television

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…)

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…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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”).

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)