1984 - Everyday Life

Everyday Life

Trivial Pursuit revives the board-game industry. Devised 5 years ago by four Montreal newspaper staffers, the game goes on sale in U.S. stores and becomes wildly popular, but San Francisco-born former Sacramento, Calif., air traffic controller Fred L. Worth, now 40, published The Trivia Encyclopedia in 1974, followed it up in 1977 with The Complete Unabridged Super Trivia Encyclopedia, the game contains some of the same errors found in Worth's books, and he files suit October 23 in the federal district court for Southern California, demanding $300 million in damages from the game's inventors and marketers. By year's end Trivial Pursuit has generated more than $256 million in sales, but although Worth's lawyers will pursue the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court their appeal will be rejected in March 1988.

The black-and-white comic book Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) features the turtles Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, who were transformed by a radioactive "mutigant" and now live in New York's sewers. Created in May by New York freelance artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the comic book has little success until a UPI reporter writes a syndicated story which attracts the attention of licensers, Eastman and Laird sign a contract, and by the end of 1990 about $1 billion worth of Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle T-shirts, buttons, comic books, toys, video games, breakfast cereals, and other merchandise will have been sold in 30 countries. The TMNT cartoon show will be the highest-rating CBS morning show in CBS history, and the first TMNT film will earn $250 million.

Vanessa Williams gives up her Miss America title under pressure July 23 when it is learned that the September issue of Penthouse magazine will contain nude photographs of her taken several years ago (she had sworn that she had never committed any acts of "moral turpitude"). Contestant Suzette Charles, who was first runner-up in last year's contest, becomes the second black Miss America.

Chess master Tigran V. Petrosian dies of cancer at Moscow August 13 at age 55.

Donna Karan mounts her first show as an independent designer (see 1974). She and her partner launched Anne Klein II last year and gained quick success, but the Japanese conglomerate that owns a majority stake in Anne Klein has urged Karan to start her own label. She has resisted, Takiyho has sacked her while agreeing at the same time to back her new company, and she breaks all records at a special sale for customers of Bergdorf Goodman, the top U.S. fashion retailer.

Free Hold is introduced by the French cosmetic giant L'Oreal. The first hair mousse—an aerosol foam containing negatively charged polymers (to create fullness), it promises to leave hair shiny, smooth, soft, and manageable, with good "body." By year's end more than two dozen competing brands are on the market, driving out sprays that leave hair stiff and sticky.