Author: Tom Panarese

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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Deathstroke, the Punisher? (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twelve)

I think that one of the drawbacks of Marv Wolfman’s sixteen year run on the various Titans books is that he didn’t do much as far as take time off.  Sure, that is definitely an advantage because he was able to really craft his core group of characters and have them grow in a way that seemed organic, but at the same time there were clearly periods where he was, for lack of a better word, running out of gas.  In the next couple of months, I’ll definitely be getting to one of those times as I start moving toward New Titans #100 and I get to go through at least a couple of years’ worth of Titans stories that aren’t considered the best of the bunch.

When Wolfman did step away for a moment and leave the books in someone else’s hands–like Louise Simonson, who did the Red Star Storyline I looked at last time around–the books weren’t necessarily better, but they were a refreshing “pinch hit”.  At the same time Simonson was handling Red Star and Cyborg over in New Titans, Steven Grant–he of the Punisher mini-series from the 1980s–was brought on to do several issues of Deathstroke.  I think that Wolfman was out on his honeymoon or something when these issues were due, or at least he felt he needed that break from Total Chaos.  At any rate, the Titans books moved along pretty well during this time, although I think Grant had an easier job than Simonson because he wasn’t dealing with all of the soap opera-type of stuff that had been moving its way through the Titans books.

Deathstroke was at the end of a long storyline that culminated in Cheshire’s destruction of Quarac and Slade’s telling off the U.S. government.  The Cheshire conspiracy had essentially been started back in the very first issue of the series so you are basically talking about nearly two years of story that wrapped up right before Grant came in.  Instead of starting something that was long and involved (which we will get with the “World Tour” storyline that starts with issue #26), Grant does one-offs and two-parters that remind us that the book is meant to first and foremost be an action comic.  I’d say that in ways it is definitely trying to reflect The Punisher but whereas The Punisher is a vigilante with a mission, Deathstroke is a mercenary/hitman and takes jobs.  It serves to further solidify his supporting cast (characters like the weapons supplier Squirrel and a contact named Frannie) and makes for some solid reading.

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Oh my Power Lords …

“Push his secret action button and he’ll move, turn, twist and change from human to the Power Lord.  With powers to save the world from Arkus, The Evil Dictator.  And only you can control him.”

Uh … what?

Our nostalgia for the 1980s and its various toy lines tends to stay with the stuff that is considered “landmark” or awesome:  G.I. Joe, The Transformers, Masters of the Universe, The Thundercats.  But for every one of those toy lines, there’s something that never really leaves a mark.  While I was reading an old comic book the other day, I noticed that the back cover had an ad for Power Lords, which Revell released in 1983.  Based on the timing and the size of the action figure produced, I think that they were trying to compete with He-Man; and the science fiction back story suggests that perhaps they were also taking a shot at Return of the Jedi, which had come out that May.

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Losers Bizhub, Winners Collate.

Though it is more than 25 years old and as a whole a pretty uneven movie, when I think about my job being accurately portrayed (or at least lampooned) in film, I think of the 1984 Nick Nolte film Teachers. One scene, in particular, has always worked and will always work. Mr. Stiles, nicknamed “Ditto” because of the amount of worksheets he produces, is in the main office using an old-fashioned mimeograph when another teacher approaches him and yells, “You’re always hogging that machine!” She then proceeds to squirt ink on his face and smack him around before being physically hauled away.

Now, I’ve never attacked another faculty member with ink, but I definitely can say that there are moments when I have become violently angry at a copier, using several four-letter words that are wholly inappropriate for a classroom but okay for the teacher’s lounge whenever the Risograph craps out in the middle of making 120 copies of my four-page, double-sided worksheet. Most office environments no longer have archaic copying systems like mine and are able to invest in something like a Bizhub; however, your average public school is not most offices. Since we cannot afford the Cadillac of copiers, we duplicate, we collate, we stack, we sort, and we manually staple everything we produce.

I am sure there is no formal statistic for the amount of time teachers spend putting papers together, but ask any teacher and he will tell you that at least a couple of times each marking period, his planning period is spent with the pages of a worksheet packet spread out among the rows of desks in his classroom in the correct order so he can move from page to page and stack then, then staple the stack together and move on to the next. I’ve done this dance myself, both in my classroom and at home and usually it takes me as long as two or three hours to put everything together.

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An Amazin’ Era

The cover to An Amazin’ Era. The images were also used on the promo poster and the tape was also available in Betamax. Yes, Betamax.

When I decided to recount my memories of the Mets’ 1986 season, I thought that I would spend some time on various games I had either watched on television or attended and my experience of being a fan 25 years ago when the team won its last World Series.  It seemed to be going all right, or at least I had some memory of the first home game of the season.  But as I began to leaf through my ’86 Mets stuff, I began to realize that I actually don’t have a lot of memories of that year.

It’s not that I wasn’t a fan or didn’t watch the team on television.  It’s just that I was nine years old and when I wasn’t spending my days playing with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toys, I was watching maybe one or two cartoons each night before going to bed at 8:00.  I got to stay up later on Friday nights, but that was probably until about 9:00 or 9:30, which meant that if Channel 9 was showing a Mets game, I’d only get a few innings in before I was sent off to bed.  There were quite a few nights when I was rushed off to bed in the middle of the fourth with runners on base and Ed Lynch or Dough Sisk trying to get out of yet another jam (Doug Sisk, btw, was one of those pitchers you tried to imitate because he had this crazy overhand delivery … it was the polar opposite of Dan Quisenberry, and every time you tried to “Sisk” a pitch in baseball or wiffle ball, the ball landed a mile behind the catcher). Sure, there were Sunday games, but only if my mother wasn’t making me go outside and do something.

I did, however, have my fair share of Mets merchandise by this point, including a video that would prove as important as the 1985 pennant race in cementing my love for the team.  An Amazin’ Era is a one-hour documentary created to commemorate 25 seasons of Mets baseball, telling the story of the team from its very humble beginnings in 1962 to the anticipated title run in 1986 (it took me a while to figure that out, by the way, because the 25th Anniversary logo said 1962-1986 and if you do the math, that’s 24 seasons but considering that there is no “season zero” that’s actually correct).  It was released in early 1986 and I am pretty sure that I got it for my ninth birthday from either my parents or my Uncle Lou along with Donald Honig’s 25th Anniversary book and the Amazin’ Era poster that had been hanging in the video store and my dad had purchased and had mounted and framed (this poster, btw, would hang on the wall of my bedroom all the way up until the time I left home when I was 22 … it may be in my parents’ attic or basement, I’m not sure). (more…)

Glasnost!!! (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Eleven)

You hate to admit that sometimes a pinch-hitter is exactly what a team needs.  I have watched too many hours of baseball in my life to see the Mets pinch hit with me wanting to pull my hair out at the supposed “intelligence” of that managerial decision.  You know, because I have this awesome track record of knowing so much about and being so awesome at baseball.  Anyway, in my experience, pinch hits usually wind up with someone like Rusty Staub or Julio Franco grounding into a 6-4-3, but every so often Kirk Gibson guts one out of Dodger Stadium.

The covers to New Titans #94-96 created a single image. It's not perfect but it's pretty cool.

I’m not saying that Louise Simonson filling in for Marv Wolfman in New Titans #94-96 was the comics equivalent of Kirk Gibson’s now-legendary homer (nor was it Rusty Staub), but I will say that her three-issue story with pencils by Phil Jiminez was exactly what the title needed.  I will fully admit that the Sell-Out story and creations like Metallik showed that Wolfman was hurting a little and probably feeling a little burned out.  So the editors gave him a break and had Simonson finally get us back to figuring out what might be going on with Cyborg.

If you recall, nearly two years earlier, in New Titans #75, Jericho had detonated Cyborg’s rocket and two issues later the team was in Russia, where Red Star and a team of Russian scientists had rebuilt him.  Unfortunately, Vic Stone is more or less a robot because his mind was completely wiped out, something we have been reminded of either through Gar leading him around by remote control, entire pages of him staring off into nowhere, and the first two issues of the Showcase ’93 series.

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Avant Garde in the Final Frontier

When I look at what my son likes to watch on television and what he likes to play with, I am amazed at how similar we are.  Now, I don’t have a photographic memory from when I was 3-1/2–most memories from that age come in flashes and spurts–but right now he is really into superheroes and Curious George.  I am sure that we’ll have years of superhero awesomeness in our house (and that’s a whole other entry), and Curious George is definitely another topic for another day as well, although I do remember that when I was young I had several of those books that I read and decorated with stickers that told everyone that it belonged to TOM.

But he’s also really interested in space travel and when he first showed interest in it I was excited but I wasn’t sure exactly how to encourage that curiosity about space.  You know, beyond watching space shuttle launches on YouTube and a set of space-themed flash cards my wife found in the dollar bin at Target.  I mean, it’s a bit too early to get him into Star Wars because even that type of violence might be a little much for a kid who gets a little scared when watching Scooby-Doo (besides, I don’t remember seeing Star Wars for the first time until I was about four or five).  And while I’m sure that I will get around to The Saga, I was hard-pressed to find something until I was hanging out in the library at work and came across National Geographic’s Picture Atlas of Our Universe.

With a futuristic-looking spaceship on the cover, Our Universe is one of those library books that when I was in junior high I would check out at least a few times a year in order to pore over its pages, taking in every artist’s rendition and satellite image.  The edition I had in my hands on was from 1992, so it was later than the one I used to check out of the library but still accessible to even a very little kid and still awesome to me.

That space ship on the cover is sort of our guide through the universe, as the book’s narrative takes us on a tour through all of the planets of the solar system including Pluto (and I don’t buy that “Pluto’s not a planet” crap anyway), and beyond.  The beyond includes stars, asteroids, comets, other galaxies and the history of space travel as well as the possibilities for the future.

The title page, which leads to …

Open the book and the title flies at you kind of how the opening credits of Superman do.  But what makes this even more awesome on some level than seeing “Richard Donner” streak across a screen is that Our Universe does the title flight over the course of two spreads with the words nearly off the page on the second spread.  That, and it’s in Avant Garde and Avant Garde is just awesomeness in itself.

After an introduction, we learn about how ancient civilizations viewed the cosmos as well as how our modern scientific theories come to fruition through scientists such as Newton and Galileo.  it’s an encyclopedia’s worth of information being written in a pretty tight narrative that your average and elementary and junior high kid would understand and probably enjoy.  The examples rely on both scientific models and artist’s conceptions, something that’s carried throughout.

… a TWO-PAGE SPREAD OF AVANT GARDE GRANDEUR!!!

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Dance ’til Dawn

When I was a teenager, I spent a little too much time thinking about what my senior prom would be like.  I wouldn’t call it an obsession, but I thought about the big end-of-high-school dance enough to keep my thoughts to myself as if they were some sort of dirty little secret.  If I wasn’t writing about it, that is.  Track down a copy of Collage, the Sayville High School literary magazine from 1995 and you’ll see a story called “Scenes from a High School Prom,” which is some sort of boy-finally-gets-the-girl story that only a lovesick teenager would write, or maybe even dream about (literally, in fact, because it’s based on a dream I once had).   I even incorporated prom (specifically, that story) into a novel I wrote nearly a decade ago; although by then the message wasn’t so much about the fairytale of the perfect prom night but what happens the morning after and the baggage that comes with it.

In real life, I never had baggage concerning my senior prom experience.  In fact, I had a great time mostly due to the fact that I went with someone very cool and avoided most of the bullshit drama that my particular group of friends was involved with at the time (at least for one night — certain friends of mine, if they’re reading this, know that there was drama that I definitely got sucked into during and after our senior year of high school).  So I was never disappointed in my prom night, mainly because I was surprisingly well-adjusted coming out of high school (though I am the first to admit that I was both high-strung and immature … but enough about my issues).  Still, I would be lying if I didn’t say that the prom fantasy definitely factored into my perception of what my prom would be like.

That fantasy, btw?  The one featured in that short story I wrote in senior year creative writing?  Well, boy takes friend on whom he has a crush to prom and at the last chance to finally do it, he tells her he loves her and she says she loves him and they kiss and everyone lives happily ever after.  And where did I get the idea that this is what was going to happen at my prom because this is what happened at every prom?  Usually I would have some long explanation regarding my unpopularity in high school coupled with my testimony of junior high dances being special, magical places; however, all I have to do is say three words:

Dance ’til Dawn.

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