A lot happened in the year 1989, including the debut of a TV sitcom in which nothing happened. That show, of course, was Seinfeld, and we’ll be doing a deep dive into this iconic 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 pop culture events that occurred in 1989.

Berne Convention

March 1 The Berne Convention, an international copyright treaty, is ratified by the United States. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, was an international assembly held in 1886 in the Swiss city of Bern by ten European countries with the goal to agree on a set of legal principles for the protection of original work. They drafted and adopted a multi-party contract containing agreements for a uniform, crossing border system that became known under the same name. Its rules have been updated many times since then. The treaty provides authors, musicians, poets, painters, and other creators with the means to control how their works are used, by whom, and on what terms. In some jurisdictions these type of rights are being referred to as copyright. The United States became a party in 1989.

As of November 2022, the Berne Convention has been ratified by 181 states out of 195 countries in the world, most of which are also parties to the Paris Act of 1971. The Berne Convention introduced the concept that protection exists the moment a work is “fixed”, that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works, unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them or until the copyright expires. A creator need not register or “apply for” a copyright in countries adhering to the convention. It also enforces a requirement that countries recognize rights held by the citizens of all other parties to the convention. Foreign authors are given the same rights and privileges to copyrighted material as domestic authors in any country that ratified the convention. The countries to which the convention applies created a Union for the protection of the rights of authors in their literary and artistic works, known as the Berne Union.

Time Warner Merger

March 4 Time Inc. and Warner Communications announce plans for a merger forming Time Warner (Now Warner Bros. Discovery). During the summer of that same year, Paramount Communications (formerly Gulf+Western) launched a $12.2 billion hostile bid to acquire Time Inc. in an attempt to end a stock swap merger deal between Time and Warner Communications. This caused Time to raise its bid for Warner to $14.9 billion in cash and stock. Paramount responded by filing a lawsuit in a Delaware court to block the Time/Warner merger. The court ruled twice in favor of Time, forcing Paramount to drop both the Time acquisition and the lawsuit, and allowing the formation of the two companies’ merger which was completed on January 10, 1990.

Effectively, Time took over Warner, resulting in a new corporate structure and the new combined company being called “Time Warner”. The Pathfinder website was launched in 1994, with content from the Time, People and Fortune magazines. It was shut down in 1999. In 2008, Time Inc. launched Maghound, an internet-based magazine membership service that featured approximately 300 magazine titles from both Time Inc. brands and external publishing companies. On January 19, 2010, Time Inc. acquired StyleFeeder, a personal shopping engine. In August 2010, Time Inc. announced that Ann S. Moore, its chairman and chief executive, would step down as CEO and be replaced by Jack Griffin, an executive with Meredith Corporation, the nation’s second-largest publisher of consumer magazines. In September 2010, Time Inc. entered into a licensing agreement with Kolkata-based ABP Group, one of India’s largest media conglomerates, to publish Fortune India magazine and the yearly Fortune India 500 list. Griffin was ousted after a brief tenure, eventually being replaced by Laura Lang, who served about a year.

Disney-MGM Studios Grand Opening

May 1 Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World opens to the public for the first time. Disney’s Hollywood Studios is a theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort in Bay Lake, Florida, near Orlando. Based on a concept by Marty Sklar, Randy Bright, and Michael Eisner, the park opened on May 1, 1989, as the Disney-MGM Studios (Theme) Park, and was the third of four theme parks built at Walt Disney World. Spanning 135 acres (55 ha), the park is dedicated to the imagined worlds from film, television, music, and theater, drawing inspiration from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Disney’s Hollywood Studios was initially developed as both a theme park inspired by show business and an operating production studio, with active film and television production services, an animation facility branch, and a functioning backlot.

Construction on the combined park and studio began in 1987, but was accelerated when the construction of the similarly-themed Universal Studios Florida began a few miles away. To increase public interest and the variety of film representation within the park, Disney entered into a licensing agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), from which the park’s original name was derived. The park’s production facilities were removed throughout the 2000s, and many of the park’s soundstages were retrofitted for newer attractions and guest use. The park’s current name took effect in 2008, with the removal of the MGM-branding throughout the park. In the 2010s, the park began to distance itself from the original studio backlot intention and entered a new direction of immersive theming and attraction development inspired by imagined worlds from Hollywood storytellers.

The park’s representative icon was originally the Earffel Tower from the park’s opening until 2001 when the Sorcerer’s Hat—a stylized version of the magical hat from Fantasia—was erected in the park’s central hub. The latter then served as the park’s icon until its removal in January 2015. Since then, the park has been identified and represented in marketing by the Hollywood Tower Hotel, with the Chinese Theatre serving as the park’s visual centerpiece. In 2018, the park hosted 11.258 million guests, ranking it the fifth most-visited theme park in North America and the ninth most-visited theme park in the world.

Tony Awards for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway

June 4 Jerome Robbins’ Broadway wins the Tony Award for Best Musical and five other Tonys. Jerome Robbins’ Broadway is an anthology comprising musical numbers from shows that were either directed or choreographed by him. The shows represented include, for example, The King and I, On the Town and West Side Story. Robbins won his fifth Tony Award for direction. The show opened on Broadway on February 26, 1989 at the Imperial Theatre and closed on September 1, 1990 after 633 performances and 55 previews.

Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins with Grover Dale as co-director, the cast featured Jason Alexander as the narrator, Charlotte d’Amboise, Faith Prince, Debbie Shapiro, Susann Fletcher and Scott Wise. With an elaborate production and a cast of 62, the show reportedly cost $8 million to produce, and was expected to recoup about 40 percent from the New York run, according to Bernard B. Jacobs (President of the Shubert Organization). “In a season that was so bereft of original musicals that Kenny Loggins on Broadway and Barry Manilow at the Gershwin were categorized as such, this reminder of Broadway’s glory days was greeted with relief and rejoicing (and six Tony Awards). It featured extended sequences from West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof.”

Rebecca Schaeffer Murder

July 18 Actress Rebecca Schaeffer is murdered by an obsessed fan, leading to stricter stalking laws in California. Rebecca Schaeffer was an American actress and model. She began her career as a teen model before moving on to acting. In 1986, she landed the role of Patricia “Patti” Russell in the CBS comedy My Sister Sam. The series was canceled in 1988, and she appeared in several films, including the black comedy Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.

At the age of 21, she was shot and killed by Robert John Bardo, a 19-year-old obsessed fan who had been stalking her. Schaeffer’s death helped lead to the passage in California of legislation aimed at preventing stalking. Bardo killed Schaeffer at her home in West Hollywood. At the time of her death, she had been stalked by Bardo for three years. He had previously been obsessed with child peace activist Samantha Smith, who died in a plane crash in 1985. He then wrote numerous letters to Schaeffer, one of which she answered.  In 1987, he traveled to Los Angeles hoping to meet with Schaeffer on the set of My Sister Sam, but Warner Bros. security turned him away. He returned a month later armed with a knife, but security guards again prevented him from gaining access. He returned to his native home in Tucson, Arizona, and lost focus on Schaeffer for a while as his obsession shifted toward pop singers Tiffany, Debbie Gibson and Madonna. Bardo watched Schaeffer in the black comedy Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills in 1989, in which she appeared in bed with another actor. He became enraged by the scene, apparently out of jealousy, and decided that Schaeffer should be punished for “becoming another Hollywood whore”.

Arthur Richard Jackson had stalked and stabbed actress Theresa Saldana in 1982, and Bardo learned that Jackson had used a private investigator to obtain Saldana’s address. Bardo then paid a detective agency in Tucson $250 to find Schaeffer’s home address in California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records. His brother helped him get a Ruger GP100 .357 handgun. Bardo traveled to Los Angeles a third time and roamed the neighborhood where Schaeffer lived, asking people if she actually lived there. Once he was certain that the address was correct, he rang the doorbell. Schaeffer was preparing for an audition for The Godfather Part III and was expecting a script to be delivered, so she answered the door. Bardo showed her a letter and autograph that she had previously sent him; after a short conversation, she asked him not to come to her home again. He went to a diner nearby and had breakfast, then returned to her apartment an hour later. She answered the door with “a cold look on her face”, Bardo later said. He pulled out the handgun and shot her in the chest at point-blank range in the doorway of her apartment building; according to Bardo, she fell and said only, “Why?”

Schaeffer was rushed to the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead 30 minutes after her arrival. She was buried at Ahavai Sholom Cemetery in Portland. Tucson Police Chief Peter Ronstadt arrested Bardo the next day after motorists reported a man running through traffic on Interstate 10. He immediately confessed to the murder. Marcia Clark, later known for her role as lead prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson murder case, prosecuted the case against him. Bardo was convicted of capital murder in a bench trial and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

As a result of this incident, federal law regarding the release of personal information through the DMV was changed. The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which prevents the DMV from releasing private addresses, was enacted in 1994. Schaeffer’s death also helped prompt the 1990 passing of America’s first anti-stalking laws, including California Penal Code 646.9. At the time of her death, Schaeffer was dating director Brad Silberling. Her death influenced his film Moonlight Mile (2002) about a man’s grief after his fiancée is murdered. Shortly after Schaeffer’s death, Pam Dawber and her My Sister Sam co-stars Joel Brooks, David Naughton, and Jenny O’Hara filmed a public service announcement for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence in her honor.

Nintendo Game Boy Debut

July 31 The Game Boy hits the shelves in North America.  The Game Boy is an 8-bit fourth generation handheld game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It was first released in Japan on April 21, 1989, in North America later the same year, and in Europe in late 1990. It was designed by the same team that developed the Game & Watch series of handheld electronic games and several Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games: Satoru Okada, Gunpei Yokoi, and Nintendo Research & Development. It is Nintendo’s second handheld game console and combines features from both the Game & Watch handheld and NES home system.

The console features a dot-matrix screen with adjustable contrast dial, five game control buttons (a directional pad, two game buttons, and “START” and “SELECT”), a single speaker with adjustable volume dial and, like its rivals, uses cartridges as physical media for games. The color scheme is made from two tones of gray with accents of black, blue, and dark magenta. All the corners of the portrait-oriented rectangular unit are softly rounded, except for the bottom right, which is curved. At launch, it was sold either as a standalone unit, or bundled with one of several games, among them Super Mario Land and Tetris. Several accessories were also developed, including a carrying pouch, a camera, and a printer.

The Game Boy received mixed reviews from critics and was deemed as technologically inferior to its fourth-generation competitors (Sega’s Game Gear, Atari’s Lynx, and NEC’s TurboExpress). Its lack of a backlight, graphics, bulky design and price were met with criticism, but it also received praise for its battery life, library of games and durability in its construction. It quickly outsold the competition, selling one million units in the United States within a few weeks. An estimated 118.69 million units of the Game Boy and its successor, the Game Boy Color, have been sold worldwide, making it the third best-selling video game console of all time. It is one of the most recognizable devices from the 1990s, becoming a cultural icon in the years following its release. Several redesigns were released during the console’s lifetime, including the Game Boy Pocket in 1996 and the Game Boy Light in 1998 (Japan only). Production of the Game Boy continued until 2003, well after the release of its second successor, the Game Boy Advance, in 2001.

Leona Helmsley Conviction

August 30 Leona Helmsley is convicted of federal income tax evasion.  Helmsley was an American businesswoman. Her flamboyant personality and reputation for tyrannical behavior earned her the nickname “Queen of Mean.” After allegations of non-payment were made by contractors hired to improve Helmsley’s Connecticut home, she was investigated and convicted of federal income tax evasion and other crimes in 1989. Although having initially received a sentence of sixteen years, she was required to serve only nineteen months in prison and two months under house arrest. During the trial, a former housekeeper testified that she had heard Helmsley say: “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes”, a quote which was identified with her for the rest of her life.

Jim Bakker Conviction

October 5 A jury in Charlotte, North Carolina convicts televangelist Jim Bakker of fraud and conspiracy. On October 24, he is sentenced to 45 years in prison and fined $500,000. In 1979, Bakker and PTL came under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for allegedly misusing funds raised on the air. The FCC report was finalized in 1982 and found that Bakker had raised $350,000 that he told viewers would go towards funding overseas missions but that was actually used to pay for part of Heritage USA. The report also found that the Bakkers used PTL funds for personal expenses.

FCC commissioners voted four to three to drop the investigation, after which they allowed Bakker to sell the only TV station that he owned, therefore bypassing future FCC oversight. The FCC forwarded its report to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to press charges, citing insufficient evidence. Bakker used the controversy to raise more funds from his audience, branding the investigation a “witch-hunt” and asking viewers to “give the Devil a black eye”. A confidential 1985 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) report found that $1.3 million in ministry funds was used for the Bakkers’ personal benefit from 1980 to 1983. The report recommended that PTL be stripped of its tax-exempt status, but no action was taken until after the Jessica Hahn scandal broke in 1987.

Art Harris and Michael Isikoff wrote in The Washington Post that politics may have played a role in the three government agencies taking no action against PTL despite the evidence against them, as members of the Reagan administration were not eager to go after television ministers whose evangelical followers made up their base. The PTL Club’s fundraising activities between 1984 and 1987 were reported by The Charlotte Observer, eventually leading to criminal charges against Bakker. Bakker and his PTL associates sold $1,000 “lifetime memberships”, entitling buyers to an annual three-night stay at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA during that period. According to the prosecution at Bakker’s fraud trial, tens of thousands of memberships were sold but only one 500-room hotel was ever finished. Bakker sold “exclusive partnerships” which exceeded capacity, raising more than twice the money needed to build the hotel. Much of the money paid Heritage USA’s operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3.4 million.

After a 16-month federal grand jury probe, Bakker was indicted in 1988 on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. In 1989, after a five-week trial which began on August 28 in Charlotte, North Carolina, a jury found him guilty on all 24 counts. Judge Robert Daniel Potter sentenced Bakker to 45 years in federal prison and imposed a $500,000 fine. At the Federal Medical Center, Rochester in Rochester, Minnesota, he shared a cell with activist Lyndon LaRouche and skydiver Roger Nelson. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld Bakker’s conviction on the fraud and conspiracy charges, voided Bakker’s 45-year sentence and $500,000 fine and ordered a new sentencing hearing in February 1991. The court ruled that Potter’s sentencing statement about Bakker, that “those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests”, was evidence that the judge had injected his religious beliefs into Bakker’s sentence. A sentence-reduction hearing was held on November 16, 1992, and Bakker’s sentence was reduced to eight years. In August 1993, he was transferred to a minimum-security federal prison in Jesup, Georgia.

Bakker was paroled in July 1994, after serving almost five years of his sentence. His son, Jay, spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to the parole board advocating leniency. Celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz acted as Bakker’s parole attorney, having said that he “would guarantee that Mr. Bakker would never again engage in the blend of religion and commerce that led to his conviction.” Bakker was released from Federal Bureau of Prisons custody on December 1, 1994, owing $6 million to the IRS.