https://wearethemutants.com/
An online magazine focusing on Cold War-era popular and outsider culture.
We Are the Mutants
Loading...
Next, we travel back in time to the '80s Cola Wars, when Dr. Pepper, Coca Cola, and Pepsi paid millions on stylish, increasingly dystopian sci-fi commercials to convince teenage nerds to buy soda.
We Are the Mutants
Post-Apocalypse Week continues with these sci-fi inspired Cola Wars commercials from the '80s targeted at the kids who dug Blade Runner and Mad Max 2.
Thank you for tuning in to Post-Apocalypse Week here at WATM. ICYMI, here they are again, complete and uncut. First up, board game Thunder Road! The boomers got The Game of Life. Gen X got the game of trying to survive an apocalyptic hellscape.
NEW TODAY! A deep dive into the ancient global disasters at the heart of all three original D&D campaign settings: Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance. What do these cataclysms tell us about the game? Why do we find the end of the world so comforting?
Reprising one of our favorite pieces for no particular reason. "We grew up addicted—by design—to brands that were relentlessly market-researched and vetted to be precisely what we desired, resulting in the uniquely capitalist brand of nostalgia-driven consumption that’s so prevalent today."
ICYMI: In 1978, a Polish publishing house released a series of comics based on Erich von Däniken's crackpot "theories." Beautifully drawn by Bogusław Polch, the comics were later published in the UK as 'The Gods from Outer Space.'
ICYMI: The early '90s comic and TV series Wild Palms present a "satirical vision of a media-saturated present/future crawling with mind-altering drugs, sinister conspiratorial cults, and ubiquitous computer technology promising transcendence."
What do Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance have in common? An apocalypse in their pasts! Revelations abound about the AD&D campaign worlds of the 1980s in today's edition of Post-Apocalypse Week!
We Are the Mutants
Maybe even more than the film, Jim Steranko's 1981 graphic adaptation of Outland conveys the deeply noir, deeply cyberpunk elements of the story that would find completion a year later in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
Finally, it's an epic adventure into the early worlds of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons! Why are apocalyptic cataclysms a defining feature of Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance? Is the end of the world a defining feature of the game itself?
By Michael Grasso A couple of years ago, a canny and intelligent friend referred to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms as “post-apocalyptic.” I thought …
wearethemutants.com
We Are the Mutants
The 1980s saw the gradual ascendancy of cyberpunk narratives in popular science fiction. The genre projected Western societal trends seen in the decade---corporate conglomeration, the rise of computer...
By K.E. Roberts Star Wars and the Cola Wars collided, launching a series of futuristic, high concept TV ads that included all the major players. At the heart of it was one Ridley Scott…
wearethemutants.com
We Are the Mutants
We Are the Mutants
By Richard McKenna Incredibly, it took only four years for the spectacle to regurgitate the absurdist nightmare future that George Miller had assembled in 1982’s Mad Max 2 as that most inane and tr…
By K.E. Roberts Star Wars and the Cola Wars collided, launching a series of futuristic, high concept TV ads that included all the major players. At the heart of it was one Ridley Scott…
By Richard McKenna In 1977, with von Däniken mania still thriving, Alfred Górny of Polish publishing house Sport i Turystyka—Sport and Tourism—made an agreement with Econ Verlag, the pu…
By Jimmy Andreakos He-Man and the Masters of the Universe bubbled up from the depths of Mattel’s marketing hive mind and irradiated the toy and TV industry with a simple but ultimately revolutionar…
By Michael Grasso A couple of years ago, a canny and intelligent friend referred to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms as “post-apocalyptic.” I thought …
When Heavy Metal published 1979’s stand-alone Alien: The Illustrated Story to coincide with the release of Ridley Scott’s now-canonical sci-fi horror, no one knew what a “graphic …
wearethemutants.com
By Michael Grasso A couple of years ago, a canny and intelligent friend referred to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms as “post-apocalyptic.” I thought …
