Worlds lived. Worlds died. I was never the same.

Crisis on Infinite Earths #12. Cover by George Perez

In the (imho, highly overrated) film Garden State, Natalie Portman hands Zach Braff her headphones and tells him, “You gotta hear this one song, it’ll change your life, I swear.”  She’s referring to The Shins, a band I’ve had little to no interest in ever since I first heard of them, so I can’t exactly say that she’s right.  Then again, I’m too old to have one song “change my life.”  But I’m sure that there’s some song out there that at one point or another did change my life. 

I can’t think of one right now because as much as I love music, I don’t know if a three-minute rock song is as earth-shattering as, say, a book.  And I know that we all have that one book that we picked up, read, absorbed, and were ultimately changed  by.  To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye … there’s a long list of books on a standard high school curriculum that offer that chance.  But what if the book that changed your life wasn’t a piece of literature?  What if it was a comic book?  And what if it was a comic book that wasn’t Watchmen or Dark Knight?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Crisis on Infinite Earths:  the comic series that changed my life.

(more…)

Let’s Dance in Style, Let’s Dance for a While

I guess that if you were going to comb through the annals of pop hits that have made their ways into senior proms and yearbooks, you wouldn’t expect to find lyrics about being resilient in the face of Armageddon.  No, your regular prom fare is about being the best of friends to the end or holding onto that girl or guy and never letting go.  Sometimes the song is written specifically to be used at a prom or graduation (I’m looking at you, Vitamin C) but “Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?” A lyric like that is unexpected.  Unless, that is, you went to high school on Long Island in the 1980s or 1990s, as my class—the Sayville High School Class of 1995—was one of many who dialed up Alphaville’s “Forever Young” for a slow dance at prom.

Running about 3:45 and coming from the 1984 album of the same name, the song was written by Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens, who comprised the German synth-pop band (whose original name was actually Forever Young).  Coming out at the height of Duran Duran’s MTV reign and around the same time as U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, “Forever Young” seems like it was an album that got lost in a sea of new wave songs that were ruling the playlists of stations like WLIR (later WDRE) in the early to mid-1980s.  However, though the title track only hit 65 on the Billboard Hot 100, stuck around, becoming a cult hit well into the later part of the decade, nearly three years after its release.  According an article in the June 11, 1988 issue of Billboard (whose text is included in the liner notes to the Singles Collection CD), the song was voted as #1 on a countdown by listeners of WDRE in 1988, and had a definite influence across the Island:

“Forever Young” is so slow and dreamy that Laura Branigan could cover it (and did).  While “Forever” was the top record of 1985 at WPST Trenton, NJ, where it is still played as an oldie, it hasn’t been passed from one hip, top 40 PD to another (Both “Blue Monday” and “I Melt With You” have).  It’s not even played everywhere in its own format.  It has shown up at various Long Island high schools as a class song in recent years.  The song’s popularity among teens may be due to its emphasis on mortality, a running theme in the bopper hits of the ‘70s.

WDRE, the name during the late 1980s and early 1990s of what was once WLIR, a leading modern-rock station based on Long Island.

(more…)

Let’s go to the movies

UA the movies in Patchogue, NY after it closed down and before it was demolished.

Time and time again, I find myself mesmerized about how disposable the culture of my childhood really is.  Granted, Hollywood in recent years has been finding ways to pillage and plunder the cartoons and movies that I loved when I was growing up, but when I think of the places where I spent most of my time, they are the malls and multiplexes that seem to be nothing but demonized.  I mean, I guess that people interested in historical preservation really wouldn’t have any interest in saving a concrete multiplex whose design is as bland and nondescript as any of the thousands that have been built, torn down, and rebuilt in the last 40 years; and I guess that said design, like a cookie-cutter multi-use stadium, dictates that it falls without any ceremony.  After all, what replaces the multiplexes and shopping malls are stadium-seating megaplexes and town centres that are upgrades and more aesthetically pleasing to the community.  Nobody misses those eyesores.

Except me, that is.  And probably others in my generation who are products of that transitional part of the late-20th Century when “medium” was “small,” but “mega,” “super,” or “extreme” sizes hadn’t been conceived. You know, when there was still something left of what most people get nostalgic for when they talk about “America” or the “American Dream.” I think the assessment that my generation doesn’t have much to look back on really is only because the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were all about knocking down the “smaller” feel of our parents’ enterprises and creating cold, impersonal places. The place, for me, that will always epitomize the era is the United Artists Patchogue 13 multiplex, which was located on Sunrise Highway, just east of Nicolls Road.  (more…)

A little Hootie never hurt …

Arguably the biggest album of 1995, "Cracked Rear View" sold 13 million copies.

A few years ago, the school I was teaching at did “decades day” as one of their spirit week days.  Quite a number of my fellow teachers were around my age, so I was not the only person who wore “’90s attire”.  However, most of those colleges of mine were ex-jocks who somehow managed to squeeze themselves back into old varsity jackets.  Having never played a sport in high school I didn’t have a varsity jacket, so I kind of “grunged” it up with a flannel shirt, some jeans, a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and a pair of black Doc Martens.

Of course, while the flannel and the NIN T-shirt were authentic, they really didn’t represent who I was or what I wore in high school (in fact, I didn’t get a pair of Docs until after college).  The flannel was from J.Crew (and is now the smock  my son uses for art time in daycare) and while I do have most of Trent Reznor’s recordings from Pretty Hate Machine through The Downward Spiral, I was never a hardcore fan.  But a pair of antique-washed jeans with a braided belt, white oxford shirt, and plaid tie, all from The Gap, would have been lost on my students. 

And truth be told, if I wanted to fully represent my 1990s self, I probably should have worn one of my Hootie and the Blowfish tour T-shirts.

(more…)

Once More to the Twine Ball

The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, which is the subject of an epic “Weird Al” Yankovic song.

For years, I have identified with E.B. White in “Once More to the Lake” as he takes his son to a lake in Maine where he and his father used to vacation when he was a boy.  He expects that in the thirty years or so since he first visited that lake–a time in which American had fallen fully in love with the automobile, among other more “modern” conveniences–much of it will have changed and the visit will be a disappointment.  To his surprise, though some of modern American life has crept in, the lake is mostly the same to the point where he sees himself in his son and his father in himself.  It’s an essay version of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s Cradle” (though written thirty years prior) and the sort of tale that you probably would aspire to associate with your life.

Alas, I can’t lie anymore and say that when I think of Kezar Lake in New Hampshire, where my parents still spend two weeks every July, I think of E.B. White.  Because the truth is, I think of Weird Al.

(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…)

Cars and Trucks and Things That Go!

The vehicle Voltron, an also-ran in 1980s anime-based giant robots.

When the casual observer hears the word “Voltron,” he definitely thinks of the famous robot that was formed from five lions; however, those of us who watched the show religiously every afternoon know that “Voltron” can be either one of two robots: the famous lion robot and one made of many vehicles (and the truly hardcore know there was a third Voltron, but I’ll get to that later).

The vehicle Voltron snuck up on the country as quickly as the lion Voltron did.  One day, we were sitting down to watch the mighty Voltron fight King Zarkon and Prince Lotor and the next, there were a bunch of people we’d never seen and a completely different robot.  This one had fifteen characters to follow, all of whom made up a Voltron force that fought against the Drule empire.  It was kind of like a mash-up between Voltron and Robotech, and it would have made sense if it seemed like it had anything to do with the other series (like Robotech did — each series took place after the other), but there didn’t seem to be much of a connection except that both robots were named Voltron and the people who piloted the vehicles were cheap knock-offs of characters on the other show.

So the introduction of the vehicle Voltron after the lion Voltron never really actually ended seemed abrupt, like they were interrupting everything to push something else on me, or trying to Coy and Vance me.  I think that’s one of the reasons this one never caught on; the other was that with fifteen characters behind fifteen parts of Voltron, it was really hard to remember who was who.  Sure, there was a land, sea, and air team that altogether formed the mighty robot, but whereas I could recite the entire lion transformation scene and knew exactly who I wanted to be when we “played Voltron” on the playground, telling my friends that I wanted to be “Cliff” from the land team seemed really awkward.

(more…)

Go Lionbot Force! Wait … that doesn’t sound right.

The Matchbox-produced lion Voltron. According to the package, he's the "king of the space jungle."

In your childhood, I guess there are phenomena and there are milestones where toys are concerned.  And then there are flash in the pans, those toys that are insanely popular for most of a school year but get shoved to the back of a toy closet by the summer.  My first experience with a flash in the pan was Voltron.

 In a couple of weeks, I’ll talk about the cartoon series that spawned this particular toy, but it’s worth mentioning that I only know what voltron was because an early episode was on at my neighbor’s house one afternoon when I was in the second grade.  I didn’t know what the cartoon was, just that five robot lions that formed a much larger robot were pretty kickass.

 Soon after watching those first few episodes of the lion Voltron (the vehicle Voltron came later), my schoolmates and I were compoetely hooked.  We played Voltron just about every day and very often I was Keith or Lance and on at least a couple of occasions, my friend Lori wore her hair like Princess Allura.

Still, the tie-in toys alluded us, which was weird considering that every single cartoon we watched in those days was essentially a 30-minute toy commercial.  Even some of the movies—Star Wars, for instance—had a toy line.  But nobody, when those first few shows aired, owned a Voltron.  That’s probably because we never saw television commercials for Voltron toys.

In fact, I would not come across any toy related to Voltron for the better part of six months, when I would be at a local stationary store, Sayville Card and Gift (which may have been known as Unique Cards and Gifts at the time), browsing through the toys while my dad was two doors down buying Chinese food, and spotted something called “Lionbot.” 

But what was inside the “Lionbot” case was a die-cast metal Voltron lion.

(more…)

Shake, it’s Great!

I guess it should be embarrassing to admit, as well as a little hypocritical since I constantly complain about how coddled my students are, that from the time I was in first grade until the time I was in high school, my dad packed my lunch every day.  Every day, I took a brown bag with a sandwich, a drink, and some sort of snack.  The sandwich and snack changed over the years, but the drink was always the same:  Yoo-Hoo.

A chocolate drink of mysterious origin that you had to shake before you enjoyed, Yoo-Hoo was  vitamin-fortified high-fructose corn syrup that had a tangy sweetness.  It wasn’t as viscous as chocolate milk and way more shelf stable.  In fact, my dad would buy it in three-packs that he would then keep in the freezer.  Then, he would put the box at the bottom of my brown paper bag with the sandwich and snack on top.  Theoretically, it would keep everything cool while it sat in my locker all morning; in reality, it was a frozen chocolate brick that as it thawed wet the bag through condensation, usually falling through the bottom of the bag, and depending on how late I had lunch that day would either be cold or warm by the time I had to drink it.

(more…)

Set my world on FIRE!

There are certain moments in your life where your mettle is tested.  Dealing with a bully.  A car accident.  Asking a gorgeous girl out on a date.  But at eight years old, such challenges are not really there.  That’s not to say, however, there aren’t tests, that there aren’t things to prove indeed at an early age you’re a man.  I was raised in a small town where nothing really happened, so I didn’t have to grow up too fast and therefore my early test of manhood was a seemingly innocent one:  the Atomic FireBall.

A small, jawbreaker-sized red ball of candy, the Atomic FireBall has the heat of an entire box of red hots, taking the flavor of sinnamon to maximum levels of tolerance.  Pop one in your mouth and there is an instant heat, which make your entire face feel warm and actually sweat a little.  Keep the FireBall in your mouth and it lets up a little, but that’s because I think the makers obviously know that people eating Atomic FireBalls do their best to suck on them all the way to their cores.

(more…)