1990s

Share a Cup of Local Cheer

When Brett was little–and I mean preschool-aged–they used to think that seasonal graphics on the weather report were the most hilarious things ever. The winter forecast had a snowman. Thanksgiving had a turkey. And Christmas, of couse, had a tree.

It doesn’t take much to keep a four-year-old entertained, but it made me think of when I was younger and I used to look for the same thing when I was watching the local news. I wasn’t a news junkie or anything when I was in elementary school, but for some reason I came to know who all of the personalities were, especially the sports and weather guys.

The other thing I always loved seeing were the holiday bumpers. If I happened to be watching television on Thanksgiving Day, there would be a “Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at channel 5” message at some point during a commercial break. The same could be said for Christmas and New Year’s. It got to the point where I was such a dork that I looked forward to seeing them every year.

I haven’t been watching television on the holidays in recent years, although I do see them from time to time. So, in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d look at a few that I found on YouTube. They’re all from the New York area, which is where I grew up.

The first is from WNBC 4 in 1977. Obviously, I never saw this when it aired because it’s from the year I was born. But in itself, it’s an interesting relic of television past–the quick bumper for a show that will be on later in the week. There are still some iterations of this around, but they usually have to do with local news shows and not locally programmed specials. I guess it’s also a fun fact to point out that up until I think about the mid-1990s, the Rockefeller Center Tree lighting was a half-hour show that wasn’t cheaply produced per se, but didn’t have the “network special” aspect it does these days. Plus, the feel of this–a still and a muffled narration due to 1977 television quality–has the feel of staying up past your bedtime.

Next up is WPIX 11 from 1984. I’m nto sure when this was first recorded because I found it on YouTube in several places, all with different years listed. I’m not surprised that it appeared several times over the years; WPIX was one of those stations that recycled stuff like this -and would re-air stuff from the Eighties way into the Nineties. What makes this interesting to me are three things: its length (it’s nearly four minutes long), the overtly religious content, and the fact that the guy speaking at us is the general manager of the station. Who these days–or at any time, really–knows who the heck the general manager of a television station is? I mean, for a second, I thought this was the PathMark guy.

Anyway, I wonder if this would even fly today. Because aside from the message, who is going to devote this much time–this much ad space–to something like this?

This one, from WNYW Fox 5 in 1998, is an example of a type of promo I’d see frequently–the idea that the people on the local news were a kind of family (and maybe by extension your family?). Like I said at the top of the post, I developed a knack early on for recognizing the people who were on television, and over the years I remember noticing when someone on one station moved to the other or even moved up to the network, like Al Roker or Sam Champion.

I live in a much smaller market these days and for a long time, the familiarity of the people on the news is still a valued commodity. I don’t know for how long, though, especially since local news stations keep getting bought out and staff is being reduced (my local weekend news has completely disappeared, for example). While I’m not going to flip a table if the weather guy changes again (because they change all the time), promos like this are nice in an age where the news seems less and less friendly.

And finally, there is the WNBC Sing-Along.

WNBC — 4 New York — is the New York City area’s undisputed champion of station promos. There’s more to write about at a later time, but right now is the time to look at one that’s been a tradition for a very long time. Granted, I have not watched television in New York in a few years, so I can’t tell you if that’s true, but I know that well into the 2010s, the entire WNBC staff would gather outside of 30 Rockefeller Center (which is where the station broadcasts from) and sing Christmas carols. The promo would air in 30-second and one-minute forms and would be just another commercial in a commercial break. And me being the dork that I am, would always look to see who I could name whenever it came on. This one’s from 1994 when I would have been a senior in high school.

Seeing this and all the reast always meant that Christmas break was coming and for a little more than a week, I’d be able to turn school off and enjoy a lot less structure in my day. Thinking about them now helps me recapture that feeling as I leave work behind and try to have a happy holiday season.

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 160: Following the Force Part 1 — The Phantom Menace

Beginning a new feature! I’m setting down a path that may or may not dominate my destiny: working my way through Star Wars. With this episode, I begin a reading and watching project that will cover the entire nine-movie Star Wars cycle plus television shows and spin-off films. First up are three novels that lead into Episode I and the film itself, The Phantom Menace.

Works included in this episode are Master and Apprentice by Claudia Gray; Cloak of Deception by James Luceno; Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter by Michael Reaves; and The Phantom Menace as a film, novel (by Terry Brooks), and comic book, including the 25th anniversary one-shot published by Marvel.

Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit

Spotify: Pop Culture Affidavit — Two True Freaks

Direct Download

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And here are a few video clips that you’ll hear in the episode.

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Localized Earworms

So if you’ve been watching enough of the Paris Olympics, you’ve seen enough footage of Parisian life and culture and you’ve inevitably heard the “Can-Can.” I think it was used in the opening ceremonies, in fact. And we’re all familiar with it, right? We can even picture the dancers from a place like the Moulin Rouge doing their high kicks to the song. Well, unless you’re like me and every time you hear the tune, you hear: “Now, Shop Rite does the can can selling lots of brands of everything in … cans cans.”

Yes, I realize that I have a problem. But really, when you think of it, we all have commercials that get stuck in our heands, and I even talked about some of my most memorable ones back on episode 97 of the podcast. And on that episode, with the exception of Crazy Eddie and a Roy Rogers commercial, most of the commercials I talked about in that episode were for national brands. When it comes to this Shop Rite commercial, people in maybe five states in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic part of the country are going to recognize that jingle, just like we also recognize character actor James Karen as “The PathMark guy”:

Again, who gets that except for people in the NY-NJ-CT Tri-State area?

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The Future of Refreshment is Now

In Reality Bites, Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller are on their first date and she tells him that hte Big Gulp is “the most profound, important invention of my lifetime.” They hook up after that and the plot follows its trajectory of a twentysomething coming-of-age romantic comedy, but the line stands out as one of the many witty pop culture observations that are simultaneously the film’s greatest strength and biggest weakness. Okay, maybe I’m just using the word weakness just so show contrast, but I will say that there are moments in the movie where the catchphrases and allusions work and other timeswhere they wind up feeling ham-handed and forced. The Big Gulp line could have been the latter if in the hands of someone other than Winona Ryder, but she’s being silly and flirting in that moment, which makes Ben Stiller melt (and I admit, me too). Besides, we all know that there is no way, with all of the technological innovation we have achieved since the end of the Second World War, that the Big Gulp of all things could possibly be that important.

Or could it?

7-Eleven has kind of always innovated when it comes to the convenience store, and especially when it comes to drinks. For instance, they invented the coffee to go cup in 1964 (although the iconic Greek Diner coffee cup debuted around the same time, so I guess you can make a case for either being first). What became the Big Gulp debuted in 1976, as according to Smithsonian magazine, 7-Eleven came out with a 32-ounce drink that was circular on the bottom and had a square top “like a milk carton” (the magazine’s authors and editors could not find an image of it and sadly neither could I). The cup was created at the requrest of Coca-Cola, who was looking for a way to shift more product, since back in the 1970s, they were still selling their drink in glass bottles that went for 50 cents and included a “deposit,” meaning you’d get money back upon returning the bottle. 7-Eleven sold the 32 ounce up at the price of 39 cents and advertised no deposit, and it was an immediate hit. When the cup’s manufacturer could not continue to produce it for a little while because they were moving their manufacturing to Canada and had to take a hiatus in operation, Dennis Potts–who was in charge o fthe product at 7-Eleven–commissioned a new design and the Big Gulp as we know it came to be.

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Lying Eyes, they’re watching you

Sometime in the Nineties, before the Lifetime Network took complete ownership of suspenseful TV movies, the networks–especially NBC–ran a slew of them and several were aimed at teens. They’d had success during the late 1980s with a bunch of kids/teen TV movies, such as Crash Course and Dance Til Dawn, but I would imagine that the shift to drama happened because of the popularity of teen television drama in the first half of the decade. The biggest things on television for adolescents were MTV’s The Real World and Fox’s Beverly Hills 90210, both of which provided enough drama (and in the case of the latter, soapy drama) that the network probably thought they could pull an audience.

I’ve seen bits and pieces of a number of these movies over the years, many of which star Tori Spelling, but also featured actresses like Tiffani-Amber Theissen, Kellie Martin and Candace Cameron and had titles like The Face on the Milk Carton or Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? In the fall of 1996, they put another one out, Lying Eyes, although this one stars Cassidy Rae, who at that point was probably best known for a recurring role on Melrose Place as well as its spin-off Models, Inc. She plays a high school senior named Amy who gets involved in an affair with a much older guy and then someone starts stalking her and …

… I honestly have no idea why, but I have not only seen this movie three times (once for the sake of this blog post and twice prior), but it’s stuck with me ever since it first aired nearly thirty years ago. I’ll try to get to that after I run through the plot.

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The Force, Funspot, and my Forties

When my wife asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday, I replied like any soon-to-be 47-year-old would: I wanted to go to the arcade. In Charlottesville, that’s Decades Arcade, which is full of old (and some new) video games and pinball machines, some dating back to the early days of the video game era (and in the case of the pinball machines, the 1950s and 1960s). Upon arriving, I went right for what I think is one of the greatest games every put into an arcade: Star Wars, which was first released in 1983 and has you piloting Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing through three stages in order to destory the Death Star. It’s clearly blown out of the water by a billion other games that have come out since, but for my quarters, it’s the most fun you can have in an arcade.

Prior to that day a week ago, I had only played the Star Wars Arcade Game a few times in my life. I was six years old in 1983 and wouldn’t have the chance to frequent arcades until my late elementary school and junior high years, which was toward the end of that decade. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the game had become a rare find in arcades that only had so much space and because the nostalgia for old games was a couple of decades away, often jettisoned older machines for whatever was new and popular. So I spent those years playing After Burner, X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Double Dragon, and Mortal Kombat. They had 16-bit graphics (which were the best in the early Nineties) and were way cooler than an old vector graphics game, although I’m pretty sure that if you put that machine in front of any 13-year-old in 1990, they’d get sucked in, especially if they spent any time standing around the Star Wars machine watching other kids play while they waited their turn like I used to do at Sayville Bowl. Come to think of it, I spent a lot of time in arcades watching other people play games or wandering around for a good hour or two because I blew all my money on sucking at Double Dragon. To this day, I’m more familiar with the demo screens of a number of games than the games themselves.

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 153: Just Part of the Song

Maybe it’s a lyric. Or a guitar solo. Or the bridge. Whatever it may be, there’s always small parts to songs that you remember. Taking inspiration from a 2004 Retrocrush post, I’m giving you a list of some of my favorite song parts. From classic tunes of the 1960s and ’70s to R&B breakdowns of the ’90s, there a lot to listen to. Maybe you’ll think of some of your own!

Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit

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Some extras down below …

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Stalking Back in The Glass House

It’s been more than a decade since I wrote about it, but my high school had some random elective courses and the one that I have some random memories of was You and the Law. I took it thirty years ago durin gmy junior year, and it was one of those classes that existed to give me a break from APs and a nightmare of a physics course. We went to the Suffolk County courthouse in Riverhead to see some proceedings, and we visited the county jail where we could get yelled at my inmates–I mean, “scared straight.”

The rest of the time, we watched TV.

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A Night Without Armor

I Say to You Idols

I say to you idols
of carefully studied
disillusionment

And you worshipers
who find beauty
in only fallen things

That the greatest
Grace
we can aspire to
is the strength
to see the wounded
walk with the forgotten
and pull ourselves
from the screaming
blood of our losses
to fight on
undaunted
all the more
Kilcher, Jewel, “I Say to You Idols.” A Night Without Armor, HarperCollins, 1998, p. 52.

Though it’s more of an artifact of 1990s pop culture these days, Jewel’s poetry collection A Night Without Armor was a New York Times bestseller when it came out, with more than a million copies sold. While big sales of a book connected to a popular singer aren’t out of the ordinary, sales of poetry books rarely ever hit this level and if they do, they’re from well-known poets, poets who are currently making or have made a big impact on our culture, or classical bards like Homer and Virgil. Even Jewel said she had a hard time getting a publisher to print it despite being huge at the time.

If you remember A Night Without Armor, you probably remember a few things: first, its success; second, its mixed reviews, which range from praise to balanced criticism to insults*; and third, that moment with Kurt Loder.

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The Suburban Squall

Though the individualistic teenagers I teach might be loathe to admit it, they all wear the same clothes. Oh sure, they all find ways to express themselves, but self-expression via nonconformity in clothing has been de rigueur for adolescents since they first gained a sense of purchasing power in the 1950s or 1960s. They may all say they aren’t one of the sheep-like masses, but look in their closets and you’ll find a hooded sweatshirt, a pair of stretch leggings, and a beat-up pair of jeans in the same way my generation had an array of flannel shirts, alternative band T-shirts, a beat-up pair of jeans, and the Lands’ End Squall Jacket.

First introduced by the Dodgeville, Wisconsin-based clothier in 1983, the Squall is a medium-weight nylon jacket with a fleeced lining that is suitable for the majority of autumn, winter, and early spring when the weather is cold but not the Ice Station Zebra conditions that make you bust out your Lands’ End parka. The company says that it “best exemplifies all of our know how. Popular for its classic style and versatility, it’s reliably warm, and made from durable windproof waterproof fabric.” That definitely appeals to the parent in me who wants to make any $50-100 jacket last as long as possible, and Lands’ End definitely knows I want dependability when it comes to my purchase at least according to their explanation of why the jacket is called “Squall”:

Reminiscent of our nautical past, the word ‘squall’ usually defines a sudden gust of wind bringing on storms of rain, snow, or sleet. Not the most comforting of images, is it? But at Lands’ End, Squall has come to define dependable warmth for generations … you might not be a captain sailing a ship through the choppy ocean but you certainly weather your fair share of storms throughout the day. Unlike a typical squall, our winter jacket may not be the cause of the storm will certainly be there to keep you cozy, dry, and protected from whatever is brewing on the horizon.
(source: Landsend.com)

I know that’s a lot to say about a jacket, or any article of clothing for that matter but the Squall jacket earned that pretense. My parents bought me my first Squall jacket sometime in the fourth or fifth grade; it was blue and I’m pretty sure that my sister got a red or pink colored one, and they were pretty much permanent fixtures during the transitional seasons all the way through high school, not just in my house but in my school and town as a whole. It was, in a sense, part of the suburban uniform of the 1980s and early 1990s. Those of a certain vintage and upbringing may remember going outside in the late winter and early spring, riding around on your bike in search of a friend to play with, and once you found them trying to figure out what to do because both of your moms kicked you off the Nintendo and out of the house. Sometimes, you got a bunch of other people together and played a rough game of touch football; other times, you just kept riding around while carrying on a conversation about whatever kid or teen topics came up. The specifics really didn’t matter, to be honest; you just remember that you were wearing the jacket.

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