As another year draws to a close, I’ve been reading a lot of list-based blog posts and articles, most of which are about books, movies, and music that I more than likely missed this year because I have no idea how to pay attention to any of it anymore. I miss the glory days of Entertainment Weekly because while I was a regular reader and subscriber, I at least knew what was out there even if I didn’t always see, read, or listen to it. And you could say the same for sports, which I have been watching more of lately but still have a problem following. I don’t know what it is, but since I don’t watch SportsCenter anymore, I can’t seem to remember to check standings or keep up with what’s going on in various leagues. Shit, I can barely tell you who the major players on a number of the teams I follow.
This was always kind of true, even when I was younger. My parents did not get the newspaper and we didn’t have cable, so the only way for me to keep up with scores was the local news; I often missed standings and stats, though. But I knew a lot of what was going on in the world of sports because I had a subscription to Sports Illustrated.
Of course, that’s nothing unique among teenage boys in America in the 1980s and 1990s. Sports Illustrated was one of the most subscribed to magazines in the country and so iconic that getting the cover could be a blessing in a “cover of the Rolling Stone sort of way” or a curse, depending on how your team was doing (Long before the “Madden Curse” was the “SI Cover Curse” where a team or player was on a hot streak, got themselves on the cover of the magazine and immediately started to slump). I can’t tell you how much of it I read on a weekly basis–although it’s not hard for you to guess that I spent a lot of time looking at the swimsuit issue every year–but I can say that it was a formative piece in my “sports education.”
It’s once again the Christmas season and as I’m writing this, I’ve already had one “Christmas” because my parents and sister came to visit last weekend and we opened gifts. There wasn’t anything unusual about the gift giving or anything, although I did find myself chuckling at how often someone opened a package and my mom said, “Well, it was on your wish list.”
When you think about it, it’s an odd thing to say to someone after they have opened a gift. Why explain to them that you bought something that they asked for? I have to think that this is a version of something my parents (and their generation, really) have been doing for decades, which is offering an explanation or detailed story as to the history of the gift or the rationale behind it, maybe so that you won’t make a face or seem ungrateful when you open it with an less than enthusaistic response. And I understand how you can have anxiety over someone opening something they bought for you–I’m in therapy for a reason, after all–and therefore preempt an unwanted response with some sort of explanation, self-deprecating talk, or even pointing out that the gift receipt is attached. But we’ve all been putting together wish lists for years, even before Amazon made it a feature. So why the worry?
I am sure the blame for this doesn’t rest squarely on the shoulders of Amazon, but I can say that having an online wishlist where you simply have to click a button in order to get something that someone wanted instead of planning a trip to Toys R Us like you’re in a heist movie has exascerbated the “greedy asshole” attitude that we all have each Christmas season when we don’t get what we want. And I say that we all have it because we do all have it; it’s just that we all express the attitude in different ways. Some of us thank a relative for the $50 gift card and mentally make a list of things that were on our wish lists that we didn’t get and will now buy; some of us make passive-aggressive comments; and yes, others of us throw temper tantrums.
And when those people get an off-list gift? Holy shit.
I can’t say if I had a good or bad attitude about opening gifts as a kid. I will claim that I was always grateful and polite, but I think that we all know that anyone who claims that is full of shit, so let’s just say that more often than not I had good manners. Then again, most of the time, I got what I wanted and if I didn’t, it was usually something that was either hard to find or a moonshot of a gift (the G.I. Joe aircraft carrier, for example). Usually when I got a gift that wasn’t on my list, it was clothes (which even as a teenager I rarely, if ever, actually asked for) or a small-sized toy or game to keep me busy while at my grandmother’s like travel-sized Hi-Q, some Matchbox cars, or yet another deck of cards. They came from my great aunts and uncles, my parents’ cousins, or friends of the family (whom I rarely, if ever, saw) and even as a kid, I knew that my parents probably didn’t mail them a photocopy of my Christmas list every year, so I just rolled with it. Besides, surprises were fun and every once in a while, an off-list gift would wind up becoming a personal favorite.
Like what? Well, I’m so glad you asked.
In the spirit of the season, and because I really have nothing better to write about right now, I’ve decided to do a rundown of some of the most random and most cherished “off-list” Christmas gifts that I received from the time I was a kid until the time I was a teenager.
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?”
Pop Culture Affidavit 