Pop Culture Affidavit

And for the blog, here’s some bonus material!

The song “Beautiful Girl” by Pete Droge, which plays over the opening credits (and provides the opening music to the show):

Gina (Rosie O’Donnell)’s epic rant about men and the female form:

The movie’s trailer:

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 50: The Weirdest Year of Your Life

Episode 50 Website Cover It’s the 50th episode of Pop Culture Affidavit! For this special episode, I take a look back twenty years to the year I graduated from high school. Along the way, I look at how senior year of high school is represented in movies. It includes stops at, among other things, American Pie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Can’t Buy Me Love, and Paper Towns as well as a host of personal memories about my own senior year of high school (which ended on June 25, 1995). Was high school the best time of my life? Was it a waking nightmare? Was it a little bit of both? You’ll have to listen to find out.

You can listen here:

Pop Culture Affidavit, Episode 49: The Waiting Place

Episode 49 Website Cover In 1997, Sean McKeever self-published his very first work, The Waiting Place, a story about the ennui that comes with being a young adult trapped in a town that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It was soon picked up by Slave Labor Graphics and McKeever along with Brendon and Brian Fraim and then Mike Norton finished the entire saga of the town of Northern Plains and its denizens in three volumes plus an epilogue.

I spend this episode taking a complete look at The Waiting Place, which has been one of my favorite comics coming-of-age stories since I bought the volume one trade in 2001. This includes a full synopsis as well as a review.

You can listen here:

If you’re interested in buying a copy of The Waiting Place, it’s available at Amazon.com. Here’s the link

As a bonus, here are the covers to all three trades put out by Slave Labor Graphics as well as the IDW “Definitive Edition”:

In case you’re curious as to what music I used in this episode, here are some YouTube clips:

Tori Amos, “Pretty Good Year”

Nine Inch Nails, “Something I Can Never Have”

R.E.M., “You Are The Everything”

The Sundays, “Here’s Where the Story Ends”

Roxy Music, “More Than This”

A New Start

I may have neglected to mention the last time that I covered anything regarding Degrassi, which was about a year and a half ago, that I initially missed the finale of Degrassi Junior High. For years, I knew that in the final episode of that season–“Bye Bye Junior High”–the school caught on fire during a dance, but I never actually saw the episode until someone sent me a video tape full of Degrassi episodes sometime in the early 2000s. So back in 1990, I had no idea what happened and really no sense of the show’s continuity. Sure, I knew who the characters were, but if a random DJH episode came on, I really couldn’t tell you what season it was from.

That changed when I tuned into watch Degrassi one day and saw a new title sequence, one for Degrassi High. The characters were the same (for the most part) but they were older and at a new school. The whole thing would end just like DJH had–with a dance after everyone learned the school was about to close–but that’s a few years off. The episode that started DH was a two-parter, “A New Start.”

One of the things that can be the most heavy-handed part of old episodes of Degrassi is its educational aspects. There was, to some degree, a mandate that the show had to teach and sometimes that issue was handled in an “issue of the day” sort of way. That kind of happens in “A New Start,” even though the episode does its best to toe the line between a solid piece of teen drama and a very special episode.

While the cast is forced to adjust to its new surroundings and we get some great subplots, involving Joey, Wheels, and Snake getting hazed by older students, including Duane (who would become a key character later in the show’s run) as well as the introduction of new characters like Claude (more about him in future episodes), this one revolved around the twins: Heather and Erica. It seems that over the summer, they held the time-honored teen jobs of camp counselors and while working at the camp, Erica met and lost her virginity to one of the other counselors, a guy named Jason. It wasn’t out of character completely–Erica was always more boy-crazy than Heather–but the complication that arose was that by the end of the first part of “A New Start,” Erica discovers that she’s pregnant.

So begins a story that even today would be considered controversial: Erica gets an abortion. Most of the second part is devoted to her contemplating the abortion, seeking counseling, and arguing with her sister, and it ends with the two of them walking either up to or into the abortion clinic, depending on what version you saw. It’s a tough topic to approach and the writers do this deftly, as do the actresses.

One of the most important things to point out about Heather and Erica, which is highlighted in a pretty forced class discussion about abortion, is that the girls are a part of a very conservative Christian family, so when Erica brings up the topic as a way of working through her feelings (like I said, it comes off as a little forced) and gets a discussion going that properly highlights multiple sides of the issue. When Erica openly wonders if it could be the right choice for someone, Heather gets visibly upset and talks about how babies die every day in the “killing centers.”

Looking back at it, twenty-five years later with the perspective of someone who now has well-established views on the issue, this discussion and some of what Heather says comes off as almost satirical; however, when I was thirteen years old, I really didn’t know what an abortion was aside from it being an issue I heard about on the news. “A New Start” made an attempt at presenting abortion in a way that was straightforward, and Heather’s inner conflict is well done, too. Erica wants her support and Heather is so anti-abortion that she doesn’t know if she will give it, but eventually she puts her love for her sister above her political ideals and walks with her when she goes to the clinic.

The original ending freeze frame to “A New Start, Part Two.” This was only aired in Canada. The U.S. version, shown on PBS, ended a few moments earlier.

That last scene, by the way, caused a controversy, at least among those who were aware of it back in 1990. The episode originally ends with Heather and Erica making their way through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters and freeze frames on a woman holding a figurine of a fetus as they walk in the door. This was too much for PBS, who truncated the American version of the episodes by a few seconds and ended with a freeze-frame of their faces. The episode still aired, though, which is more than I can say for a similar episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation which aired in Canada but was initially not shown in the U.S. by the cable network The N (incidentally, neither was “A New Start” or a later episode that referenced the abortion).

I don’t know if this opener was a way for Degrassi High to make a statement that they weren’t going to shy away from heavier topics now that characters were older, but it certainly gripped me and up until the show seemed to vanish from my television, I never missed an episode.

Both episodes can be found on YouTube …

Part One:

Part Two:

Pop Culture Affidavit, Episode 46: The Pop Culture Affidavit TV Theme Song Countdown!

Riding the coattails of The Palace of Glittering Delights, I’ve got my own TV theme song countdown. There’s comedy! There’s drama! There’s Canadians! There’s Hasselhoff! Join me as I count down twelve of my all-time favorite TV theme songs.

You can listen here:

iTunes: Two True Freaks Presents Pop Culture Affidavit

For your viewing pleasure, here’s all of the theme songs I mention in the episode.

Billy Joel, “Sleeping With the Television On” (the episode’s opener):

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

CHiPs

Hill Street Blues

Community

California Dreams

Friends

Great Scott!

House of Cards

Charles in Charge

Growing Pains

The Facts of Life

Mad About You

Night Court

Cheers

The extended version of “Where Everybody Knows Your Name”

Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High

Beverly Hills, 90210

The West Wing

My So-Called Life

Baywatch

21 Jump Street

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 45: Live From New York, it’s Saturday Night!

Episode 45 website cover It’s a coattails-riding self-indulgent trip down comedy memory lane as I spend 30 minutes talking about Saturday Night Live, which just had a huge 40th anniversary special this past Sunday. Here, I look back on another anniversary special from the show, its 15th anniversary special, which aired in the fall of 1989, and I also talk about how the show has had an effect on me since I’ve been watching it for the last 25 years.

Here’s where to listen:

Two True Freaks Presents: Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

80 Years of DC Comics, Part One: A Comics Life in Moments

Presenting the first episode in an all-new podcast miniseries from Pop Culture Affidavit, 80 Years of DC Comics. Throughout these twelve episodes, I am going to be taking a look at the various genres of comic books that DC Comics has produced in its 80-year history. For my first episode, I start off easy by talking about superheroes. More specifically, I go through 10 moments in DC Comics published during my lifetime that have I’ve enjoyed or that have had some sort of impact on me. So while it doesn’t necessarily cover all 80 years of the company, it’s a personal look at DC, company I’ve been very loyal to since I started seriously collecting comics more than two decades ago.

Of course, you can download the episode from the same iTunes feed used for every episode of Pop Culture Affidavit, or you can listen here: Pop Culture Affidavit Presents 80 Years of DC Comics, Part One: A Comics Life in Moments.

Below are scans of the ten moments I talk about, in brief, in the episode (btw, some of these are spoilers for the stories they are from).

1. Batman Confronts Silver St. Cloud (Detective Comics #475):

2. Donna Troy Reunites With Her Adopted Mother (The New Teen Titans [First Series] #38):

3. Ordinary Citizens Reacting to Merging Earths (Crisis on Infinite Earths #5):

4. Bruce Wayne Has Some Bad News (Detective Comics #620):

5. The Atom and Green Arrow Kill Darkseid (JLA #14):

6. Batman meets … Batwoman? (The Kingdom: Planet Krypton):

7. Rose Wilson Chooses Her Family (Teen Titans #1/2):

8. Darkseid and The Infinity Gauntlet (JLA/Avengers #2):

9. “Superheroes. Kill.” (Final Crisis #3):

10. Danny Chase’s Sacrifice (The New Teen Titans: Games)

We Wrote the Book on Savings

The cover of the fall 1991-1992 Consumers catalog. The company stayed in business until the mid-1990s, although my local store was gone by then.

I think that I am at the point in my life where I don’t get upset if I go to the store and something is out of stock. Oh sure, it’s a minor inconvenience and the solution usually leads to me getting in the car and driving to another, similar store down the road. But when you are a kid, this is a hard lesson to learn. You don’t have a car and you don’t know much about the stores in your area beyond what you have seen whenever your parents have taken you, so showing up to TSS only to find out that the action figure you wanted was completely sold out can be absolutely devastating, even if it provides you with much-needed lessons about how you’re not always able to get what you want instantly. Now, I’m sure that if you ask a number of people in my generation how they learned this lesson, they’ll tell you a variation on the same story–they wanted a toy, they asked mom or dad to take them to the store to get it, it wasn’t there. Or they may say one word: “Consumers.”

Consumers was a catalog-based store that was founded in Canada as Consumers Distributing in 1957 and expanded over the course of a couple of decades, adding stores and then buying out other, similar retail outlets, something that helped them to pop up with more frequency during the 1980s. The idea behind the store was similar to its main competitor, Service Merchandise: the company published a catalog and then anyone who wanted to buy something from the catalog would head to the local retail outlet–usually at a mall–and pick it up.

That is, if they actually had anything.

The G.I. Joe page of a 1980s Consumers catalog. Photo courtesy of YoJoe.com

The arrival of the Consumers catalog twice a year was an event. My friends and I would grab it out of the mail and skip right to the toys and games section. Open before us was a display of everything we ever wanted, from G.I. Joe figures and vehicles to every Nintendo game that we’d ever seen advertised anywhere. Plus, the prices were much better than what you would get at Toys R Us–not that Toys R Us was overpriced or anything, but any time you can say, “Hey Mom! The Legend of Zelda is only $45 and not $60! Can we get it?” you have a better shot at getting what you wanted.

That is, if your parents were completely gullible, which mine were not, but that didn’t stop me from trying. Unfortunately for those who actually got this ploy to work, going to Consumers was usually a bust because they would head to the store, find the item on display, give the cashier a ticket and most of the time discover that said item was currently out of stock. According to the Wikipedia page on the store, this led to the company creating what was then an innovative inventory checking system, where they were able to look up the item you wanted on the inventory of every store in the area, which is something that we take for granted in today’s retail world.

But the prevailing perception was that most of the merchandise at Consumers was non-existent and as much as the company tried to change that, I don’t think it really helped. It also didn’t help that the Consumers store in the Sayville area was in the Sun Vet Mall, a mall that was closer than any of the malls in the area but was clearly third-tier, especially when compared to the South Shore Mall and Smith Haven Mall, which had big-name department stores. Sure, Sun Vet had The Gap, which was convenient when I was in junior high and high school, but its anchors were a Rickel Home Center and a PathMark, so it didn’t exactly scream “Galleria” if you know what I mean.

The Consumers store was located in the corner of the mall near the Gap and McCrory, both of which have since left, and whereas the other malls always were bustling, Sun Vet always seemed half dead and while the mall’s pizzeria was excellent and Sun Vet Coin and Stamp always was good for a few back issues, you only went there if you absolutely had to or if you were like me and my friend Jeremy, who would ride there on our bikes when we were teenagers simply because we had very little else to do. Whereas Service Merchandise would be a huge store that was part of a brand new shopping center down the road, Consumers was shoved into that corner and while the first few catalogs would get people there, the store was pretty dead within a year or two, especially as we’d taken to dragging our parents back to Toys R Us or anywhere else where we knew that would have what we wanted in stock.

So in a way, it was a learning experience about being more strategic in begging for toys and other stuff as well as being more patient, and perhaps that is why so many of us are more intelligent these days about where we shop.

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 42: Closing the Door on 1994

Episode 42 Webpage Cover It’s the end of the year and that means it’s the end of my year-long series, “1994: The Most Important Year of the Nineties!” I close things out with another grab bag that features music, movies, television, politics, and the Internet and then give a final, closing statement about why 1994 is the most important year of what’s proven to be an incredibly important decade.

You can listen here: