Author: Tom Panarese

A Last Point in Elementary School

I wish I could have some profound way of starting this essay or even something or someone to tie it together, but the truth is that last week, I fell down one of hte more random Internet rabbit holes. Although I don’t know if this was a rabbit hole beacuse I was actually finding the answer to something and had some serendipity come along with it. Either way I think I am probably the only person in the world who does a fist pump the moment he discovers his sixth grade reading textbook on the Internet Archive.

The timing of my search for it does make sense, though. It was my last week of summer break and I didn’t have much to do on the day when it was pouring out, so I decided to look into some of the topics on the very large list of topics for possible blog posts and then remembered that years ago, I’d purchased a copy of The Mine of Lost Days by Marc Brandel. It’s a children’s/young adult novel published in 1975 that’s about a kid visiting relatives in Ireland and finding a group of children in a mine who are actually from more than 100 years ago. I remembered liking the book when I was a kid and had bought it because I had been looking for an answer to my very specific question: “What was that novel that was in Point?”

Point was a book published in 1982 as part of the Addison-Wesley Reading Program and at Lincoln Avenue Elementary was considered the highest level of reading book that you could hit. I was a high-achieving reader through all of elementary school, so I was pretty sure that as I was working my way through Green Salad Seasons in the fifth grade, I would wind up being one of those cool kids in sixth grade carrying around the elite reading book–and nothing says elite like a textbook with a unicorn on the cover. I probably had to cover it with a brown paper bag anyway.

Point‘s elite status lost a little bit of its luster when my sixth grade teacher, Ms. Frei, told us that everyone in the class was reading from it. Modern pedagogy says that this is probalby not a good idea (although to be fair, modern pedagogy gives you conflicting information on everything from instructional approach to whether or not you should put a poster on the wall), although now that I have been teaching for about 20 years, I see the case of having everyone read the same thing at the same time. Besides, she had us do a lot beyond simply trudge our way through a reading book story by story–there were book reports, research projects, and the occasional short story from a 1970 reading book called To Turn a Stone, which sounds like the most 1970 title for a reading book ever. I remember one story from that collection called “The Cave” where this kid who is in a gang befriends a homeless guy who lives in a cave and then his gang runs the guy off so they can use the cave for their new hideout. He winds up fighting the gang leader and getting kicked out, then makes a vow to join the other gang and get revenge. Between this and The Outsiders in the eighth grade, no wonder my generation was largely feral.

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Localized Earworms

So if you’ve been watching enough of the Paris Olympics, you’ve seen enough footage of Parisian life and culture and you’ve inevitably heard the “Can-Can.” I think it was used in the opening ceremonies, in fact. And we’re all familiar with it, right? We can even picture the dancers from a place like the Moulin Rouge doing their high kicks to the song. Well, unless you’re like me and every time you hear the tune, you hear: “Now, Shop Rite does the can can selling lots of brands of everything in … cans cans.”

Yes, I realize that I have a problem. But really, when you think of it, we all have commercials that get stuck in our heands, and I even talked about some of my most memorable ones back on episode 97 of the podcast. And on that episode, with the exception of Crazy Eddie and a Roy Rogers commercial, most of the commercials I talked about in that episode were for national brands. When it comes to this Shop Rite commercial, people in maybe five states in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic part of the country are going to recognize that jingle, just like we also recognize character actor James Karen as “The PathMark guy”:

Again, who gets that except for people in the NY-NJ-CT Tri-State area?

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 156: Faster, Higher, Stronger

As the 2024 Summer Olympics gets set to begin in Paris, I got together with Professor Alan to talk about our Olympics fandom. Join us as we discuss our love of the Games, my favorite moments, and what makes them so great.

Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit

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Here are a couple of extras …

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The Future of Refreshment is Now

In Reality Bites, Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller are on their first date and she tells him that hte Big Gulp is “the most profound, important invention of my lifetime.” They hook up after that and the plot follows its trajectory of a twentysomething coming-of-age romantic comedy, but the line stands out as one of the many witty pop culture observations that are simultaneously the film’s greatest strength and biggest weakness. Okay, maybe I’m just using the word weakness just so show contrast, but I will say that there are moments in the movie where the catchphrases and allusions work and other timeswhere they wind up feeling ham-handed and forced. The Big Gulp line could have been the latter if in the hands of someone other than Winona Ryder, but she’s being silly and flirting in that moment, which makes Ben Stiller melt (and I admit, me too). Besides, we all know that there is no way, with all of the technological innovation we have achieved since the end of the Second World War, that the Big Gulp of all things could possibly be that important.

Or could it?

7-Eleven has kind of always innovated when it comes to the convenience store, and especially when it comes to drinks. For instance, they invented the coffee to go cup in 1964 (although the iconic Greek Diner coffee cup debuted around the same time, so I guess you can make a case for either being first). What became the Big Gulp debuted in 1976, as according to Smithsonian magazine, 7-Eleven came out with a 32-ounce drink that was circular on the bottom and had a square top “like a milk carton” (the magazine’s authors and editors could not find an image of it and sadly neither could I). The cup was created at the requrest of Coca-Cola, who was looking for a way to shift more product, since back in the 1970s, they were still selling their drink in glass bottles that went for 50 cents and included a “deposit,” meaning you’d get money back upon returning the bottle. 7-Eleven sold the 32 ounce up at the price of 39 cents and advertised no deposit, and it was an immediate hit. When the cup’s manufacturer could not continue to produce it for a little while because they were moving their manufacturing to Canada and had to take a hiatus in operation, Dennis Potts–who was in charge o fthe product at 7-Eleven–commissioned a new design and the Big Gulp as we know it came to be.

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Lying Eyes, they’re watching you

Sometime in the Nineties, before the Lifetime Network took complete ownership of suspenseful TV movies, the networks–especially NBC–ran a slew of them and several were aimed at teens. They’d had success during the late 1980s with a bunch of kids/teen TV movies, such as Crash Course and Dance Til Dawn, but I would imagine that the shift to drama happened because of the popularity of teen television drama in the first half of the decade. The biggest things on television for adolescents were MTV’s The Real World and Fox’s Beverly Hills 90210, both of which provided enough drama (and in the case of the latter, soapy drama) that the network probably thought they could pull an audience.

I’ve seen bits and pieces of a number of these movies over the years, many of which star Tori Spelling, but also featured actresses like Tiffani-Amber Theissen, Kellie Martin and Candace Cameron and had titles like The Face on the Milk Carton or Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? In the fall of 1996, they put another one out, Lying Eyes, although this one stars Cassidy Rae, who at that point was probably best known for a recurring role on Melrose Place as well as its spin-off Models, Inc. She plays a high school senior named Amy who gets involved in an affair with a much older guy and then someone starts stalking her and …

… I honestly have no idea why, but I have not only seen this movie three times (once for the sake of this blog post and twice prior), but it’s stuck with me ever since it first aired nearly thirty years ago. I’ll try to get to that after I run through the plot.

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The Force, Funspot, and my Forties

When my wife asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday, I replied like any soon-to-be 47-year-old would: I wanted to go to the arcade. In Charlottesville, that’s Decades Arcade, which is full of old (and some new) video games and pinball machines, some dating back to the early days of the video game era (and in the case of the pinball machines, the 1950s and 1960s). Upon arriving, I went right for what I think is one of the greatest games every put into an arcade: Star Wars, which was first released in 1983 and has you piloting Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing through three stages in order to destory the Death Star. It’s clearly blown out of the water by a billion other games that have come out since, but for my quarters, it’s the most fun you can have in an arcade.

Prior to that day a week ago, I had only played the Star Wars Arcade Game a few times in my life. I was six years old in 1983 and wouldn’t have the chance to frequent arcades until my late elementary school and junior high years, which was toward the end of that decade. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the game had become a rare find in arcades that only had so much space and because the nostalgia for old games was a couple of decades away, often jettisoned older machines for whatever was new and popular. So I spent those years playing After Burner, X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Double Dragon, and Mortal Kombat. They had 16-bit graphics (which were the best in the early Nineties) and were way cooler than an old vector graphics game, although I’m pretty sure that if you put that machine in front of any 13-year-old in 1990, they’d get sucked in, especially if they spent any time standing around the Star Wars machine watching other kids play while they waited their turn like I used to do at Sayville Bowl. Come to think of it, I spent a lot of time in arcades watching other people play games or wandering around for a good hour or two because I blew all my money on sucking at Double Dragon. To this day, I’m more familiar with the demo screens of a number of games than the games themselves.

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 155: Born in the U.S.A.

It’s the 40th anniversary of one of the biggest albums of the Eighties, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. Join me as I go through the album song by song, look at a few of my favorite B-sides, and talk about why it’s one of my favorite albums of all time.

Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit

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Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

Here’s some extras …

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 154: Off-Brand Robotech

In 1984, DC Comics published a Robotech miniseries as a tie-in with the Revell model company. But Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, Lynn Minmei, the SDF-1 or anything else we know and love from Robotech was nowhere to be seen. Titled Robotech Defenders, it was a three-part miniseries that became a two-part miniseries and that lack of success meant it faded into obscurity pretty quickly.

So what was Robotech Defenders?

Join me as I take a look at the Revell models, the DC Comics miniseries and what, if any, ties it has to the classic Harmony Gold-produced cartoon.

Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit

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Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

Here’s some extras …

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 153: Just Part of the Song

Maybe it’s a lyric. Or a guitar solo. Or the bridge. Whatever it may be, there’s always small parts to songs that you remember. Taking inspiration from a 2004 Retrocrush post, I’m giving you a list of some of my favorite song parts. From classic tunes of the 1960s and ’70s to R&B breakdowns of the ’90s, there a lot to listen to. Maybe you’ll think of some of your own!

Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit

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Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

Some extras down below …

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Nintendo on Ice

The Stanely Cup Playoffs start this weekend. I’m a longtime hockey fan and I really can’t think of anything more exciting to watch than playoff hockey. And with the Rangers actually being good this year, I’m usually a bit more engaged. So I decided to celebrate this upcoming awesomeness by playing a game of Nintendo Ice Hockey.

That’s right, I said Ice Hockey.

To anyone who grew up playing the NES, Blades of Steel is the superior hockey game, and I’ll agree with that. But Ice Hockey, which came out in 1988, was one of the first games I ever got after I received my Nintendo for my eleventh birthday, and I think that it was probably one of the games I played the most. So as much as I did enjoy Konami’s entry into the hockey game category, I think my heart has always been with the original Nintendo game.

When Nintendo came out, it was a true cut above the Atari 2600 and while it had a number of iconic adventure and arcade-style games, the sports games were very solid even if they weren’t as popular as, say The Legend of Zelda or Metroid. Ten Yard Fight would be completely forgotten in the wake of Tecmo Bowl, but was still a good football game; Baseball earned the nickname “glitchball” among me and my friends, but we still played it endlessly; Pro Wrestling remains one of the best wrestling games for the NES; and when I was in college, my roommates and I played endless hours of Golf. Ice Hockey was as good, if not better than all of those.

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