Is this ‘bye-bye Michael’?

Press, 31 October 1984, Page 10

Is this ‘bye-bye Michael’?

NZPA-AP New York “Kaboom! It’s World War III,” announces the tabloid newspaper’s red-and-black headlines. “Michael Jackson, 80 million others dead ... super-Powers rumble, skies tumble ...” Nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union has broken out on the pages of a newspaper parody, the “Post New York Post,” which went on sale yesterday at news-stands in New York for SUS2 ($4) a copy. The “Post Post,” a parody of the New York Post, chronicles a war which began after the President, Ronald Reagan, taunted the Soviets by saying, “Go ahead — make my day”. Most of page three o'f the parody is devoted to “Goodbye, Gloved One”, the photoillustrated story of Jackson’s demise. The pop star was supposedly practising his famed dance spin in a rehearsal studio when a nuclear bomb exploded nearby, screwing him into the Earth’s crust like a high-speed human power drill. The war even appears in Dear Abby’s column in the

“Post Post.” A 14-year-old writes that, “ever since the nuclear blast, my boyfriend has been pressuring me to go all the way with him. He says we’re all going to die anyway”. Dear Abby denounces the boyfriend for using one of the oldest lines in the book. Asked for his reaction to the parody, Steve Dunleavy, metropolitan editor of the “Post,” called the “Post Post” a very poor imitation of a brilliantly packaged paper.