1980s

16 Days of Glory

As of my writing this, we’re about knee-deep in the 2012 London Summer Olympics.  In fact, as I glance over to my television, the NBC Sports Network is showing a U.S.-North Korea women’s soccer match (it was either that or tennis).  I’ve always been a huge fan of the Olympic Games, both summer and winter, especially at how it has me watching and enjoying sports I would never watch otherwise (I went to lunch with some work friends the other day and we watched a water polo match that was on at the restaurant).

This love of the Olympics has its roots in my love of sports, of course, because if I didn’t like sports I wouldn’t care about the Olympics; however, I feel like sometimes I am the only guy who watches the games for the sheer pageantry of it all.  Which is why, by the way, I kept tweeting out snarky bon mots throughout last Friday night’s Opening Ceremonies, pissing and moaning about how badly NBC was mangling their tape-delayed coverage.  In fact, NBC’s fail on this part has been so epic this year it’s like a running joke among tweeters and bloggers, especially those who look forward to the games every four years.

But I’m not going to spend this entry complaining about NBC (that’s what Twitter is for).  No, I thought it might be cool to sit down for a few moments and think about why I am so enthralled by the Olympic Games and why I will spend so much time watching them, even staying up until ungodly hours to watch women’s gymnastics prelims in the summer or a curling match in the winter.  And thankfully it’s not a hard thing to figure out because the very first games I watched were I think the games that people my age think of the most when they think “Olympics.”

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be speaking for my entire generation but I think that the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics really did come to define “Olympics” for quite a number of Children of the 1980s.

I turned seven in 1984, which meant that this was the first Olympic Games that I actually remember.  I’m sure that people who are even slightly older than me will tell me they have memories of the 1980 Winter Olympics, especially the “Miracle on Ice,” and to that I say that they’re seriously lucky.  Being born in June 1977, I was all of 2-1/2 years old when the underdog U.S. hockey team beat the U.S.S.R. and then Finland to win the gold medal, so if I saw the game against the Russians (which I highly doubt), I don’t remember it at all.  Had there not been a boycott of the Moscow games that same year, I may have seen the 1980 Summer Games, but that wasn’t to be.

The 1984 Summer Olympics soundtrack cassette. This is not available on CD or digitally, so I kind of regret not getting it back in the 1980s when I really wanted it.

So, the summer when I was seven years old and was allowed to stay up slightly later than usual, I saw some of the competition, but most importantly I caught quite a bit of the opening ceremonies.  I don’t know if it was because my parents thought it was important for me to see it or if ABC aired it live instead of on tape delay (which may have been the case — a 3-hour time difference meant it might have aired live; then again, ABC tape delayed the U.S.-Soviet hockey game in 1980 so I wouldn’t put it past them), but I saw quite a bit, including parts of the Parade of Nations (or as my wife put it, “The Model U.N.”).

In my mind, I thought it was the most epic thing I had ever seen (which is saying a lot because I had been watching Star Wars every morning for the past two years).  The audience all had cards on their seats and after a guy came flying in on a jet pack–yes, a JET PACK, which is awesome on so many levels–the PA announcer told them to hold up the cards and the entire stadium was then decorated in the flags of the participating countries.  Plus, you had a theme composed by John Williams that to this day stands as one of my top five John Williams pieces (and next to his NBC News theme, one of his most underrated).  In fact, I loved it so much that when I saw a copy of the soundtrack on cassette at TSS a few years later, I wanted it.  In fact, I coveted that soundtrack so much that I actually took it out of the place where it had been placed and put it behind another cassette on another shelf where nobody but me would find it, not realizing that I probably wouldn’t ever get the money to buy it or that I didn’t have to hide it because it was 1988 and nobody but me was coveting the soundtrack (for the record, I never did get the tape).

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Fuzzy memories of summer camp

On Monday, my son started summer camp.  Beng that he is a four-year-old rising kindergartener, this was a pretty big deal because it is his first “summer break” after a year of school (whereas up until last August he was simply in daycare).  The camp is run out of his school, so there really is no difference in our morning and afternoon routines of dropping him off or picking him up, even though he is going to spend most of his days going to the pool or making crafts or playing games as opposed to sitting in class and learning letters and numbers.

Apparently, camp around here is kind of a big thing, to the point where every spring, there is not only a huge advertising supplement in the local newspapers about the various summer camp programs offered throughout the greater Charlottesville area, but there is a “summer camp expo” held at a local hotel where parents can stop by, pick up literature, sign up for camps, and meet local newscasters (I don’t know what the appeal is in meeting local newscasters, but there you go).  Where I grew up on Long Island, I don’t remember the ramp-up to summer break being a huge rush to get kids “signed up for something,” because quite a number of my summers were spent sitting around and doing very little.  I know that I sound like an old fart when I say that I was a kid in the days when kids could be left home alone and there was no danger in that, but it is actually true.  Most of the friends I had in later elementary school were kids whose parents weren’t always home and as long as I could ride my bike to their houses and as long as I was home before dinner time and wasn’t committing any criminal acts (and seriously, I grew up in freaking Sayville … the most “illegal” thing I ever did was cut through an abandoned lot and buy smoke bombs from the ice cream man), everything was fine.  Granted, there were days where my friend Tom and I spent time jumping out of trees and body slamming his little brother and I’m amazed that nobody got seriously injured, but we wound up fine.

But for those kids whose parents: a) were sick of their children doing nothing except watch TV all day; b) didn’t want their children unsupervised; or c) had the money, there was “camp.”  I didn’t know many kids who went to a “sleepaway” camp like the type portrayed in Meatballs or Wet Hot American Summer, probably because by the time I was old enough to do a sleepaway camp, those places had become synonymous with machete-wielding, hockey-mask-wearing killers.

Okay, that probably wasn’t the reason–it was probably more like sleepaway camp was a pain in the ass and parents preferred something more local, of which there were plenty of opportunities, some of which were almost like a sleepaway camp but were called “day camps.”  Every spring during my childhood, when I would be home in the afternoon watching G.I. Joe or He-Man and the Masters and the Universe, the local syndicated stations (like WPIX and WNEW/WNYW) would air a commercial for Young People’s Day Camp:

Now I am sure that this commercial ran well into the late 1980s and maybe even the early 1990s because I remember seeing it for years and I am sure that most of the kids in the commercial were in college by the time I was watching it.  I’d say that Young People’s Day Camp is the Mount Airy Lodge of children’s camps–the type of place that if you visited it now, it would be mired in bankruptcy and one skinned knee from being shut down by either the board of health or child protective services–but they are still up and running throughout the New York and New Jersey area, even if they’re not airing the same commercials. (more…)

On Earth, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

“The Book of Alien,” published in 1979, had me scared out of my mind when I was a kid.

I think of all the movies I’m looking forward to this summer, Prometheus is at the top of the list. I know that being a huge comic book reader I would probably be more excited about The Avengers or The Dark Knight Rises, but when I heard that Ridley Scott was making a movie that had ties somehow to Alien, something in my nerd past reawakened and I remembered (suddenly? I mean it’s not like I ever really forgot) that when I was about 11 years old, the world he created in Alien was the center of my universe.

Okay, to be fair, the reason for that was more due to James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, because up until the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I had only ever seen anything to do with Alien in the movie book–The Book of Alien–that someone on my bus had been passing around when I was in the second grade. Furthermore, what I had seen was a picture of the movie’s infamous “chestburster scene” (although at the time we called it “when that thing came out of the guy’s stomach”) and it scared the crap out of me.

I refused to watch Alien until I finally sat down and watched it during the summer before sixth grade–this was either the day before or the day of the incident where my father, who was wallpapering the living room–stepped on a razor blade and wound up with a few stitches in his foot. I don’t think I thought very much of the movie when I first saw it because it wasn’t as cool as Aliens, which I had already been watching on constant replay for the better part of a year.

Can you really blame me, after all? I was eleven or twelve and it was the middle of the “action Eighties” where I was into any movie that had large guns that shot lots of people, it quickly became my favorite movie. My friends and I would “play” Aliens (I was often Hudson to my friend Tom’s Hicks, although I think one time I actually played Ripley which I’m sure that some psychologist would have jumped on … but I have a feeling I just wanted to be one of the leads) when we wanted something slightly different than the “army” games we were used to playing after being kicked out of the house for watching Aliens way too many times.

But with anything from my childhood, my interest faded after a little while and I paid less attention to Ripley, Hicks, Hudson, Newt, and the other characters and more attention to things like baseball and the WWF. I would gravitate back toward Alien when I was in junior high after watching the original theatrical trailer while waiting on line to ride The Great Movie Ride at what was then called Disney’s MGM Studios in Disney World.  I knew I had seen the movie before, but trailers were hard to come by in 1990–you either had to have it as part of a commercial break on something you taped off of television or on another video tape that came out at that time, and considering that Alien was released in 1979 and then released on VHS for the first time by CBS FOX video in the early 1980s, that wasn’t likely to happen in my house.  The trailer blew me away and left so much of an impression that I remember trying to duplicate it as part of a computer animation project in my advanced computer graphics class in the ninth grade (I think it was a bunch of stills with quick cuts that wound up with no sound and a title in a really bad font … then again, it was 1991).

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Just ‘Round the Corner!

If you watch enough television where I live–Charlottesville, Virginia–you will probably see commercials for no less than four furniture stores.  There’s Kane Furniture (with a kicky cool-jazz-with-flute jingle: “At Kaaaaaaaaane furniture, you’ll have a home fashioned just for you”), Under the Roof (which is a montage of modern-looking furniture set to a ragin’ drum solo), Grand Furniture, and Schewels (who always is having a sale.  They had a Friday the 13th sale last month).  I swear they advertise more than car dealerships these days, although it is understandable because in a recession, buying furniture is one of the last purchases on a person’s mind.

The unfortunate thing about all this is that with the exception of Schewels’ Crazy Eddie-like tendencies (“WE’RE GIVING EVERYONE CREDIT!  WE’RE GIVING EVERYONE EMPLOYEE PRICES!  FOR GOD’S SAKE COME IN AND BUY AN ENDTABLE!”), the furniture store commercials in Charlottesville are kind of boring.  It’s like … yeah, there’s a couch with giant arms wider than most morbidly obese people.  Oh, and a glass table with a marble column for a pedestal just in case someone from New Jersey might shop here.  And a denim loveseat.  I’m so excited.

But hey, I consider myself spoiled when it comes to local television furniture store commercials (yes, you can be spoiled in this regard) because I grew up on Long Island and our local TV spots were nothing short of epic.

While I am sure that there were more stores advertising on television, when I think back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, I think of two stores:  Coronet and Room Plus

Coronet was a family owned baby furniture store located in Old Westbury, and probably did good business for quite a while when I was younger because those were the days before the baby superstores.  In fact, nowadays, I’m pretty sure that if you do not register yourself at Babies R Us or Buy Buy Baby, you get a visit from Child Protective Services.

Anyway, the commercials mostly starred the two owners–a couple of brothers with mustaches who looked like your uncle or older cousin–and they’d usually be doing some sort of gag while their mother (“The Coronet Mother”) did the pitch.  For instance, The Coronet Mother pitches with her two boys in cribs behind her:

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All You Have to Bring is Your Love of Everything

It’s been a mild winter, so skiing is the last thing on my mind (granted, I’ve only been skiing twice in my life, so it’s not on my mind very often), and based on what I have been seeing on the local news, it’s been the last thing on everyone’s mind because ski resorts are struggling.  In the same vein, I find myself wondering if any other vacation spots are struggling.  The economy isn’t exactly doing the best, and airfares are insane, so travel to anywhere for a period of time longer than a weekend seems to be costing a year’s tuition at Harvard.

Still, I keep seeing commercials for those ever-popular destinations for people who don’t find hitting the slopes and then curling up in a snowflake sweater appealing–the Caribbean.  Specifically, resorts like Sandals and Beaches.  My son loves the latest commercial for Beaches because Cookie Monster is in it (although I’m not sure that he realizes that Cookie Monster might not be at Virginia Beach when we go in July).  But the Sandals commercials always amuse me because they make a vacation to that resort seem like the most epic romantic time ever imagined.

That’s the best example of a couple frolicking outside on an apparatus that’s not in a Cialis commercial.  And actually, it’s kind of appropriate that the ad agency used “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warrens (but not the version sung by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warrens) in the commercial because the movie it comes from is Dirty Dancing, which takes place at a resort in the Catskills and mentions several times the decline of such resorts as popular family destinations.  Indeed Sandals and Beaches have sort of become the new Catskills or Poconos and the commercials are the perfect evidence of that because that Sandals commercial is very much like a commercial from my youth:

Ah, beautiful Mount Airy Lodge, which was, by the time this commercial was airing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a deteriorating shell of its former self.  What was once a popular getaway for couples in the 1960s and 1970s was by this time (at least according to Wikipedia) hemorrhaging money and wound up going into foreclosure in 1999 before being bought by Harrah’s and turned into a casino.  But this commercial aired before the great decline and if you were watching one of the syndicated channels in the New York metropolitan area (WPIX or WWOR) during the day, you wound up seeing the Mount Airy Lodge commercial at least a few times, enough that you knew the “All you have to bring is your love of everything” slogan by heart. (more…)

Taking Off

A screen shot of the end of “Taking Off,” the two-parter surrounding Wheels’ grief over his parents’ deaths. Image courtesy of Degrassi Online.

I know that I wasn’t the only person surprised by the news that Neil Hope, who played Wheels on Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High not only died, but died back in 2007 and this was just discovered now.  In fact, I probably would have never heard about it at all had I not “liked” his onetime co-star, Stacie Mistysyn, on Facebook and read a post of hers.

In light of this, I watched the Degrassi Junior High third-season two-parter, “Taking Off,” which while not the next episode I wanted to watch for the purpose of this blog (that would be “Food for Thought,” which I think I’m going to get to anyway even if it is out of order), is one of the more important points of that season because it continues two crucial stories–Wheels’ parents’ deaths, and Shane and Spike.  It also puts the spotlight clearly on Hope and his acting, as Wheels continues to struggle with his grief and does so not just by acting out but running away altogether.

We begin by finding out that Wheels has been skipping school and hanging out all day at the arcade; furthermore, he’s sold his bass guitar to get money to play video games like Konami’s Main Event, much to the chagrin of the rest of the Zit Remedy (especially Joey, who’s still in his Zack Morris “scheme to get us some airtime” phase … yunno, when he’s not flirting with Caitlin).  His grandmother is concerned and he is not just stand-offish to her, but downright hostile and wishes that he could be anywhere but home and school.  Then, the possibility presents itself when his birth father, Mike, sends him a postcard from a town called Port Hope, which is where his band has a standing gig for the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, most of the DJH crew is going to the Gourmet Scum concert that Saturday night (love the band’s name, btw), including Luke and Shane, who buy acid and then drop it before going inside.  What’ll happen is that Shane will disappear and the police will spend the better part of the two-parter looking for him, even asking Luke if the boy was under the influence (and paranoid Luke will lie his ass off).  He is eventually found underneath a bridge, having fallen off, and at the end of the second part is comatose, leaving Emma completely without a father (something that is explored in both Degrassi High and Degrassi: The Next Generation).

But that’s really a subplot and it’s Wheels who takes center stage as he hitchhikes through Ontario and at one point winds up getting picked up by a guy who seems okay at first–in fact, he kind of looks like Sam Waterson–and that guy tries to molest him.  But he makes it to Port Hope to see Mike, and his hopes for a happy reunion are dashed when Mike more or less wants very little to do with him (in fact, he’s got a pregnant fiancee) and his grandmother ultimately tracks him down. (more…)

Thanks, Kid.

I’m not a sportswriter; hell, I’m not even a sports blogger.  So sitting down to write anything about an athlete’s death on my part is probably more self-indulgent than anything, especially since I’m sure that come morning there will be at least a few columns on the same topic.  That being said, when my wife told me this afternoon that Gary Carter had passed after a battle with brain cancer, I felt the urge to say something.

As the catcher for the Mets when I began following them in 1985, Carter was one of their sluggers as well as an RBI leader and he became one of my favorite players. I probably, at one point, imitated his batting stance (which was one of those stances that didn’t suggest that he really had any power); I had a poster of him on the wall of my basement; and of course I had quite a number of his baseball cards.  I don’t know if he was a hero in the sense that I ever wanted to “be” like him–after all, nobody would have wanted as terrible a little leaguer as me to get behind the plate–but he was definitely someone I looked up to.

Gary Carter wins game 5 with an extra-inning hit. From the Daily News Scrapbook of the 1986 Mets Season

It seems like I made a good choice in that regard, too, because from what I’ve read over the years about Carter and his career, he had a love of the game of baseball and played that way but if you watch some of his highlights you can tell that he was a true competitor.  I’ll never forget the opening to those Mets games of the 1980s where you could see a highlight of him tagging out Ken Griffey, Sr. on Rusty Staub Day, or his reaction to finally breaking through in game 5 of the 1986 NLCS and getting what was probably the second-most clutch hit of his career (the first being the hit that started the Game Six rally).  It was, to put it simply, genuine joy. I mean, he took his fair share of curtain calls for home runs but I don’t remember the guy as a showboat, on or off the field.  I never had the fortune of meeting him, but a few friends of mine had personalized autographed pictures and I rarely, if ever, heard a bad word about what it was like to actually meet him.

I know that I’m writing this through the lens of childhood nostalgia, and I know that all he was was a baseball player and didn’t fight and die for our country and all of the other things that true heroes do.  But when I was seven years old, I was thinking about those things when I chose my role models.  He was a guy who was on my favorite team and got hits and hit home runs and I thought of him in the same way that people of the generations before me thought of Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle, and even though other players are more famous for wearing number 8, and there have were better catchers before and since, I have to set those aside and tip my hat.

 

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…)

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…)