1990s

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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The Jericho Gambit (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Five)

The cover to The New Titans #82, picking up where we left off four issues ago.

Is it me or does it seem that I’m taking forever to get through coverage of what amounts to about 12 issues of Titans comics?  Well, I guess when you’re doing these once a month it is going to take a while, but in thinking of what it was like to buy New Titans off the shelf back in the early 1990s this is very appropriate.  The title, creatively, was doing very well and what the new editor, Jon Peterson had brought was the shot in the arm it had so desperately needed.  However, there were several times where it was terribly late, and that makes it kind of surprising that within a year or so it would be selling well at all.

Who knows why fans put up with it?  Perhaps having a book run a couple of weeks late isn’t that bad in the beginning of the Image Comics era of books that would ship late up to a year (to the point where it would become a running joke), although DC was able to get four Superman titles out on time each month, so it’s not like their operation was a complete disaster.

Anyway, I remember riding up to Amazing Comics each month with my money in my pocket and being excited when the book was there and a little dismayed when it wasn’t, although not having Titans meant that I could dive into the back issue bins for a few minutes and maybe add to my Wolfman-Perez collection.

It’s also pretty appropriate that I took forever to get to this point because not only had the book been shipping late, but the story itself had been dragging on for a little bit.  Not in an X-Men sort of way, but the last issue that I covered was New Titans #78 and I’m starting this with #82.  There are four issues (three plus an annual) that had a little bit to do with the story but didn’t advance it, and all of which I’ll get to next month when I take a look at the long road to the “Total Chaos” storyline.

For now, though, we have “The Jericho Gambit,” which concluded the “Titans Hunt” in New Titans #82-84.  What “The Jericho Gambit” actually means is beyond me.  Webster’s defines “gambit” as  a chess opening in which a player risks one or more pawns or a minor piece to gain an advantage in position.  No, seriously, that’s what Webster’s says.  I looked it up. But whose opening move is this?  I’d say that Jericho made his gambit back in issue #71 when he kidnapped all of the Titans or maybe even #72 when the ‘beests killed Golden Eagle in an effort to get Aqualad.  I think that they were going for a title that sounded a little like “The Judas Contract,” which is the most famous New Teen Titans storyline (and one I’ll get to at some point), but this time around there was nothing on the cover to indicate the name of the istoryline and I don’t know how much the book was advertised.  From what I remember, It wasn’t covered in Wizard (then again, DC had to kill Superman in order to get coverage in Wizard).

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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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The Hunt Continues (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Two)

When I began reading the Titans Hunt storyline, I wasn’t a novice at comic book collecting.  True, I had just started picking up comics on a rgular basis, but prior to 1990, I had been a reader of G.I. Joe and was often seen raiding Amazing Comics’ back issue bin.  Therefore, I knew that the characters had histories and there were probably very important stories that had already been told.  But it would take a while to really get there.

As mentioned in my last entry, I bought New Titans #71 and devoured it and then picked up issue 72 as soon as it came out.  With a dead Golden Eagle and nearly dead Aqualad on the cover, this was one of those great “shocker” issues that showed longtime Titans fans taht whomever was behind the Wildebeests was deadly serious because they were not only hunting down the “core” members of the team but secondary and ancillary members.  In October 1990, I still had no idea who these people were, although I knew it wasn’t very often that heroes died in comic books and in such a brutal fashion (Golden Eagle is essentially hanged when the Wildebeest’s rope/wire is wrapped around his neck, then is pulled to the ground and beaten to death).  By the end of this issue, we know that Troia is not captured and that there is more than one Wildebeest.

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The Hunt is On (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part One)

“What started as a celebration has turned into a NIGHTMARE!”

You don’t get exclamations like this on the cover of comics these days, and it’s very rare that you can look at a cover, go “Wait, what’s this?” and pick it up without having read the soliciation months before on the web followed by spoiler-filled message board and blog posts.

But then again, this is September 2010 and the comic in question with that excalamtion came out in September 1990.  It’s amazing to me in a way that twenty years have gone by since I started the eighth grade at Sayville Junior High and had just started buying comics that summer.  Okay, re-started, because I spent 1988 buying G.I. Joe and Transformers comics.  Now, though, I was into Batman, and had started collecting the two Bat-books going on at the time: Batman and Detective Comics.  Both had been intriguing because this was around the time that Tim Drake became Robin and The Joker came back after a couple of years of being “dead”.  I’d collect Batman comics for at least the next decade, but the omic that I would pick up one Thursday in that September would be New Titans #71.

Entitled “Beginnings … Endings … and (we promise) New Beginnings,” I picked it up because I saw Nightwing on the cover and having read the “Batman: Year Three” and “A Lonely Place of Dying” (not the best title, I know) storylines, I knew that Dick Grayson, the original Robin, had become Nightwing.  My friend Harris, who owned all of the “A Lonely Place of Dying” issues, recommended that I pick up New Titans.  It would actually be the start of a great friendship through comics, one that I will get to when describing those issues in which our letters were published, but at that point, I thought I would give it a try.

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Domesticated Animals

The front page of Target.com, where you can get all of our essentials for going to college.

I think I have lost count of the number of times my wife and I have been walking around Target, looked at all of the “dorm gear” that’s on sale and said, “I wish they would have had this when we went to college.”  I mean, every single time, without fail, as we wheel the cart past the school supplies or toward the granola bars and spot a mini-fridge or stackable storage containers or three-pack of Old Spice body wash, we scrunch our noses and remark how good kids these days have it.

Too bad the economy is so fucked that they won’t have jobs when they graduate.  BWAH-HA-HA!!!

Okay, that was rude and probably uncalled for.  But I have to admit that I’m kinda jealous that everything the kids in my area who are attending college need (and then some) can be found at Target of all places.  I didn’t have the convenience of a Target when I was heading off to Loyola back in the summer of 1995; instead, Sayville had a K-Mart that was so hectic and disorganized that I once nearly had a panic attack when I stepped inside.  And I’m not the type who is prone to panic attacks.

I don’t know, I just find it kind of both genius and funny that Target and other stores like it have latched on to going away to college and turned it into a shopping season of sorts, the kind of thing that you throw in to the back-to-school sales on July 5 and take down the day after Labor Day because the Halloween candy needs to be shelved.  If they did this fifteen years ago, I completely missed it, as I had to deal with schlepping out to Linens and Things on Sunrise Highway in Patchogue about a week and a half before I headed to Baltimore.  They could have been running a sale, but I was completely oblivious to it and I don’t remember seeing commercials about outfitting me with a laptop and all sorts of wireless wonder so that my life was complete in the dorm.

Then again, it was 1995 and my graduation present was a Packard Bell desktop PC with a 2400 baud modem and HP Laser Jet 4L printer, which took up half of my parents’ car and my friends were all carrying beepers around in their pockets.  So … yeah.

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Just What the Dr. Ordered

1980s-1990s Dr. Pepper logo

If I were to say “Dr. Pepper commercial,” your first thought would probably be of David Naughton (star of American Werewolf in London and the horribly underrated Midnight Madness) singing “Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper too?”  And that’s understandable because that ad campaign is right up there with the Big Mac ingredients commercial as one of the most memorable of the last 40 years.

But in the early 1990s, Dr. Pepper decided to revamp its image and by creating a sequel of sorts to its iconic “Be a Pepper” campaign.  I guess in an age of MTV, the old commercial was too friendly and not aggressive or cool enough, maybe even hokey.  So, we got “Just What the Dr. Ordered,” a series of commercials that like most sequels, pales in comparison to the original and has more or less been forgotten by everyone in my generation (except me, of course).

This was in an era where the soda being advertised in commercials seemed to bring about unbridled awesomeness and happiness, and the people who developed “Just What the Dr. Ordered” decided to find someone cool and awesome to lead us to the caffeinated promised land.  The guy they hired was some random dude wearing a white T-shirt and jeans who sang about the ills of the world and how Dr. Pepper cures them.  He was basic, he had common sense, and he knew exactly what to do. His name is Terry Gatens (thanks to Patty, who commented below and is Terry’s sister), and over the course of four commercials from about 1990-1992, Dr. Pepper made him go out of his way to get more cool points than Fonzie ever dreamed of having.  If I had to name the guy he’s playing in the commercials, it would be Nick (because Nick’s a real name. Nick’s your buddy. Nick’s the kind of guy you can trust, the kind of guy you can drink a beer with, the kind of guy who doesn’t mind if you puke in his car, Nick! … Oh, vomit. I’m sorry. Vomit.) but I don’t want to confuse the two people reading this, so I’ll call him Dr. Pepper Guy II, or DPII (out of respect for David Naughton, the original recipe Dr. Pepper Guy).  I don’t know the order in which these commercials aired, either, so I’m listing them in rank of DPII’s awesome effect on the world.

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Let’s Dance in Style, Let’s Dance for a While

I guess that if you were going to comb through the annals of pop hits that have made their ways into senior proms and yearbooks, you wouldn’t expect to find lyrics about being resilient in the face of Armageddon.  No, your regular prom fare is about being the best of friends to the end or holding onto that girl or guy and never letting go.  Sometimes the song is written specifically to be used at a prom or graduation (I’m looking at you, Vitamin C) but “Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?” A lyric like that is unexpected.  Unless, that is, you went to high school on Long Island in the 1980s or 1990s, as my class—the Sayville High School Class of 1995—was one of many who dialed up Alphaville’s “Forever Young” for a slow dance at prom.

Running about 3:45 and coming from the 1984 album of the same name, the song was written by Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens, who comprised the German synth-pop band (whose original name was actually Forever Young).  Coming out at the height of Duran Duran’s MTV reign and around the same time as U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, “Forever Young” seems like it was an album that got lost in a sea of new wave songs that were ruling the playlists of stations like WLIR (later WDRE) in the early to mid-1980s.  However, though the title track only hit 65 on the Billboard Hot 100, stuck around, becoming a cult hit well into the later part of the decade, nearly three years after its release.  According an article in the June 11, 1988 issue of Billboard (whose text is included in the liner notes to the Singles Collection CD), the song was voted as #1 on a countdown by listeners of WDRE in 1988, and had a definite influence across the Island:

“Forever Young” is so slow and dreamy that Laura Branigan could cover it (and did).  While “Forever” was the top record of 1985 at WPST Trenton, NJ, where it is still played as an oldie, it hasn’t been passed from one hip, top 40 PD to another (Both “Blue Monday” and “I Melt With You” have).  It’s not even played everywhere in its own format.  It has shown up at various Long Island high schools as a class song in recent years.  The song’s popularity among teens may be due to its emphasis on mortality, a running theme in the bopper hits of the ‘70s.

WDRE, the name during the late 1980s and early 1990s of what was once WLIR, a leading modern-rock station based on Long Island.

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A little Hootie never hurt …

Arguably the biggest album of 1995, "Cracked Rear View" sold 13 million copies.

A few years ago, the school I was teaching at did “decades day” as one of their spirit week days.  Quite a number of my fellow teachers were around my age, so I was not the only person who wore “’90s attire”.  However, most of those colleges of mine were ex-jocks who somehow managed to squeeze themselves back into old varsity jackets.  Having never played a sport in high school I didn’t have a varsity jacket, so I kind of “grunged” it up with a flannel shirt, some jeans, a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and a pair of black Doc Martens.

Of course, while the flannel and the NIN T-shirt were authentic, they really didn’t represent who I was or what I wore in high school (in fact, I didn’t get a pair of Docs until after college).  The flannel was from J.Crew (and is now the smock  my son uses for art time in daycare) and while I do have most of Trent Reznor’s recordings from Pretty Hate Machine through The Downward Spiral, I was never a hardcore fan.  But a pair of antique-washed jeans with a braided belt, white oxford shirt, and plaid tie, all from The Gap, would have been lost on my students. 

And truth be told, if I wanted to fully represent my 1990s self, I probably should have worn one of my Hootie and the Blowfish tour T-shirts.

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Once More to the Twine Ball

The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, which is the subject of an epic “Weird Al” Yankovic song.

For years, I have identified with E.B. White in “Once More to the Lake” as he takes his son to a lake in Maine where he and his father used to vacation when he was a boy.  He expects that in the thirty years or so since he first visited that lake–a time in which American had fallen fully in love with the automobile, among other more “modern” conveniences–much of it will have changed and the visit will be a disappointment.  To his surprise, though some of modern American life has crept in, the lake is mostly the same to the point where he sees himself in his son and his father in himself.  It’s an essay version of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s Cradle” (though written thirty years prior) and the sort of tale that you probably would aspire to associate with your life.

Alas, I can’t lie anymore and say that when I think of Kezar Lake in New Hampshire, where my parents still spend two weeks every July, I think of E.B. White.  Because the truth is, I think of Weird Al.

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