Author: Tom Panarese

Kynasf’rr and … The Teraizer? Seriously?! (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twenty-Nine)

Liz Alderman in full-on Renfield mode, pregnant with her master’s demon seed. New Titans #108.

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing eBay for things Titans-related and among the auctions was a group of four or five comics that were being offered at a starting price of $5.00 (with some sort of astronomical shipping attached). I almost laughed out loud because the comics in question were New Titans #108-112 and in all honesty, those are barely worth their cover price anymore.

Okay, maybe that is a little harsh, but those books are smack in the middle of what was, at the time, the nadir of the New Titans. In fact, a couple of the issues in this pile still make my all-time, dumpster-behind-a-Sizzler, bottom five Titans stories of all-time. Yet unlike some of the other stories I would put on this list, these do have at least one or two redeeming values.

I’ll start, I guess, with what has been happening since it’s been a couple of months since i sat down and looked at the main Titans book (which is kind of how things went for me back in 1994 anyway–I was so into Team Titans and the lead-up to Zero Hour and so turned off by what I was seeing in New Titans that I’m sure I was reading these out of obligation). Anyway, the Titans are now being led by Arsenal and have returned from the whole Cyborg/Technis storyline a team member down and without any real support. Meanwhile, Nightwing, their former leader, is focused on taking care of Starfire because she’s still suffering from whatever Raven did to her in issue #100 (oh yes, Dark Raven is still out there … and they won’t truly get rid of her until issue #130, which is the last issue of the series). Basically, this is the focus of the book all the way to Zero Hour‘s aftermath, and the quality of the two plot lines differ incredibly.

I’ll start with Dick and Kory; specifically, Kory, who is the focus of the first two issues and quite frankly who Marv Wolfman seemed to want to write about. This was around the time when the “Knights” sagas (-fall, -quest, -end) were finally wrapping up in the Batman books and as a result, Dick Grayson was going to be brought back into that particular “family”.” Wolfman would be losing a character he had been writing for a decade and a half, and since Nightwing’s solo adventures would (at first) have little to no connection to anything Titans, Dick and Kory had to break up. So, in issues 108 and 109, Starfire undergoes Kynasf’rr (pronounced “k-eye-nass-ferr?” I have no idea. I mean, you pronounce “Koriand’r” “coriander,” which … spicy … but … yeah …), which is a Tamaranean maturity ritual that I can best describe as kind of like Pon farr, the Vulcan mating ritual. As a result, Kory goes from being a blubbering mess to a fierce, almost emotionless “Shaman of Tamaran.”

Where this starts is in an insane asylum. Kory once again visits Liz Alderman, who now looks like a crazy old woman who is … pregnant? Huh? Well, she tells Kory exactly what is gestating inside of her and our hero as well: a demon seed, the dead children of Trigon. Nightwing steps in to protect Kory and as he does, an image appears to her and she flies off to the Southern Hemisphere, burying herself deep in the Andes to begin Kynasf’rr. (more…)

Cuckoo for CoCo Wheats

I’ve always been attracted to random stuff at stores. When I was a kid, for instance, I liked to walk down the “aisle of forgotten toys” at Toys R Us. In fact, I even had a few of the random-assed action figures found in that aisle or at places like Odd Lot. The obscurity of those things was kind of alluring – they were products that weren’t as cool or popular as the G.I. Joe figures that were selling out in droves, so they were more or less buried in the store (which, in a way, probably explains why I created this blog). As I got older, I saw the same thing with books, albums, and movies, which led to some purchases that were pretty awesome and others that wound up explaining why said item had been left for retail dead.

I never thought the same could be said for food, however. Food, in general, has an expiration date, so I would be less likely to find a three-year-old jar of peanut butter on a store shelf (although I am sure they probably have some at South of the Border) than, say, leftover Spider-Man 3 toys. Still, there are always some foods in a supermarket that never seem to exist anywhere else, as if they were brought here through an interdimensional portal or something.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with cereal. Stroll down your average cereal aisle and you’ll see a variety of products you never knew existed–bagged cereals, oddly named generic cereals, laxative cereals, King Vitaman–and while most of them won’t even garner a second glance, there is sure to be one that jumps out at you.

For my wife and I, this was the case with CoCo Wheats. A chocolate-flavored farina cereal, we first encountered it at a Kroger in Charlottesville back in 2004 or 2005. I can’t remember if we bought a box the first time we saw them or if our first time came later, but somewhere along the line in our search for a breakfast food that wasn’t the same boring box of Cheerios, we decidd that we had to have them. Thankfully, we were not disappointed upon trying them for the first time; in fact, they’ve been a welcome addition to our breakfast table ever since.

Okay, I read that last sentence and realize it sounds like every crappy commercial ever. Sorry.

Anyway, two things that I found particular about CoCo Wheats were that for a cereal that kind of seems obscure, it has a pretty rich history; and the actual process of cooking CoCo Wheats is nothing short of a chemistry experiment. (more…)

Elseworlds (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twenty-Eight)

As I’ve said before, when you’re trying to cover a series, annuals can be problematic. They don’t often fit into the continuity, or you find yourself struggling to fit them in, and even when they do they’re often not that good. During the sixteen years that Marv Wolfman wrote the New Teen Titans and New Titans series, there were fourteen annuals, and when I think of it there were three that were good and three that were worth reading. The three that were great were the exceptions to the rule–three annuals that wrapped up major storylines (the original Tamaran storyline, the origin of the Vigilante, and The Judas Contract in the 1980 series’ three annuals). The three that were worth reading either wrapped up long-standing questions (New Titans Annual #6, where the team returns to Tamaran and Karras dies), introduced new characters (New Titans Annual #7, which introduced the Team Titans), or carried the story along (1995’s New Titans Annual #11). But for the most part, the annuals from the New Teen Titans/ New Titans “baxter” series badly introduced new heroes or villians or spent time trying to reconcile post-Crisis continuity issues.

For what it’s worth, during the 1990s, DC did try to make their annuals relevant and for a couple of years it seemed to work. I don’t have the exact sales figures or anything in front of me, but I found both Armageddon 2001 and Eclipso: The Darkness Within fun, and Bloodlines … well, I read Bloodlines, does that count?

Okay, pithy comments aside, I’m sure that lack of quality and/or interest in Bloodlines proved a little problematic because when 1994 rolled around and it was time for annuals, DC decided that it wasn’t going to force its readers to buy every single annual out there to get a full-on storyline, but still wanted to tie together all of its annuals in some way and went for a thematic tie-in with Elseworlds.

Elseworlds was a concept that up until this point had mainly been applied to prestige format one-shots that mostly featured Batman or Superman, beginning with the excellent Gotham By Gaslight, which placed Batman in 19th Century Gotham City trying to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper (it didn’t have the “Elseworlds” emblem on it, but is considered one of the very first).

The concept, as described by DC, is, “In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places–some that have existed and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist.”

The Elseworlds specials seemed to be pretty successful each time and fans seemed to love the idea so much that the 1994 annuals were all “Elseworlds” stories starring the characters from those individual comics. This made it easy for continuity geeks like me to figure out where the annuals go, even if some of the annuals were pretty good and others seemed to come from the hackneyed “Die Hard on a ______” type of storytelling model.

The Titansverse had three annuals going for it, as Deathstroke: The Terminator Annual #3, New Titans Annual #10, and Team Titans Annual #2 were Elseworlds tales, and apparently I found these so significant that I didn’t realize that I didn’t even known the Deathstroke annual until a couple of years ago when I was sorting my collection into fresh long boxes and I noticed it wasn’t there. My local comics shop had it for a whopping $2.00, so it’s not like it was a crisis.

That Deathstroke annual, which was written by Marv Wolfman with art by Ed Benes (yes, that Ed Benes, and it’s extremely early Benes, so there’s no butts in anyone’s face), is the story of how Deathstroke fights in a future gone made against a race called The Genetix. Since he has been made immortal because of all of the experiments conducted on him, he seems to be the only man who can take down The Genetix, especially after learning their secret. Reading the story made me wonder if Wolfman had been watching Mad Max movies or reading old issues of Hex, because the post-apocalyptic world is right out of the 1980s. But to his credit, he chooses not to rework an origin story (which is what so many of the Batman Elseworlds tended to do) and that makes it the strongest of the three and a decent stand-alone story.

New Titans Annual #10, on the other hand, which was scripted by Louise Simonson from a plot by Wolfman, tries a little too hard. The creative team tries to place the Titans in a sword-and-sorcery epic and relies on a plot by Raven to bring back Trigon so he can take over the world, which is what had already been going on in the regular title (and what, quite frankly, fans were a little tired of) and quite frankly it feels like … well “It’s Die Hard but with magic!” and is rather forgettable.

Team Titans Annual #2, on the other hand, is not too bad. This came out a week before Team Titans #20, so Monarch hadn’t been revealed as the Team Titans’ leader and we weren’t aware of how he had this master plan that involved the upcoming Zero Hour crossover, but it wound up revealing one of the plot points for the last issues of the series. The adventure takes place in outer space with Lord Chaos essentially using Earth as some sort of Warworld and the Teamers being a band of rebels committed to destroying his tyranny. Most of the characters stay who they are, except for Redwing, who is able to transform into a beast called “Warhawk.” The difference between this and her transformation during Team Titans #20-24 was that in the annual she changes back to her more humanoid form and in the series the change is permanent, but I do remember seeing the regular issues and thinking it was pretty cool that I was able to see that Carrie would become “warhawk” in the regular comic.

Otherwise, the comic feels like a rehash of the Team Titans’ origin but a good enough rehash to stand on its own as a halfway decent story. Jeff Jensen and Phil Jiminez wrote a story that seemed to be a throwback to Marvel’s Star Wars series from the late 1970s and early 1980s, with its rebels and swashbuckling sort of space adventure and much like the series they were writing, they did their best to show that they were having some sort of fun. Had there not been three art teams, it may have been a little more solid, but reading “The Titans do Star Wars” is worth tracking it down.

So I’m sorry if this seems a little rushed, but that’s annuals for ya — something you’ve got to read because you’re reading everything, but nothing that you really remember when you’re done and file it away among the regular story.

Next Up: Raven haunts Starfire as New Titans heads toward a huge change.

Self-Righteous

The watershed moments in your life rarely come with a script. Oh sure, you have your major milestones and accomplishments but the moments of true epiphany are the most random, often happening when you least expect it. One such moment in my life came before a club meeting during my senior year of high school. I was helping pass out agendas and had left my backpack on my seat. A friend of mine, Jim, was a fellow officer in the club happened to see my Walkman and out of curiosity, pulled it out of my bag and gave it a listen. I returned to the table in time to see a look of complete confusion make its way across his face.

“Give me that,” I said, snatching the Walkman out of his hand. Jim didn’t respond, and I put my headphones on to hear what had prompted such a strange look. Playing near full blast was “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Luckily, the meeting soon began and Jim didn’t care enough to mention it again or to anyone else, and needless to say that had me relieved because while I brushed the incident off, I felt the same sort of weird guilt you’d feel as if you’d been caught masturbating. This was music I had been listening to when nobody was around, an act of musical self-pleasure that I kept hidden from the guys I talked heavy metal with at the lunch table where for all they knew, I was genuinely impressed that Jeff tracked down a Megadeth bootleg or that Brian finally acquired the studio version of “Breadfan” when he bought the Japanese import single for “One.” Had he mentioned it to the group of people we hung out with, I would have been mercilessly ridiculed, like the time they found my copy of Born in the U.S.A. and wrote “Nice ass!” on the cover.

I probably shouldn’t have cared, to be honest. What’s wrong with having your own tastes? Who cares what other people think, right? But I was an individual with serious self-esteem problems and a need for approval that meant not only did I really want to seem like I was cool, but I was quite possibly the easiest target for ridicule. I will spare you the vulgar nicknames, the perfume sprayings, and other jokes in my honor and say that though Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield’s glory years were a good thirty years behind them at that point, my listening to the Righteous Brothers tape I’d borrowed from my mother, especially “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” had a perfectly reasonable explanation: Top Gun. (more…)

Fuzzy memories of summer camp

On Monday, my son started summer camp. Beng that he is a four-year-old rising kindergartener, this was a pretty big deal because it is his first “summer break” after a year of school (whereas up until last August he was simply in daycare). The camp is run out of his school, so there really is no difference in our morning and afternoon routines of dropping him off or picking him up, even though he is going to spend most of his days going to the pool or making crafts or playing games as opposed to sitting in class and learning letters and numbers.

Apparently, camp around here is kind of a big thing, to the point where every spring, there is not only a huge advertising supplement in the local newspapers about the various summer camp programs offered throughout the greater Charlottesville area, but there is a “summer camp expo” held at a local hotel where parents can stop by, pick up literature, sign up for camps, and meet local newscasters (I don’t know what the appeal is in meeting local newscasters, but there you go). Where I grew up on Long Island, I don’t remember the ramp-up to summer break being a huge rush to get kids “signed up for something,” because quite a number of my summers were spent sitting around and doing very little. I know that I sound like an old fart when I say that I was a kid in the days when kids could be left home alone and there was no danger in that, but it is actually true. Most of the friends I had in later elementary school were kids whose parents weren’t always home and as long as I could ride my bike to their houses and as long as I was home before dinner time and wasn’t committing any criminal acts (and seriously, I grew up in freaking Sayville … the most “illegal” thing I ever did was cut through an abandoned lot and buy smoke bombs from the ice cream man), everything was fine. Granted, there were days where my friend Tom and I spent time jumping out of trees and body slamming his little brother and I’m amazed that nobody got seriously injured, but we wound up fine.

But for those kids whose parents: a) were sick of their children doing nothing except watch TV all day; b) didn’t want their children unsupervised; or c) had the money, there was “camp.” I didn’t know many kids who went to a “sleepaway” camp like the type portrayed in Meatballs or Wet Hot American Summer, probably because by the time I was old enough to do a sleepaway camp, those places had become synonymous with machete-wielding, hockey-mask-wearing killers.

Okay, that probably wasn’t the reason–it was probably more like sleepaway camp was a pain in the ass and parents preferred something more local, of which there were plenty of opportunities, some of which were almost like a sleepaway camp but were called “day camps.” Every spring during my childhood, when I would be home in the afternoon watching G.I. Joe or He-Man and the Masters and the Universe, the local syndicated stations (like WPIX and WNEW/WNYW) would air a commercial for Young People’s Day Camp:

Now I am sure that this commercial ran well into the late 1980s and maybe even the early 1990s because I remember seeing it for years and I am sure that most of the kids in the commercial were in college by the time I was watching it. I’d say that Young People’s Day Camp is the Mount Airy Lodge of children’s camps–the type of place that if you visited it now, it would be mired in bankruptcy and one skinned knee from being shut down by either the board of health or child protective services–but they are still up and running throughout the New York and New Jersey area, even if they’re not airing the same commercials. (more…)

On Earth, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

“The Book of Alien,” published in 1979, had me scared out of my mind when I was a kid.

I think of all the movies I’m looking forward to this summer, Prometheus is at the top of the list. I know that being a huge comic book reader I would probably be more excited about The Avengers or The Dark Knight Rises, but when I heard that Ridley Scott was making a movie that had ties somehow to Alien, something in my nerd past reawakened and I remembered (suddenly? I mean it’s not like I ever really forgot) that when I was about 11 years old, the world he created in Alien was the center of my universe.

Okay, to be fair, the reason for that was more due to James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, because up until the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I had only ever seen anything to do with Alien in the movie book–The Book of Alien–that someone on my bus had been passing around when I was in the second grade. Furthermore, what I had seen was a picture of the movie’s infamous “chestburster scene” (although at the time we called it “when that thing came out of the guy’s stomach”) and it scared the crap out of me.

I refused to watch Alien until I finally sat down and watched it during the summer before sixth grade–this was either the day before or the day of the incident where my father, who was wallpapering the living room–stepped on a razor blade and wound up with a few stitches in his foot. I don’t think I thought very much of the movie when I first saw it because it wasn’t as cool as Aliens, which I had already been watching on constant replay for the better part of a year.

Can you really blame me, after all? I was eleven or twelve and it was the middle of the “action Eighties” where I was into any movie that had large guns that shot lots of people, it quickly became my favorite movie. My friends and I would “play” Aliens (I was often Hudson to my friend Tom’s Hicks, although I think one time I actually played Ripley which I’m sure that some psychologist would have jumped on … but I have a feeling I just wanted to be one of the leads) when we wanted something slightly different than the “army” games we were used to playing after being kicked out of the house for watching Aliens way too many times.

But with anything from my childhood, my interest faded after a little while and I paid less attention to Ripley, Hicks, Hudson, Newt, and the other characters and more attention to things like baseball and the WWF. I would gravitate back toward Alien when I was in junior high after watching the original theatrical trailer while waiting on line to ride The Great Movie Ride at what was then called Disney’s MGM Studios in Disney World. I knew I had seen the movie before, but trailers were hard to come by in 1990–you either had to have it as part of a commercial break on something you taped off of television or on another video tape that came out at that time, and considering that Alien was released in 1979 and then released on VHS for the first time by CBS FOX video in the early 1980s, that wasn’t likely to happen in my house. The trailer blew me away and left so much of an impression that I remember trying to duplicate it as part of a computer animation project in my advanced computer graphics class in the ninth grade (I think it was a bunch of stills with quick cuts that wound up with no sound and a title in a really bad font … then again, it was 1991).

(more…)

Sometimes, more isn’t that groovy

For so many good movies, there are the unfortunate sequels. Oh sure, there are good sequels out there, but there’s also Predator 2, American Pie 2, or Eddie and The Cruisers II: Eddie Lives. And I’ve seen all three of those, so I know.

Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, most of those sequels are pretty much forgotten, relegated to late night runs on random cable channels that cannot afford quality movies, and I don’t think I would have known there was a sequel to American Graffiti if it hadn’t been pointed out to me via Charles Champlain’s book, George Lucas: The Creative Impulse when it came out in 1992. While it doesn’t get the attention of Star Wars, Empire, Jedi, or the original American Graffiti, More American Graffiti is covered halfway decently. In reading about the movie online and watching it last week, however, I get the feeling that this one is ranked in the Lucas filmography as “At least it’s not Howard the Duck.”

Okay, that’s a little harsh, but it wasn’t a movie that I intended seeking out and had I not been showing American Graffiti in my advanced English class, I would have been fine with watching bits and pieces of it here and there throughout the years whenever I happened to come across a random showing on WPIX or on cable. Plus, when I looked it up on Netflix, it was available for instant viewing.

American Graffiti, Lucas’s 1973 classic, follows a group of friends on the last night of the summer. What Lucas and director Bill Norton do is set More American Graffiti on four consecutive New Year’s Eves, from 1964-1967. After an initial scene in 1964 where several characters from the original meet at a racetrack, the storylines go their separate ways: John Milner is drag racing cars in 1964; Terry “The Toad” is in Vietnam; Debbie is a hippie in 1966 San Francisco; and Steve and Laurie are a married couple in Modesto in 1967. (more…)

Zero Hour: Crisis in Time (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twenty-Seven)

About two years ago, when I started posting comics-related entries to this blog, I made a point to write about the first series that ever had a true impact on me, which was Crisis on Infinite Earths. Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s 1985 epic was a story that I came late to, having read it for the first time in its entirety in 1991 after owning only issue 12 and then going back and collecting the rest. Before the summer of ’91–when Armageddon 2001 and War of the Gods were both published–there had been three company-wide crossovers that don’t hold the same weight as Crisis did and some of which haven’t aged very well. Legends, Millennium, and Invasion! were published in the late 1980s before DC decided to take a break from the company-wide crossover for a couple of years. With maybe one or two exceptions, the issues for each of these stories were pretty easy to find and were cheap to procure in the early 1990s (seriously, except for Batman books, nobody was buying DC back issues at the time) so I quickly became an obsessive crossover fan.

The annuals crossovers that began with Armageddon 2001 (awesome then awesomely disappointing), Eclipso: The Darkness Within (uneven in parts but still a solid crossover), and Bloodlines (let’s not go there) were nice to have, but since the one company-wide-within-the-actual-books crossover that DC had in the early 1990s was the poorly executed War of the Gods, there wasn’t much to satisfy my craving for something epic. Oh sure, there was the Superman books’ Panic in the Sky! and by the time 1994 rolled around I was knee-deep in both The Death and Return of Superman and Knightfall, but I still wanted more. I mean, if Marvel could have Infinity Wars and Crusades, couldn’t DC have something?

Then, in the fall of 1993 on the DC Universe promo page, there appeared a simple graphic of a ticking clock with the words “The Countdown Has Begun. Zero Hour. Be Prepared.”

I remember going almost practically apeshit over this. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know what it was going to be … but I wanted it. During the course of the next year or so, weird stuff would happen in the various books of the DC Universe that suggested that this Zero Hour event was going to be something very important, not just some random C-list villain making an effort to be someone important. The biggest one that I noticed was that Valor–otherwise known as Lar Gand of the 30th Century–dies in his 20th Century-set book, a thousand years before he is part of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Plus, there was this attempt to make some sense of Hawkman (I didn’t understand it either), and in Team Titans, the identity of The Leader was revealed to be none other than … Monarch.

This all led in to two issues of the anthology series Showcase ’94 where Waverider (he of Armageddon 2001 and Linear Men fame) and Rip Hunter observe Hank Hall as Monarch in some random hideout where he’s hooked up to a bunch of machines and … well, we’re supposed to accept the idea that Hall has been able to get his hands on a lot of different technology and also had the knowledge to use it. They attempt to develop his character a little bit, or at least try to “erase” the mistake of the end of Armageddon 2001 by having him explain something about how when Dove died, her essence as a personification of order went into him (Hawk, the personification of chaos) and he became more powerful and aware than he ever had. Then, Hall changes himself into Extant, a time-traveling villain who is supposed to serve a legitimate threat to the heroes of the DCU (instead of Monarch, who never really could seem to get his crap together).

It’s a halfway decent lead-in to Zero Hour, because we at least have a villain established and by the time Zero Hour #4 opens (the issues were numbered counting down to 0), it’s thought that Extant has somehow figured out how to screw with time itself to the point where pockets of entropy are opening up and swallowing time and space from both ends. The heroes of the DCU are called upon to fight it and even though Wally West (aka The Flash) seemingly dies (he winds up in the speed force, a concept that Mark Waid would introduce at this point in his spectacular run on The Flash) and the Justice Society is forced into retirement (in quite possibly the worst way possible), they seem to stop the entropy from eating up the universe. At least for a moment, when it’s revealed that the true villain of the story is Hal Jordan, aka Parallax, who has decided to try to recreate the universe so that everything that sucked never happened. The heroes fight him, use a kid named Damage to start a new version of the Big Bang, and then the universe restarts as it should.

Make any sense? (more…)

Pedro’s fireworks! Does yours?

South of the Border. Photo by mollypop via cc license on Flickr.

I don’t know if I can consider myself a “well-seasoned” traveler, at least compared to my Facebook friends who always seem to be jetting to some exotic locale and posting pictures of themselves in a bar or on a beach that’s thousands of miles away from my kitchen table. I’ve only been out of the country a few times myself, and my travels throughout the United States haven’t been too extensive. So why do I think that I’m a halfway decently traveled person Well, because I have done quite a bit of traveling in my day and that “travel” has meant driving up and down Interstate 95.

This past weekend, my wife and I drove from our home in Charlottesville to Savannah, Georgia. She was graduating with her MBA from Georgia Southern University, and while some of our trip involved what I guess William Least Heat-Moon would have termed “Blue Highways,” most of it was downt he main road of the east coast, a road that is not prestigious enough to be called a “mother” road; in fact, I’m sure “motherfucker of a road” would be more appropriate.

Anyway, with this particular trip, I have more or less traversed I-95 all the way from the interchange with I-91 in Connecticut to right around the South Carolina/Georgia border. This particular trip was my first time through the Carolinas by car and I have to say that I-95 surprised me. To me, I-95 is a motherfucker. It’s a sprawling beast of a mega-highway that spans as many as eight lanes across and is often riddled with traffic jams and construction zones. I-95 is the world’s biggest parking lot in Northern Virginia and it is the definition of time suck in Maryland. A trip up to my parents’ house on Long Island can sometimes be an epic schlep if not timed correctly, and I have beamed with pride whenever I have been able to take a minimum amount of time getting there.

But the Carolinas were just so … desolate. We entered North Carolina around 9:00 a.m. and by then the highway had shrunken from what you’d expect from an interstate to a four-lane highway with two lanes on each side that looked like they hadn’t been maintained since I was a toddler (though, funny enough, the signs had been updated because the font used was obviously Calibri and not Helvetica). Further adding to the oddity was the copious amount of billboards for adult shops and gentlemen’s clubs. For a region so devoted to conservative politics, they sure advertised a lot of skin.

I had heard of South of the Border years ago, through friends of mine who had driven to places like Disney World (a trip from Long Island that is a solid two days’ worth of driving). They way they put it, South of the border was some sort of monumental destination. Their usual description was, “You start seeing signs for it, like 100 miles before you get there. Then there is another sign, and another one, and another one. And then, it’s just huge and everyone stops there.” It had been built up in my mind to be a sort of Vegas in the Carolinas. (more…)

Just ‘Round the Corner!

If you watch enough television where I live–Charlottesville, Virginia–you will probably see commercials for no less than four furniture stores. There’s Kane Furniture (with a kicky cool-jazz-with-flute jingle: “At Kaaaaaaaaane furniture, you’ll have a home fashioned just for you”), Under the Roof (which is a montage of modern-looking furniture set to a ragin’ drum solo), Grand Furniture, and Schewels (who always is having a sale. They had a Friday the 13th sale last month). I swear they advertise more than car dealerships these days, although it is understandable because in a recession, buying furniture is one of the last purchases on a person’s mind.

The unfortunate thing about all this is that with the exception of Schewels’ Crazy Eddie-like tendencies (“WE’RE GIVING EVERYONE CREDIT! WE’RE GIVING EVERYONE EMPLOYEE PRICES! FOR GOD’S SAKE COME IN AND BUY AN ENDTABLE!”), the furniture store commercials in Charlottesville are kind of boring. It’s like … yeah, there’s a couch with giant arms wider than most morbidly obese people. Oh, and a glass table with a marble column for a pedestal just in case someone from New Jersey might shop here. And a denim loveseat. I’m so excited.

But hey, I consider myself spoiled when it comes to local television furniture store commercials (yes, you can be spoiled in this regard) because I grew up on Long Island and our local TV spots were nothing short of epic.

While I am sure that there were more stores advertising on television, when I think back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, I think of two stores: Coronet and Room Plus

Coronet was a family owned baby furniture store located in Old Westbury, and probably did good business for quite a while when I was younger because those were the days before the baby superstores. In fact, nowadays, I’m pretty sure that if you do not register yourself at Babies R Us or Buy Buy Baby, you get a visit from Child Protective Services.

Anyway, the commercials mostly starred the two owners–a couple of brothers with mustaches who looked like your uncle or older cousin–and they’d usually be doing some sort of gag while their mother (“The Coronet Mother”) did the pitch. For instance, The Coronet Mother pitches with her two boys in cribs behind her: