1980s

Death from Spaaaaaace!

I am sure that everyone has a movie that he’s meant to see but never gotten around to.  Moreover, I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there who are weirdly obsessed with the possibility that they may watch a certain movie, yet never seem to get around to watching.  Or, as my father often says, they’ve seen “bits and pieces” of certain films.

For years, whenever I would walk into Sayville’s Video Empire with my dad, the first place I would check out would be the science fiction/horror section.  The reason for this was twofold: Star Wars movies fell under this classification and they were located along the right-hand wall next to the new releases.  On the shelves were always random movies that to this day I’m sure nobody ever rented (ah, the early days of video stores where inventory meant whatever was actually available at the time) as well as the popular flicks.  One of those was the 1984 movie Night of the Comet.

A film about teenagers having to make it in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Night of the Comet didn’t do much at the box office and I would never had heard of it if I hadn’t been watching At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert on a regular basis and saw their review, which was pretty good for a movie that was nearly a B movie and didn’t do that well at the box office. 

But the concept intrigued me: everyone in the world has been wiped out, a few teenagers seem to have survived, and all is not as it seems.  Plus, the poster (and the subsequent video box) was really cool looking.  How could you go wrong with this?

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It’s Always About a Girl, Isn’t It?

I think there is a point in everyone’s life where rock music intersects with girls.  Every one I know, including me, has a CD or concert stub that can be explained using the phrase “Well, there was this girl …”  Usually said intersection occurs during adolescence.  Mine happened at the age of seven.

Now, I’m not one of those people who has had important popular music included in every last moment of his life.  I don’t have early childhood memories of my mother playing Led Zeppelin and there’s no story about me listening to John Lennon when I was a zygote.  In fact, my nursery school playlists were more likely to includesongs like “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?” and “C is for Cookie,” and my very first exposure to popular music was through Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Released in 1982, Chipmunk Rock is a collection of late 1970s and early 1980s hits as well as a few classics, such as “Leader of the Pack,” with a cover featuring Alvin taking his place among the presidents of Mount Rushmore (a nod to Deep Purple’s In Rock album) and the jacket opened up to show the group in situations that reflected the song titles.  My personal favorite of all of the tracks on the LP was the Pat Benatar hit “Heartbreaker.”  There’s something about a chipmunk shredding a guitar solo that pumps the adrenaline of a second grader.  Combine that with Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” and Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” and I, as well as any kid my age back then, was ready to strap on a guitar, throw on a headband, and freaking wail.

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All the people tell me so …

The best songs sometimes start simply–a drum beat, a guitar riff, a hand clap, a guitar riff, or a keyboard followed by an opening lyric that every listener will remember and hopefully associate with said intro every time it’s played: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah”; “I love the beautiful clothes she wears and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair”; “You know I told you once tonight that you could always speak your mind …”

For years, I’ve been trying to figure out why “What od All The People Know?” by The Monroes isn’t in the 1980s pop culture stratosphere.  It’s not without airplay and definitely not without its admirers, but it never had the honor of showing up on any of VH-1’s 20,000 1980s-related nostalgia shows from the last decade, nor have I ever heard it in a nostalgic movie trailer or seen it on a compilation (that I own or have seen in a record store).  If anything, I’d say the song is a “sleeper” of a hit, something that’s just … well, it’s just known.

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The Best Laid Plans

The Degrassi Junior High kids. Wheels and Stephanie are third and fourth from the left.

I didn’t have cable television when i was growing up.

To anyone older than me, this is not uncommon, but to people my age and younger (especially those that I have taught), not having cable and growing up with only seven channels is a completely foreign concept.  I am sure that some would even consider it child abuse that I didn’t get to watch the latest Stryper video when it ran 20 times a day in 1990, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter.  Oh, I suppose it did because I missed out out on most of The State and Remote Control when they first aired and several years’ worth of VMAs.  But for every video I didn’t watch, I caught another, way more important show, and that was Degrassi Junior High.

I don’t remember the exact day when I first watched Degrassi Junior High.  I know that I was in the fifth grade and it was probably in the winter or spring of 1988 because by the time school was out that June, I had already watched several episodes.  What I do remember, though, is that I more or less stumbled onto it because I was bored one afternoon and had tired of seeing commercials for the Craft-Matic adjustable bed on channel 11 between reruns of 1970s-era television shows.  So I flipped around and when I landed on channel 13–PBS–there was a scene of a boy and his father walking along a beach and talking about sex.  That was, as I discovered later, the midpoint of the first season episode “The Best Laid Plans,” which originally aired in March 1987.

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Shea Hello

Shea Stadium on August 25, 1985.

If you judge my love of the New York Mets by my first Shea Stadium experience, then it’s no wonder I’ve been a fan for twenty-five years now.  In fact, I don’t really know what it’s like to start following a team when they are really bad, considering that the three pro teams I’ve followed since I was a kid–the Mets, Giants, and Rangers–were all competitive in the mid-1980s. 

Then again, I hold certain members of my family and circle of friends responsible for my Mets fandom.  In the spring of 1985, I was wrapping up my time in Mrs. Holl’s second grade class at Lincoln Avenue Elementary, a class I did all right in even if my best memory is catching shit for zoning out, daydreaming, or getting easily distracted (how was I not labeled ADD?  Seriously …).  In my class was John Purcell, with whom I had spent kindergarten and who would truly be responsible for my love of the Rangers and much of my not-so-storied Swindon Row street hockey career.  But that’s a topic for another post, as he showed up in school one day having been to the previous night’s Mets game and did nothing but rave about how Gary Carter hit a home run and the Mets beat the Reds. 

I was intrigued.  I’d played for the Reds in tee ball and was playing real baseball that year–if you could call it that considering I couldn’t field for shit and spent my time at the plate dodging pitches–so I knew a little about how to play.  And I knew that there were professional baseball teams because my grandfather on my mom’s side was a die-hard Yankees fan.  But unlike my cousin Brian, I hadn’t been sucked into the Bronx vortex and after I expressed interest in the Mets, my Uncle Lou would help make sure that I definitely didn’t.

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Catch the Rising Stars

Unfortunately, work’s been crazy this week and while I had several things I’ve thought about covering I haven’t had much time to sit down and watch them or write about them.  So, I’m going to tease next week a little bit by showing you a commercial for the WOR Channel 9’s coverage of the Mets’ 1985 season. 

The theme for that year’s series of promos was “Catch the Rising Stars,” which I guess meant that the Mets were on their way up to being contenders.  Considering how the year turned out, that’s probably a good slogan, just like “Baseball Like It Oughta Be” was a good one for 1986.

In addition to the promos, channel 9 produced a Norman Rockwell-esque poster of Gary Carter signing a kid’s baseball that you could special order with some of the proceeds going to the Leukemia Society of America, a charity Carter is heavily involved with.  My parents had the poster framed and it hung in their basement for years and I took it with me to Arlington, where I hung it in my first apartment.

Anyway, I’ll go more in-depth on the 1985 Mets and my first experiences at Shea Stadium next week.  For now, enjoy the promo.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … Supershish?

Silvan the cat, manufactured by Dakin in the 1980s. This picture is from a recent eBay auction.

“Vintage Dakin 1980 Japanese Artists Black Cat Silvan,” the listing says, “He has a slight musky odor but due to his age I do not want to wash him–he was surface washed with disinfectant wipe and sprayed with allergen spray lightly.”  Next to the description is the price:  $179.10. In another auction with a similar discription, Silvan is wearing a Santa hat and the seller is asking for $129 [note: these prices were in 2010 … another look at eBay in 2017 sees prices run from $10-$75].

I was looking for a gag gift for my sister’s 30th birthday, which happens to be today.  It was an old tradition of ours–give a “cheesy gift” with a real gift for birthdays and Christmas–that we gave up a couple of years ago after running out of good ideas that weren’t going to cost too much money.  I brought it back because when your younger sister turns 30, you bust her chops as much as possible.

Finding her gift meant combing eBay for something that was appropriate or reflected whatever idiotic inside jokes we’ve shared over the years.  I spend the better part of an evening doing so, and in the midst of my searching, I typed in “Silvan cat” and found the listings I described above.

Had I been able to afford such a high-priced stuffed animal, I’m sure I would have sent it her way because she would have laughed her ass off (I know she did when I sent her the link to the auction).  Back when we were kids, Nancy had a menagerie of stuffed animals, most of which were gifts from grandparents and other relatives, and with the exception of some Pound Puppies or various stuffed Garfields and Odies, none of them were really from a series or line of characters.  Most, I believe, were purchased at random from toy stores or stationery stores.  Silvan, however, was a little bit different and wound up being a little more important.

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Legions of Power: Guardians of the toy closet

The Legions of Power "air team" set, complete with thermonuclear warhead. (graphic courtesy of Virtual Toy Chest.com)

I have often wondered what goes through the heads of those aunts who seemed to give you the most random toys for Christmas every year.  You know the ones I’m talking about–they seem to be able to find the last remaining Star Wars figures five years after anyone stopped collecting Star Wars figures, or hear you like He-Man and buy you a figure from a completely different line of toys that sort of looks like He-Man but isn’t.  During my childhood, I had several of these relatives, both aunts and great aunts, who bestowed upon me figures, vehicles and playsets from toy lines that were out of style or had never really been heard of.  It’s how I wound up with the Castle of Lions playset as well as much of the Panosh Place line of Voltron toys.  And It’s also how I wound up with several vehicles in the Legions of Power.

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Top That!

My wife is 33 years old today, and as a special birthday present (don’t worry, I’m not so much of a cheap-ass that I think that this is a good replacement for an actual gift), I decided that instead of focusing on something that is important to me, I would do an entry on something in pop culture that “matters” to her. 

Now, there are lots of things and I’m sure that I could dig through her iTunes library and pick a song or an album or thumb through one of the many books she’s read or is reading.  But I’ve decided to go with a movie here and not just any movie, but the 1989 Robyn Lively cult classic, Teen Witch.

That’s right, my wife is one of the many who have seen Teen Witch (probably during one of the many thousands of times it has popped up on cable in the last two decades) and has a definitely love for it, so much so that yesterday morning, my son and I were watching an advertisement for the newfangled version of The Electric Company and she asked if we were watching the film. 

And I guess if I weren’t me, I would not understand why she loves the movie so much.  But considering that I actually own a copy of Megaforce, her love of Teen Witch makes perfect sense.  It also reinforces that she’s a true 1980s fan, something I’ve never called into question, but I’ve come across so many superficial Eighties fans since … oh, The Wedding Singer first came out (mostly students of mine who weren’t even freaking born in the 1980s, which … uh, no, I don’t think so.  Go back to your shitty emo vampires and your Miley, kiddies) … that I think that there are certain pieces of 1980s pop culture that can be held up as benchmarks of “Eighties Cred.”  And Teen Witch is clearly one of those benchmarks.

Why?  Because it has nobody who’s really well-known (read: no Coreys), it’s insanely cheesy, and in spite of that (or maybe because of that) you just can’t get it out of your freakin’ head after you’ve watched it.  Seriously, come across it on cable one night and see if you don’t wind up looking at the clock and realize that 45 minutes have gone by, especially if you drop in the middle of one of the jaw-dropping musical numbers.  Oh that’s right, I said musical numbers.  Teen Witch is almost like the “girl Megaforce.” 

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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.

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