Author: Tom Panarese

The Numbers Game (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Sixteen)

You know, the 1990s take a lot of crap from comics fans (read: it’s cool to trash them on the Internet) and a lot of that crap is pretty justified (you find value in Brigade.  No, seriously.  I’ll sit here and wait.), but as I have said before and will say again, it actually was a pretty great time to be a comic book fan.  Not only were comics selling like crazy, but so many titles hit milestone issues.  Between the time I started collecting comics in the late summer of 1990 and the time I graduated high school in June 1995, there were plenty of “anniversary” issues to go around.  Either characters turned 30, 40, or 50 (such as happened over at Marvel) or titles hit an issue that was a multiple of 50.   For instance, you had Action Comics hit issue #700; Batman hit issue #500; and because they all more or less debuted around the same time after Crisis, The Flash, Superman, Justice League America, Wonder Woman, and Green Arrow all hit issue #100 within a few months of one another in 1995.  And the New Titans celebrated its centennial issue as well.

Now, considering that this was the 1993, an anniversary cover could no longer simply carry a special banner (like the “Anniversary” one that DC used for the better part of a decade on the cover of any milestone isssue–in fact, the last comic I remember seeing the “Anniversary” banner on was Detective Comics #627, which was the “600th” appearance of Batman in the title).  In order to commemorate said anniversary, you needed a gimmick.  For instance, Superman #75 (the Death of Superman issue) had a deluxe edition that came in a black polybag with some stuff (you know, I never opened the polybag and wound up selling it on eBay still in the polybag); Batman #500 had an overlaid cutout of Batman swinging through Gotham over Azbats swinging through Gotham in an entirely different costume.  And the title that during its formative years the Titans had been compared to–The Uncanny X-Men–had a foil cover with the X-Men’s logo in a hologram for its 300th issue that March, a mere three months before New Titans #100 debuted in July.

Considering that since its debut in 1984 with the epic return of Trigon storyline, the New Teen Titans series that would eventually would be renamed The New Titans with #50 had gone through many ups and downs and had nearly been canceled at least once, the fact that issue #100 was hitting the stands was something pretty remarkable.  Also, the fact that Nightwing and Starfire were going to be married in issue #100 was something pretty remarkable because if you go all the way back to issue #1, they were shown in bed together for the very first time and that caused quite a stir in the lettercolumns.

But if you look at the foil-embossed cover, which is all nice and rainbow-reflective when you hold it up to the light, Dick and Kory weren’t exactly on their way to wedded bliss.  The Grummett/Vey cover (their very last on the title) shows an unmasked Dark Raven looking excessively sunburned and wearing an outfit that is something out of a bad S&M fantasy holding both the bride and groom while the Titans plus guest stars Robin and The Flash look on.  It’s a revelation of a villain whose big “reveal” we would have expected to have to wait for during the issue but I guess considering that the average Titans fan had figured out that the cloaked figure who’d made out with Liz Alderman and brought us the Deathwing (seriously … Deathwing?) for the past few issues was Raven, so at least we weren’t left feeling insulted, and we were teased from the shelves by what promised to be a decent fight. (more…)

The Teamwork to Make a Dream Work

It’s been a few months since I’ve written about the 1986 Mets.  Put simply, it’s been hard to find many memories of the regular season that really are worth the space I usually devote to an entry around here.  My most vivid memories–as I think is the case with most people–center around the postseason, although when I think hard I do remember a few great regular season moments.  For instance, there was a four-game series against the Braves in mid-July where I watched Darryl Strawberry charge the mound after Dave Palmer plunked him after Gary Carter launched one into the seats en route to an 11-0 win.  It was the first time I had ever seen a brawl in a baseball game live on TV, and I didn’t really understand why Straw charged the mound but it was cool to see a fight.

The Sunday game of that series featured a tribute to Rusty Staub, where the team came out during the pre-game ceremony wearing red wigs and a 2-0 victory which featured Gary Carter tagging out Ken Griffey, Sr. at home plate, a tag that was so awesome it wound up in promos for at least another year or so (it shows up in the music video at the 3:30 mark).  But aside from those and the whole mess in Houston where Tim Teufel, Ron Darling, Bob Ojeda, and Rick Aguilera were arrested for a bar fight, I spent the summer watching games and checking the paper whenever I could to see how far ahead the Mets were.  Then, as August started to drag on, I started checking their magic number and then learning what a magic number and “clinching” meant (I was nine and new to following baseball, so sue me).

There was no magic number in the daily news yet when we went to a game against the Expos on August 2, and I honestly don’t remember much about the game, except that Uncle Lou and Aunt Geri took us, it was the first time I had ever been to a night game at Shea Stadium, and it rained.  My aunt and uncle will at least be able to confirm that–it seemed like it rained every single time we bought a bunch of tickets to go as a family.  But still, sitting in the upper deck, watching the Mets win 4-2 under the lights was pretty cool.  Plus, my dad and I had tickets for another game a few weeks later, against the Cardinals, a team I had hated since last season when they downed the Mets en route to a World Series appearance.

However, by this time, the Cards were toast and the Mets’ magic number sat at 33.  We had tickets to the first game of an impromptu doubleheader (meaning that one of the games was a makeup of a rainout) and my dad took me and my “cousin” Vic (“cousin” meaning that our families were such good friends we might as well be related).  It was a 2-1 loss and made me concoct a theory that perhaps I’d go to one losing game and one winning game every season.  Anyway, it was a “down” time for the team–Gary Carter had just been placed on the DL the day before with a torn thumb and Ed Hearn hadn’t completely started to rise to the challenge of being the everyday catcher like he would.  Rick Aguilera started the game but wound up leaving with an inflammed right knee (I always thought Aguilera was a decent pitcher with the Mets but not as steadfast as Doc, Darling, and Ojeda … Aguilera would wind up hitting his stride with Minnesota years later), and it was one of those games that just sort of sputtered out.

We intended to leave between the games of the doubleheader (after all, we needed to beat the traffic), but we stuck around because between the games, a guy took the field and made the crowd do all sorts of shouting and cheering and even The Wave.  Yes, we did The Wave.  Why was the guy there?  Well, he was doing crowd shots for “Let’s Go Mets,” the official 1986 Mets music video, which premiered later in the season as the team was gearing up for its playoff run.  Unofficially titled, “Let’s Go Mets Go” (because of the “Let’s go Mets go!” shout throughout the song), the video features the team, its fans, as well as some highlights and is set to a tune written by Shelton Leigh (“Shelly”) Palmer, who lately more notable as a technology columnist for sites like CNN.com and The Huffington Post, but composed several theme songs for television productions back in the 1980s.

It is, more or less, a huge PR piece with better production value than the local television promos.  We begin in one of the parking ramps of Shea where three kids are playing some game where you flip baseball cards and the winner keeps all the baseball cards, which is something I never knew how to do when I was a kid.  I’m pretty sure that a relative once tried to teach me but I never picked up on it.  The rules of the game didn’t matter in the video anyway, because after the two kids lose all of their cards to a bully-type who looks like a cross between Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story and Jason Hervey’s character in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Doc Gooden, Gary Carter, and Kevin Mitchell (because they couldn’t sober up Straw and who is rocking 1980s eyeglasses and a track suit that I can only describe as “Sharpton-esque”) show up.

Garysays, “Go ahead, Doc.”

Doc says, “Do it.” (more…)

It’s getting dark in here (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Fifteen)

The name is so '90s, the costume looks like he's the superhero of the Charlotte Hornets. Ladies and Gentlmen, ARSENAL!

If you were creating a comic book in the 1990s or if you were revamping a flagging title, you probably wound up doing one of four things (if not all four):  added a lot of guns and maybe some leather jackets to the cast’s wardrobe; gave the entire female cast, even the mousy girl, boob jobs; made half of the characters darker, edgier, or maybe even evil; killed someone; and hired an artist who drew like Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, or Todd MacFarlane.  By the time that New Titans hit its “zero issue” (in other words issue #0) in 1994, they had either attempted or accomplished all five.  It started, of course, with issue #71, which is where we started this journey, but the process ramped up with New Titans #100, which was the conclusion to a story arc called “The Darkening.”

Yeah, they actually called it “The Darkening.”  Moreover, there was a companion story that ran in Team Titans called “The Darkening Night,” which wrapped up in that title but the implications of which were shown in New Titans #100.  It’s kind of hard to figure out the order in which to read the individual comics of these stories, as they are two separate continuous stories, but in looking at them again I broke it down by reading New Titans #97, 98, and 99, then following with Team Titans #7-10 before reading New Titans #100 (and Annual #9, which will get a little bit of a mention at some point).  I know, this is one of those “get back to the nerdery” moments here, but the only books that I knew at this time that were doing a continuing story across several titles and let you know what order in which to read those titles were the Superman books, so sometimes you have to figure these things out for yourself.

New Titans #97 begins the very last story arc for the art team of Tom Grummett and Al Vey, who had more or less been working on the book during the end of George Perez’s second tenure, which was about issue #56 or so.  I was going to miss this art team, although not too much–not because I didn’t like them, but because Grummett was already on Adventures of Superman and would be working on the regular Robin title, so at least I got to see the same pencils somewhere else.  I’ll … uh … get to his replacement in a later entry, so for now let’s just get to “The Darkening.” (more…)

Pass Tense

Joey Jeremiah, resident Degrassi clown and keyboardist for The Zit Remedy. Photo courtesy of Degrassi Online.

I have to admit, in my half-assed effort to recap old Degrassi episodes, I was going to cherry pick stuff I remembered from Degrassi Jr. High and then go on to cover probably all of Degrassi High because I have all of that series on DVD and have watched it enough times in the last few years that I can probably pick off an episode at random.  Besides, YouTube only had the first 26 or so episodes of DJH available and that was it.  However, Hulu has the rest of them, and as I browsed through the titles I was reminded of how much of the show’s final season (before high school) I actually did watch.

Arguably the most famous storyline on Degrassi Junior High‘s second season is Spike’s pregnancy, which wound up providing the impetus for Degrassi: The Next Generation nearly fifteen years later (but enough about that for now).  The thing is, while I knew that Spike was the pregnant teenager on Degrassi Junior High whenever I managed to catch an episode, I never actually saw the episode where she got pregnant, nor did I see the ones where her pregnancy became a huge scandal and she had to fight to stay in school.  During those first two seasons, I saw a smattering of episodes and all I knew was that the show was about Arthur, Yick, Stephanie Kaye, the twins (whom I couldn’t tell apart), and the guys in the band The Zit Remedy.

Which is why I am probably sure that while I saw some of those second season episodes, I didn’t really remember any until the next season rolled around.  There were few exceptions, and one of them was the second season finale, “Pass Tense.”

When the episode opens, it’s finals and Wheels is freaking out about his upcoming tests.  He’s been having a pretty tough year academically and doesn’t want to risk being left behind.  Meanwhile, everyone else is getting ready for the big eighth grade dance, as it’s their time to graduate to the local high school.  Except, well, they won’t.  City-wide overcrowding has resulted in the administration making the decision to keep the ninth grade at Degrassi Junior High next year, which puts a huge damper on the eighth graders’ celebration, especially when the seventh graders (led for the most part by Caitlin Ryan) decide that they are not going to be decoration monkeys anymore.  But the show must go on (and the seventh graders get to attend as “payment” for doing the decorations) , especially when that show includes the first-ever performance by The Zit Remedy.

I think that anyone with a passing knowledge of Degrassi knows The Zit Remedy, which was the band comprised of Joey Jeremiah on keyboards, Derek “Wheels” Wheeler on bass, and Archie “Snake” Simpson on guitar.  They had one song and only one song, the immortal, “Everybody Wants Something” (which in itself would be the title of an episode of Degrassi High, so when I get around to that one, I’ll talk more about it).  This dance, according to Joey, was going to be their big break and throughout the episode he seemed to have a “Today Degrassi, tomorrow the world!” attitude.  Until, that is, Mr. Raditch pulls him aside and tells him that he has failed eighth grade and will repeat.

It was a very pivotal episode for Joey for two reasons:  first, you could tell that he was being hit pretty hard with reality here, and the fact that he was … well, slower than everyone else would define his character for most of the rest of the series.  He also starts to take an interest in Caitlin, and that would … well, that’s “the relationship.”  It’s a very quick moment at the dance at the end, but enough to suggest that something would go on between the two at some point in the coming year.  And I have to admit that this was around the time that I started noticing Caitlin.  I’m pretty sure that Stacie Mistysyn, the actress who played her, was my first real actress crush, which probably explains A LOT. (more…)

Sequelitis (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Fourteen)

The cover to New Teen Titans (Baxter) 15 sums up this entire era perfectly.

So the Titans were popular when I was a teenager, but not that popular.  Sure, Jon Peterson’s editorial run put the book back in the spotlight with enough cache to warrant two spin-off titles with an “event” crossover between them, but they weren’t so popular that comics shops were charging ridiculous amounts of money for their back issues.  The Wolfman-Perez run on the book, which started in 1980 and ran until 1984 (or 1985-1986 if you factor in, by extension, Crisis on Infinitie Earths) is now one of those “classic” runs, something that comics fans put up as one of the best of that particular period (I don’t know if I’d say the best of all time because then you wind up in Lee/Kirby territory and I think that’s still considered blasphemy.  Anyway …) but Marv Wolfman and George Perez are not Todd MacFarlane, Jim Lee, or Rob Liefeld whose backstock on the X-Men and Spider-Man were selling for prices in the double-digits.  I should know … I’m the jackass who once paid $25 for a copy of Uncanny X-Men #248.  So like I said, I got most of the original New Teen Titans series for about $2-$3 an issue, with the occasional issue, usually a very early one or a Deathstroke appearance, costing more.

The back issues of the Baxter series, which began in 1984, were a little more expensive and a little harder to come by, at least at Amazing Comics.  Part of that was because the original price of each of those issues was more.  Back in 1984, instead of paying 75 cents or $1.00 for an issue of New Teen Titans/Tales of the Teen Titans, you paid $1.25 for the Baxter series (by the time I started collecting, the price was $1.75).  If you were buying off a newsstand, you could stil get the same stories for 75 cents or $1.00 because DC was reprinting the Baxter series in Tales of the Teen Titans, which continued the numbering of the original series.  This meant that anyone buying Titans off the newsstand got those stories about a year after they had originally been printed.

Why a year, if DC was publishing the books simultaneously?  Well, that’s because for the first year or so of the Baxter series, the original, newsstand series (which had been retitled Tales of the Teen Titans, if you didn’t guess that by now) was still running original stories.  I think it might have confused readers a little because the stories in the Baxter book featured events that hadn’t happened yet in the other book.  When Tales started reprints with #60 (well, technically #59, but that issue reprinted DC Comics Presents #26 and a DC Digest tale), it became apparent that if you were going to read the New Teen Titans from beginning to end, you’d start with DCCP #26 and work your way to Tales of the Teen Titans #58.  Then you’d pick up the second series starting with issue #1 and the Raven/Trigon storyline.

Now that we’ve gotten that exhausting bit of explanation out of the way, I have to say that I think I agree with those fans who think that one of the contributions to the decline in the Titans through the late 1980s was the fact that the book was part of this direct market push.  This was at a time when the idea of a comics shop was really starting to gain steam and both DC and Marvel (but honestly, I think DC more than Marvel because I don’t recall that many “direct market only” titles from Marvel) were creating products specifically to be sold in comics shops.  For DC this meant books like The New Teen Titans, The Legion of Super-Heroes, The Outsiders, Vigilante, and The Omega Men being printed on Baxter paper and sold at a higher price as if they were meant to be in a bookstore instead of a spinner rack at the 7-Eleven (I think we kinda see this today with the trade paperbacks market … more books are coming out in hardcover and then softcover because DC and Marvel are clearly following a traditional publishing model that caters to Barnes & Noble rather than the LCSes of the world).  Sure, of the three super-hero titles (Titans, Legion, Outsiders) there were newsstand-available reprint books, but I think that this move still took the Titans off the market and damaged sales potential.

But that’s not what really hurt the book so much as the actual stories did.  Wolfman and Perez were a great team, but they tend to have the same faults as a Lennon/McCartney pairing.  Both are great writers on their own but their weaknesses definitely get the better of them at times.  I haven’t read too much of George Perez’s Wonder Woman, which is the title he took over after Crisis (I intend to, eventually), but I can say that Wolfman’s work suffered a bit … and he admits it, having said that during the post-Crisis period he went through a serious case of writer’s block, which caused the quality of the book to suffer and storylines to drag on way longer than they had to.  I mean, Chris Claremont was writing the X-books at the time and his run is notorious for long-assed storylines, but the x-books in the 1980s had really hit their stride and Marvel was doing the right events and hiring the right artistic talent to put that book on top and keep it on top.  I mean, I enjoyed Eduardo Barretto’s run as an artist on New Teen Titans, but the guy wasn’t Jim Lee.

Why, then, did it always seem that the books published between New Teen Titans #6 and New Titans #50 were such a pain in the ass to find?  I have no idea.  If I could speculate, perhaps the first year or so the book was selling so well that there weren’t that many back issues, and once the book started to fall off, the number of books ordered probably declined.  Bob just didn’t have that many of the second series, so it meant going elsewhere, like to Sun Vet and any other shop I could find.  Thankfully, the trip was always worth it because here and there I wound up with a couple of books at the low price of $3-5 each and eventually collected the entirety of an enormous storyline that starts with a spaceship crashing in Tales of the Teen Titans #52 and ends with Raven getting naked in New Teen Titans #39.

Uh … what?  Trust me, I’ll get to it.  It’ll take a long time, but I’ll get there. (more…)

5, 4, 3, 2 … OOPS!

A couple of weeks ago, the final space shuttle mission launched, and by the end of this week, it will have landed, ending a 30-year era of space exploration for the United States.  It goes without saying that this is the end of an era.  The first space shuttle launched when I was 3-1/2 years old, and I (unfortunately) rank the Challenger Disaster as one of the most important moments of my childhood.

I wanted to post something about what I thought about the space shuttle saying farewell; however, I don’t know if I would have anything to say that hasn’t been said already, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep whatever I wrote within the confines of my “pop culture” subject matter.  I thought of the Young Astronauts Challenger Commemorative Packet that I got when I was in the fourth grade and I also thought of writing about the time I put together one of those Revell space shuttle kits and got glue all over my hands, paint all over the place, and never got the decals to go on correctly (seriously, did anyone?).  But then I thought of what nobody is probably talking about as far as the space shuttle is concerned, which is the biggest (and well … kind of only) space shuttle movie there is:  SpaceCamp.

Starring Kate Capshaw, Lea Thompson, Kelly Preston, Joaquin Phoenix (back when he was known as “Leaf”), Tate Donovan, and Larry B. Scott (a.k.a. Lamar from Revenge of the Nerds), SpaceCamp is one of the few science-fiction  (although in a way, this is more “science” based) movies from the late 1970s and 1980s where aliens do not attack and lay waste to the Earth, nor do they mate with, possess, or disembowel anyone.  In fact, SpaceCamp doesn’t have any aliens.  Unfortunately, its tension is tepid enough for a teacher to show an elementary school class.

Capshaw (about a year or two removed from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) plays Andie Bergstrom, an astronaut who, when she sits on her family’s farm in 1961, sees John Glenn’s capsule fly through space and says proudly to her dog, “I’m goin’ up!” (a line delivered in the cheesiest manner possible, btw).  More than two decades later, she has received the umpteenth notification that she will not fly on a shuttle mission–Atlantis, which is scheduled to launch within a couple of weeks.  Her husband, Zach (Tom Skerritt, who would be Viper in Top Gun the same summer), then coaxes her into being an instructor at Space Camp, which for plot reasons is held at Cape Canaveral and not in Huntsville, Alabama (a Space Camp was opened in Florida in 1989, but this came out in 1986).  She reluctantly takes on the “blue team” of Space Camp students, who are …

… a group of stock characters.  Kevin (Donovan) is the arrogant screw-up guy and we know that because when we meet him, he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and rocking out in his new Jeep; Kathryn (Thompson) is an overachiever who is already a pilot, and we know this because she flies a WWI-era bi-plane to the parking lot; Tish (Preston) is a mall ditz who possesses the ability to memorize just about anything she reads, and we know this because she cinches her flight suit with a stylish red belt; Max (Phoenix) is the annoying kid genius who everyone will pick on, and we know this because everyone picks on him; and Rudy (Scott) is … well, the only one without any issues. (more…)

It Begins With a Kiss (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Thirteen)

Starfire meets Robin and kisses him right away ...

Going into the winter of 1992 and spring of 1993, DC was definitely riding a pretty high wave considering the sales it had gotten from the Death of Superman and upcoming Reign of the Supermen storylines as well as events like Knightfall, which was billed as the “breaking of the Batman.”  The Titans franchise itself was still enjoying a decent amount of success, especially considering that 1992 had seen a very huge event (well, huge as far as the Titans were concerned), “Total Chaos.”  The books had lost a bit of momentum after the whole “Sell-Out” storyline but a quality pinch-hit and a looming 100th issue still had it poised for something pretty great.

What had gotten them to this point was a good editor in Jon Peterson, who had taken a look at a failing title and said, “Let’s shake up the status quo.”  So, we got Titans Hunt.  Peterson left with the end of “Total Chaos” and Rob Simpson came on to the book.  His first few issues were the “Sell-Out” storyline as well as the three-issue Red Star arc but the lead in to issue 100 and that event in itself was obviously going to be considered his biggest moment (oddly, nobody, not even Titans Tower or the Titans Companion people, have been able to pin down Rob Simpson for an interview about this period.  Marv Wolfman has a bit of disdain for everything that followed Total Chaos, so it would be interesting to see another perspective).  Once again, with the storyline that would start with New Titans #97–“The Darkening” (yeah, it’s a very 1990s sounding story title)–he’d go for the shakeup of the status quo again.

... so that she can learn the English language. I tried that on a foreign girl once. It didn't work.

When I started to reread these issues, I had no problem remembering how we got here, but there were things that Woflman was working into his stories that anyone who picked up the book for the very first time wouldn’t know the first thing about.  Like, what’s a Mento Helmet?  Who are the Doom Patrol?  Why does Nightwing want to marry Starfire?  And what does that have to do with Raven?  I mean, I would have been lost, too, because what leads up to #100 really has its roots way back at the beginning of the famed Marv Wolfman/George Perez run that started in 1980 with DC Comcs Presents #26 and New Teen Titans #1.  And since I was immersed in the Titans back in these days and was buying as many back issues as I could, I thought I’d take a couple of entries to really get into the very long and involved backstory.

Then I realized how freaking long and involved this backstory is.  I’ve heard a few podcasters say (and forgive me for forgetting who it was … probably Scott Gardner, Michael Bailey, or Thomas Deja b/c I listen to their shows on a fairly regular basis and sometimes they get mixed up in my head) that Marv Wolfman’s Titans was a soap opera that just happened to have super heroes.  Considering how long some storylines and relationships in the Titansverse played out over the years, that’s a very accurate statement.  It probably also explains why I’ve always been able to sit through All My Children and One Life to Live whenever I’m at my in-laws’.  Anyway, I started combing through my back issues to see what I needed to pull for the best Dick and Kory and Raven moments and I found myself with a huge stack of comics.  So, I’ve split it up.  This time around, I’ll take a look at the aforementioned Wolfman/Perez run and how the characters first developed; next time, I’ll take a look at Wolfman post-Perez in the Baxter era, which gets quite sluggish at times.  Then we’ll go back to the present for “The Darkening” and its corresponding story in Team Titans, “The Darkening Night.”

(more…)

There are no rules, bra

So last year, on my wife’s birthday, I did a rundown of everything that is awesome about the 1989 Robyn Lively classic Teen Witch.  I thought I’d do something similar.  Now, there wasn’t a Teen Witch 2 or a Teen Witch Too, which is kind of a shame because if they could make a sequel to shit like Zapped!, they could surely make a sequel to Teen Witch.  I mean, it’s not like the cast members of the first movie all went on to superstardom.

Instead, I felt like taking a look at a movie that I know that she doesn’t necessarily love but has probably seen as many times as some people have seen Star Wars, which is the 1993 rollerblading movie, Airborne.

Yes, in 1993 someone decided to make a teen/sports movie whose focus was rollerblading.

Now, in my wife’s defense I am sure she’s only sat through this entire movie a couple of times and it’s not her Star Wars by any means.  However, I think that we both have lost count of the number of times that we’ve been flipping channels only to come across this movie, usually on one of the high-numbered random-assed movie channels that we get as part of our basic cable plan (like “FLIX”) or one of the assorted Disney-owned channels like ABC Family.  You’d think that an 18-year-old movie about a niche sport that never really caught on would spend time wallowing in obscurity only to be occasionally retrieved from the bowels of Netflix instant streaming or one of the few remaining video stores throughout the land.

However, as we all know, there really aren’t any video stores left in the land (and certainly not many that have a VHS inventory or would have bought Airborne on DVD).  Plus, this is not available on Netflix at all.  And I’d like to say “Thankfully, it’s on cable all the time so I got the chance to tape and watch it,” but I can’t even do that because when I sat down to prep for this entry I couldn’t find it anywhere in my television listings.  So I had to watch this movie “illegally” in a sense: in ten-minute increments on YouTube.  No, really.  I mean, I could have rented it from YouTube for $2.99 but it’s not worth that price (plus, isn’t that why I have a Netflix subscription) but someone took the time and the effort to break the movie into segments and post them in “parts” up on YouTube.  It’s a little tedious and a couple of the parts are missing a few minutes but overall worth not having to pay for it.

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Liberty Enlightening the World

So a week or two ago, I was cleaning up some stuff in my basement and in a huge Rubbermaid tub that was full of old VHS tapes found an old tape labeled “Liberty Weekend.”  I don’t remember grabbing it from my parents’ house when I moved away, but that’s not a surprise considering I grabbed quite a few things from their basement that I am sure they were happy to get rid of.

Still, I had to wonder why we had a tape labeled “Liberty Weekend” (not why I grabbed it–that’s explained by my love of having random crap) and then I noticed that the handwriting on the label was neither mine nor my parents’.  It was that of my dad’s old friend, Chuck, or “Uncle” Chuck as we used to call him.  He was the guy who once copied the entire Star Wars trilogy from laserdisc to VHS for me, so that meant that he’d probably put something together either using the footage from Liberty Weekend or for Liberty Weekend.

After realizing what it was, I had to wonder why he had put together the tape to begin with, unless he had been trying out some sort of editing equipment and decided to have a little fun.  Then, I actually started to watch the tape and remembered how huge the Statue of Liberty centennial celebration was twenty-five years ago.  So much so that not only did I decide to take the time to reflect on the weekend but a lot more.

Because in all honesty, it was very hard to escape the Statue of Liberty’s 100th anniversary, especially if you were a kid living in the New York City area.  The weekend of July 4, 1986 was a four-day party in and around New York City (especially New York harbor) and it was quite possibly one of the hugest things I had seen at the time, or since.  But the story really starts a few years earlier and encompasses more than a fireworks show and a concert that wound up in my basement in Virginia a quarter century later.

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So no one told you life was gonna be this way

I just started participating in a Facebook “challenge” (meme?) called the “30 Day Song Challenge.”  For the next month, I have to post one song per day to my wall and each day has a different caveat.  For instance, Day One was “Your Favorite Song” (for the record: “Summer, Highland Falls” by Billy Joel) and Day Twenty-Seven is “Song You Wish You Could Play on an Instrument” (I have yet to share this one).  I got bored one night and wrote a list down in a notebook, although I’m sure those songs will change somewhat when I go to post them.  Day Seven’s song is “Song That Reminds You of an Event.”  Now, I would have used my wedding song but that is already being used for Day Twenty-Three, “Song For Your Wedding,” so I wound up being stuck trying to think about something else.  Strangely enough, the first song that popped into my head was “I’ll Be There For You” by The Rembrandts.

If you are unfamiliar with the song’s title, you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say, it’s the theme from Friends.  Friends premiered in the fall of 1994, back when NBC’s Must See TV lineup consisted of Mad About You at 8:00, Seinfeld at 9:00, and ER at 10:00.  Friends took the 8:30 slot and a very short-lived and largely forgotten Dabney Coleman sitcom called Madman of the People premiered at 9:30.  The night for NBC was a powerhouse because CBS was premiering Due South and Chicago Hope and ABC had Matlock along with the culturally significant but ratings anemic My So-Called Life.  But the time winter and spring rolled around, Friends was the breakout hit and everything that had been new and in direct competition was basically scorched earth (I love MSCL but even the most ardent of fans will admit that Angela Chase and company got their asses handed to them).  Friends was one of the few Generation X-oriented shows/films that actually connected, so much so that by the time Ross got off of a plane at Kennedy Airport with Julie on his arm while Rachel waited unknowingly with flowers and new feelings, you couldn’t escape the show.  There were posters, T-shirts, magazines covers, a hairstyle, and that theme song.

It’s somehow ironic that “I’ll Be There For You” because so popular because at the previous fall’s Emmy Awards, Jason Alexander had done a song and dance number about TV theme songs because they were considered to be a dying breed, and kind of still are.  After all, the last TV theme song written specifically for television that charted I think was this very song.  In fact, I think this took most people by surprise because by the spring of 1995 when Friends-mania began gaining serious traction, the entire version of the song had yet to be released or even recorded.  The Rembrandts had recorded a one-minute TV version of “I’ll Be There For You” for the show’s opening credits and wound up rushing the full three-minute version of the song onto their album because there was serious demand by people for its radio airplay.

I was still listening to WBAB in the evenings while I did homework and the station had been receiving requests for the song.  Now, radio stations weren’t going to just play a one-minute television theme song, so some deejay decided to just loop it three times to create a three-minute song (according to Wikipedia, said deejay was in Nashville).  WBAB began playing this as a way to placate the listeners, even though I’m sure there were plenty of real rock and roll fans who wound up being disgusted.  As I sat in my bedroom doing my homework that May, I managed to catch a playing of the song and hit record on my stereo (having a tape in the cassette deck ready to record stuff was still a common practice of mine at the time).  Then I played it over and over and over, to the point where I nearly wore the tape out.  This, of course, was in the days before I would go and find out via the Internet who sang the song and could download it for about a buck, so I had to wait for the opportunity to take a weekend trip to the mall to see if it was on CD.

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