A corporation is blasting and drilling for oil and if they don’t find it at Site A, they’re going to dynamite a Site B and that means killing Santa! Take a trip back with me to North Pole City in 1984 as I review the TV movie The Night They Saved Christmas starring Jacklyn Smith and Art Carney.
I’ve been asking myself the same question for years around the holidays: When the heck did “My Favorite Things” become a Christmas song?
If I were to turn on the all-Christmas-all-the-time radio station right now, I’d probably hear at least one version of “My Favorite Things” before we hit another commercial block courtesy of Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, Michael Bublé, and it’s always puzzled me. I associate the song with The Sound of Music, not the holidays, so why must I be forced to endure weeks of this radio station playing a song from a movie I can’t stand.
Now, before you say anything, yes, I do just avoid the song when possible; in fact, I’ve stopped listening to that station altogether because their selection of songs got so milquetoast and repetitive that I couldn’t take it anymore. There’s a limit to the amount of Pentatonix one can ingest before it becomes toxic, and I think if I heard Andy Williams sing “Doop de doo and dickery dock and don’t forget to put your sock” (or whatever the lyrics are), I was going to lose it.
Anyway, back to “My Favorite Things” and why a song from a music about singing children resisting the Anschluss became a Christmas stable. In the original Broadway production by Rogers and Hammerstein, the song appears in act one as a duet between Maria and Mother Abbess just prior to Maria being sent to oversee the Von Trapp brood. There is no Santa Claus, no Christmas tree, no holly, no mistletoe; the only Christian imagery is the fact that the two characters are nuns. Which is strong Christian imagery but not Christmas imagery. Hence the mystery. Was it always meant to be a Christmas song? Did the capitalist machine decide that a lyrical wish list was good for encouraging rampant consumerism during the holidays? Did Andy Williams simply need another song for a Christmas album? Or is the association more organic?
The answer, as it turns out, is easy to find because “My Favorite Things” has its own Wikipedia page and the source for its holiday-ness is the person who is most associated with The Sound of Music: Julie Andrews. While Mary Martin originated the role on Broadway in 1959, Andrews played Maria in the 1965 film, which would win Best Picture and Best Director for Robert Wise (director of such films as West Side Story, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Whether or not you like the film or her performance, Julie Andrews is undeniably iconic as Maria. But it wasn’t her performance in that movie that made the song a holiday song, it was Andrews’ performance on a 1961 Christmas special of The Garry Moore Show on CBS that did it.
Knowing that, should I stop my pissy attitude whenever I hear the song come on and accept that “My Favorite Things” qualifies as a Christmas song? Yes. After all, songs have become associated with events many times throughout history even if they were not directly about or for them. “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, for instance, became a World War I standard even though it was not directly written for or about the war. So, I guess Maria’s raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens can provide holiday cheer.
With that in mind, I decided to take this a little further and opened up Spotify to take a look at five different versions of the song, some of which are known for putting their own spin on its tune.
Set at the end of the 1980s, Déjà View is a coming of age novel with a supernatural elements, and joining me for this episode is its author, Michael Thomas Perone. We sit down to talk about his novels Déjà View and Danger Peak and the inspirations behind them.
My trilogy of nostalgia-fueled movies comes to an end with a look at The Big Chill, Lawrence Kasdan’s iconic 1983 film that was a touchstone for the Baby Boomer generation. Along for the ride with me is Michael Bailey, who talks about the film and its impact on us as children of those Boomers as well as the movie’s best-selling soundtrack.
One of the things you have to remember about Friends when it premiered is that the six members of the cast were made up of five “Hey, It’s That Guy!” actors and Courteney Cox, and wasn’t wholly unique in its presentation–Fox had been doing Living Single at the time and NBC had hits with thirty-something sitcoms like Seinfeld and Mad About You, so aging the main characters down but giving them the “adult sitcom” plots that had worked for the other shows made sense. I can’t remember if the show was a hit at first because I picked it up about halfway through its first season; I’d been watching My So-Called Life on ABC and returned to NBC after that show’s cancellation. Once I did, however, I recognized every one of the cast members from other shows: Jennifer Aniston had been on the short-lived Fox sketch show The Edge, David Schwimmer had been on The Wonder Years; Matt LeBlanc had played Kelly’s boyfriend Vinny on Married … With Children (and its spinoffs), and Lisa Kudrow had been and still was playing the ditzy waitress on Mad About You.
And then there was Matthew Perry, whom had shown up in a number of places over the past several years, especially on television. I’d seen him as a tragic, pressured rich kid on Beverly Hills, 90210; as Christina Applegate’s put-upon boyfriend in Dance ‘Til Dawn (which I reviewed in episode 136 of the podcast); as Ami Dolenz’ skeezy prom date in She’s Out of Control (a movie I should look at in the future); and Carol Seaver’s dead boyfriend on Growing Pains. But most importantly, I knew him as the guy from Boys Will Be Boys.
A retool of a sitcom called Second Chance, Boys Will Be Boys debuted on the Fox network on January 16, 1988 and starred Perry (then credited as “Matthew L. Perry”) as Chazz Russell, a typical suburban teen in California whose best friend is an Italian greaser named “Booch”. Chaz is the nice play-by-the-rules guy with a solid head on his shoulders while Booch is a borderline criminal. And if this sounds familiar to you, that’s becuase the creators were going with the Richie Cunningham/Fonzie dynamic. Rounding out the cast were Randee Heller (the mom from the Karate Kid movies) as Chazz’ mom, and Demian Slade (the paperboy from Better Off Dead) as Eugene, who I think was the slightly younger neighbor (it’s not defined in the episode I watched).
The intro is pretty much everything you’d expect from a generic sitcom on the Fox network in 1988: T&A shots, a synth and sax theme song, some “hijinks” taken from episodes, and … well, I don’t know how to describe the title card and camera effects for this montage, but it’s got 1988 written all over it:
A number of the show’s 11 episodes (it was cancelled after the end of its first season) are available on YouTube (because really, who is going to come for the copyright on this thing), so I watched the premiere, which is typically formulaic. As he’s cleaning up in the garage after mowing the lawn, Chazz is approached by his hot new neighbor, Debbie (who’s wearing as little clothing as any extra on a Fox show would wear back then), who wants to borrow his weed whacker. They wind up making a date for him to “show her the sights” around California. But then a problem arises: Chazz can’t get the car because mom needs it. So Booch steps in to help, and with Chazz’ $500 secures … a Corvette. That we know from the jump is stolen, and even Chazz thinks so. But then Debbie walks into his garage and drools over the car, so he decides to take it out for just one night.
Of course, the two of them get thrown in jail and are placed in a holding cell with a bunch of tough biker gang-looking guys (I swear that there was just a pool of these actors for sitcoms back in the 1980s) and one pleasant-enough looking guy in a suit. And if you’ve watched enough dumb sitcoms like I have, you know that the guy in the suit is the most dangerous, which he proves to be when he tells the boys that he’s been accused of killing seven people but it wasn’t him and was “Mr. Bunny” who did it. Mr. Bunny, by the way, is a hand puppet, so we’ve got the Fox sitcom version of the Batman villain The Ventriloquist and Scarface (even though I think this predates them). Anyway, mom bails them out and later on she and Chazz have a heart to heart talk and the episode ends.
When I was 10, my friend Tom told me about this show a few episodes into its run, and since it was on at 8:00 on Saturday night, I would be allowed to stay up and watch it (I had a pretty strict 8:00 bedtime back then). Of course, it was on against The Facts of Life, a show that I watched on the regular because of its daily reruns on the same channel. So I’m pretty sure that I didn’t pick up Boys Will Be Boys until later that spring when its timeslot changed to 8:30 after Fox’s 8:00 airing of Family Double Dare (oh, and that’s a whole other tangent and blog entry, let me tell you), and that meant I only watched about four or five episodes of the show after it went off the air that May. For some reason, I remember the two of us having arguments over whether Boys Will Be Boys was a better show than The Facts of Life, which are the kind of stupid arguments you have when you’re 10 years old. I’m sure our attention shifted to action movies or the Mets or something pretty quickly. I know I forgot about it and would only think of it when Perry showed up in something else I watched; in fact, I’m sure he was my very first “Hey, It’s That Guy!” actor.
Watching the show again, 35 years later, I obviously don’t see a “brilliant but canceled” or “hidden gem” of a television show. But I do see where we’d eventually get to Chandler Bing. From the very first scene, Perry gives his character the same neuroitc insecurity that his Friends character had, even if Chandler’s sarcasm isn’t there. Perry’s physical humor and his reactions to the situations and dialogue in the episode foreshadow his comedic acting skill; in other words, he stood out enough on a crappy show to be someone to remember.
Hearing of his passing this weekend was sad for a number of reasons. Having been a fan of Friends through pretty much its entire run, I was well aware of Perry’s struggles; moreover, it’s always sad whenever an actor from my generation passes on when they’re too young to do so. Perry had the familiarity that a lot of television actors (especially those from sitcoms) do, and while I can’t say that I considered him a “friend,” it definitely feels like a classmate or someone from the neighborhood is gone.
The Baltimore Comic-Con was held the weekend of September 8-10 and once again Tom and Brett were there. Join us as we talk about what we saw and what we bought; plus, interviews with Joe Staton and John K. Snyder III.
Music in this episode is “Retro Arcade” by Beat Mekanik and is used under Creative Commons via the Free Music Archive.
My look at nostalgia-themed movies continues! This time around, Amanda joins me to sit down and talk about a formative movie for the two of us: Dazed and Confused, the 1993 Richard Linklater film that takes place during one night in 1976. We look at the movie, its soundtrack, and the book published alongside it as well as share our memories about watching it many times.
It’s the first of three episodes that look at the nostalgia subgenre of films, and I’m starting with the granddaddy of all of them, 1973’s American Graffiti. Directed by George Lucas, this is a seminal film and soundtrack that takes a look back at the teenage years of a generation, and along with me for this ride is The Fire and Water Network’s own Rob Kelly. So get comfortable on that tuck-and-roll upholstery, pour yourself some Old Harper, and crank up the jukebox as we ask “Where were you in ’62?”
“We had no timeouts. It was a belt and you better not cry for long.”
“Most of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
“We were the latch key generation.”
I’ve been seeing a lot of this on TikTok over the past couple of years regarding Generation X, especially when it comes to pushing back against the current generations of twentysomethings and teenagers. With all of us being middle-aged, it seems like thumping our chests about our childhoods as a response to getting dragged (or Gen Z TikTokers wondering why we aren’t getting dragged) is a favorite sport. And why not? It shows our inherent strength and our ability to be resilient as well as get things done, especially when nobody is looking. And for a generation who spent its formative years either being ignored or dismissed as “slackers”, it’s as good a response as any to our parents and their generation, who decided that we were a vast disappointment and our younger Millennial siblings were worth more attention.
An image from Reality Bites. I chose this because it is literally the image that accompanies the “Generation X” entry on Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
There is something that really bugs me about this, though. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have as much of a hardscrabble, feral, latch-key kid life as some of my friends and peers, but Gen Xers posting videos where they say these things makes them sound like the Baby Boomers we have all grown to loathe. Isn’t “We were feral” just a different version of telling the kids that you walked uphill both ways through a foot of snow in order to get to school? I could have sworn that at some point, we told ourselves we weren’t got to pull that sort of toxic shit when we got to be our parents’ age. But here I am, seeing it on TikTok, in memes, and in copy/pasted Facebook ramblings from former classmates. Why are these people acting like they survived The Great Depression when they were simply a bunch of middle-class suburban white kids who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s?
Well, to answer this question, I’m going to break down what I quoted at the top of this post, starting with …
“We were the fuck around and find out generation.”
This is one I actually like, although credit where credit is due, we weren’t the original “fuck around and find out” generation. Our Greatest Generation grandparents, after all, fought a war against Fascism; equally important to our society were their older siblings, the Silent Generation. That generation–which actually makes up a good portion of the older set of Generation X’s parents–started or led the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s. We learned from their example that risks were worth taking. Now, some of our risks were mundane shit like flying over concrete on a skateboard without wearing a helmet or any other protection, but many other risks we took were significant. My peers and the older members of my generation have been vocal for environmentalism, LGBTQIA+ rights, and a number of liberal and progressive causes and reforms since we came of age during and at the end of the Reagan era. We’re not without our problems, of course, but being shoved aside by Boomers who sold out and were fucking around without a care of what would happen to future generations led to us calling upon other past examples and taking a stand,. We are passing that on to our Generation Z children.
But then there’s …
“We were the latch key generation.”
“We raised ourselves.”
“We were the last generation of feral children.”
Did we forget that “latch key kids” was literally a “concern topic” for talk shows like Donahue back in the 1980s? Now, I didn’t “raise myself” and in fact could have done with more independence because I have a major permission complex, but these statements aren’t always the flexes people think they are. The lack of parental supervision for many of us contributed to our resourcefulness as a generation, but forced maturity was not entirely beneficial. Some of my friends in junior high and high school spent a lot of time “raising” their younger siblings and keeping their households running smoothly. In most cases, that was out of economic necessity and I can’t faulty their parents for working as hard as they did to keep everyone’s head above water, but let’s recognize that this made childhood tougher and shorter. I wonder if some of my friends wish they had some of that time back or if they have even fully processed it as they raise their own kids. Which brings me to …
“We had no time outs. It was the belt and you better not cry for long.”
In defense of the TikTokers, a number of videos acknowledged how fucked up this was. In one video, a woman addressed how a lot of us have never fully come to terms with this because we suppressed our feelings and solved it by “moving on”. This led to us having pretty dark views on the world as well as very dark senses of humor (which I think is a slightly positive side effect). But I’ve also seen this expressed a number of times on social media as a point of pride and each time I see it that way, I’m puzzled because in my view, it’s not. My generation was one of the last where spanking and other forms of physical punishment were considered acceptable. I’m not saying that Millennial and Gen Z-ers didn’t get hit, but during my formative years there was a massive debate over spanking that led to it falling out of favor and largely out of practice.
As it should have. Hitting your kids is horrible and I’m not going to debate it. I have memories of getting yelled at and smacked with a wooden spoon as a kid. The hitting stopped early on, but getting yelled stuck around for a while. I don’t think I have fully processed all of it and I can’t tell you if I am ready to do a deep dive into it with my therapist either. I don’t classify is as abuse even though it was traumatic, because some people I grew up with were actually abused by their parents in an “I’ve seen this on an After-School Special” sort of way. These are the types of things that leave scars that never fully heal because when it came to our mental health as a generation, nothing ever got addressed. We were taught “not to talk about these things.” And therapy? Well, that might reflect poorly on our parents, so it never entered the conversation. Even if we wanted to get help, we didn’t know how. This led to …
“Many of us drank or smoked by the time we were 14.”
I will come out and say that this was never me. I didn’t have my first beer until I was 17 and aside from a couple of cigars in college, never smoked anything. Okay, I tried pot once and didn’t like it, but my dad did me a solid by quitting smoking back in 1987. However, my teetotaling as a teenager was because of a combination of not being popular enough to drink and being deathly afraid of the consequences of getting caught drinking. There’s more to that sentence that I’m not going to get into; instead, I’m going to address the statement above because while it is a bit of a brag, it has a very sharp other edge.
Drinking has been hugely glorified in television and movies for decades, with the party scene being a teen movie staple. With this glorification came a lot of destructive behavior and the amplification of toxic masculinity and rape culture, especially in the Eighties. As the Eighties became the Nineties, we learned more about rape and more women began to speak up about their experiences, but my generation still has a horrible track record when it comes to sexual violence. In fact, the current generation of youth appears to be learning from our mistakes; there’s certainly work to be done, but what I see on a regular basis has me optimistic.
But if we weren’t chasing the Platonic ideal of Animal House’s toga party, many in my generation were drinking and smoking by the time they were 14 because they were self-medicating. Like I said, nobody landed in therapy, and when they did it was for substance abuse because they had turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with their mental health issues. Some of my classmates went through rehab before they graduated, some eventually got help as adults, others wound up dying way too young, and a number of them continue to struggle. While I am sure the majority of my peers have a healthy relationship with alcohol, bragging about getting drunk at 14 simplifies this to the point where it ignores the very serious issues. But I think that for some of these TikTokers, it’s kind of the point because of one more line I want to discuss …
“There were no safe spaces. There were no trigger warnings.”
Now I know why my Spidey Sense tingled when watching these videos. I’m not sure what the political leanings are of every TikToker I watched, so I can’t lump them all under one umbrella …
… BUT …
… complaining about trigger warnings and safe spaces has become a favorite pastime of right-wing trolls for the better part of a decade. The image they like to conjure up is a kaleidoscope-haired, multi-pierced, multi-gendered, pride-flag-bedecked student at Berkeley or Oberlin frothing at the mouth about a professor assigning a short story where the main character gets a hangnail without warning them about said hangnail because reading about the hangnail made them curl up in the fetal position as they flashed back to the time they got a hangnail in the third grade.
I’m kidding.
Sort of.
Right-wingers are fucking insane when it comes perpetuating fallacies about the fragility of young people who refuse to go along with their ideals, and a number of these Fox News-viewing, QAnon-following choads are Gen Xers. This should surprise absolutely nobody; despite MTV’s efforts in the early 1990s to frame Generation X as largely liberal, we’re not a monolith because no generation is. But I can still be disappointed by the number of people my age or slightly older who agree with Tucker Carlson or Alex jones and were led that way by social media algorithms. I’m not being ridiculous; it’s not hard to go down the rabbit hole that begins with “Kids these days …” and ends with a membership in a Moms for Liberty Facebook group.
To quote one of our generation’s heroes: It’s a trap.
I mean, all of it really is. Generational discord is a construct that exists for media hits. I have fond memories of the decades in which I grew up and I love reveling in nostalgia for the simplicity of my childhood, especially on the days where the problems of the world are overwhelming. We should all be able to do that. But as a generation, it’s our duty to avoid the trap it presents. We’ve done a good job at starting to break cycles of toxic behavior and culture; let’s be the generation to break the cycle of losing perspective in favor of mythology and ego.
On June 3rd, Chris Honeywell, one of the founders of the Two True Freaks podcasting network, and his roommate Trudy lost their home due to a fire. Chris, Trudy, and Bernice the Cat are all fine and healthy, but they lost everything but the clothes on their backs. Chris has always been one to give of his time and effort, and has provided many of us with hours upin hours of podcast entertainment, so now it’s up to us to help him. While their belongings were insured, there’s no guarentee how much of the value they will get, or when that check will arrive, so we at TTF wanted to set up this fundraiser to get them the money they need to get back on their feet. Any donation, even as little as $1, will go towards helping Chris and Trudy out during this difficult time. We thank you in advance for your generosity.
Please donate and spread the word. Chris is not only one hell of a podcaster, but he’s an amazing person. Anything you can do will be greatly appreciated.
Pop Culture Affidavit 