Nine years ago, the author Ernest Cline published the monster hit Ready Player One. Somehow, despite being a huge gamer nerd, Sam Brooks managed to avoid it – until now. We also made him read the sequel, which came out last month. Sorry, Sam. Ready Player One is an ode to the kind of white … Read more
Three decades since it first emerged on our screens, Captain Planet and the Planeteers will always be remembered as the show that introduced an entire generation to corporate greed and environmental protection. Children of the late 1980s and early 1990s had a number of iconic cartoons to choose from: Transformers, He-Man, Gummi Bears, My Little … Read more
Few hobbies have captured the mainstream imagination in 2020 quite like roller skating. Jihee Junn explores the many reasons why. Just down the road from Auckland’s Glenfield mall is the ActivZone Indoor Sports Arena, an inconspicuous-looking building which, many years ago, used to be a Chipmunks play centre. These days though, it’s the self-proclaimed “home … Read more
Tara Ward takes a trip back in time with this classic 1980s New Zealand tourism video. Be warned, it contains bare buttocks. Covid-19 has made us tourists in our own country, so there’s no better time to wrap your optic nerves around the classic tourism film Come On to New Zealand. It was a 34-minute … Read more
This week, the Norwegian band A-ha will play their first ever dates in New Zealand. Though it’s been more than three decades since the release of their timeless debut single ‘Take on Me’, sometimes it seems like it was only yesterday, writes Catherine McGregor. It’s a Saturday evening in the spring of 1985 and I’m … Read more
Right now the country’s booksellers are gasping, frantic, knackered – and still dealing politely with the rest of us at our worst. We at the Spinoff thank them for their service and invite booksellers and book-buyers alike to please enjoy this nostalgic hug of an essay by Catherine Robertson. From late 1985 to early 1987, … Read more
Twenty years ago Stephen Chbosky had a massive hit with coming-of-age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Now the director/producer/scriptwriter is back with an epic, kid-centric horror. Early on in Stephen Chbosky’s frustrating new horror novel, Imaginary Friend, its seven-year-old protagonist Christopher is sitting down to watch his favourite cartoon, Bad Cat. Christopher is … Read more
Last week, Dame Fiona Kidman won the 2019 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for her eleventh novel. Her first, A Breed of Women, was published 40 years ago in 1979. Here, you can read the opening chapter. A Breed of Women is a frank portrayal of what it was like to be a woman in small-town New … Read more
In the mid-1980s, a teenager paid five dollars for a Katango fan club parcel. Thirty years later, her son attempts to track down the missing goods, or at least a refund. Katango was one of thousands of bands in the 1980s. Their members were effeminate young men who wore make up. Their fashion was loud … Read more
Long-lost siblings? A high-stakes and seemingly pointless quest? A fake death? Sounds like a good time. Sam Brooks celebrates the forgotten Kiwi drama Seekers. Before Filthy Rich was even a glimmer in Gavin Strawhan’s eye, Seekers brought the unpredictable and improbable drama to New Zealand primetime television. Straight off the bat, Seekers is an extremely weird high-concept premise for … Read more
Everybody wants to rule the world, but who else, asks Simon Wilson in this “partner content” feature, sets out to do it with as much wham-bam glam as the 80s dancefloor revivalist musical Pleasuredome? Just before the intermission, Lucy Lawless gets up close and personal with the woman she’s seducing and slides into ‘Hey little girl … Read more
Every week Chartlander travels back through time, landing in a different year on the official New Zealand singles chart in the hopes of (re)discovering forgotten Top 40 gold. Today we continue our tour of significant election moments. The date is Thursday the 14th of June, 1984. Tonight, New Zealand’s prime minister Robert Muldoon will get … Read more
Ever wondered what Cobb & Co’s menu looked like in the 80s? Thanks to an unearthed staff training video, Sam Brooks knows. Now he’s ready to share the unsettling results. I have been to Cobb & Co once in my life, in 2016. On the way back from Wellington, we stopped in Taupō. Now there … Read more