1980s

The Yearbook Myth

One commercial that stuck with me from the time I first saw it as a kid until I became a teenager was an ad for McDonald’s entitled “Great Year!”  It features the antics of Central Junior High School’s yearbook staff as they attempt to cover all of the great and crazy things that happened during the course of the school year and then meet at McDonald’s to celebrate their success.

Watch the minute-long ad and you’ll see a portrait of a junior high school that in 1983 or whenever it was originally shot had to be the coolest place on Earth.  Everyone gets along, someone walks through the hallway dressed as a strawberry, and even the high pressure moments are filled with a goofiness that only comes when you are selling hamburgers.  I don’t have to do much to convince anyone that my junior high experience was not really like this.  Had “Great Year!” been a real reflection of what I remember, there would have been footage of a gym teacher cutting gum out of someone’s hair, two guys blowing snot rockets all over the school store while the people who worked there gagged and yelled at them to stop, and one kid looking scared out of his mind while another threatened to beat the ever-loving snot out of him if he did even the slightest thing wrong.  Or maybe that’s just my take.

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XOXO

One of my favorite things about looking at old commercials, especially those from when I was a kid, is how someone thought that their idea was what kids back then thought looked cool.  Granted, in 1988 this wasn’t very hard.  I mean, this was the decade where you could put a bunch of random cartoon characters on screen for thirty seconds and tell us there was a toy involved and parents would be beating one another down in parking lots for the toys.

But those were toys.  How did you sell something that wasn’t a toy, or say a movie that looked like it would have cool toys?  How did you sell, for instance, food?

A few weeks ago, I took a glance at an old McDonald’s commercial, which was this sappy brother-sister number where the brother is obviously stalking his sister but it’s supposed to be all cute because he offers her a french fry or something.  Phone company commercials from that era are noted for this type of syrupy fun, and soft drink commercials?  Well, I’ve already talked about the epic nature of Dr. Pepper’s early 1990s ad campaign and at some point I’m going to get around to Coke.

But a lot of those commercials weren’t specifically geared towards kids, mainly because kids weren’t the only people going to drink Coke or go to McDonald’s.  However, we were the people most likely to eat Chef Boyardee.

Canned pasta has been around for what seems like eons (I think that’s its shelf-life, too) and there have been quite a number of products geared towards kids, such as Franco-American’s Spaghetti-O’s and Chef Boyardee’s Tic Tac Toe’s (yeah, I know it’s a misused apostrophe … it was their mistake, not mine).  The former is somewhat of an American institution because even those of us who have never eaten a single Spaghetti-O know the jingle “Uh oh, Spaghetti-O’s!”  Tic Tac Toe’s, however, don’t enjoy the same iconic status.  In fact, they’re not even made anymore.

But back in the late 1980s, the pasta company tried to break Spaghetti-Os monopoly on kids’ pasta consciousness and unveiled one of those commercials that I have never been able to get out of my head since:

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Revolution!

Stephanie Kaye next to one of the many "Out of the way Stephanie Kaye" posters that were up in the halls of DJH. Yes, they made posters. Photo from Degrassi Online.

Lately, when I’ve rewatched old Degrassi Junior High episodes, I’ve been marveling not only how realistic it is but how typical the plots seem to be.  Not cliche, mind you, but a lot of the episodes seem to be what I would expect from the junior high/high school drama genre:  drugs, sex, alcohol stories that are just “hard” enough so that you can picture a person of that age dealing with the issues.

Furthermore, when it comes to character development there are expected outcomes to the way certain characters act or consequences for their actions, even if the consequences come a few episodes down the road.  In the first season of DJH, Stephanie Kaye was one of the spotlight characters, or at least one of the characters that I remember being so prominent.  Her big struggle through that season, which detailed the first half of her eighth grade year, was how to deal with being popular while becoming more mature.  The last episode I discussed, “Best Laid Plans” addressed that, especially how she wore provocative clothing while at school yet dressed “down” at home.  We also saw how she treated her younger step-brother, Arthur, like crap.

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If I could just hold you again

When it comes to nostalgia, there are those things that are true memories and those which are false memories.  No decade has more of this going for it than the 1980s.  Eighties nostalgia is a juggernaut that began when I was in high school back in the early 1990s and really hasn’t stopped since, especially since I’ve had students who say they’re nostalgic for the 1980s, something I find hilarious considering they weren’t really old enough to remember it (And no, they don’t, because that would be like me saying I remember the 1970s when I was born in 1977 and my only memory of anything world events before 1981 is seeing Jimmy Carter on a television screen.  That might be a 1970s memory but it doesn’t exactly put me inside Studio 54).

If you are truly a Child of the Eighties, you are fully aware of these two sides of nostalgia because for every movie, television show, compilation album, or Glee medley that says, “Remember Eighties?  Here it is!  No, don’t think about anything that really happened.  This is Eighties.  Enjoy these memories.”  You’re not supposed to remember that Wang Chung had three good songs, only that they recorded “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” and made a seizure-inducing video to go along with it.  You’re not supposed to remember Fresh Horses, the piece-of-crap other Molly Ringwald/Andrew McCarthy flick, just Pretty In Pink.  And you’re not supposed to remember the Cloris Leachman years of The Facts of Life.

Okay, sorry about that last one.

Anyway, I’m one of those people who will listen to a flashback station on Sirius and be happy that Alan Hunter has decided to play “Stone in Love” instead of “Don’t Stop Believin'” for the hour’s dose of Journey.  Maybe it’s because I’m a nostalgia dork, or maybe it’s because I’ve been exposed to so much Eighties nostalgia for the past two decades that I need more than something that scratches the surface.  I think that everyone reaches that point in his life, where he wants more than just another playing of “Hungry Like the Wolf,” and usually there is one work that serves as a trigger for the true memories that lie beneath the VH-1-produced surface.  For me, it was “At This Moment” by Billy Vera and the Beaters.

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The Routine

A "fall in the suburbs" shot of a brother and sister that's worth some caption about Americana, but I can't think of one.

In the middle of my sister’s wedding last month, I walked over to her and said jokingly, “Now we are so happy, we do the dance of joy!”  She finished the sentence along with me, as it’s one of the many weird in-joked the two of us have, most of which have something to dow ith the countless hours of crappy 1980s-era sitcoms that we grew up watching in syndication because my father was too cheap to spring for cable. 

It is entirely fitting, by the way, that I turn to sitcoms when I think about what growing up with my sister was like.  I know brothers and sisters who are weirdly close, or have one of those relationships where the brother may as well be another father.  I also know brothers who are perfect confidants and had greeting-card upbringings.  While Nancy and I had annoyingly ordinary childhoods, we weren’t exactly the Cleavers of the Bradys.  On some level I guess you could say we were the Cunninghams, even though my parents didn’t have an older child who mysteriously disappeared (I’ve always thought that Chuck Cunningham was an early anti-war activist and a member of the communist party so Mr. C. drove him to the Canadian border under the cover of night because while he loved his son, he was proud of his country and didn’t want to face the humiliation of HUAC) and none of my friends were cool guys who lived above my parents’ garage.  Besides, we didn’t really grow up watching Happy Days unless WPIX was rerunning it in the afternoons.

No, we were more accustomed to vegging out in front of stuff like Growing Pains, The Wonder Years, Full House, or Charles in Charge.  Full House, especially, stuck with us over the yars because it gave my sister her longest-running nickname (unless you count the Wonder Years reference “butthead”).

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Introducing Satan’s Daughter (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Four)

A promo poster for The New Teen Titans (1984 or "Baxter" series) #1

So in making my way through the Titans Hunt storyline, I find myself putting off the end of the Hunt (aka “The Jericho Gambit”) and subsequent story arcs to flesh out the background of these characters as well as my personal collecting history.  Because when you are so into a series that you want to get every single issue going back ten years, there are definitely periods of time when what is going on in the present is an afterthought and you choose to relive the glory days of the past.

In this case, the glory days tie directly into the present as it is, because when “The Jericho Gambit” begins in issue 82, we will find out what has been hinted at for a while now–Jericho did not simply decide to betray his team.  instead, he is possessed by an evil force that has a connection to Raven and her dead father, Trigon, the raison d’être of the New Teen Titans.

In 1980, DC slotted a 16-page new Teen Titans preview into DC Comics Presents #26 and that short story starred Robin, who seemed to be having nightmares wherein he was fighting with a new group of Teen Titans.  Except half of these people were not familiar to anyone, and they weren’t really dreams but premonitions that a girl named Raven planted not only in his mind but in the minds of all the other teammates, manipulating them to team up because her father was coming to destroy the world.

Raven, you see, is an empath, and the only surviving offspring of the demon Trigon, the evil ruler of another dimension who has just discovered Earth’s existence and wants it all to himself.  Raven has been raised by the denizens of Azareth, a realm where people who dress like monk/cult members follow Azar, a pacifist goddess of sorts, and she has the power to heal other people’s wounds (and pretty soon will be able to actually manipulate emotions).  Knowing that her father was coming, she tried to get the Justice League of America’s help, and was rejected because Zatanna–the resident magician–saw something evil inside her.

The Titans do stop Trigon, sending him to a “prison dimension” and he spends the next four years manipulating his daughter in an effort to take her over, reenter our dimension, and rule the world.  What’s great about that is that it’s done subtly, through the occasional moment when Raven stretches herself too far or is too angered, or has a few panels here or there where she is behind the scenes suffering because her father’s influence has weakened her.

Trigon the Terrible: interdimensional demon. Don't ask him if you can date Raven.

Trigon meets his first defeat in issue #6 of the original New Teen Titans series, which started in 1980.  he would return with the beginning of a new New Teen Titans series in 1984, a series printed on better quality paper and sold directly to comic stores as opposed to newsstands.  In fact, the type of paper was called Baxter paper so the series is often referred to as the “Baxter” New Teen Titans series.

This new series was where I first encountered Trigon and really got to know the Marv Wolfman-George Perez era team, once again picking up one of the many back issues that Harris had gotten a hold of and that I sifted through during my sister’s piano lessons.  He had picked up issues 2 and 3 of the series, which featured Raven’s turn to evil (she grows another pair of eyes and her skin turns red) and then subjecting her former teammates to their worst nightmares wherein they face and ultimately fight and kill their darker selves.  I’d pick up #1 shortly afterward, paying only $5.00 for it because with the exception of a few very early issues or Deathstroke appearances, Titans back issues went cheap.

If you could find them, that is.  Because it would be a long time before I would get the rest of this storyline and find out how it ended.  I mean, I knew how it ended because Raven as of 1991 was still alive and Trigon hadn’t been heard from except a passing mention here and there.  But I would get issues #4 and #5 before “The Jericho Gambit” ended, tracking both down at Sun Vet Coin and Stamp, which was my “alternative” comic store, the place I went to when Bob didn’t have the back issues I needed.

This particular time in my life was when I was branching out on my own a little more.  Had I lived in a place where I could drive at the age of 15 or 16, this would have meant taking my brand new car all over Long Island to discover what comics I could find.  But I didn’t get a license until after I turned 18 and I wasn’t driving my own car until I was in college.  But I did have my bike and I did have friends who would ride insanely long distances.

the "Monster" comics shop is what was formerly known as Sun Vet Coin and Stamp. Picture courtesy of "The Caldor Rainbow" blog

My friend Jeremy was not a comic fan.  He was the friend I spent time with playing video games, watching shitty horror movies, and exploring a new thing called the Internet.  but when we weren’t screwing around at his place, we were riding to other libraries to look up books on the paranormal and to places like Sun Vet Mall.  I think he was indulging me by hanging out at Sun Vet Coin and Stamp because there honestly wasn’t anything else of interest, unless he really wanted to build model rockets.

Then again, there wasn’t anything really of interest at all at Sun Vet.  Located where Sunrise Highway and Veterans Highway meet in Holbrook (hence the name), the mall is anchored not by any department store, but by a PathMark and a Toys R Us (although back in the day that Toys R Us was a Rickel Home Center).  The mall is one level with not much else to speak of except for maybe The Gap, which was right by the main entrance, and Santa’s workshop, which was in the center of the mall not far from the snack stand that always made the place smell like soft pretzels.

So aside from throwing a few quarters into the Arkanoid machine at “The Subway,” which was a leftover relic of the Eighties, why would we want to go to the dimly lit Sun Vet Mall?  Simply put, in order to get there, we had to not only drive all the way across town, but we had to cross Sunrise Highway.

At 13 and 14 years old, this was a bit of a feat for a kid who used to have to ask his parents for permission to walk just a few blocks to the comic store or get a slice of pizza.  Sunrise highway was at the very north end of town and crossing meant waiting for a traffic light to change nad then running or riding as fast as possible across all four lanes, praying that you would make it across before the traffic started blaring its collective horn.

Possessed by Trigon, Raven takes on her former teammates.

That was the case if you were crossing at Lakeland or Johnson Avenues in order to get to K-Mart, anyway.  Crossing at Broadway Avenue and Sunrise Highway was less treacherous because there was a bridge and service roads,s o we didn’t have to dodge traffic.  The hours I spent making want lists and then combing the Sun Vet Coin and Stamp back-issue bins were just as many as those I spent poring over the prices in the Mile High Comics catalog, through which I placed comics orders for my birthday and Christmas every year.

My eventual purchase of all five issues (which are now collected in the Terror of Trigon trade) and the sixth epilogue issue brought together the culmination of a great era in Titans history.  Like I said, Wolfman and Perez had been working toward Trigon coming back and the Titans making their last stand since about 1980-1981 when the New Teen Titans series had begun.  Issues 1-4 take the team into the darkest of possible places wherein each hero is corrupted and turned into his/her darker self, but then turns on Raven (who thought she was controlling them) and kills her.  Issue #5, ont he other hand, ends in a symphony of light where the disembodied souls of Azareth use Raven to envelop Trigon and ultimately destroy him.  Of coruse, as we will come to find in “The Jericho Gambit,” thsoe souls would become corrupted and take over Jericho,w ho had once entered Raven’s body as a way to figure out what was wrong with her.  This is where I was around this time in The New Titans, waiting for the climax of The Titans Hunt, and then wondering what would happen if and when they finally escaped.

Next Up: “The Jericho Gambit” in New Titans #82-84.

The Devil’s in the Creme Filling

In the annals and aisles of snack cake history, Hostess seems to get all the recognition.  I am sure that’s because being a nationally distributed brand, it’s been easier to get a hold of Suzy Q’s and SnoBalls and the iconic Twinkie.  But while the lunches of my school days did sometimes involve me peeling apart the remnants of an obliterated Hostess cupcake, I have always pledged my allegiance and had a very fervent love for the Devil Dog.

Manufactured by Drake’s Cakes, the Devil Dog is a hot dog-shaped chocolate cake and creme filling sandwich that comes one to a pack and usually about a dozen or so per box.  It’s a lot like Hostess’s Suzy Q, except it’s far superior.  Sure, the Suzy Q is actually bigger and has more creme filling, but Hostess’s insistence on moist-right-out-of-the-wrapper cake often leads to those cakes being unnecessarily sticky and ultimately leads to the cake sticking to your hand.

That cake, by the way, is nearly impossible get off with a napkin.  I have lost count of the number of times I have purchased a Suzy Q or a Twinkie at a convenience store, marveled in disgust at how much grease was left behind on th white cardboard, at it anyway, and then had to find a place to wash my hands after I was done eating.  I don’t know about you, but this is quite irritating, especially because it shouldn’t happen.  Icing, I can understand.  In fact, anyone who buys a Suzy Q is well aware of the potential for icing fingers, much like sticking one’s hand into a bag of Cheetos will turn the fingers orange.  But the cake is supposed to hold the icing in and provide a barrier of protection from mess, not be the reason for it.

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Scary Evening

There are some kids who aren’t scared of anything and there are some kids who are scared of everything.  I spent most of my childhood in the latter camp, doing my best to avoid any situation that was a little scary, whether it be climbing aboard a roller coaster or climbing the ropes in gym class.  Scary movies definitely fell into this category.  I think that by the time I was ten years old, the scariest movie I had watched might have been a WPIX airing of Carrie (which really wasn’t scary) or an old Hammer Studios flick like Dracula: Prince of Darkness.  In other words, despite my fascination with the video boxes for horror movies, I really wasn’t up for renting one.

I can’t tell if spending my early years being relatively sheltered from the sights and sounds of scary movies had a positive or negative effect on my life.  I mean, the negative is that I was a complete pussy when it came to watching even Alien for the first time, and one scary scene could give me a really bad nightmare to the point where I insisted that my closet door be closed each night before I went to bed.  Then again, the fact that I remembered that one scary scene so well has made me really appreciate what goes into a quality horror movie.  In other words, I’m not one to sit back and simply let The Exorcist or The Blair Witch Project simply happen.  If I’m watching one of those films, I’m involved.

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Horror in a Box (Portions NSFW)

The poster for 1981’s “The Howling,” which was one video box I could never stop staring at when I was a kid.

I am not a horror movie guy.  Sure, I’ll sit down and watch stuff like Halloween or Night of the Living Dead on occasion, but I am not the type to line up outside of a movie theater on the opening night of the latest Saw movie because I am promised that there are going to be 50% more genital mutilations.  However, I’ve always been fascinated by horror films, especially those which are outside of the mainstream.

This fascination began at an early age, when Sayville’s Video Empire opened in 1984.  This wasn’t the first video store that my parents frequented–that distinction belongs to Video Village, which was located in a very small house-like building next to what was Chicken Delight but is now Hot Bagels on Montauk Highway in Sayville; and Video Zone, which was across from the Oakdale train station–and those video stores were pretty cramped establishements with very little to offer me except for repeated rentals of Superman: The Movie and video collections of Mickey Mouse cartoons which, if you waited long enough after the cartoons were over, featured a long and terrible trailer for Disney’s long and terrible sci-fi movie, The Black Hole.

Video Empire, as I’ve mentioned before, quickly became my home video store after it opened because it was on the same side of Main Street/Montauk Highway as my parents’ house was, so that meant I didn’t have to worry about crossing it to get there on my bike; and it was pretty huge for a video store.  Now, it was nowhere near the size of a Blockbuster Video but for a mom and pop operation, it was pretty large.  The children’s section of the store was right as you came in, to the right, and if you kept walking toward the counter you found that the kiddie videos transitioned into the sci-fi/horror videos.  By this time in my life I had seen Star Wars a ton of times, so I would peruse the shelves hoping to find The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, both of which had just come out on video back in the mid-1980s and were highly sought after by Video Empire’s customers.

While perusing, my eyes would eventually land on the box for one of the many horror movies available.  These included your obvious classics, such as the Friday the 13th series (which at that point was up to Part IV, or The Final Chapter), the Halloween series (at the awful Season of the Witch), or something random like Psycho or Alien.  But they also included movies that probably didn’t make a lot of money at the box office and whose studios had decided to recoup whatever losses they had by making them readily available for the bourgeoning video rental market.  If there’s nothing else out, they have to rent something, right?  I mean, it’s a decent rationale.  Eventually, while my dad tried to figure out what new release action flick to rent and my sister looked for The Last Unicorn or some shit, I would pick up one of those boxes and turn them over, reading the description.

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The Start of a Titanic Undertaking (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Three)

Now, in covering the era of the New Titans that I started reading with New Titans #71 (and wrote about last month), I intend to go in order, “chunking” the various books into the various storylines that ran all the way up until the series ended in 1996 with New Titans #130.  But from time to time I’ll be taking a detour into older issues of the series.  That’s because they both tie into the stories at hand as well as this period in my life when I moved beyond buying current Titans issues to hunting through the back issue bins looking for the older stories.

Ask any die hard comic fan and they will probably tell you exactly what issue of his title was the one that cemented his love for the characters or creative team and made him want to own every single issue, no matter what the price that his local comic shop has them going for.  It’s usually a random issue, one that comes out while he’s starting to read a title or has been reading one for a little while, or it’s a trade paperback that collects several issues and gets him wanting to buy the issues that are not only collected but were published around them.  In my case, it was neither.  My desire to collect Teen Titans back issues began in quite possibly the most random way, through The Official Teen Titans Index #4.

Published in partnership with DC Comics, Independent Comics Group (which may have been connected to the late, lamented Eclipse Comics, as Eclipse has a lot of house ads in the books) printed five issues that ran through each of the comics featuring the Teen Titans from their first appearance in Brave and the Bold #54 all the way up until the second New Teen Titans series #16 (I’ll explain about the whole 1980 series/1984 series thing in a bit).  Each issue’s entry went through the details about who the creative team was, the major characters, and an overall synopsis of the issue’s story.  Notes about the last and next appearance of each character as well as special notes were included.

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