television

Revolution!

Stephanie Kaye next to one of the many "Out of the way Stephanie Kaye" posters that were up in the halls of DJH. Yes, they made posters. Photo from Degrassi Online.

Lately, when I’ve rewatched old Degrassi Junior High episodes, I’ve been marveling not only how realistic it is but how typical the plots seem to be.  Not cliche, mind you, but a lot of the episodes seem to be what I would expect from the junior high/high school drama genre:  drugs, sex, alcohol stories that are just “hard” enough so that you can picture a person of that age dealing with the issues.

Furthermore, when it comes to character development there are expected outcomes to the way certain characters act or consequences for their actions, even if the consequences come a few episodes down the road.  In the first season of DJH, Stephanie Kaye was one of the spotlight characters, or at least one of the characters that I remember being so prominent.  Her big struggle through that season, which detailed the first half of her eighth grade year, was how to deal with being popular while becoming more mature.  The last episode I discussed, “Best Laid Plans” addressed that, especially how she wore provocative clothing while at school yet dressed “down” at home.  We also saw how she treated her younger step-brother, Arthur, like crap.

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The Routine

A "fall in the suburbs" shot of a brother and sister that's worth some caption about Americana, but I can't think of one.

In the middle of my sister’s wedding last month, I walked over to her and said jokingly, “Now we are so happy, we do the dance of joy!”  She finished the sentence along with me, as it’s one of the many weird in-joked the two of us have, most of which have something to dow ith the countless hours of crappy 1980s-era sitcoms that we grew up watching in syndication because my father was too cheap to spring for cable. 

It is entirely fitting, by the way, that I turn to sitcoms when I think about what growing up with my sister was like.  I know brothers and sisters who are weirdly close, or have one of those relationships where the brother may as well be another father.  I also know brothers who are perfect confidants and had greeting-card upbringings.  While Nancy and I had annoyingly ordinary childhoods, we weren’t exactly the Cleavers of the Bradys.  On some level I guess you could say we were the Cunninghams, even though my parents didn’t have an older child who mysteriously disappeared (I’ve always thought that Chuck Cunningham was an early anti-war activist and a member of the communist party so Mr. C. drove him to the Canadian border under the cover of night because while he loved his son, he was proud of his country and didn’t want to face the humiliation of HUAC) and none of my friends were cool guys who lived above my parents’ garage.  Besides, we didn’t really grow up watching Happy Days unless WPIX was rerunning it in the afternoons.

No, we were more accustomed to vegging out in front of stuff like Growing Pains, The Wonder Years, Full House, or Charles in Charge.  Full House, especially, stuck with us over the yars because it gave my sister her longest-running nickname (unless you count the Wonder Years reference “butthead”).

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The Best Laid Plans

The Degrassi Junior High kids. Wheels and Stephanie are third and fourth from the left.

I didn’t have cable television when i was growing up.

To anyone older than me, this is not uncommon, but to people my age and younger (especially those that I have taught), not having cable and growing up with only seven channels is a completely foreign concept.  I am sure that some would even consider it child abuse that I didn’t get to watch the latest Stryper video when it ran 20 times a day in 1990, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter.  Oh, I suppose it did because I missed out out on most of The State and Remote Control when they first aired and several years’ worth of VMAs.  But for every video I didn’t watch, I caught another, way more important show, and that was Degrassi Junior High.

I don’t remember the exact day when I first watched Degrassi Junior High.  I know that I was in the fifth grade and it was probably in the winter or spring of 1988 because by the time school was out that June, I had already watched several episodes.  What I do remember, though, is that I more or less stumbled onto it because I was bored one afternoon and had tired of seeing commercials for the Craft-Matic adjustable bed on channel 11 between reruns of 1970s-era television shows.  So I flipped around and when I landed on channel 13–PBS–there was a scene of a boy and his father walking along a beach and talking about sex.  That was, as I discovered later, the midpoint of the first season episode “The Best Laid Plans,” which originally aired in March 1987.

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It’s like West Side Story but with trains!

My son turns three today and while I actually did buy him a real birthday present (a NY Mets shirt–gotta start him early!), I wanted to write an entry about something in pop culture that he likes.  Now, three-year-olds are not exactly discerning consumers.  He’ll sit and stare at the most random crap for at least ten minutes before he gets distracted by one of his toys.  However, since last Christmas, he definitely has had a love of Thomas and Friends, the British-produced, PBS-aired television show where model trains get into all sorts of adventures.  He has several of the motorized train toys and a mile or two of tracks which I can configure several hundred ways.  He’s also got several DVDs, most of which are collections of various episodes from the series.

One of his favorite DVDs, Calling All Engines, is a “full-length” episode of the show, meaning that it’s an entire hour as opposed to several stories in the span of 30-60 minutes.  The story is pretty simple–of course, it has to be considering it’s geared toward preschoolers–a new airport is going to be build on the Island or Sodor (where every episode takes place and which has weather patterns so varied that it must take up half of the Western Hemisphere) and Sir Topham Hatt wants all of his engines to aid in construction.  The steam engines get to work but them run afoul of the deisel engines.  They all fight, get reprimanded after nothing gets done, but then pull together at the end.

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Fleet of DOOM!

Clearly, the Voltron cartoon series and the associated toys are a benchmark in my childhood, the first time that I ever felt I’d “discovered” something really cool, something that I hadn’t been told to like by commercials.  And as evidenced by the lengths I went to get the lion Voltron and the fact that I was one of a few people so fully vested in the cartoon that I also had the vehicle Voltron, I was one of those kids who watched the show religiously, even when both cartoons had cycled completely through and WPIX began re-airing the original lion stories.

But as Voltron fans, my second-grade friends and I were not fully satisfied by what we were seeing on television.  After a slew of lion stories , what seemed like an interminable amount of vehicle stories, and endless debates on which Voltron could win in a fight, we wanted a crossover.  I mean, He-Man and She-Ra could do it (and later on in the 1980s, G.I. Joe and The Transformers would do it) so why not the lion and vehicle Voltrons?

In 1986, we got our wish with an extra-long episode entitled Fleet of Doom, although I don’t know if most of my friends knew it.  I first learned about the crossover episode when my dad took me to Video Empire one day and my sister and I spent a few minutes combing through the children’s section looking for something other than the same five Disney cartoon tapes we’d rented since the day the store opened in 1984.  There, two shelves above my head, were two or three Voltron video boxes.  I jumped up and got them down, then studied the synopsis on the back of each (I have loved reading the back of videocassette/DVD boxes since I first stepped into a video store).  Two of them were shows I had already seen—the original five-parter and some of the episodes hat immediately followed—but the third was called “Fleet of Doom” and was about a team-up between both the lion and the vehicle Voltron.

I was sold.  I went home, watched it, and apparently remembered very little about it because when I watched it last week (thank you, Netflix) it really felt like I had never seen it before.  I mean, even with American Ninja, which I hadn’t seen in 25 years either, I at least had some flashbacks to when I originally watched it.  Fleet of Doom?  Nothing.  No memory of what it was about; honestly, I can see why.

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Don’t wake me up if I’m dreamin’

The original lineup: Matt, Tiffani, Sly, Jenny, and Tony

You know, I was all set to write about something else (specifically, Commando) when of all people, Jimmy Fallon completely knocked me on my ass.  More specifically, he inspired me … and while you probably don’t know much about me, I will tell you that I am not easily inspired.

Last week, Jimmy Fallon reuinted the cast of California Dreams.

I cannot express how awesome this made me feel when I was surfing around the internet last night and came across the reunion video.  Watching it, I get that there’s a huge joke going on here — Fallon is definitely doing this for the silliness of it all (oh, and because he couldn’t reunite the cast of Saved By The Bell) and when they are performing the cast has a “Man, this was so lame” look on their faces.

And yeah, when it was first on television back in the early 1990s, it was kind of lame.  Airing on Saturdays in the late morning (around noon or so, I think) after SBTB, California Dreams was the story of a group of teenagers that had a rock band.  In fact, the show was created by Peter Engel, the same guy responsible for SBTB, who probably saw an opportunity after the show became popular and aired that Zack Attack episode.

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