My kids really enjoyed Nickelodean Magazine, but it’s no longer published and they got older!
Computer magazines Byte, PC Magazine and Computer Shopper
I really miss Brill’s Content Magazine. It was kind of a pre-Daily Show take on news and personalities.
Life.
Another vote for FMOF (Famous Monsters of Filmland) I think I might have a copy buried deep in the archives someplace. I miss the early Rolling Stone and National Lampoons.
George.
Sort of trashy but with politicos.
Another vote for Omni and National Lampoon.
Also, Desert, a magazine about, well, deserts, mainly in California and Arizona. A fine architecture magazine was Progressive Architecture.
Another vote for National Lampoon. It was in its pages that I read the original “Vacation '58,” and they had great covers. “Rah-Rah-Raw” indeed!
I also miss the print version of Cracked. I do enjoy the online version, but the print version was a lot of fun.
I also miss Weekend Magazine (a Canadian version of Parade, that came with the weekend paper). It was perfect for a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon: interesting, but without anything too challenging or thought-provoking.
It seems to me that most all magazines are just no longer economical to produce.
So, in a way, this thread could be a lot like asking, “what is your favorite brand of buggy whip”?
It may be sad, but there is just no reason to produce buggy whips anymore. It would seem that in a few years you simply won’t see any magazines anymore.
So, an interesting question might be, “which magazine do you think will be the last to go?”
I would guess it would be some magazine about TV or about The Internet.
I got a couple of 1985 TV Guides from an Iowa antique store a time back; they’re coming apart very badly, but they are very much representative of what TV Guide was like when I was a boy. The current one pales in comparison to what those were like.
I really liked GIANT, in its first incarnation.
It was a sort of pop-culture magazine for nerds. Films, TV, video games, collectables, etc.
Then it turned into some sort of GQ bling magazine.
Then it went poof…
Film Threat and The Comics Journal (although both still exist as websites).
Although Penthouse is still nominally in print, it’s hardly the glorious thing I remember from the late 70s. It died in three stages: Guccione went insane, Guccione lost editorial control of the magazine, and Guccione died. Playboy has only (partially) suffered the second stage of this process, though I have a hard time proving it was ever as great as I seem to remember it being.
National Lampoon also died in stages: When the founding editors sold their stake to the publisher in 1975, when all the old staff except Ed Subitzky drifted away by 1985, when they were acquired via a hostile takeover in 1989 by Tim Matheson and in 1991 by the company that made those DORF videos, and in 1998 when it ceased to exist as anything but a logo on crappy, direct-to-video movies. Not sure why print satire is such a hard sell these days, but it is.
In addition to the oft aforementioned Spy magazine, I miss Option magazine, a good resource in the days when it wasn’t nearly as easy to find new music.
SPY!
I was packing up my apt to go on a long trip and threw out my old issues. By the time I got back, they’d been sued and ceased publication. It was educational: Logrolling in Our Time was my introduction to PR hacks. It was influential. It was literate.
I still laugh when I see “short-fingered vulgarian” in print.
The other one is Domino. I had just discovered it when it went belly up. I am holding onto my two issues though. Now it’s been revived as a quarterly…
Avalon Hill’s The General.
As a kid I loved some of AH’s board games, and it was cool finding errata or game variants for them in the magazine.
I suspect they were thinking, “We survived four decades being the magazine ‘Mad’ fans bought when the newsstand ran out. Unfortunately, ‘Mad’ sales have dropped too much for that to be viable. Who’s hot right now that we can imitate and be the backup choice for?”
And a tenth (or whatever) for ‘Spy.’ How can you not like a magazine that calls up freshmen Representatives and asks their opinions on the ethnic cleansing in Freedonia?
Whoa, many props for *Spy *in this thread!
And may I also join in missing Omni and National Lampoon
Which in my case would apply to *MAD *(which I can’t be too mad about, after all Bill and the gang were not going to live forever and I would one day become middle aged) and to Playboy (especially when you compare to its contents-rich 1960s-80s incarnation).
That makes two of us.
I miss the original Punch - not to be confused with the New Yorker wannabe that replaced it. Best story I remember: when Hunter Davies was in San Francisco (visiting his eldest daughter, who was spending a year at UC-Davis - apparently, she wanted to attend UC-Santa Cruz as she had heard that it offered a class in surfing, but got sent to Davis instead) just in time for a mid-5 magnitude earthquake.
Of course, *Omni. *In fact, I still have the first issue. I also miss *Scientific American, Games *and Life.
Premiere Magazine. I was a subscriber for just about every issue of it’s entire 20-year run, only missing the first few (which I bought at the newsstand). I think it survived for a little while after ceasing to be a print magazine as an online-only one, but even that is no more, apparently.
I very fondly remember Creem as well during my formative years. If that wiki article is to be believed, Creem not only coined the term “punk rock” and “heavy metal”, but it did both in the very same issue. If that’s true, it’s pretty amazing.
People have already mentioned Spy and Omni, but let me add the following:
motive:
http://www.bu.edu/cgcm/scm-usa-project/motive-magazine/
Lingua Franca:
Maledicta:
Movieline:
I loved Sassy. It had a very different tone to it than anything else available at the time.