depth reports throughout each edition, although it also included live in-studio and pre-taped interviews. The format was chosen as an alternative to the soft media and lifestyle-driven formats of competitors Today and Good Morning America following the first hour or half-hour of those broadcasts, in an attempt to give the program a competitive edge with its infotainment format. (CBS has historically placed a distant third in the ratings among the network weekday morning shows.)

On August 31, 2021, CBS announced that the weekday program would be replaced with the reformatted CBS Mornings effective September 7, while the Saturday edition of CTM was renamed CBS Saturday Morning on September 18, 2021, completing the transition.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (initially known as Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in some European countries) is an American animated television series produced by Fred Wolf Films, and based on the comic book characters created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Set in New York City, the series follows the adventures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their allies as they battle the Shredder, Krang, and numerous other villains and criminals. The property was changed considerably from the darker-toned comics, to make it more suitable for children and the family.

The pilot was shown during the week of December 14, 1987 in syndication as a five-part miniseries, and the show began its full-time run on October 1, 1988. The series ran until November 2, 1996, when it aired its final episode. The show was the first television appearance of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and helped launch the characters into mainstream popularity, becoming one of the most popular animated series in television history. Action figures, breakfast cereals, plush toys, and other merchandise featuring the characters appeared on the market during the late-1980s and early-1990s, and became top-sellers worldwide. By 1990, the series was being shown daily on more than 125 television stations.

Characters from the show have been included in crossovers with later entries of the franchise, including the 2009 film Turtles Forever and cameos in the 2012 TV series.

A lot happened in the year 1987, including the debut of a family-friendly TV sitcom set in San Francisco. The name of the show was Full House, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this popular comedy over the coming weeks.

But first, to get a sense of the times and trends that helped shape this series, here’s a quick look at the notable films that premiered in 1987.

Wanted: Dead or Alive

January 16^th Wanted: Dead or Alive is released. Nick Randall is a Los Angeles-based bounty hunter and ex-CIA operative who is asked by a former co-worker to help track down terrorist Malak Al-Rahim, who bombed a movie theater and later planned to release gas from a chemical plant similar to the Bhopal disaster.

Radio Days

January 30^thRadio Days is released. The film is an American comedy-drama film written and directed by Woody Allen, who also narrates the story. The film looks back on an American family’s life during the Golden Age of Radio using both music and memories to tell the story. It stars an ensemble cast.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

February 27^th A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is released. This film is an American fantasy slasher film directed by Chuck Russell. The story was developed by Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner and is the third installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and stars Heather Langenkamp, Patricia Arquette, Larry Fishburne, Priscilla Pointer, Craig Wasson, and Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. Dream Warriors grossed $44.8 million domestically on a budget of over $4 million. It received mostly positive reviews from critics and is considered by many to be one of the best films in the Elm Street series. The film was preceded by A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) and followed by A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988).

Lethal Weapon

March 6^th Lethal Weapon is released. This film is an American buddy cop action comedy film directed and co-produced by Richard Donner, written by Shane Black, and co-produced by Joel Silver. It stars Mel Gibson and Danny Glover alongside Gary Busey, Tom Atkins, Darlene Love, and Mitchell Ryan. In Lethal Weapon, a pair of mismatched LAPD detectives – Martin Riggs (Gibson), a former Green Beret who has become suicidal following the death of his wife, and veteran officer and family man Roger Murtaugh (Glover) – work together as partners. Upon its release, Lethal Weapon grossed over $120 million (against a production budget of $15 million) and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Sound. It spawned a franchise that includes three sequels and a television series, with a fourth sequel in development.

Raising Arizona

March 18^thRaising Arizona is released. This film is an American crime comedy film directed by Joel Coen, produced by Ethan Coen, and written by Joel and Ethan Coen. It stars Nicolas Cage as H.I. “Hi” McDunnough, an ex-convict, and Holly Hunter as Edwina “Ed” McDunnough, a former police officer and his wife. Other members of the cast include Trey Wilson, William Forsythe, John Goodman, Frances McDormand, Sam McMurray, and Randall “Tex” Cobb. The Coen brothers set out to work on the film with the intention of making a film as different from their previous film, the dark thriller Blood Simple, as possible, with a lighter sense of humor and a faster pace. Raising Arizona received mixed reviews at the time of its release. Some criticized it as too self-conscious, manneristic, and unclear as to whether it was fantasy or realism. Other critics praised the film for its originality. The film ranks 31st on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Laughs list, and 45th on Bravo’s “100 Funniest Movies” list.

Street Smart

March 20^th Street Smart is released. This film is an American dramatic crime thriller film directed by Jerry Schatzberg and starring Christopher Reeve, Morgan Freeman and Kathy Baker. It was shot in New York City and Montreal, Quebec. Despite being well-received by audiences and critics (especially being Morgan Freeman’s first Oscar-nominated performance), the film was a commercial failure.

Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol

April 3^rd Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol is released. This film is an American comedy film. It is the fourth installment in the Police Academy franchise. The original Police Academy cast reprise their roles in the film. This was the last Police Academy film to feature Steve Guttenberg as Carey Mahoney. This film also stars a young David Spade in his feature film debut, as well as featuring a brief appearance from pro skateboarder Tony Hawk as Spade’s double in a skateboarding scene. Despite the commercial success, the sequel was panned by film critics.

The Secret of My Success

April 17^th The Secret of My Success is released. This film is an American comedy film produced and directed by Herbert Ross and starring Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater. The screenplay was written by A.J. Carothers, Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. from a story written by Carothers. It was filmed on location in Manhattan.

Ishtar

May 15^th Ishtar is released. This film is an American adventure-comedy film written and directed by Elaine May and produced by Warren Beatty, who co-starred opposite Dustin Hoffman. The story revolves around a duo of incredibly untalented American songwriters who travel to a booking in Morocco and stumble into a four-party Cold War standoff. Shot on location in Morocco and New York City by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, the production drew media attention before its release for substantial cost overruns on top of a lavish budget, and reports of clashes between May, Beatty, and Storaro. A change in studio management at Columbia Pictures during post-production also led to professional and personal difficulties that undermined the film’s release. The film polarized critics and became a notorious failure at the box office. Many initially considered it to be one of the worst films ever made, although critical support for the film has grown strongly since its release.

Beverly Hills Cop II

May 20^th Beverly Hills Cop II is released. This film is an American buddy-cop action-comedy film directed by Tony Scott, written by Larry Ferguson and Warren Skaaren, and starring Eddie Murphy. Murphy returns as Detroit police detective Axel Foley, who reunites with Beverly Hills detectives Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) to stop a robbery/gun-running gang after Captain Andrew Bogomil (Ronny Cox) is shot and seriously wounded. Despite making less money than the first film and receiving mixed reviews from critics, the film was still a box office success, grossing $276.6 million. Aside from box office success, the film was nominated for an Oscar and for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, for Bob Seger’s “Shakedown”.

Ernest Goes to Camp

May 22^nd Ernest Goes to Camp is released. This film is an American comedy film directed by John Cherry and starring Jim Varney. It is the second film to feature the character of Ernest P. Worrell and was shot at Montgomery Bell State Park. It was also the first “Ernest” film to be distributed by Touchstone Pictures. This film also marks Iron Eyes Cody’s final appearance on screen.

The Untouchables

June 3^rd The Untouchables is released.  This film is an American crime film directed by Brian De Palma, produced by Art Linson, and written by David Mamet. The film is loosely based on the book of the same name (1957) and the real-life events it was based on, but most of its plot is fictionalized. The film stars Kevin Costner, Charles Martin Smith, Andy García, Robert De Niro and Sean Connery, and follows Eliot Ness (Costner) as he forms the Untouchables team to bring Al Capone (De Niro) to justice during Prohibition. The Grammy Award–nominated score was composed by Ennio Morricone and features period music by Duke Ellington. The film grossed $106.2 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews from critics. It was nominated for four Academy Awards; Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Harry and the Hendersons

June 5^th Harry and the Hendersons is released. This film is an American fantasy comedy film directed and produced by William Dear and starring John Lithgow, Melinda Dillon, Don Ameche, David Suchet, Margaret Langrick, Joshua Rudoy, Lainie Kazan, and Kevin Peter Hall. Steven Spielberg served as its uncredited executive producer, while Rick Baker provided the makeup and the creature designs for Harry. The film tells the story of a Seattle family’s encounter with the cryptozoological creature Bigfoot. Harry and the Hendersons grossed $50 million worldwide. It won an Oscar for Best Makeup at the 60th Academy Awards, and inspired a television spin-off of the same name.

Predator

June 12^th Predator is released. This film is an American science fiction horror action film directed by John McTiernan and written by brothers Jim and John Thomas. It is the first installment in the Predator franchise. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as the leader of an elite paramilitary rescue team on a mission to save hostages in guerrilla-held territory in a Central American rainforest, who encounter the deadly Predator (Kevin Peter Hall), a skilled, technologically advanced alien who stalks and hunts them down. The film grossed $98 million worldwide. Initial reviews were mixed, but has since been considered a classic of the action and science fiction genres and one of the best films of the 1980s. The success of Predator launched a media franchise of films, novels, comic books, video games, and toys. It spawned four sequels: Predator 2 (1990), Predators (2010), The Predator (2018), and Prey (2022). A crossover with the Alien franchise produced the Alien vs. Predator films, which include Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007).

The Witches of Eastwick

June 12^th The Witches of Eastwick is released. This film is an American dark fantasy-comedy film directed by George Miller and starring Jack Nicholson as Daryl Van Horne, alongside Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon as the titular witches. The film is based on John Updike’s 1984 novel of the same name, telling the story of three women who are unaware of the power of the words they speak; as they tell each other their deepest desires, a man arrives just in time and fulfills them, but has a dark side of his own.

Roxanne

June 19^th Roxanne is released. This film is an American romantic comedy film directed by Fred Schepisi and starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah. It is a modern retelling of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 verse play Cyrano de Bergerac, adapted by Steve Martin.

Spaceballs

June 26^th Spaceballs is released. This film is an American space opera parody film co-written, produced and directed by Mel Brooks. It is primarily a parody of the original Star Wars trilogy, but also parodies other sci-fi films and popular franchises including Star Trek, Alien, The Wizard of Oz, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, and Transformers. The film stars Bill Pullman, John Candy and Rick Moranis, with the supporting cast including Daphne Zuniga, Dick Van Patten, George Wyner, Lorene Yarnell, and the voice of Joan Rivers. In addition to Brooks playing a dual role, the film also features Brooks regulars Dom DeLuise and Rudy De Luca in cameo appearances. Despite initially getting a mixed reception from critics and audiences, it has since become a cult classic, and is one of Brooks’s most popular and well-known films.

Adventures in Babysitting

July 3^rd Adventures in Babysitting is released. This film, which is also known as A Night on the Town in certain countries, is an American teen comedy film written by David Simkins and directed by Chris Columbus in his directorial debut. It stars Elisabeth Shue, Keith Coogan, Anthony Rapp, and Maia Brewton, and features cameos by blues singer/guitarist Albert Collins and singer-songwriter Southside Johnny Lyon.

Full Metal Jacket

July 10^th Full Metal Jacket is released. This film is a war drama film directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford. The film is based on Hasford’s 1979 novel The Short-Timers and stars Matthew Modine, Lee Ermey, Vincent D’Onofrio and Adam Baldwin. The storyline follows a platoon of U.S. Marines through their boot camp training in Marine Corps and deployment during the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War. The film’s title refers to the full metal jacket bullet used by military servicemen. It was the last of Kubrick’s films to be released during his lifetime. The film received critical acclaim, grossed $120 million against a budget of $16 million, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Kubrick, Herr, and Hasford. In 2001, the American Film Institute placed the film at number 95 in its poll titled “AFI’s 100 Years…100 Thrills.”

Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise

July 10^th Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise is released. This film is an American comedy film and sequel to Revenge of the Nerds. Its cast featured most of the main actors from its predecessor, including Robert Carradine, Anthony Edwards, Curtis Armstrong, Larry B. Scott, Timothy Busfield, Donald Gibb, and Andrew Cassese. This film also provided an early starring role for Courtney Thorne-Smith. Other cast members include Bradley Whitford, Ed Lauter, and Barry Sobel.

Jaws: The Revenge

July 10^th Jaws: The Revenge is released. This film is an American horror film produced and directed by Joseph Sargent. It is a direct sequel to Jaws, ignoring the events of Jaws 2 and Jaws 3-D, and is the fourth and final film in the franchise. Lorraine Gary reprised her role from the first two films while new cast members include Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles, Karen Young and Michael Caine. The film focuses on a now-widowed Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) after Chief Brody died from a heart attack, her conviction that a great white shark is seeking revenge on her family, particularly when it kills her son, and follows her to the Bahamas. The lowest grossing film of the franchise with only $51.9 million, it was widely panned by critics, who criticized the story, acting and effects. The film introduced the infamous tagline “This time, it’s personal.”

RoboCop

July 17^thRoboCop is released. This film is an American science fiction action film directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner. The film stars Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Daniel O’Herlihy, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith, and Miguel Ferrer. Set in a crime-ridden Detroit, in the near future, RoboCop centers on police officer Alex Murphy (Weller) who is murdered by a gang of criminals and subsequently revived by the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products as the cyborg law enforcer RoboCop. RoboCop was a financial success upon its release, earning $53.4 million. Reviews praised the film as a clever action film with deeper philosophical messages and satire but were more conflicted over the extreme violence throughout. The film was nominated for several awards, and won an Academy Award as well as numerous Saturn Awards. Since its release, RoboCop has been critically reevaluated and it has been hailed as one of the best films of the 1980s and one of the greatest science fiction and action films ever made. The success of RoboCop created a franchise comprising the sequels RoboCop 2 (1990) and RoboCop 3 (1993), children’s animated series, multiple live-action television shows, video games, comic books, toys, clothing, and other merchandise. A remake was released in 2014. A direct sequel to the original 1987 film, tentatively titled RoboCop Returns, is in development as of 2020; it ignores other entries in the series.

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

July 24^th Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is released. This film is a superhero film directed by Sidney J. Furie and written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal from a story by Christopher Reeve, Konner, and Rosenthal based on the DC Comics character Superman. The film stars Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure, Jon Cryer, Sam Wanamaker, Jim Broadbent, Mariel Hemingway, and Margot Kidder. The film marks the final appearance of Reeve as Superman, who agreed to return in exchange for a large salary and a story promoting nuclear disarmament. Upon release, it was widely lambasted by critics and fans alike, with many reviewers citing poor special effects, inconsistencies, and plot holes. Superman IV has often been named one of the worst films ever made. No further Superman films were released until Superman Returns in 2006.

The Lost Boys

July 31^st The Lost Boys is released. This film is an American supernatural black comedy horror film directed by Joel Schumacher, produced by Harvey Bernhard with a screenplay written by Jeffrey Boam, Janice Fischer and James Jeremias, from a story by Fischer and Jeremias. The film’s ensemble cast includes Corey Haim, Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, Jami Gertz, Corey Feldman, Dianne Wiest, Edward Herrmann, Billy Wirth, Brooke McCarter, Alex Winter, Jamison Newlander, and Barnard Hughes. The title is a reference to the Lost Boys in J. M. Barrie’s stories about Peter Pan and Neverland, who, like vampires, never grow up. Most of the film was shot in Santa Cruz, California. The Lost Boys was a critical and commercial success, grossing over $32 million against a production budget of $8.5 million. The success of the film has spawned a franchise with two sequels (Lost Boys: The Tribe and Lost Boys: The Thirst), and two comic book series.

Stakeout

August 5^th Stakeout is released. This film is an American buddy-cop action-comedy film directed by John Badham and starring Richard Dreyfuss, Emilio Estevez, Madeleine Stowe and Aidan Quinn. The screenplay was written by Jim Kouf, who won a 1988 Edgar Award for his work. Although the story is set in Seattle, the film was shot in Vancouver. A sequel, Another Stakeout, followed in 1993.

The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland

August 7^thThe Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland is released. This film is an animated musical fantasy film and the third theatrically released film in the Care Bears franchise. It is based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. It starred the voices of Keith Knight, Bob Dermer, Jim Henshaw, Tracey Moore and Elizabeth Hanna. The film featured a musical score by Patricia Cullen along with songs by pop musicians John Sebastian and Natalie Cole. Upon its North American release, the film opened weakly to mixed reviews, and ended up with a $2.6 million gross; worldwide, it barely made back its $5 million cost.

Masters of the Universe

August 7^th Masters of the Universe is released. This film is an American superhero film directed by Gary Goddard, produced by Yoram Globus and by Menahem Golan and written by David Odell. The film stars Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, Jon Cypher, Chelsea Field, Billy Barty, Courteney Cox, Robert Duncan McNeill, and Meg Foster. It is based on the Mattel toy line of the same name and tells the story of two teenagers who meet He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe, and his friends, who arrive on Earth by chance from their home planet Eternia and go on a mission to save the universe from He-Man’s archenemy, the evil Skeletor. It was a critical and commercial failure, grossing $17 million worldwide against a budget of $22 million, but is now regarded as a classic cult film.

Dirty Dancing

August 21^st Dirty Dancing is released. This film is an American romantic drama dance film written by Eleanor Bergstein, produced by Linda Gottlieb, and directed by Emile Ardolino. Starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, it tells the story of Frances “Baby” Houseman, a young woman who falls in love with dance instructor Johnny Castle (Swayze) at a vacation resort. Dirty Dancing earned over $214 million worldwide, and was the first film to sell more than a million copies for home video. It earned positive reviews from critics, who particularly praised the performances of Grey and Swayze, and its soundtrack, created by Jimmy Ienner, generated two multi-platinum albums and multiple singles. “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life”, performed by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, and the Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. The film’s popularity led to a 2004 prequel, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and a stage version which has had sellout performances in Australia, Europe, and North America. A made-for-TV remake was also released in 2017. A sequel is scheduled to be released in 2024, with Grey reprising her role.

Fatal Attraction

September 18^th Fatal Attraction is released. This film is an American psychological thriller film directed by Adrian Lyne from a screenplay by James Dearden, based on his 1980 short film Diversion. Starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, and Anne Archer, the film centers on a married man who has a weekend affair with a woman who refuses to allow it to end and becomes obsessed with him. It received positive reviews from critics, but generated controversy at the time of its release. The film became a huge box office success, grossing $320 million against a $14 million budget, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1987 worldwide. At the 60th Academy Awards, it received six nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (for Close), Best Supporting Actress (for Archer), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.

The Princess Bride

October 9^thThe Princess Bride is released. This film is an American fantasy adventure comedy film directed and co-produced by Rob Reiner and starring Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, Wallace Shawn, André the Giant, and Christopher Guest. Adapted by William Goldman from his 1973 novel of the same name, it tells the story of a swashbuckling farmhand named Westley, accompanied by companions befriended along the way, who must rescue his true love Princess Buttercup from the odious Prince Humperdinck. The film was well received by critics at the time. After only having modest success at the box office at first, it has over time become a cult film and been considered as one of the best films of the 1980s, and one of Reiner’s best works. The film is number 50 on Bravo’s “100 Funniest Movies”, number 88 on The American Film Institute’s (AFI) “AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions” list of the 100 greatest film love stories, and 46 in Channel 4’s 50 Greatest Comedy Films list. The film also won the 1988 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. In 2016, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.

Gaby: A True Story

October 30^th Gaby: A True Story is released.  This film is a biographical drama film directed by Luis Mandoki. An international co-production of the United States and Mexico, it stars Rachel Chagall, Norma Aleandro, Liv Ullmann, and Robert Loggia. Written by Michael Love and Martín Salinas, the film chronicles the lives of Gabriela Brimmer, a Mexican writer and disability rights activist, and her caretaker, Florencia Sánchez Morales.

Cry Freedom

November 6^th Cry Freedom is released. This film is an epic apartheid drama film directed and produced by Richard Attenborough, set in late-1970s apartheid-era South Africa. The screenplay was written by John Briley based on a pair of books by journalist Donald Woods. The film centers on the real-life events involving South African activist Steve Biko and his friend Donald Woods. Denzel Washington stars as Biko, while Kevin Kline portrays Woods. The film was primarily shot on location in Zimbabwe due to not being allowed to film in South Africa at the time of production. South African authorities unexpectedly allowed the film to be screened in cinemas without cuts or restrictions, despite the publication of Biko’s writings being banned at the time of its release. The film was generally met with favorable reviews and earned theatrical rentals of $15 million worldwide. The film was nominated for multiple awards, including Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song. It also won a number of awards including those from the Berlin International Film Festival and the British Academy Film Awards.

The Running Man

November 13^thThe Running Man is released. This film is an American dystopian action film directed by Paul Michael Glaser and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, María Conchita Alonso, Richard Dawson, Yaphet Kotto, and Jesse Ventura. The film’s story about a television show where convicted criminal “runners” must escape death at the hands of professional killers is very loosely based on the 1982 novel of the same name written by Stephen King and published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. A lawsuit determined the movie was plagiarized from the French movie Le prix du danger (1983). The 1987 US film is set in a dystopian United States between 2017 and 2019. The Running Man was a moderate box office success in the United States, grossing $38 million on its $27 million budget, but opened to mixed reviews from critics. A new movie adaptation of the novel, announced in early 2021, is in development at Paramount Pictures, with Edgar Wright directing and Michael Bacall writing the script.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

November 27^th Planes, Trains and Automobiles is released. This film is an American comedy film written, produced and directed by John Hughes and starring Steve Martin and John Candy with supporting roles by Laila Robins and Michael McKean. It tells the story of a high-strung marketing executive and a goodhearted but annoying shower curtain ring salesman who become travel companions when their flight is diverted and share a three-day odyssey of misadventures trying to get to Chicago in time for the executive’s Thanksgiving Day dinner with his family. The film received critical acclaim, with many praising it for Hughes branching out from teen comedies, and for Candy’s and Martin’s performances. It has become a Thanksgiving Day tradition for many.

Three Men and a Baby

November 27^th Three Men and a Baby is released. This film is an American comedy film directed by Leonard Nimoy. It stars Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, and Ted Danson as three bachelors as they attempt to adapt their lives to de facto fatherhood with the arrival of the love child of one of the men. The script was based on the 1985 French film Trois hommes et un couffin (Three Men and a Cradle). The film was the biggest American box office hit of that year, surpassing Fatal Attraction and eventually grossing $167 million in the United States and Canada and $240 million worldwide. The film won the 1988 People’s Choice Award for Favorite Comedy Motion Picture. The success of the movie launched a franchise.

Throw Momma from the Train

December 11^th Throw Momma from the Train is released. This film is an American crime comedy film starring and directed by Danny DeVito in his theatrical directorial debut. The film co-stars Billy Crystal, Anne Ramsey, Rob Reiner, Branford Marsalis, Kim Greist, and Kate Mulgrew. The title comes from Patti Page’s 1956 hit song, “Mama from the Train (A Kiss, A Kiss)”. The film was inspired by the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train, which is also seen in the film. The film received mixed reviews, but was a commercial success. Anne Ramsey was singled out for praise for her portrayal of the overbearing Mrs. Lift; she won a Saturn Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Wall Street

December 11^th Wall Street is released. This film is an American drama film, directed and co-written by Oliver Stone, which stars Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah, and Martin Sheen. The film tells the story of Bud Fox (C. Sheen), a young stockbroker who becomes involved with Gordon Gekko (Douglas), a wealthy, unscrupulous corporate raider. The film was well received among major film critics. Douglas won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the film has come to be seen as the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas’ character declaring that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Stone and Douglas reunited for a sequel titled Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which was released theatrically on September 24, 2010.

Ironweed

December 18^th Ironweed is released. This film is an American drama film directed by Héctor Babenco. It is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by William Kennedy, who also wrote the screenplay. It stars Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, with Carroll Baker, Michael O’Keefe, Diane Venora, Fred Gwynne, Nathan Lane and Tom Waits in supporting roles. The story concerns the relationship of a homeless couple: Francis, an alcoholic, and Helen, a terminally ill woman during the years following the Great Depression. Despite mixed reviews and being a box-office bomb, Ironweed received two nominations at the 60th Academy Awards, Best Actor (for Nicholson), and Best Actress (for Streep).

Moonstruck

December 18^th Moonstruck is released. This film is an American romantic comedy-drama film directed and co-produced by Norman Jewison, written by John Patrick Shanley, and starring Cher, Nicolas Cage, Danny Aiello, Olympia Dukakis, and Vincent Gardenia. The film follows Loretta Castorini, a widowed Italian-American woman who falls in love with her fiancé’s hot-tempered, estranged younger brother. Moonstruck had a limited theatrical release on December 18, 1987, and was released nationally on January 15, 1988 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The film earned critical and commercial success. It received six nominations at the 60th Academy Awards, winning three for Best Actress (Cher), Best Supporting Actress (Dukakis), and Best Original Screenplay (Shanley).

September

December 18^th September is released. This film is a drama film written and directed by Woody Allen. The film is modeled on Anton Chekhov’s 1899 play Uncle Vanya, though the gender roles are often subverted. Allen’s intention for September was that it be like “a play on film,” hence the great number of long takes and few camera effects. The film does not use Allen as an actor, and is one of his straightforwardly dramatic films. The cast includes Mia Farrow, Sam Waterston, Dianne Wiest, Elaine Stritch, Jack Warden, and Denholm Elliott. Critical response to September was generally lukewarm.

The Last Emperor

December 23^rd The Last Emperor is released. This film is an epic biographical drama film about the life of Puyi, the final Emperor of China. It is directed by Bernardo Bertolucci from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mark Peploe, which was adapted from Puyi’s 1964 autobiography, and independently produced by Jeremy Thomas. The film depicts Puyi’s life from his ascent to the throne as a small boy to his imprisonment and “political rehabilitation” by the Chinese Communist Party. It stars John Lone in the eponymous role, with Peter O’Toole, Joan Chen, Ruocheng Ying, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, Vivian Wu, Lisa Lu, and Ryuichi Sakamoto; who also composed the film score with David Byrne and Cong Su. It was the first Western feature film authorized by the People’s Republic of China to film in the Forbidden City in Beijing. It earned widespread positive reviews from critics and was also a commercial success. At the 60th Academy Awards, it won nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It also won several other accolades, including three BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, nine David di Donatello Awards, and a Grammy Award for its musical score.

Broadcast News

December 25^th Broadcast News is released. This film is an American romantic comedy-drama film written, produced and directed by James L. Brooks. The film concerns a virtuoso television news producer (Holly Hunter) who has daily emotional breakdowns, a brilliant yet prickly reporter (Albert Brooks), and the latter’s charismatic but far less seasoned rival (William Hurt). It also stars Robert Prosky, Lois Chiles, Joan Cusack, and Jack Nicholson. The film was acclaimed by critics and at the 60th Academy Awards received seven nominations, including Best Picture. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Empire of the Sun

December 25^th Empire of the Sun is released. This film is an American epic coming-of-age war film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tom Stoppard, based on J. G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical 1984 novel of the same name. The film tells the story of Jamie “Jim” Graham (Christian Bale), a young boy who goes from living with his wealthy British family in Shanghai to becoming a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. The film received positive reviews, but was not initially a box office success, earning only $22 million at the US box office, although it eventually more than recouped its budget through revenues in other markets.

Good Morning, Vietnam

December 25^th Good Morning, Vietnam is released. This film is an American war comedy film written by Mitch Markowitz and directed by Barry Levinson. Set in Saigon in 1965, during the Vietnam War, the film stars Robin Williams as a radio DJ on Armed Forces Radio Service, who proves hugely popular with the troops, but infuriates his superiors with what they call his “irreverent tendency”. The story is loosely based on the experiences of AFRS radio DJ Adrian Cronauer. Most of Williams’ performances that portrayed Cronauer’s radio broadcasts were improvisations. The film was released by Buena Vista Pictures (under its Touchstone Pictures banner) to critical and commercial success; for his work in the film, Williams won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor and a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. In 2000, the film was number 100 on the American Film Institute’s “100 Years…100 Laughs” list, containing 100 movies considered the funniest in American cinema.