Superman and the Image problem

Recently, screenwriter Max Landis (Chronicle) posted a video to YouTube where he took down the 1992-1993 Death and Return of Superman storyline (it was his commentary accompanied by several famous friends playing roles). It’s snarky, mean-spirited, and wildly inaccurate, and the best rebuttals have been from Michael Bailey and Jeffery Taylor, the guys behind a great podcast called From Crisis to Crisis: A Superman Podcast (their mission is to cover every Superman comic published between 1986 and 2006 and right now, they are covering this very storyline).

Nothing more needs to be said about Landis’ video, but it did remind me of another time Superman’s death was used as a springboard for commentary on the state of the comics industry. What’s funny is that like Landis’ commentary it comes off more as a poor reflection of the commentator rather than the story. You see, in the world of comics, there are great stories, great artists, and then there are those who just think they’re great. Sometimes, they intersect in a way that at the moment seems important but looking back borders on the ridiculous.

Spawn #10 was written by Dave Sim as part of a four month-long string of issues that were written by notable guest writers (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Sim, and Frank Miller) and penciled by series creator Todd McFarlane. Moore, Gaiman, and Miller’s issues served to introduce new characters nad help build the Spawn mythos; Sim’s spot in issue #10 seems to serve the Image Comics mythos. It’s a piece of meta-fiction about the nature of creativity that is a reinforcement of the attitude that McFarlane and his Image co-founders had when they left Marvel twenty years ago.

In the story, after the conclusion of the previous issue where Spawn touched the mystical staff of that issue’s villain, Angela (a move that “removed” him from the continuity long enough to tell issue #10’s story), he meets up with Sim’s Aardvark, Cerebus, who teaches the hero a lesson about creator-owned characters and the happiness that comes with being able to have the rights to what you make. It even ends with “Spawn is trademark and copyright Todd McFarlane/Cerebus is trademark and copyright Dave Sim FOREVER” written in the same way it would be airbrushed onto a license plate Gina made for Tommy’s IROC.

Pithy comments aside, the most important few pages in the story are in the beginning. Spawn walks down a dungeon hall where men stand with hoods over their heads and their hands tied behind their backs while several costumed hands reach out for his help. Many of the hands are identifiable (in fact, shortly after this issue came out, Wizard–never one to miss a chance to promote an Image comic–had a contest where they challenged you to name all of the characters displayed on that panel), and the hooded men with their hands behind their backs are obviously the creative teams of those various heroes’ books. It is Sim and McFarlane’s comic book version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, although I think that the Greeks were a little more subtle.

The biggest point made in the whole sequence, however, comes not from the multitude of hero hands reaching out from inside their prison, but from a single hero who tells Spawn that he is the “original hero.” In a two-page sequence, he offers Spawn his power because he claims that Spawn has the ability to free all of the prisoners. Our protagonist takes it, and fires, but it is to no avail, as the villain (a version of Spawn’s archenemy The Violator wearing a dress made of money) claims he is too powerful and there will be no justice for those creators because even that “original hero” has succumbed to his will. This is confirmed when the hero utters one word: Doomsday. (more…)

Jewel-cased Memories

And this is only A-H of my CD collection.

One of the most practical gifts I received for Christmas was a CD book the size of a photo album. It’s made out of faux leather and holds about 375 CDs, which is about half of my music collection. I’m going to need another one at some point, but I was able to clean out half of the dresser that houses my CDs and I did something that I have never been able to do in nearly twenty years of owning compact discs: I threw away my jewel cases.

That sounds completely ridiculous because I am sure that there are plenty of people who were throwing jewel cases out the moment they bought their CDs a decade ago and didn’t feel the need to write about it. Then again, I have that hoarder’s mentality where I hold on to some things because I feel like I am going to miss out on something, which is why I never threw out my jewel cases the first time I had one of these large CD books fourteen years ago, or during my twenties when I hauled box after box of CDs up and down flights of stairs during move after move.

So why pull the trigger now? Well, as I was making my Christmas list, I realized that I had absolutely no CDs on it. I certainly had been listening to a lot of music, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had purchased a new CD (which, after some thinking, I realized was The Gaslight Anthem’s American Slang), and the dresser where I keep the CDs was taking up so much space in my office that I wanted to get rid of it. I began with the start of the alphabet, or ABBA Gold, and in a few hours found myself staring at a pile of empty jewel cases on the floor.

It didn’t seem right that they—along with the CD booklets—were so disposable. If this were a record collection, I would have been carefully preserving the album sleeves and covers as much as the albums themselves. But so many of the jewel cases were cracked and missing pieces that preservation wasn’t exactly going to be an issue. And I don’t think that years from now, a guy on Antiques Roadshow will be telling me that my copy of Ride the Lightning would be worth more if the jewel case didn’t have a crack in it. (more…)

Man vs. Machine (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twenty-Two)

When I finally return to the New Titans, I’ll be taking a look at a storyline called “Terminus: the Final Fate of Cyborg.” At the time, it was a long-awaited story because Cyborg had been blown up in a rocket to Russia at the end of New Titans #75 and then rebuilt in New Titans #77. We’re heading into issue #104 at this point, so that means that Vic Stone has been a vegetable for something like 2-1/2 years, which is a long time for a character whose story is so integral to the Titans as a team.

I have to admit, though, when I was a teenager first collecting the New Teen Titans and New Titans, I really wasn’t the biggest Cyborg fan. Robin/Nightwing was obviously my favorite character and I also wanted all of the issues that involved Terra and Deathstroke, which are all issues I’ll get to in a few months. I mean, I bought the issues that focused on Cyborg but that’s because I wanted as many issues as I could.

Or that I could find, anyway.

Up until I was about 15, I had rarely been to a comic book store outside of Amazing Comics or Sun Vet Coin and Stamp. Sure, there was the occasional trip to that comic book store in Huntington, but it was true that for the most part, I had bought just about every Titans back issue that Bob had in the bins and with the exception of ordering back issues through Mile High Comics (which usually charged a pretty penny for them) didn’t have any other ways to get comics. In the summer of 1992, however, I flew down to Fort Lauderdale to spend a week with my friend Chris, who was as much of an X-Men fan at the time as I was a Titans fan.

Armed with a stack of Uncanny X-Men back issues for him–mostly stuff from the mid-170s, which were all part of the “From the Ashes” trade–and a hefty amount of cash I had saved from the job I had working at a stationery story on weekend mornings, I hit Florida and went comics shopping at his LCS, which I don’t remember the name of except that he referred to it as “Phil’s.” Phil had an enormous backstock, especially of Titans and I was able to complete most of my collection of the 1980 series (I think I had to track down #2, and #34, and if I wanted to, the reprints issues). Among those were most of Cyborg’s story before the Trigon storyline in the first issues of the Baxter series.

That story begins all the way in the New Teen Titans’ very first appearance in DC Comics Presents #26 (a book I got for all of a buck at a comics show back in the early 1990s). The premise of that story is that Raven is planting dreams in Robin’s head that involve him fighting alongside the New Teen Titans, a team that includes herself, Starfire, and Cyborg, none of whom he knows at that point. While Starfire is simply a “golden girl” flying around and shooting bolts from her fingers and Raven is at the center of the mystery, We see that something has made Cyborg angry because when they defeat an interdimensional monster at STAR Labs, he starts yelling at one of the scientists, who happens to be his father.

That’s all we get for the most part, but it establishes his character as two things: a very powerful Cyborg and an angry kid. I’d venture to say that at a glance, the early Vic Stone stories are that of an angry black kid and he would have been a complete stereotype if Wolfman and Perez hadn’t slowly given hints to his origin throughout the first year or so of the book before revealing it completely in the first issue of the Titans mini-series, Tales of the New Teen Titans (not to be confused with Tales of the Teen Titans). In New Teen Titans #7, we see Vic’s father, Silas Stone, again as he has designed Titans Tower and had it built and then reveals he is dying. The two get a chance to reconcile before he does pass, which is supposed to show that he hasn’t lost all his humanity because we had just been treated to a brief summary of how Vic was mutilated in a lab accident and his father built the Cyborg body to save him. (more…)

Three O’Clock High

My movie viewing history as a child and adolescent seems to have two phases. Starting from when I was very young, I have always loved science fiction and action movies. That shouldn’t be a surprise, considering I was born the year Star Wars came out and spent the better part of my youth watching cartoons that were used to sell action and sci-fi based toys. My father, his friend (my “uncle”) Chuck, my Uncle Lou, and quite a number of other family members happily fostered my love for those things through buying me toys and making me copies of those movies, or not balking at the fact that in the fourth and fifth grade I was watching R-rated movies.

But as I went through high school, I began to become more interested in another genre, which was the teen movie. I’d known about the types of movies for a while and had owned a copy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off since it first came out on video, but before I graduated, I had probably seen every movie starring John Cusack or directed by John Hughes. The person or people who deserve the credit for this are not the same who got me into a galaxy far, far away, because none of them absolutely loved Say Anything … the way I did (though nobody seemed to think it was weird that a 15-year-old boy wanted to rent Porky’s). I lay the blame for my love of the teen movie genre at someone I didn’t even know: the programming director of WPIX.

Now, here is where I probably should talk about how I first watched Three O’Clock High on a random Saturday afternoon on WPIX and that prompted me to rent the uncensored version of the movie and from there I was completely hooked on this little gem of a film, but that would be a lie. That’s because I actually saw Three O’Clock High in the theater, which should have been a sign that I would become fully ensconced in teen angst flicks within a few years, but in all honesty I went to see it with my friend Tom on Columbus Day weekend of 1987 because we had nothing better to do that day and the commercial had been running on television for the better part of a couple of weeks, so we asked my dad for some money and rode our bikes up to Sayville Theater to take in a very cheap matinee.

My dad was on the phone when I asked him for the money, although I wasn’t deliberately timing it that way because the cost of a matinee for two people at Sayville Theater in those days came in under ten bucks, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to get the money. He reached for his wallet and began describing what he thought was the movie we were going to see: a guy has to protect a daughter and she’s in danger, which was the plot of the Scott Glenn version of Man on Fire. I corrected him and he stopped telling my neighbor what the movie was about and looked at us incredulously.

“You’re going to see the one about the fight?” he asked.

“Uh … yeah,” I said.

My father looked at both of us and let out a groan, as if we had just committed the most disappointing act a couple of ten-year-old boys ever could have done. I mean, I might as well have told him that we were going to the salon to learn how to braid the hair of my sister’s My Little Pony collection.

And yes, Three O’Clock High is about a fight. Casey Siemaszko plays Jerry Mitchell, an overachieving geek who raises the ire of Buddy Revell (played by Richard Tyson, who is probably best known for being the villain in Kindergarten Cop) because … well, Jerry touches him and Buddy hates being touched. (more…)

Slade Wilson Fightin’ ‘Round the World (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twenty-One)

The opening splash page to Deathstroke #27. All of the "World Tour" issues began with similar splash pages.

There was a time in my life when I actually did want to be a comic book writer. Okay, that’s a lie–if someone gave me the opportunity to write a comic book, I would jump at the chance, but that’s beside the point. Comics are one of the coolest things in the world, I think, to write (especially if you can draw, then you don’t have to find an artist), but in following series that are as lengthy in numbers like the Titans, I can see one of the major drawbacks, which is having to constantly keep your audience excited. The “Graphic Novelist” (in caps because it’s pretentious) doesn’t really have that problem because he or she can do his thing and leave satisfied. But when DC or Marvel are looking for an ongoing series to stretch beyond issue 12 or 20 and possibly into the 100’s (although the way both companies constantly reset or relaunch stuff these days, I’m amazed anything makes it past 20), you have a harder road to travel.

That’s why I have a lot of admiration for people like Marv Wolfman. Oh sure, he had some clunkers in his day–the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Brother Blood saga and some of the stuff that is coming down the road in New Titans are good examples–but the man wrote the same set of characters mostly uninterrupted for sixteen years, and constantly came up with new ideas, even if all of them weren’t the best. The Deathstroke: The Terminator series falls on the side of “good idea” because while it was obvious from the outset that while Slade Wilson was a popular anti-hero due to his “pilot” issue in New Titans #70 and role in the Titans Hunt it seems pretty clear that Wolfman wanted to write more of an adventure book than a Punisher knock-off. As the title went into its third year, he finally got that chance with “World Tour ’93,” a eight-part globe-trotting adventure that begins with the kidnapping of his ex-wife Adeline at the end of issue #26 and ends in an Indiana Jones-type fashion in issue #34. (more…)

Rock like you rocked twenty years ago!

When I was younger, I lived for year-in-review specials; heck, I still really enjoy anything with a good retrospective attached to it. But as December 31 drew closer, I always found myself getting psyched for two things: being able to stay up past midnight, and watching whatever special was on that looked back. Even if it was a badly produced local news special, I would look for it in TV Guide and if I wasn’t going to be home to watch it, I’d pop a tape in the VCR and set the timer.

Unfortunately, throughout those years my year-in-review options were limited by my not having access to cable, so I missed what the kids in my generation considered the definitive retrospecticus, which was MTV’s Year in Rock. I don’t think that the channel does this anymore, but I’d say that up until maybe the late 1990s or early 2000s (when TRL had basically taken everything over), the news department was pretty steady with its programming, bringing news every hour (set to the bass of Megadeth’s “Peace Sells”), and The Week in Rock every single Friday. So the Year in Rock made total sense.

I am sure that I saw at least one of these Year in Rock specials at one time or another, because my sister and I would often spend New Year’s Eve at my grandmother’s house and would go to bed shortly after midnight. Some years, we stayed up listening to 106.1 WBLI play their “Top 106 Songs of the Year” coundown; others were spent watching a hockey game or reading books. But as I went through my rather disastrous first few years as a teenager and my sister inched closer to adolescence, the two of us would sit in the back room with MTV playing, watching whatever was on it (or sometimes flipping to VH-1) because we were fully ensconced in trench warfare with my father over whether or not we would ever get cable, and at the time were taking heavier losses than at the Battle of the Somme, so we took our cable where we could get it.

Anyway, YouTube being the beautiful thing that it is, someone took the time to put the 1991 Year in Rock special up in seven parts and since it was twenty years ago–a huge year for music as well as the year I finally escaped junior high and headed to high school–I thought I’d take a look at it for my last entry of the year. Usually, I’d spin a few paragraphs here about the various things in it and provide a link or two, but I felt like doing a bit of commentary because the entire special is available for viewing. It may be unethical in a way and I am essentially piggybacking off of someone else’s upload … so H/T to YouTube user 1BigBucks1, whoever you are.

Okay, let’s get started. (more…)

Ho Ho Ho, Ha Ha Ha!

My car is quite possibly the most annoying place to be during the month of December. That’s because I listen to Christmas music almost non-stop. I have an entire CD wallet full of CDs that I bust out between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and a preset on Sirius for holiday music. Now, this may seem like a far way to go to listen to the sounds of the season, especially when there is a regular radio station that plays non-stop Christmas music, but the station near me plays a pretty bad selection. Everything on Z-95.1 is too inspirational or the same bad Sinatra (or Sinatra impersonator’s) rendition of an otherwise okay song.

Especially missing is the humor. Oh sure, they’ll play “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” and some stay-at-home mom with the fashion sense of an elementary school art teacher will call in a request for “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” but those songs aren’t very good and even if I did like them, it’s not worth listening to Dan Fogelberg to get to them.

When I was younger, the local deejays would run the occasional Christmas song and not a 24-7 holiday barrage that we have now, and while they played their fair share of traditional Christmas tunes, some of the rock stations (I was particularly attached to WBAB, the classic rock station that was one of the very few my radio actually picked up) would find the time to play something out of the ordinary. WBAB is the reason I’m so familiar with The Kinks’ “Father Christmas” and The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping,” but it’s also the reason I am familiar with Bob Rivers’ Twisted Christmas tunes and other warped material.

So, if you are being forced to suffer through little brats singing about hippos, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing the caroling of bells as if it has explosions, or versions of “Do You Hear What I Hear” that are so epic you expect to hear Gandalf shout “You shall not pass!”, may I present five songs that will provide some relief. (more…)

Toast to Innocence

[A quick note: this is actually something that I posted on an old blog of mine about four years ago; I decided to repost it here because while I was getting a post ready on Christmas songs, I remembered this and thought it was worth the repost. I’ll have another, all-new post before the weekend.]

So I’m driving to the most depressing Food Lion on the face of the earth and I have Z 95.1, our local “Lite Rock” station on because they’re the greater Charlottesville area’s source for “All Christmas, All the Time” every holiday season and I hear that song about drinking a toast to innocence. Turns out it’s “Same Old Lang Syne” by soft rock god Dan Folgelberg. I don’t know why it’s on the holiday playlist but someone out there likes it.

Anyway, it’s been going through my head and while this particular commentary had me laughing my ass off, I still couldn’t help but look up the lyrics to break them down. And analyze them. Because it’s what I do best, right?

Same Old Lang Syne

Okay, so by looking at the title, I can see where this might fit into the holidays because “Old Lang Syne” is the song sung at New Year’s, and the phrase, according to Wikipedia, means … literally as “old long since”, or “long long ago” or “days gone by”. So perhaps there is some theme of reminiscing of days gone by or remembering things from long ago, which is what you tend to get from your average soft rock song.

Met my old lover in the grocery store
The snow was falling Christmas Eve
I stole behind her in the frozen foods and I touched her on the sleeve
She didn’t recognize the face at first but then her eyes flew open wide
She went to hug me and she spilled her purse
And we laughed until we cried

So we start out in a grocery store. The guy’s shopping for some peas or something like that, which is pretty interesting considering that the guy in the song is supposed to be Fogelberg himself and at he was a pretty successful musician in his day. But people have to eat, so maybe he was standing in Waldbaum’s in his leisure suit with a wide-collared shirt, gold chains and classic soft rock beard looking over a shopping list going, “Okay, got the chicken and the Potato Buds. They were out of cheddar, so I got swiss cheese. Shit, I forgot the paper towels. Oh well, I’ll get them on my way toward the register.”

He’s doing his shopping and he sees and old flame. But not just any old flame. A LOVER. You’ve gotta emphasize the word LOVER because it is quite possibly one of the dumbest words ever. There are only two ways I can accept the use of the word LOVER. The first is if you’re talking about someone you are screwing around on your wife with. That’s technically a LOVER. The second is if you’re Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch in that SNL sketch where they play that creepy couple who says “My Lover” a lot. (more…)

The Sure Thing

Being that I grew up without cable television and didn’t always get the chance to get to a video store, there were times in my formative years where I lived for a good movie on broadcast television. The local stations always seemed to comply with my wishes, too, because WPIX seemed to have one of the deepest film libraries imaginable, and even our local Fox affiliate would bust out something random when the network wasn’t running their primetime programming. And of course you had the ABC Sunday Night Movie, which is where I got most of my exposure to the Roger Moore-era Bond films as well as various versions of the first two Superman movies. The 1980s and early 1990s were a glorious period of movies on television, and are definitely directly responsible for my ongoing obsession of teen films, especially those of the two Johns: Hughes and Cusack.

Now, I think one day I will probably do an entire post on the edited-for-television version of The Breakfast Club because it has its own place in the “Children of the Eighties” museum, and how WPIX seemed to have all of the rights to all of John Cusack’s mid-1980s teen comedies, even Hot Pursuit, which is one of those “Someone greenlighted this?” films that only the most hardcore of teen movie buffs will sit through. I’ll even go into Better Off Dead, which was the start of my Cusack fandom (up until then, I’d recognized him as the older brother in Stand By Me and The Journey of Natty Gann, the latter of which made me bawl my eyes out when I first saw it), because I would rather focus on one of the films that is in my All-Time Desert Island Top Five Cusack films, and that is The Sure Thing (the others, in chronological order, are Better Off Dead, Say Anything …, Grosse Pointe Blank, and High Fidelity).

Directed by Rob Reiner in 1985, The Sure Thing was his follow-up to the seminal This is Spinal Tap and has the most Eightiesness about his films from that decade, even though it does not look dated at all (except for maybe Nicolette Sheridan’s hair and the fact that her breasts are real, but we’ll get to that). I first saw the film in 1991 when it had its network broadcast premiere on Fox one summer evening. I was about to enter high school at the time and therefore the strict 8:00 bedtime my parents had maintained up until that point was starting to be eased, especially since it was the summer and I didn’t have school and rarely went out at night because I was either without rebellious friends or spending the summer recovering from some kind of facial surgery.

Anyway, I had heard of the film’s title because I had the easy-level sheet music to Rod Stewart’s “infatuation” in a movie themes book for the piano. Never played it, though because I didn’t like Rod Stewart very much and the only thing I remembered about that song was the black-and-white video where he’s being really pervy. The way the song is used in the film, by the way, is where I am sure that David Hasselhoff got his inspiration for about a hundred Baywatch montages, because it’s simply Nicolette Sheridan in a white bikini on a beach putting a blanket down, putting lotion on, and laying out while a very 1980s-looking title font rolls credits. And even though I don’t like the song, I give props to Reiner because it’s a damn near perfect introduction.

I stuck with the movie not because of Sheridan (although being that I was fourteen years old, I was definitely, shall we say, intrigued), but because I noticed Cusack’s name in the credits and I had just spent most of the summer watching my taped copies of Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer to the point where I had every line memorized and they were already wearing out. Rob Reiner was a director I was slightly familiar with too, having watched Stand By Me and The Princess Bride quite a bit. And the plot was simple enough to keep me going through Fox’s various commercial breaks that advertised the only thing it had going for it in the summer, which was the beach club episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210 (I can never remember the name of the beach club, btw. I want to say Malibu Sands, but that was Saved By The Bell … ah, Stacy Carosi …): guy travels 3,000 miles to get laid.

Okay, that’s not the entire plot of the movie because the 3,000 miles to get laid part starts after the movie’s first act is over and that first act sets up the two major characters: Walter “Gib” Gibson (Cusack) and Allison Bradbury (Daphne Zuniga, who I definitely knew from Spaceballs). They’re attending college together at some ivy league-type school in the northeast (Gib tells his friend that he’s “never seen so much corduroy in one place”) and much like any good romantic comedy where opposites attract, they don’t really like each other after they first meet and by the time they wind up stuck together on the road trip to UCLA, where his friend Lance (a pre-Goose but nicely fratbro Anthony Edwards) has arranged a night with The Sure Thing; and her boyfriend Jason (Boyd Gaines) attends, they absolutely despise one another.

At this point, the film actually becomes a road movie and very much in the classic sense, which is what I think gives The Sure Thing its timelessness. It’s one of those movies that I’m sure hasn’t been attempted in the remake/reboot sense, and I have a feeling that if a remake was attempted it would fall completely flat because it would be more like Road Trip, which has its moments but also has diminishing returns on subsequent viewings. I’ve been watching The Sure Thing for twenty years—first on a pirated VHS copy and then on DVD—and to this day I laugh my ass off the entire way through. I think it has to do with how realistic the situations and characters actually are. A movie like Road Trip might be zany and crazy, but what happens to Allison and Gib while they’re on the road in The Sure Thing could very well still happen. Reiner and the screenwriters seemed to take a lot of care to make sure that the film felt organic and that comedic bits, such as Allison’s flashing a truck full of guys after Gib calls her repressed, aren’t forced.

The credit also goes to the entire cast, too. Cusack’s obviously the star (and it’s hard to believe that he was only 17 and actually had to be emancipated from his parents in order to shoot on location), and he nails every line and rant (his “if I fail English my life is ruined” bit is a classic). But it’s not a John Cusack showcase; Zuniga’s job is to elevate the comedy above that of stuff like Porky’s, and she plays Allison like a Mallory Keaton with a brain. Then, you have her on-screen boyfriend, Jason, who is the epitome of the “square” and should be a one note character, but Boyd Gaines delivers his lines so well that he almost steals certain scenes, especially when it becomes obvious that Allison is kind of over him. The line, “How about a good hot mug of China Black?” which should be a random line, is quite possibly one of the funniest lines in Eighties teen movies.

But I digress. I could very well sit down and talk for at least a couple of hours (or in our case, 1500 more words) about all of the little things that make this such a favorite of mine. I’m just honestly pleased that a film genre that is very so often disposable has produced a gem like this.

Merry Metsmas

So back in October, when I was wrapping up my look at the 1986 Mets with all of the memorabilia that I had collected over the years, I left one particular item out of my list. At first, I thought that I had forgotten to include it, but then I realized that it actually commanded its own entry, in a way. That’s because I can’t write about the 1986 World Champions commemorative ornament without writing about Christmas itself.

I received the ornament as a Christmas gift in 1986 and while I am not 100% sure who gave it to me, I’m going to say it was my Uncle Lou because around the same time he also gave my sister and I copies of the 1986 World Series program. And since we always went to my grandmother’s house on Christmas Eve, we more than likely hung it on the tree that night before we went to bed. Soon after, however, I became insistent that every single year it go on the center of the Christmas tree, to the point where I would make sure it was the first ornament on the tree.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This weekend, my wife and I will be putting up our Christmas decorations and our pre-lit artificial tree is in a bag in the basement all ready for us to take it out and put it together. This is a radical departure from what my sister and I had to go through when we were kids and it was time to put up the tree. You see, my family was never one to rush a holiday, so we actually waited until after Thanksgiving to think about decorating for Christmas (as opposed to people who start putting inflatables up in September), but once Black Friday hit, we were shopping and were also commencing what was a 42-step process of putting Christmas together:

Go to St. Ann’s church on Middle Road in Sayville. Find a tree.
Set that tree aside and wander around the lot in search of a better tree.
Re-locate that first three and purchase it.
Put tree in a bucket of water and lean against fence in backyard.
Wait two weeks, during which children ask, “When are we going to put the tree up? When are we going to put the tree up? When are we going to put the tree up?”
Decide on a day to decorate. Wait until late afternoon to get started.
Open attic stairs, do impression of Chevy Chase taking stairs to the face in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
Go up to attic, realize how dark it is.
Go to basement and get droplight.
Hang droplight in attic and plug into bathroom outlight using extension cord that is longer than most “Turkey Trots” run on Thanksgiving weekend.
Locate giant cardboard box that once held case of Luvs diapers but now holds every Christmas ornament that family has owned since the Carter Administration.
Drag box across attic floor, almost fall to death when attic stairs are misjudged.
Carry box down stairs, to den.
Take Tylenol for back pain.
Bring the tree in bucket from the back fence to the deck.
Attempt to pry bucket off with hands.
Give up on hands, start kicking the bucket.
Give up kicking the bucket, use a hammer.
Realize that water poured into bucket has frozen and chisel is required
Chisel ice.
Find tree stand bought during Eisenhower Administration in decorations box.
Spend twenty minutes sawing tree trunk and fitting tree to stand.
Bring tree into the house.
Spend twenty more minutes making sure that tree is straight.
Listen to kids bitch impatiently.
Spend twenty more minutes making sure that fullest part of tree is in front.
Continue to listen to kids bitch.
Put on Christmas music to shut kids up or drown them out.
Listen to kids bitch that Celine Dion’s Christmas album is an affront to the season.
Begin stringing lights.
Discover one strand of lights is not working properly.
Spend twenty minutes finding malfunctioning light.
Replace bulb.
Realize you put in bulb that makes lights flash.
Replace bulb again.
Continue stringing lights.
Continue stringing lights.
Insist that tree is neither straight nor full, which leads to further tree adjustment.
Wash sap off hands from tree adjustment.
Continue stringing lights.
Allow first ornament to be put on tree.
Watch sun rise.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating on that last one but when you’re nine or ten years old and your life during the latter part of the year centers around celebrating Christmas, you have to admit that the process of putting a tree together seems to take an eternity, and every year I would spend that eternity fondling the blue ball that had the classic Mets logo on the front at 1986 World Champions, waiting to place it front and center, usually next to an orange light so that anyone that came by could bask in the awesomeness of the 1986 Mets.

Pop Culture Affidavit

The Sworn Testimony of a Dork