1988 History, Facts and Trivia

In 1988, a graduate student at Cornell released a self-replicating program onto the internet from an MIT terminal, and by morning, a significant portion of the connected internet had ground to a halt. Die Hard arrived and settled the question of what a Christmas movie could be. Steffi Graf won all four Grand Slams and an Olympic gold medal in the same calendar year, an achievement that has never been matched. Phil Collins closed the year at number one. George Michael opened it. The Olympic flame in Seoul incinerated several doves that had settled on the cauldron during the opening ceremony. It was that kind of year.

Quick Facts from 1988

• World-Changing Event: The Morris Worm, the first internet-distributed computer worm to gain significant mainstream attention, was released on November 2, 1988, infecting thousands of connected computers and demonstrating for the first time that networked systems were vulnerable at scale
• Top Song: Faith by George Michael, the best-performing single of the year on the Billboard Year-End Hot 100; Roll With It by Steve Winwood was the dominant song of the summer, spending four weeks at number one
• Influential Songs: It Takes Two by Rob Base and E-Z Rock, Push It by Salt-N-Pepa, Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley, Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N’ Roses
• Must-See Movies: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Rain Man, Coming to America, Big, Die Hard, Beetlejuice, Cocktail, and A Fish Called Wanda
• People’s Sexiest Man Alive: John F. Kennedy Jr.
• Most Famous Person in America: Roseanne Barr, whose sitcom was the second most-watched show on television and whose persona had become a genuine cultural force
• Notable Books: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice, and Matilda by Roald Dahl
• Price of a Little Tikes Turtle Sandbox: $34.99
• Price of a Movie Ticket: $4.00
• The Funny Guy: Dennis Miller
• The Funny Lady: Roseanne Barr
• The Unexpected Celebrity Crossover: Michael Jackson’s 1988 autobiography Moonwalk was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was working as a book editor at Doubleday
• Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Dragon, associated with strength, ambition, and good fortune — though not necessarily for the doves at the Seoul Olympics
• Doomsday Clock: 6 minutes to midnight
• The Habit: Rewinding your VHS rental before returning it, arguing about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie
• The Conversation: Did you hear about the computer worm? And is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

Top Ten Baby Names of 1988

Girls: Jessica, Ashley, Amanda, Sarah, Jennifer Boys: Michael, Christopher, Matthew, Joshua, Andrew

Jessica held the top spot for girls for the third consecutive year. Jennifer, which had been the most popular girls’ name through most of the 1970s, was still in the top five but declining. Michael remained firmly at the top for boys, a position it had occupied for most of the preceding three decades.

Fashion Icons and Sex Symbols of 1988

Elle Macpherson, Jessica Rabbit

Jessica Rabbit, the animated femme fatale of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, was designed specifically to be the most glamorous figure in a film that mixed live action and animation, and succeeded so thoroughly that she was discussed as a cultural sex symbol alongside actual human beings. This was either a tribute to the animators’ skill or a commentary on the year’s standards, depending on one’s perspective.

Hollywood Hunks and Leading Men of 1988

Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, Richard Gere, Morrissey

Tom Cruise had Cocktail in 1988, which grossed $171 million despite reviews suggesting the film did not entirely deserve it. Richard Gere was in the middle of a career run that would culminate in Pretty Woman two years later. Morrissey had recently launched his solo career following The Smiths’ breakup in 1987 and was at the peak of his cultural influence among people who wore black and felt things intensely.

The Quotes

“Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” — Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle during the vice-presidential debate on October 5, 1988, after Quayle had compared his experience to that of John F. Kennedy. The line was considered the most devastating single exchange in modern debate history. Bentsen and Dukakis lost the election anyway.

“Read my lips: no new taxes.” — Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush at the Republican National Convention, August 18, 1988, a promise that became one of the most famous broken pledges in American political history when he agreed to a tax increase in 1990

“Just do it.” — Nike, launching a slogan that became one of the most recognized in advertising history, created a campaign featuring 80-year-old runner Walt Stack

“I’m not bad — I’m just drawn that way.” — Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a line that managed to be both a joke about the nature of animation and a surprisingly resonant statement about the gap between appearance and character

Time Magazine’s Planet of the Year

“The Endangered Earth,” marking the first time Time had named something other than a person as its annual honoree. The designation was driven by a year of extreme weather events, including severe drought across the American Midwest, the discovery that the ozone hole over Antarctica was larger than previously measured, and growing scientific consensus about climate change that was entering mainstream public awareness. The cover image depicted the Earth wrapped in plastic. It was the first time the planet itself had received the recognition, and it would not be the last time the question was asked.

Miss America and Miss USA

Miss America: Kaye Lani Rae Rafko, Monroe, Michigan — an oncology nurse who became a vocal advocate for nursing as a profession during her reign
Miss USA: Courtney Gibbs, Texas

We Lost in 1988

Andy Warhol, the artist whose work had defined Pop Art, whose Factory had been a center of New York cultural life through the 1960s and 1970s, and whose portraits of Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe had permanently altered the relationship between commercial imagery and fine art, died February 22, 1988, at age 58, of cardiac arrhythmia following gallbladder surgery. His estate was valued at approximately $509 million. He had predicted his own celebrity accurately enough that most of his quotations about fame have become famous.

Pete Maravich, the basketball player who had averaged 44.2 points per game during his college career at LSU — still the highest scoring average in Division I history — died January 5, 1988, at age 40, of a congenital heart defect that had never been diagnosed. In a 1974 interview, Maravich had said: “I don’t want to play ten years in the NBA and then die of a heart attack when I’m 40.” He had played ten years in the NBA. He was 40 when he died.

Roy Orbison, the singer and songwriter whose voice was considered one of the most extraordinary in American popular music and whose recordings of Oh, Pretty Woman, Crying, and In Dreams had defined a generation of pop melody, died December 6, 1988, at age 52, of a heart attack. He had recently recorded Mystery Girl with the Traveling Wilburys and was experiencing a career revival. Mystery Girl was released posthumously and reached number one.

Enzo Ferrari, the racing driver and automobile manufacturer who had founded Ferrari in 1939 and built it into the most celebrated racing and road car brand in the world, died August 14, 1988, at age 90. Ferrari had not driven one of his own cars for decades and reportedly disliked driving in general. His company has continued to produce cars that other people very much enjoy driving.

America in 1988 — The Context

The presidential election of 1988 pitted Vice President George H.W. Bush against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Bush won with 426 electoral votes to Dukakis’s 111, the most lopsided electoral result since Reagan’s 1984 landslide. The campaign was notable for its negativity — the “Willie Horton” advertisement and the “Dukakis in the tank” photograph defined how low modern campaigns would go — and for several moments that generated immediate political vocabulary.

Dukakis’s decision to ride in an M1 Abrams tank while wearing an oversized helmet, intended to project toughness on defense, produced photographs so widely ridiculed that “Dukakis in the tank” became permanent shorthand for a backfired publicity stunt. The image was turned into a Bush campaign advertisement within days.

Gary Hart, who had entered 1988 as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, dared the press to follow him after allegations of womanizing surfaced. The Miami Herald complied and photographed Hart with model Donna Rice on a yacht named Monkey Business. Hart withdrew from the race. He later re-entered briefly and withdrew again.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1987, was being implemented in 1988, eliminating an entire category of nuclear weapons. It was the most significant arms control agreement since SALT II and moved the Doomsday Clock to 6 minutes to midnight, the closest it had been set to safety in years.

The Morris Worm

On November 2, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a 23-year-old graduate student at Cornell University, released a self-replicating program from an MIT computer terminal — one of the first widely distributed computer worms. The program exploited vulnerabilities in Unix sendmail, fingerd, and rsh/rexec programs, and was designed to spread. It spread faster than Morris had anticipated, reinfecting systems repeatedly and slowing connected computers to unusable speeds. Approximately 6,000 computers were affected — a significant portion of the internet as it existed in 1988. Morris was subsequently convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and sentenced to three years’ probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $10,050 fine. He later became a professor at MIT. The worm is now in the Computer History Museum’s collection.

Pop Culture Facts and History

Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan and starring Bruce Willis, was released on July 22, 1988, and grossed $140 million on a $28 million budget. Alan Rickman’s performance as Hans Gruber established the template for the sophisticated, articulate action villain that subsequent films spent decades attempting to replicate. The genuine terror on Rickman’s face as his character falls from Nakatomi Tower resulted from his stunt team dropping him on the count of one rather than three as agreed. Rickman’s surprise is real. The film’s status as a Christmas movie has been debated annually since approximately 1996 and will not be resolved here.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed by Robert Zemeckis, combined live action and animation with a technical precision that had not previously been achieved. The film required each animated character to interact physically with the live-action environment in every frame, a labor-intensive process that took years. The result was so seamless that audiences who had grown up with cartoons having their own separate visual rules found the integration genuinely unsettling. It won three Academy Awards for visual effects, film editing, and sound effects editing.

Rain Man, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, opened on December 16, 1988, and became the highest-grossing film of the year. Hoffman’s portrayal of an autistic savant was widely praised and won the Best Actor Oscar. The film introduced the concept of autism to mainstream American audiences in a form that, while criticized by some advocates for oversimplification, significantly raised public awareness.

Coming to America, directed by John Landis and starring Eddie Murphy, grossed $288 million on a $39 million budget and remains one of Murphy’s most beloved films. The film employed make-up artist Rick Baker to transform Murphy and co-star Arsenio Hall into multiple elderly characters, a technical achievement that was impressive enough to attract almost as much attention as the performances.

Steffi Graf won the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open in 1988, plus the Olympic gold medal at the Seoul Games — a sequence now known as the Golden Slam. No player in the history of tennis has won all five in a single calendar year before or since. Graf was 19 years old. She finished the year having won 72 of 75 matches.

The Olympic Games in Seoul used live doves as part of the opening ceremony, as had been traditional at the Summer Olympics for decades. Several doves, startled by the crowd, landed on the cauldron housing the Olympic flame before it was lit. When the cauldron was ignited, the doves were incinerated. The International Olympic Committee discontinued the use of live doves at opening ceremonies after Seoul.

The Phantom of the Opera, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, opened on Broadway at the Majestic Theatre on January 26, 1988. It ran until April 16, 2023 — 35 years and 13,981 performances, the longest run of any show in Broadway history by a considerable margin. The production, which opened in London’s West End in 1986, featured sets and costumes considered the most elaborate on Broadway, and a chandelier sequence that became one of the most famous staging moments in theatrical history.

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons was published as a collected edition in 1988, having run as a 12-issue limited series from 1986-87. The book deconstructed the superhero genre so thoroughly that subsequent writers have spent decades working within and around its shadow. It remains the only graphic novel on Time’s list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923.

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, released in 1973, spent 741 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 album charts, finally leaving the chart in 1988. The album had never gone out of print, never stopped being purchased, and had been in continuous commercial distribution for 15 years. It returned to the chart subsequently and has continued to appear there intermittently ever since.

CDs outsold vinyl records for the first time in 1988. The transition had been accelerating since the CD format launched in 1982, but 1988 was the year it crossed the threshold. Vinyl enthusiasts correctly noted that the sound quality argument had not been resolved. The convenience argument had.

The last major album released on 8-track tape was Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits in 1988, ending a format that had dominated the late 1960s through the mid-1970s and had already been commercially marginalized for most of a decade. The 8-track’s exit was appropriately quiet.

Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, the Hawaiian musician, recorded his medley of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and What a Wonderful World in a single take after calling a studio late at night and asking for time to record an idea. The studio owner agreed. Kamakawiwoʻole played ukulele and sang; the engineer recorded, and it was done. The recording circulated quietly for years before becoming one of the most recognized pieces of music associated with Hawaii, reaching global audiences through film and television use in the 1990s and beyond.

Wrigley Field in Chicago hosted its first night game on August 8, 1988, ending the Cubs’ status as the last major league team playing exclusively daytime home games. The game was rained out after 3½ innings; the first completed night game was played the following evening on August 9. The Cubs’ resistance to lights had been considered a charming anachronism for years and was ultimately resolved by the practical requirements of playoff scheduling.

Debbie Gibson became the youngest person in history to write, produce, and perform a number one single when Foolish Beat reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1988. She was 17 years old.

The Video Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1988 after a Washington, DC newspaper published a list of video rental records belonging to Robert Bork, who had been nominated for the Supreme Court the previous year. The publication was legal at the time. Congress passed the Act within months, making video rental records protected private information and imposing fines of up to $2,500 on services that disclosed them without consent.

DC Comics ran a phone-in poll in 1988 asking readers to vote on whether Robin should live or die in the storyline Batman: A Death in the Family. The results: 5,343 votes for Robin’s death, 5,271 for survival — a margin of 72 votes. Robin died. The margin remains the most expensive fan decision in comics history, in terms of what it cost one fictional character.

Nobel Prize Winners in 1988

Physics was awarded to Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino — work that confirmed the fundamental structure of matter’s building blocks.

Chemistry went to Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber, and Hartmut Michel for the determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction center — the first time the structure of an integral membrane protein had been determined, opening a new field of structural biology.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Sir James Black, Gertrude Elion, and George Hitchings for their discoveries of important principles of drug treatment. Elion, who had been denied entry to graduate school decades earlier because she was a woman, helped develop drugs for leukemia, malaria, herpes, and AIDS. She accepted her Nobel without a completed doctorate, having been too busy making discoveries to finish it.

Literature went to Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, the first Arabic-language writer to receive the prize, for a narrative art that, with equal parts clarity and ambiguity, fashions an Arabian humanism applicable to all mankind. His Cairo Trilogy remains his best-known work in translation.

Peace was awarded to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in recognition of their contributions to reducing tension in conflict areas around the world.

Economics went to Maurice Allais of France for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources.

1988 Toys and Christmas Gifts

Scattergories, the category-based party game published by Milton Bradley, was the year’s notable new game introduction. The holiday season was otherwise dominated by electronics — the Sega Genesis had not yet launched in North America, making the existing Nintendo Entertainment System the gaming default. VHS players had become standard household equipment, making video rental memberships a common gift.

Broadway in 1988

The Phantom of the Opera opened January 26, 1988, at the Majestic Theatre and ran for 35 years, becoming the longest-running show in Broadway history. The production featured a 22-foot chandelier that descended over the audience, a masked phantom, and a score that resisted all critical attempts to dismiss it as too melodramatic. Lloyd Webber reportedly considered the chandelier his greatest theatrical innovation.

Blood Brothers, Willy Russell’s musical about twin brothers separated at birth who grow up in different social classes in Liverpool, opened July 28, 1988, at the Albery Theatre in London’s West End and ran until November 10, 2012 — 24 years and over 10,000 performances, one of the longest West End runs in history.

Best Film Oscar Winner

The Last Emperor, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring John Lone as the last emperor of China, Puyi, won Best Picture at the 60th Academy Awards on April 11, 1988, for the 1987 film year. The film won all nine Academy Awards for which it was nominated, a sweep not achieved since Gigi in 1958 and not matched since. It was the first Western film permitted to be shot inside the Forbidden City.

Top Movies of 1988

1. Rain Man
2. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
3. Coming to America
4. Big
5. Twins
6. Crocodile Dundee II
7. Die Hard
8. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
9. Cocktail
10. Beetlejuice

Rain Man was the highest-grossing film of the year and the Best Picture winner. Big, starring Tom Hanks as a boy who wakes up in an adult’s body, gave Hanks his first Academy Award nomination and was one of the most purely entertaining films of the year. Twins, pairing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as mismatched twin brothers, had no business working as well as it did. Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s follow-up to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, established his visual style as one of the most distinctive in Hollywood and launched a franchise that took 36 years to produce its sequel.

Most Popular TV Shows of 1988

1. The Cosby Show (NBC)
2. A Different World (NBC)
3. Cheers (NBC)
4. The Golden Girls (NBC)
5. Growing Pains (ABC)
6. Who’s the Boss? (ABC)
7. Night Court (NBC)
8. 60 Minutes (CBS)
9. Murder, She Wrote (CBS)
10. ALF (NBC)

The Cosby Show was in its fourth season and remained the most-watched show on American television. Cheers was in its sixth season. The Golden Girls, starring Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty, was in its third season and performing strongly, demonstrating that a show centered on older women could be both commercially successful and genuinely funny. ALF, about an alien life form living in a suburban household, was in its second season and is here primarily as a document of what the late 1980s considered acceptable in a family sitcom.

1988 Billboard Number One Hits

December 12, 1987 – January 8, 1988: Faith — George Michael (carryover from late 1987)
January 9 – January 15: So Emotional — Whitney Houston
January 16 – January 22: Got My Mind Set on You — George Harrison
January 23 – January 29: The Way You Make Me Feel — Michael Jackson
January 30 – February 5: Need You Tonight — INXS
February 6 – February 19: Could’ve Been — Tiffany
February 20 – February 26: Seasons Change — Exposé
February 27 – March 11: Father Figure — George Michael
March 12 – March 25: Never Gonna Give You Up — Rick Astley
March 26 – April 8: Man in the Mirror — Michael Jackson
April 9 – April 22: Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car — Billy Ocean
April 23 – May 6: Where Do Broken Hearts Go — Whitney Houston
May 7 – May 13: Wishing Well — Terence Trent D’Arby
May 14 – May 27: Anything for You — Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine
May 28 – June 17: One More Try — George Michael (3 weeks)
June 18 – June 24: Together Forever — Rick Astley
June 25 – July 1: Foolish Beat — Debbie Gibson
July 2 – July 8: Dirty Diana — Michael Jackson
July 9 – July 22: The Flame — Cheap Trick
July 23 – July 29: Hold On to the Nights — Richard Marx
July 30 – August 26: Roll With It — Steve Winwood (4 weeks)
August 27 – September 9: Monkey — George Michael
September 10 – September 23: Sweet Child O’ Mine — Guns N’ Roses
September 24 – October 7: Don’t Worry Be Happy — Bobby McFerrin
October 8 – October 14: Love Bites — Def Leppard
October 15 – October 21: Red Red Wine — UB40
October 22 – November 4: Groovy Kind of Love — Phil Collins
November 5 – November 11: Kokomo — The Beach Boys
November 12 – November 18: Wild Wild West — The Escape Club
November 19 – December 2: Bad Medicine — Bon Jovi
December 3 – December 9: Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird — Will to Power
December 10 – December 23: Look Away — Chicago
December 24, 1988 – January 13, 1989: Every Rose Has Its Thorn — Poison (carrying into 1989)

George Michael had an extraordinary 1988 by any measure — Faith, Father Figure, One More Try, and Monkey gave him four separate number ones from a single album, tying Michael Jackson’s record of four number ones from Thriller. Michael Jackson also had three number ones — The Way You Make Me Feel, Man in the Mirror, and Dirty Diana — making 1988 effectively a two-Michael competition for chart dominance. Rick Astley had two number ones; Whitney Houston had two; George Harrison became the last Beatle to have a US number one when Got My Mind Set on You reached the top in January. Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley spent two weeks at number one in March 1988, a detail that has become more culturally significant than the chart position itself.

Sports Champions of 1988

World Series: The Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Oakland Athletics four games to one, in one of the most celebrated upsets in baseball history. The series is remembered primarily for Game 1, when Kirk Gibson — so injured he could barely walk, playing despite a torn ACL in his left knee and hamstring damage in his right — was sent to pinch-hit with two outs in the ninth inning, the Dodgers trailing by one, and hit a walk-off home run off Dennis Eckersley. Gibson’s slow trot around the bases, pumping his fist, is one of the most replayed moments in baseball history. He did not play another inning in the series.

Super Bowl XXII: The Washington Redskins defeated the Denver Broncos 42-10 on January 31, 1988, in San Diego. Doug Williams became the first Black starting quarterback to win the Super Bowl, passing for 340 yards and four touchdowns in a single quarter — the second quarter that produced 35 Redskins points. At the pre-game press conference, Williams answered a question about how long he had been a Black quarterback by noting that he had always been Black.

NBA Champions: The Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Detroit Pistons four games to three, becoming the first team to win back-to-back championships since the 1968-69 Boston Celtics. James Worthy was named Finals MVP, scoring 36 points, 16 rebounds, and 10 assists in the deciding game. Magic Johnson averaged a triple-double for the series.

Stanley Cup: The Edmonton Oilers defeated the Boston Bruins four games to none. Wayne Gretzky was not named Conn Smythe Trophy winner — that honor went to Wayne Gretzky, who had already won it multiple times, before Edmonton traded him to Los Angeles the following year in one of the most shocking transactions in sports history.

U.S. Open Golf: Curtis Strange defeated Nick Faldo in an 18-hole playoff at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Strange would win the following year again, becoming the first back-to-back U.S. Open champion since Ben Hogan in 1950-51.

U.S. Open Tennis: Mats Wilander of Sweden won the men’s title and Steffi Graf won the women’s, completing the fourth leg of her Golden Slam.

Wimbledon: Stefan Edberg of Sweden won the men’s title, and Steffi Graf won the women’s title, the third leg of her Grand Slam.

NCAA Football: Notre Dame, under first-year head coach Lou Holtz, won the national championship with an undefeated 12-0 record, defeating West Virginia 34-21 in the Fiesta Bowl. It was Notre Dame’s first national title since 1977.

NCAA Basketball: Kansas defeated Oklahoma 83-79 in the national championship game in Kansas City. Danny Manning, playing in his final college game, scored 31 points and was named Most Outstanding Player. Manning had announced his decision to stay for his senior year specifically to win a national championship. He won it.

Kentucky Derby: Winning Colors, trained by D. Wayne Lukas, became only the third filly to win the Kentucky Derby, winning by a neck. She went on to finish third in the Preakness and third in the Belmont, ending Triple Crown hopes but establishing herself as one of the more remarkable horses of her generation.

Frequently Asked Questions About 1988

Q: What was the Morris Worm?
A: Robert Tappan Morris, a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student, released a self-replicating computer program on November 2, 1988, from an MIT terminal. The worm exploited vulnerabilities in Unix systems and spread faster than intended, causing approximately 6,000 computers to slow to unusable speeds — a significant portion of the internet at that time. Morris was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the first such conviction. He later became a professor at MIT and co-founded the startup incubator Y Combinator.

Q: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?
A: The film takes place on Christmas Eve, uses Christmas music throughout, and ends with a Christmas morning resolution. Director John McTiernan has said it is not a Christmas movie. Bruce Willis has given conflicting answers at different points. The debate has continued for over three decades and shows no signs of resolution, which is probably what everyone involved prefers.

Q: What was Steffi Graf’s Golden Slam?
A: In 1988, Graf won the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open — a calendar Grand Slam — plus the Olympic gold medal at the Seoul Games, a combination now called the Golden Slam. No player in the history of tennis has achieved this before or since. Graf was 19 years old when she completed it.

Q: What happened when the Olympic flame was lit in Seoul?
A: During the opening ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, several doves that had been released as part of the traditional ceremony settled on the cauldron housing the Olympic flame before it was ignited. When the cauldron was lit, the doves were killed. The International Olympic Committee ended the tradition of releasing live doves at the opening ceremonies after Seoul.

Q: Why is George Harrison significant in chart history?
A: George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord reached number one in the United States in 1970, making him the first Beatle to have a solo number one. His Got My Mind Set on You reached number one in January 1988, making him, at the time, both the first and last Beatle to achieve that distinction.

Q: Who was the first Black quarterback to win the Super Bowl?
A: Doug Williams of the Washington Redskins was the first Black starting quarterback to win a Super Bowl, leading Washington to a 42-10 victory over the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXII on January 31, 1988. Williams passed for 340 yards and four touchdowns in the second quarter alone.

In a year when a graduate student crashed the internet, a chandelier descended over a Broadway audience for the first time, Kirk Gibson limped around the bases in October twilight, and George Michael dominated the charts from January through September, 1988 offered a year’s worth of moments that aged well. The Phantom was just getting started. The doves had no idea what was coming. Die Hard was and remains a Christmas movie, and this page is not going to settle it.

More 1988 Facts and History Resources:

Most Popular Baby Names (BabyCenter.com)
Popular and Notable Books (popculture.us)
Broadway Shows that Opened in 1988X
1988 Calendar, courtesy of Time and Date.com
Fact Monster
1980s, Infoplease.com World History
Millennial Generation (1981-1996)
1988 in Movies (according to IMDB)
1988 Top Movies (according to BoxOfficeMojo)
Retrowaste Vintage Culture
80s Facts About the 80s(Mental Floss)
80s and 90s Classic NES Games (1985-1994)
1980s Slang
Wikipedia 1988