Word: first
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They forgot about Mikey, the embryo (and then infant) with star quality. Sassy but never cynical, Mikey is first seen, through some cunningly simple special effects, as a kind of hot-rodding sperm cruising up the Fallopian tube to the tune of the Beach Boys' I Get Around. "The sperm comes on and people go crazy," says Jonathan Krane, the film's producer. "From then on they're laughing at the picture." Not quite. They're laughing with it, in the easy, conspiratorial laughter any domestic comedy would kill...
Moviegoers love babies, of course. A lame comedy like 3 Men and a Baby earned $168 million by offering little more than Tom Selleck diapering a child. The talking baby is another familiar Hollywood tradition; street-smart infants narrated the film The First Time (1952) and a 1960 sitcom called Happy. Spermatozoa have schmoozed (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex), and in this year's Me and Him even a penis got chatty...
NATION: In Virginia, Douglas Wilder cracks the color line to become the first black elected Governor...
...truncated and unrevised form, The People will add little to Malamud's reputation, which hardly needs embellishment in any case. His novels, including The Natural and The Assistant, and books of stories such as The Magic Barrel and Idiots First long ago established his place among the best postwar American writers. This triumph was not easily won. Malamud never catered to popular tastes or expectations. His fiction was often as grim as it was enchanting. He wrote, and rewrote, slowly, with consummate care...
...first, buildings along the new boundary afforded windows on the West. Many refugees leaped, some into fire nets, others to the pavement; more than a few died in the fall. After the regime bricked up the windows, the resourceful tunneled beneath the 20-ft. "death strip" and its mines and gun emplacements. The most daring efforts came from Wall jumpers, who confronted head on the "antifascist protective barrier," as the jargon of totalitarianism described the Wall. In their jagged sprints, dodging searchlight beams and bullets, they created a theater of longing where the value of freedom -- and the maleficence...