Playboy December 1984

Playboy

December 1984

Let's go back in time 38 years, and celebrate December, 1984, along with Playboy magazine.

This is a prosperous time for the magazine; the December issue has a whopping 308 pages, crammed with ads for liquor, tobacco products, consumer electronics, clothing, and fitness gear. Anyone remember Jantzen sportwear....?!

Then there is something called the 'Aroma Disc' player - ?! Labeled a 'fragrance record diffuser', a kind of a cross between a Renuzit and a CD player, it sold very well when introduced in December 1983. 

You can find vintage units for sale at eBay.

As far as celebrity nudie action, the December 1984 issue featured Suzanne Somers, born in 1946 as Suzanna Mahoney. Somers was looking to raise her profile, having departed the hit TV series Three's Company in 1981. Somers plays it coy with the pictorial, keeping the action at an R-rated level, ostensibly because she had a 18 year-old son (who, according to the Wiki entry, saw the photos anyway).

Elsewhere in the December issue we get some additional 'celebrity skin' in the form of a 'Sex Stars of 1984' review:

There are the usual cartoons and, in 1984, the magazine had a section devoted to comic strips.

The fiction features in the magazine are high-powered, and include an excerpt from the 1984 novel by Mario Puzo, 'The Sicilian', which was set in the universe of the highly successful 'Godfather' franchise.

For nonfiction, we have another installment in the serialized version of the 1987 book by Michael Drosnin, 'Citizen Hughes', about the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes. Don Ivan Punchatz provides a great illustration:

There's an advertising / marketing section devoted to the magic of - robots ! Yes, in '84, robots were available, to do simple things. The Roomba was still 17 years in the future (the first robot vacuum was the Swedish-made Trilobite, in 2001). But in '84 you could spend quite a bit of money on a robot that transported your drinks.

That's how it was, at the tail of end of 1984. Who knew what 1985 would bring.........?