In 1990, Fox debuted Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, a show about a charming teenager who always seems to get his way. Comparisons to Ferris Bueller abounded, but the show went beyond that and made the idea its own. For three seasons, the antics of Parker and his Buds–Mikey and Jerry–along with Kubiak, Shelley, and Principal Musso were unlike any other sitcom. Join me as a I take a walk through the show by talking about its history, its cast and characters, and some of my favorite moments.
In episode 172 of the podcast, I talked about the Fox Network, and at one point, I played part of the “It’s on Fox!” promo that first ran in 1990 and was a showcase for their then-new five nights a week programming. I’ve seen promotions like this in the years since, like when the WB and UPN premiered in the mid-1990s, and old promos for the big three networks that made the rounds on YouTube. With the exception of “It’s on Fox!”, I don’t remember most of them.
On the other hand, I clearly remember some of the promotional commercials for my local television stations. Since I was watching the NYC stations, they were fairly well-produced, catchy, and reran a lot during commercial breaks, especially in the late afternoon when I was watching cartoons, sitcoms, and the news.
Syndicated stations usually had the most of these, and often ran advertisements for specifical programming blocks. You’d have “A full hour of The Simpsons every night on Fox 5″ or “The Brady Bunch Hour on Channel 11.” Then there were special movie months like Shocktober. In fact, Channel 11 was the best with these ads as well as station theming (they were “11 Alive” for a number of years in the Seventies and Eighties). My favorite had to be the commercial that was simply a montage of slows WPIX aired set to Huey Lewis’ “The Power of Love.” I’m sure nobody else but me remembers it; in fact, I can’t find it anywhere.
But what I could find were two ad campaigns from the late Eighties and early Nineties for WABC and WNBC, channels 7 and 4 in New York.
90210, The X-Files, The Simpsons, In Living Color,21 Jump Street, and … Herman’s Head? Join me this episode as I take a trip back into the late 1980s and the first decade of the Fox network. I go into the network’s origins as well as its early programming (some of which were hits and many of which were not), and then will talk about some of my favorite or most-remembered shows in various genres.
It’s the early ’90s. It’s my adolesence. And yes … it’s on Fox!
It’s the most rewritten and confusing backstory in the history of comics. No, not Hawkman. Not The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. Not even Jean Grey. It’s Donna Troy.
For this episode, I return to the topic of the Wonder Girl herself by taking a quick look at how her origin has been told and retold, and then do a deep dive into the 2025 Titans annual by Phil Jimenez, which reveals the identity of her father and lays to rest the question of who she really is.
In the 1990s and 2000s, VH-1 declared itself “Music First” and began airing original programming. It began with music-related shows and eventually went fully into reality television. But during that time, it was appointment television. For this episode, Amanda joins me to talk about those glory days of VH-1. From Pop Up Video to Behind the Music to Hindsight, we go through the shows we watched, what we remember, and why we miss true music television.
So we all remember the Energizer Bunny ads from the mid-to-late-1980s, right? The first one were simply the bunny drumming and rolling and not stopping. Then, the commericals got creative; they’d start with ads for fake products and thent he bunny would interrupt (“Still going … nothing outlasts Energizer”). For its time, it was a pretty innovative idea for a commercial. I’m not going to say that it ushered in an era of humor or parody in commercials or anything; maybe it did. But there were definitely a few copycats.
The one I remember the most was, for, of all things, TV Guide.
It’s kind of weird to me that TV Guide had commercials. After all, it was one of those things that was always just … there. You know, that digest-sized magazine you threw around and sometimes read just beyond the listings (or in my case, always read the articles). But in the early Nineties, they launched their own ad campaign using fake commercials. I don’t know how many there were, but I do remember one, a music video named SKUM and the song “Screaming at the Top of Our Lungs.”
So in case you are wondering, the band in the commercial doesn’t exist. A comment from 11 years ago made by YouTube User @rhino6849 says:
This was written played and sung by Chuck Duran. We were in a band together called Loud and Clear which was quite a departure from this.Sorry to disappoint some of the metal heads but this was written with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. I was on the floor laughing the first time he played it. Funny stuff!
p.s. That’s an actor, not Chuck.
Another user, @painebobby, adds, “Chuck sang and played guitar But did not write it.”
And even Chuck Duran himself, whom I found on the website “Demos That Rock”, has posted about it in some places. He is also a working voice-over artist who has a podcast about that work. One of his guests was E.G. Daily, which is pretty cool.
For me, the commercial still holds up, especially because of the over-the-top nature of the video. I’m not sure if GWAR was getting any rotation on MTV (this is about a year or two before Beavis and Butt-Head premiered), but that’s what it reminds me of. With a … tap … of Spinal Tap (I’ll show myself out).
The cover to the NES Game Atlas, one of the specials that Nintendo published.
A while back, I wrote about the games series that Nintendo created as part of their initial years of the NES and the first wave of available games. Of course, I ownd a few of them and played a number of others, but I have to onfess that so many of them passed me by because I didn’t get my NES until 1988. That was the “Action Set”–with the still-gray Zapper and Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge–and it was a huge birthday present, completely changing how I spent my free time.
Along with that set was a chance to join what was then called “The Nintendo Fun Club,” which had a thin magazine that came out every so often and featured stories about upcoming games and tips for taking on certain levels or bosses. My one and only issue of tha tmagazine was its very last and it featured Ice Hockey on the cover (a game I played endlessly and wrote about a while back). But I wasn’t cheated out fo whtever money my parents psnt on a Fun Club memership because in the fall of 1988, Nintendo put out the first issue of Nintendo Power.
I don’t need to explain Nintendo Power to most people my age because it’s the single most important magazine published for my generation. In fact, I am sure that I am not the only person who can close his eyes and see that first cover with Mario jumping, telling us taht inside the issue was an exclusive look at Super Mario Bros. 2. That first issue, with its coverage of the Mario sequel, also profiled three baseball games we could choose from (including Bases Loaded) and previewed upcoming games, including one announced or in development (something that magazines like Wizard would do for comics and movies about comics for years afterward).
My well-worn and taped back together copy of the map for the second quest of The Legend of Zelda, which you could find in the very first issue of Nintendo Power.
Most importantly, the first issue of Nintendo Power featured a pull-out centerfold that on one side was a baseball video game-themed poster and on the other was a map. And it wasn’t just any map; no sir, it was the map for the second quest of The Legend of Zelda.
I cannot express how important this was. Zelda was the premier game for the NES and beating that gold cartridge was a badge of honor. Okay, maybe I considered it a badge of honor because I suck at video games and to this day have never actually completed The Legend of Zelda by myself–both times I had quests that had gotten deep into the game, one of my friends proceeded to “help” me and did a speed run of the remaining boards. At least I got the second quest–as did my sister, who took advantage of naming a game “Zelda” so she would automatically get the second quest. That map, therefore, proved invaluable and was used so many times. I still have it and it’s held together with Scotch tape and a prayer.
Nintendo Power published this guide to Dragon Warrior. You can see where I wrote down where to find treasure in the caves.
The same can be said for a couple of other things Nintendo Power published, such as their mini magazine insert about Dragon Warrior, the role-playing game that I know some of my friends found boring as hell, but I was obsessed with (along with its first sequel, and would have kept going in that series if I ever found III and IV but they were hard to come by). I marked that up with notes about where to find certain things or what direction to go in at certain points; I also saved one of the advice columns where someone wrote in to ask about the network of caves that would get you to the island where the final boss–The Dragon Lord–lived. And to their credit, Nintendo knew exactly what they had because eventually, they got into publishing player’s guides like The NES Game Atlas.
A book composed entirely of screenshots of each level from various games, the Game Atlas was a special book that you bought separately or came with a subscription renewal–which I’m pretty sure is how I got mine. It was printed to stand out as well, with a stiffer cover and size akin to what we’d eventually see in comic book trade paperbacks. The graphics on the page, while real, were microscopic and it took some real effort to actually see the images. I’m pretty sure I didn’t care, though, because this was a treasure trove, especailly for games like Zelda and Metroid.
Not that helped me win anything or get any further in a game, mind you.
I guess, though, that was the other appeal, because I was able to see later stages of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that I never, ever saw due to dying in that damned underwater stage every time I played the game. Seriously, it was rage-inducing.
Anyway, the Game Atlas was the frist of a series of Players Guides of which Nintendo would publish three more before choosing a different format. The other three were Game Boy, Mario Mania, and Super NES. That last one is on our house and I’m pretty sure it’s because my wife owns a Super Nintendo. It is similar to the Game Atlas in that it does contain some maps, but it’s more like a set of fairly in-depth profiles of just about every SNES game available at the time. Nintendo was competing with Sega Genesis at the time.
Most of my Nintendo Power issues were thrown away years ago. I still have the one with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the cover as well as issue #41, which was Super Castlevania IV. I’m pretty sure the latter issue was toward the end of my subscription because they were covering NES games less and less. And that made sense considering that they would phase out the system by 1994. I never did own a Super Nintendo or a Game Boy, so I decided to drop my subscription and read Sports Illustrated.
But I get such a rush of nostalgia whenever I flip through one of these books or magazines. They are such an encapsulation of my early teen years.
Ramona Quimby, Age 8. The paperback edition from the 1980s. That Dell Books border was a mainstay for kids’ paperbacks. Image from Amazon.
I have had so many discussions with Stella about the literature we read in our formative yearrs. While I realize that pointing out the difference in ages (she’s nine years younger than I am) is a running joke, it applies here because what was “Young Adult” literature was different for eachof us. I am sure that there was some overlap of titles we’d find on the Scholastic Book Club flyer, but I also can say that YA lit was at the beginning of its boom years when she was in middle and high school and barely existed when I was a tween (in fact, the word “tween” didn’t exist when I was a tween).
I realize that’s a bit of an exaggeration. There certainly were books aimed at a middle or junior high school audience, but the great ones were few and far between and I found my refuge in Star Trek, Star Wars, and Robotech novels as well as more adult works by Stephen King. But I didn’t get there right away because while I am sure that my fandom for a franchise like Star Wars would definitely motivate me to read at least one novel, something before all of that made me want to read.
Looking back, I always had books in my home. My parents had a good stack of novels and when I was little, I owned a ton of Golden Books and Curious George books. I can’t remember when I graduated from those to works that were more complicated, but I want to say that it probably started sometime in the first grade. I have done an entry about the McGraw-Hill readers and also have a memory of grabbing these Reader’s Digest collections in the back of Mrs. Hickman’s room and reading through them one by one. I cannot tell you what any of them were about, of course, but I did understand them, and by the time I was in the second grade, I (and a number of my friends) had children’s novels and textbooks to read or read to us.
But that, of course, is probably the case for so many of us, and there has to be some specific books that I can set apart from the rest as truly formative. And of course, I have a list.
My generation’s weekends always began with The Smurfs.
Or maybe it was The Snorks? The Shirt Tales? The Super Friends?
No matter what the show was, we all share a common memory of sitting in our parents’ TV room every Saturday morning watching cartoons. I’m not sure when this particular tradition started–children’s programming had been part of Saturday morning television since Captain Kangaroo and The Howdy Doody Show in the 1950s–and I knew that it died out in the Nineties and 2000s as cable networks started becoming the place to go for endless hours of cartoons. But Generation X can lay a significant claim to sitting ont he floor in your PJs–possibly while eating some sugary cereal–and watching nearly four hours of cartoons. I mean, they’re such a part of our childhood that we remember even the more random ones that didn’t have a toy line, like Camp Candy or Kidd Video.
But when I think about my Saturday mornings, the often began a little earlier that 8:00. Sometimes by a couple of hours.
Maybe it’s just me because I have never been able to sleep in on Saturdays (well, with the exception of when I was in high school and college), so for much of my childhood, I would be up way before the ffirst cartoon started and because nobody else was awake, I had to fend for myself. Sometimes, that meant making myself breakfast or cleaning my room (for some strange reason I remember emptying out my dresser, folding all my clothes, and then putting everything back). Sometimes, I played with my toys. Very often, though, there was television.
Look at Wikipedia’s listings for daytime television int eh 1980s, and pre-cartoon Saturday mornings are listed as “local programming.” I didn’t have the luxury of cable as a kid, so I made do with seven channels: the three networks, WNEW (which would become WYNW, the Fox affiliate), WWOR 9, WPIX 11, and PBS (WNET 13). WPIX was usually the best bet for early morning cartoons because they’d run shows that had falled out of their afternoon lineups, so you’d catch Voltron or later seasons of Transformers a couple of years after they’d faded away. On the networks, though, the programming was completely random.
It’s JSApril! All this month, comics podcasts and blogs are celebrating the original super-hero team, the Justice Society of America. For this episode, I’ll be talking about one of the JSA’s darkest hours, their battle with Extant in Zero Hour, followed by their re-match/redemption in “The Hunt for Extant”. I’ll also talk about Extant’s origins and the Impulse One-Shot “Bart Saves the Universe.”
For more JSApril content, look for #JSApril on social media or check out JSApril: Celebrating 85 Years of the JSA at the Fire and Water Podcast Network.
Note: I have a new Apple Podcasts feed and am on Spotify! Just search for Pop Culture Affidavit!
And for more JSApril, look for #JSApril on social media and check out this list of all of the contributors to JSApril, and thanks to The Fire and Water Podcast Network for putting all of this together!
Pop Culture Affidavit 