1984

1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday (dominical letter AG) of the Gregorian calendar, the 1984th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 984th year of the 2nd millennium, the 84th year of the 20th century, and the 5th year of the 1980s decade.

Events

January

The Smurfs

The Smurfs (French: Les Schtroumpfs) (Dutch: De Smurfen) is a Belgian comic and television franchise centered on a fictional colony of small blue creatures who live in mushroom-shaped houses in the forest. The Smurfs was first created and introduced as a series of comic characters by the Belgian comics artist Peyo (pen name of Pierre Culliford) in 1958, where they were known as Les Schtroumpfs. There are more than one hundred Smurf characters, and their names are based on adjectives that emphasize their characteristics, such as "Jokey Smurf", who likes to play practical jokes on his fellow smurfs. "Smurfette" was the first female Smurf to be introduced in the series. The Smurfs wear Phrygian caps, which came to represent freedom during the modern era.

The word “Smurf” is the original Dutch translation of the French "Schtroumpf", which, according to Peyo, is a word invented during a meal with fellow cartoonist André Franquin, when he could not remember the word salt.

The Smurfs franchise began as a comic and expanded into advertising, films, TV series, ice capades, video games, theme parks, and dolls.

Shirt Tales

Shirt Tales are characters that were created in 1980 by greeting card designer Janet Elizabeth Manco, and were featured on Hallmark Cards greeting cards. The characters were adapted into an animated series for television by Hanna-Barbera Productions, which first aired in 1982 on NBC.

Cards

Hallmark Cards released the homonymous line of greeting cards with animal characters wearing T-shirts upon which was a message. Those cards were among Hallmark's best sellers at that time, which led the company to team with Hanna-Barbera Productions to adapt the Shirt Tales into a Saturday morning cartoon, which premiered on NBC on September 18, 1982. The card line remained, but faded shortly after the show left broadcast television in 1985.

TV series

The animated Shirt Tales cartoon featured Tyg Tiger (in orange), Pammy Panda (in pink), Digger Mole (in light blue), Rick Raccoon (in red), and Bogey Orangutan (in green, so called because he spoke using a Humphrey Bogart-style voice). They lived in Oak Tree Park and wore shirts which flashed various brightly lit messages reflecting the characters' thoughts. They spent their time teasing the park custodian, Mr. Dinkel, and battling crime in and out of their hometown of Mid City. They zipped around the world in a vehicle known as the STSST (Shirt Tales' SuperSonic Transport) which could operate as a car, jet, boat, submarine, and other forms of transportation. Though most law enforcement agencies knew of the Shirt Tales as crime fighters by reputation, few people seemed aware that they were talking animals—including Mr. Dinkel, whom the group often had to trick to keep their secret safe.

News

News is packaged information about current events happening somewhere else; or, alternatively, news is that which the news industry sells. News moves through many different media, based on word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, and electronic communication.

Common topics for news reports include war, politics, and business, as well as athletic contests, quirky or unusual events, and the doings of celebrities. Government proclamations, concerning royal ceremonies, laws, taxes, public health, and criminals, have been dubbed news since ancient times.

Humans exhibit a nearly universal desire to learn and share news from elsewhere, which they satisfy by traveling and talking to each other. Technological and social developments, often driven by government communication and espionage networks, have increased the speed with which news can spread, as well as influenced its content. The genre of news as we know it today is closely associated with the newspaper, which originated in China as a court bulletin and spread, with paper and printing press, to Europe.

Coronation Street

Coronation Street (informally known as Corrie) is a British soap opera created by Granada Television and shown on ITV since 9 December 1960. The programme centres on Coronation Street in Weatherfield, a fictional town based on Salford, its terraced houses, café, corner shop, newsagents, textile factory and The Rovers Return pub. The fictional street was built in the early 1900s and named in honour of the coronation of King Edward VII.

The programme was conceived in 1960 by scriptwriter Tony Warren at Granada Television in Manchester. Warren's initial kitchen sink drama proposal was rejected by the station's founder Sidney Bernstein, but he was persuaded by producer Harry Elton to produce the programme for thirteen pilot episodes. Within six months of the show's first broadcast, it had become the most-watched programme on British television, and is now a significant part of British culture. This show has been one of the most financially lucrative programmes on British commercial television, underpinning the success of Granada Television and ITV.