In 1988, NBC produced three television movies starring a gaggle of teenage stars from some of the most popular sitcoms of the day. And for this episode, I sit down and talk about them. So strap in for “Crash Course,” get on the floor for “Dance ’til Dawn” and set sail on a “Class Cruise!”
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After four years and six films, John Hughes left the teen movie subgenre behind in 1987, but not before producing one last film, Some Kind of Wonderful. Join me as I take a look at the film, its novelization, the soundtrack, and evaluate its place in the teen movie canon and 1980s film history.
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Toward the end of her documentary Kid 90, Soleil Moon Frye talks about how she watches video tapes that she made of her and her friends in the early and mid-1990s and considers how she never saw the warning signs regarding those friends who died by suicide or because of drug abuse. She also mentions that she is living a lot of those memories for the second time and (of course) with the perspective of a now middle-aged adult. It’s a moment that is predictable because of the way we naturally consider such things after a tragedy, but is sad nonetheless and tempers a very nostalgic documentary with a sadness, making it more than superficial fluff.
If you haven’t heard of Kid 90, it was born out of the fact that Frye spent much of her childhood and adolescence recording both audio and video of herself and her friends in their everyday live, intending it as a private keepsake*. A few years ago, she dug up the material and began going through it with the intention of making a documentary about being a child star and a teenager in Hollywood during the 1980s and early 1990s. She originally didn’t intend to put herself into the film (except for the aforementioned archival footage) but as she told Variety, she was editing one particular segment and realized that in order to give it full context, she needed to be interviewed. And that’s how we get the moment I just described.
I came to this film via Hulu’s recommendations and upon seeing the description, put it on my watch list. Plus, I’m a mark for any sort of late 1980s/early 19990s nostalgia, and am like every other person my age in that I immediately associate Fry with her iconic role as Punky Brewster. I also remember her showing up on a couple of random sitcom episodes–The Wonder Years and Friends, especially. What I didn’t know was that her circle of friends consisted of actors and actresses I was watching regularly during my early teen years and whom were also about my age (Frye is a year older than I am). So when people like Brian Austin Green, Mark Paul Gosselaar, and Jenny Lewis started showing up in both the footage and interviews, and also oddly connected to it beyond just recognizing those faces.
Over the past couple of years, I have spent time going trough my own personal teenage archive. Most of the stuff I have been looking at has been my teenage journal, along with various ephemera I’d thrown in a box or storage bin and held onto over the years. None of it is nearly as star-powered as Frye’s video and audio footage of hanging out with Danny Boy from House of Pain, but I could at least relate to it on the level of digging into what you had in the past. But as I watched Kid 90, I also had the passing thought:
This is what it must like like for the cool kids to reminisce.
Oh yeah, that is flat-out one of the most idiotic thoughts a middle-aged man could have about people from high school, but I couldn’t help it. As the movie rolled, my mind flashed to Facebook group threads filled with pictures of them at house parties, seventeen with 1990s haircuts, flannels over Gap jeans, with Budweiser cans everywhere. And really, that’s what Frye’s home movies look like–suburban keggers but with famous people. There’s a point she makes in the film that her mom tried her best to her and her brother (Meeno Replace, the star of the NBC show Voyagers!) as normal a life away from their jobs in Hollywood as possible and this is the proof. The rooms they’re in, the general silliness that they’re up to (especially when they’re 13 or 14) all looks s if it could be taking place in any number of my classmates’ houses, and a world that I never entered. I spent many Saturday nights playing video games with friends or renting whatever movie I could get my hands on and then watching Saturday Night Live.
And while I’d like to be nonchalant and say “Ah, who gives as shit about school popularity when you’re 44?”, I have to also admit that this lack of coolness dogged me for quite a long time. I wound up with more tan a few toxic “friendships” and a laundry list of embarrassing and awkward moments, which my anxiety loves to weaponize on occasion, just to remind me who I am … or at least who I was. The world of the cool kids in my immediate vicinity was as much a mystery to me as the world of these ultra-cool Hollywood kids in the film. Frye goes from hanging with the ‘tween and teen jet set of the early ’90s to heading across the country to attend college in New York and befriending cast members from Larry Clark’s Kids, showing that she always had a “crew” wherever she decided to live.
But in the midst of all of that, there’s a real darkness. At one point, we hear an audio recording of her talking to a friend and trying to figure out what happened the previous night because she woke up at home not knowing how she got there. At another point, she is discussing how a guy at a party clearly raped her when he kept going even though she told him she didn’t want to. You can’t dismiss those stories by saying that it’s some symptom of Hollywood excess or that it’s another sign of how former child stars often become cautionary tales. No, ask around and you are bound to meet a woman who has had one of both of those happen, maybe even more. And, to bring in Hollywood, add the way the film industry treated her because of her body (she had breast reduction surgery at 16, which was a People Magazine cover story) and you have a look at how monumentally screwed up our culture is.
Which brings me back to what I mentioned in the beginning of this piece–Frye’s perspective as a woman and parent in her forties. One of the reasons she began the project that would become Kid 90 is to see if how she remembered her teenage years was accurate, and I found myself relating to the honesty with which she approached everything as well as the bravery required to do it. You can always flip through an old yearbook and laugh at the silly or even heartfelt things people wrote to you, but there is a point where you have to decide if you want to cross the threshold into the uncomfortable and really meet the kid you were. As a parent, you want to see what you can learn from your younger self so that your kid doesn’t suffer the same fate. Sure, there are adolescent rites of passage that involve mistakes and regrettable moments and I know I can’t protect my kid from everything bad they might encounter, but I also know that part of my job as a father is to use the gift of hindsight to discern between true rites of passage and truly awful things that we are too scared to admit were wrong or even toxic.
Reopening old wounds, taking the blindfold off in the cave, digging into the past–whatever you want to call it–can suck, even when you know it’s going to be therapeutic and said therapy can last longer than intended. But it’s a testament to the fact that making it through any of it is a small miracle.
* A similar documentary from Val Kilmer is set to debut on Amazon Prime in August.
It’s the fifth chapter in a podcast miniseries that looks at the fall of the Iron Curtain and the popular culture of the Cold War. To start us off, I look at what happened in Eastern Europe from September to November 1990 with a special focus on the roles that corporate America and pop music played in the end of the Cold War. Then, the discussion turns to sports; specifically, the Olympics with a spotlight on the controversial 1972 men’s basketball final, The Miracle on Ice, and the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.
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It’s Halloween and that means it’s time for me to actually get seasonal … for once. I’m here and talking about some oddities of entertainment from the late 1980s and early 1990s. First up is Time-Life Books’ best-selling series Mysteries of the Unknown, whose commercials were some of the creepies of the time. Then, I move into the area of true crime (among other subjects) by looking at a classic Robert Stack-era episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Plus: listener feedback!
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After the break, here’s some extras for you, including four of the classic Mysteries of the Unknown commercial …
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Space. The final frontier. This episode is a conversation between me and special guest star Gene Hendricks. Our mission? To talk about the original crew Star Trek films and explore our own origins as fans of the classic science fiction franchise. But it’s not just movie talk. We have also read all six of the film novelizations and discuss how much they add to the experience. It’s a classic fan conversation with two guys who are boldly going where many have gone before!
And a quick note on the audio quality of the episode. At one point, early on in recording, my USB microphone died and I had to switch to my in-computer mic. I have done my best to remedy the poor quality through rerecording a few pieces of what I had, and using various noise cancellation and volume balancing tricks. So my apologies for the bad quality of sound on my end. I just didn’t want to let such a great conversation go unheard.
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Get on your bike and grab your sack of morning editions! This time around, we’re back to looking at comics as Stella and I take a look at the Eisner-winning series “Paper Girls” by Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang. We give a summary of the book–with and without spoilers–and then talk about why we both think it’s required reading (even if that’s usually on our other podcast).
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I can’t get the image of Eric Zala begging his boss for another day off out of my head. It happens about two-thirds of the way through 2015’s Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, which chronicles his efforts to reunite his childhood friends–Chris Strompolos and Jayson Lamb–so they can recreate the aistrip scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones fights a Nazi brute and wins when said brute is chopped up by a plane’s propeller. It’s the only scene that he and his friends never filmed when they were teenagers and put together a shot-for-shot adaptation of the movie. At this point in the film, Eric is woefully behind schedule due to constant rain storms, and we hear his boss, Alex, berating him for wanting just one more day off and he sits in his trailer looking like a kid who is being chastized.
For a split second, my thoughts line up with the frustration that’s boiling over to anger coming from Alex–this guy is middle-aged, has a wife and kids, and his responsibilities to them should take priority over this project. Yeah, it’s cool that he got enough Kickstarter funding to put all of this together, but shouldn’t he just grow up already? But then Alex gives Eric the day off, and Eric’s wife comforts him by telling him that what is important is that he is doing something that makes him happy. It’s the moment in the film that puts me not only back on board with him but makes me actively root for him to finish because I’m thinking of myself, my friends, and my own abandoned cinematic efforts.
I was bitten by the “filmmaking bug” at an early age, evidenced by how I put down “movie director” as the answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question on my first grade class survey. I’d been watching Star Wars on a loop for at least the past year, and while I played on the playground as Luke Skywalker, I wanted to be George Lucas. And while my interests when it came to play would travel through various iconic 1980s toy lines, the creative streak never left–I wrote short stories, thought of ideas for movies, and my friend Tom and I even conceived a Miami Vice-esque comic book series called Drugbust that got as far as a plot outline, a few cover sketches and a finished splash page. It was enough to keep my young imagination active and sated, at least until Christmas of 1987 when my dad bought the family a video camera.
A print ad for the Panisconic Omnimovie camcorder circa late 1987/early 1988.
Retailing for somewhere close to $1000 (based on crack research–I found an ad for a similar model that had a price of $898), the Panasonic Omimovie camcorder was not a small purchase by any means. It signaled that you had the money to blow on such an expensive toy, and was a literally hefty purchase, as this was a shoulder-mounted camcorder that took full-sized VHS tapes. I’d learned how to use one the previous summer as part of an enrichment class called “video volunteers” and I’d like to think that’s maybe why my dad let my friends and I use it almost right away–although he did tell us that it “had a drop ratio of zero” as a way to remind us to be careful. To this day, I have no idea if he was using any of that terminology correctly, but the message did get across.
At first, we made music videos, the best of which was a two-hour concert video by our fake band, The Terminators. Tom, my sister, and I would use G.I. Joe airplanes (specifically, the Sky Striker and the Cobra Night Raven) as guitars and a croquet mallet as a microphone with a stand while lip syncing to Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, and other hits of the mid-Eighties, getting the song onto the tape by placing the camera on the washing machine and putting my boom box next to it. That tape featured a lot of Tom playing guitar and looking cool in a denim jacket and spiked hair, me melodramatically singing while wearing military camo pants and a Naval Academy sweatshirt, my sister looking happy that she wasn’t chased out of the room, and several shots of someone running toward the camera to turn it off so that we could cue up the next song. We made a few more and then gave up fun with the video camera because the novelty wore off, until the eighth grade, which is when I attempted something more ambitious: a feature film called Kung Fool & Company.
I can’t recall where the title or the character name came from, although I’m pretty sure it is because we watched Big Trouble in Little China so many times, but between that and the number of hyper-violent action flicks we were renting on a regular basis, I had enough to write a full-length screenplay about our hero going on a full-fledged revenge spree after his best friend is killed by the mafia. It had roles for a number of my friends, and when I finished it, I roped them into helping me out, even though none of us had any idea of how we were going to shoot a gritty action flick in our quiet suburb. I guess we thought we’d figure that out later.
We shot an opening credits sequence and two scenes. The opening credits were handwritten on paper and filmed by placing them on a small easel, then zooming in to try and avoid getting my hand in the shot while I removed each page (and even then, you probably could have seen my fingers) while music I’d taped off of the Ninja Gaiden II video game played behind me on the same boom box used for our basement concert. That, by the way, put the budget at the $1.99 it cost for me to rent the video game, a cost that would not get any higher.
The two scenes were the first two scenes of the screenplay, because it wouldn’t be until a few years later that I learned that movies were shot out of sequence, and even if I did know that I didn’t have access to editing equipment. In scene one, my friend Rich played a mob boss who killed the best friend character, who was played by my friend John. We shot the scene at the desk in my bedroom during the day and created atmosphere by turning all of the lights off and letting the sunlight shine through the red curtains, something I think was Rich’s idea and that we were all proud of because it seemed really cinematic when we were watching it back. The second scene was not as cool–it was me as the future Kung Fool standing at my friend’s grave, which was really a cutting board placed in my parents’ backyard flower bed, and vowing vengeance. I remember that the music we were playing drowned me out so much you couldn’t hear my lines.
I think we were supposed to shoot a training scene that would have taken place in a foreign country like Japan or China, but how we figured that we would duplicate that at a place where we could go to on our bikes is lost on me because we never shot the scene and abandoned the project in favor of whatever was going on in the world of professional wrestling at the time. We would eventually get our first taste of shows like Saturday Night Live and In Living Color and shoot comedy sketches and return to actual attempts at music videos, and in between ninth and tenth grades, my friend Chris and I did complete a short film about cops busting drug dealers when I visited him in Florida for a week, this time with songs off of the Classic Queen compilation album providing the soundtrack.
At the heart of Raiders! is a story between three childhood friends, and shooting the airstrip scene is as much a reunion and patching up of a broken friendship as it is about getting the shot. Eric, Chris, Jayson have a lot of baggage between them, with Jayson feeling like he was pushed out of the project before it was finished, and the friendship between Eric and Chris deteriorating by the end of high school and beyond. As we see how they were able to not only finish the film but rent out a movie theater to show it (with local news coverage to boot), we see the tension between them grow and Eric’s social ineptitude along with Chris’s inner demons more or less destroy it.
I personally didn’t have any epic fallout with the friends involved in any of our movies–some of us stayed friends all the way through the end of high school while others just drifted to other groups. I’m sure I was a dick to a few of them or them to me at one point or another, but it was obviously not enough for me to recall how. It was just the drift that comes with getting older. Plus, as we went through high school, my interest in films shifted to Eighties movies and I pretty much spent the back half of my teen years setting George Lucas aside for Cameron Crowe, with Say Anything … as my Raiders. And I got my chance at that in the form of a humanities class project during the spring of my senior year.
I’d taken creative writing during the fall semester and that’s where I wrote a story about having the chance to kiss a girl but never actually taking it. While structured as fiction, it was based on a moment where, after hanging out with my next door neighbor Elizabeth (on whom I had a massive crush–and no, that’s not her real name), we were saying goodnight and there was one of those moments with a tension-filled pause. You know, the ones that have some sort of music swell or pop song in the background of the movie because the audience is being told to wait for a great kiss. Sadly, this was reality, no music was playing, and I simply said goodnight and walked home.
Now, reality says and would later confirm that I actually had no shot–she’d friendzoned me pretty much from the moment we met–and while I still pined, I managed to muster up what maturity I had to not pursue her, because it was cool to have a friend. But the moment became a great idea for a story and that got turned into a short film that I was not only able to shoot, but shoot out of sequence and edit using our high school’s video editing booth.
The premise of the story is that we see a couple on a date and it’s being narrated via the guy’s inner monologue, a monologue that starts off with the voice of a coach and then devolves into frustrated and angry yelling at our main character. In the film, I played both guy and narrator, with the date scenes being shot at a nearby park and the narration in my basement using the same washing machine-as-tripod setup that I employed for lip syncing several years prior. Originally, the girl in the story was going to be played by my then-girlfriend, but she didn’t want to be on camera (in retrospect, I don’t blame her) and my sister was supposed to be the cinematographer. They switched places and when I showed the completed film in class, this made one of the girls in my class incredibly uncomfortable–even though, you know, no on-screen kiss happened.
That was the last time I used the camera to shoot, unless you count my senior prom, when my friends and I managed to commandeer it and take it with us to the dance after my parents were done shooting the pre-prom stuff. I’d go on to make a college choice that was regrettable in some ways, as while I do think I learned how to be a better writer, I often found myself overreaching in my efforts to seem “literary” in class while the stuff I really wanted to write was relegated to my student newspaper column or short story and novel drafts that got tucked away on my hard drive and taken out only when I didn’t have schoolwork. I don’t have the tapes anymore, either–they were taped over or thrown away years ago (well, except for the prom video).
So I watched Raiders! and found myself surprised that I wasn’t filled with any sort of midlife crisis anger or regret about not standing my ground and pursuing the creative endeavors that anyone around me would have called distractions. If anything, I rooted for Eric and his friends, sharing in the hopeful glee that they managed to still have the sense of wonder that so many of us often lose to cynicism.
So I’m watching Lucas last night …
I guess I have to justify why I’m watching a Corey Haim movie from 1986? It had been in my Netflix DVD queue and therefore part of my “uncollecting” list. Oh, and I guess I should also say that I’m going to talk about the ending of the film here, so here’s a spoiler alert for a Corey Haim movie from 1986.
So I’m watching Lucas last night and I get to the end, which I had completely misremembered from when it first came out. I was pretty sure that the title character (played by Corey Haim) went out for the football team, got put in the game, and was killed as a result. I am also now pretty sure that I never actually watched the entire movie when it was released on video or aired on TV back in the late 1980s and was simply relying on a friend giving me the wrong information, but I kind of wonder if that would have been an improvement on what I actually watched.
You know, that sounds so much crueler when I read it than it did in my head. No, I don’t want a pipsqueaky kid to get crushed to death by a bunch of twentysomethings who are playing high schoolers. But the ending did bother the hell out of me because of the way it adds another item to the pile of conformity glorification and popularity validation that is rampant in Eighties teen movies.
The plot of Lucas is this: Lucas is a scrawny fourteen-year-old boy who is at least one year ahead academically because he’s incredibly smart. He’s also a nerdy kid who loves insects (a running thread is his fascination with the 17-year cicadas) and because of that is mercilessly teased by the jocks at school. To an epic degree. There’s only one, Cappie (Charlie Sheen)*, who is not only not a complete asshole to him but actually seems to genuinely like him. At the beginning of the film, Lucas meets Maggie (Kerri Green) and they become very close friends, but things get complicated when it’s obvious that he’s fallen in love with her and she doesn’t think of him that way. Moreover, she and Cappie fall for one another**. To show Maggie how tough he is, Lucas goes out for the football team and despite being told he can’t play by both the coach and the school principal, forces his way onto the field for a few plays.
It’s these few plays and their aftermath that make up the climax of the film. After being knocked around by defensive linemen for a few downs, Lucas finds himself downfield and completely wide open. When the pass comes his way, he traps it, bobbles it, drops it, and when the other team recovers it and goes downfield, he attempts a tackle and winds up at the bottom of a pile-on. This knocks him completely unconscious and puts him in the hospital.***
The scene then shifts to the hospital where you see the majority of the football players and cheerleaders in the waiting room, but as the night goes on, just his friends are around. He finally wakes up when Maggie goes to see him, they reconcile, and when he returns to school, the jocks who beat him up have placed a varsity jacket in his locker and we get the slow clap to end all slow claps.
I mean, I don’t think there is a better slow clap in cinematic history. You have the one guy starting everything, everyone joining in, it getting faster, Lucas realizing that this is all for him and then a glorious freeze frame before the synth score of the end credits kicks in. It’s gloriously Eighties feel-good and even the Ronald Miller Redemption in Can’t Buy Me Love doesn’t top it.
The blond guy in the scene is named Bruno (of course his name is Bruno) and he’s played by Tom Hodges (whom I recognized as Rich, Jason Bateman’s friend on The Hogan Family, who is the subject of a very special episode about AIDS). Bruno’s been the main antagonist the entire movie (along with Jeremy Piven, who plays a similar bully sidekick in One Crazy Summer). And the fact that Bruno’s behind the varsity jacket in the locker? Well, it Means! SO! MUCH!
For years, two of the biggest mistakes in the John Hughes movie cycle**** were Allison’s being prettied up at the end of The Breakfast Club and Andie’s choosing Blaine over Duckie in Pretty in Pink.***** Both of these films seem to be about understanding the differences between us all and being proud of your own individuality. However, those particular scenes also send a message that what girls really want is for the popular boy to like them and give them the fairytale ending. Lucas is the “boy” equivalent because the nerdy boy fairytale ending is glory on the field, or in the case of The Breakfast Club, Emilio Estevez’s Andrew walking through the hallway with Anthony Michael Hall’s Brian and then mentoring him on the wrestling team******. Lucas may not get the girl,m but he certainly gets the glory.
Now, I realize that it’s unfair to measure a 34-year-old film by the more progressive cultural standards and views I hold today. I’ve complained about people doing this too much in cultural and literary criticism, because often works do need to be judged in their own context as well as the context of the current culture. But I taught for nine years years at a high school where one’s athletic prowess was the most valuable character trait and success on the field made him an untouchable deity in the eyes of the adults. Those same adults, by the way, would have fit in very well in the setting of this film, because they held so many of the views and values put forth by this film. And if I look at it within its own context, Lucas upholds the cultural values of the Reagan Eighties, which were very much a loving nostalgia for the Eisenhower Fifties but with a lot more T&A on our screens.
Compounding my frustration here is that Lucas is a character who is ascloseasthis to being precocious and unlikable and it’s only Corey Haim’s performance that makes us care about him. He presents this kid as someone who is still very innocent and immature and has been stomped on because of it. I wanted him to triumph in the end, but not like this. Instead, I was hoping that he would realize that: a) Maggie was genuinely his friend; b) Cappie thought of him like a little brother; c) he had a crew of friends; and d) one of those friends, Rina (played by Winona Ryder in her film debut), liked him the same way he liked Maggie. Yes, we get a) and b), but imagine how much better this would have been if after the football game, Bruno would have simply apologized for being an asshole, and Lucas could have walked off into the hallway with his friends, feeling way more confident about who he was instead of basking in symbolic gestures.
Yeah, I know that wouldn’t have happened in an Eighties movie, or at least one that was as mainstream as Lucas. We sort of get it in the 1995 movie Angus, but it’s not until the Freaks and Geeks episode “Carded and Discarded” that we see it happen in the Eighties. The plot of that episode is similar to Lucas up to a point: a pretty new transfer student named Maureen arrives at school, befriends the geeks, but as the episode goes on she begins spending more time with the popular crowd. The difference here is that whereas Lucas decides to try to be a sports hero, the guys realize the inevitability of Maureen’s popularity and decide to let her go. And yes, it’s not their decision to make, but it’s a wonderfully bittersweet moment of growth for those guys that I wish we would have gotten more of in the Eighties instead of movies proving to us that the jocks are essentially always right.
*I hear “Cappie” and I think of Louis Gossett Jr.’s character in Iron Eagle.
**Nowhere to put this bit of commentary/plot detail, but Cappie is dating Alise, who is played by Courtney Thorne-Smith. Maggie is never presented as nerdy, but Green’s being a redhead makes me wonder if the writer watched Sixteen Candles where Jake dumps Carolyn for Samantha and said, “Yeah, like that.”
***The IMDb trivia page for Lucas points out that this play is completely illegal and never should have happened. Prior to the Hail Mary pass, the quarterback passes Lucas the ball and Lucas pitches it back. That’s legal, but the subsequent pass downfield is not, plus Lucas was not checked in as an eligible receiver. Furthermore, when Lucas drops the ball, he never had control of it and therefore, it’s an incomplete pass and not a fumble. All this could have been solved by having the team run a flea flicker and letting the kid bobble the pass, control it, make a football move, and then fumble. Plus, he took his helmet off, which would have also blown the play dead. I mean, I never played football and even I know this.
****And I’m specifically referring to the time before we all turned around and realized the terrible message the Claire/Bender hookup sends and what an absolute dumpster fire Sixteen Candles is.
*****Compounding this is that ending was a reshoot. She originally ended up with Duckie and test audiences hated it.
******Yeah, the fact that Emilio Estevez is Charlie Sheen’s brother and they’re playing similar characters isn’t lost on me either.
So right now, we’re in a massive societal lockdown, which means that all of us are sitting at home and trying to find things to do. It also means that our usual spring distractions and entertainment have been canceled or altered. There’s no NCAA Championship, and no professional sports. Now, I’m bummed that I wasn’t able to fill out a March Madness bracket and watch tournament games during the day, but I didn’t realize how much I would be missing baseball.
I’ve written about my long-standing and oft-frustrating Mets fandom over the years, and that hasn’t changed. I remain loyal to the team even though there have been large chunks of time in the last two decades were I have checked out and stopped paying attention. And I can say with some confidence that there are enough highlight compilations on YouTube to keep me entertained and remind me of what I’m missing, but the thing that has reminded me of the joy of baseball the most has been Bases Loaded.
Released by Jaleco in 1988, Bases Loaded is a Nintendo game that was one of a few games that stepped up that year to take advantage of the dearth of quality NES sports games. Yes, the system had an entire sports category when it premiered a few years earlier, and those games were playable, but the overall quality left something to be desired. Golf and Ice Hockey were probably the better of the selection with the football game 10 Yard Fight at the bottom and Baseball somewhere between. I mean, we played the hell out of that game, but it was a glitchy mess–outs would not be recorded and players would walk off the field at random, so we called it “Gitchball”–but it was the only thing going.
But then I got the first issue of Nintendo Power and that proved to be a–no pun intended–game changer. Really, the whole magazine was, and I’m not alone in saying that it was a landmark moment in the 1980s. For baseball, it was important because that issue featured a preview of three new games: RBI Baseball, Major League Baseball, and Bases Loaded.
The baseball games poster from the very first issue of Nintendo Power. Notice the Bat Signal in the corner. This is my copy and it’s seen better days.
This article–which had an accompanying poster (it’s on the back of the overworld map for the second quest of The Legend of Zelda)–was easily the most important thing I read in 1988 because not only did it advertise three different baseball games, it analyzed and compared them. My friend Tom and I spent the entire summer watching the Mets cruise through the NL East and collecting a ton of Topps baseball cards, so finding out that there was not just one new baseball game but three out there was mind blowing and we knew that choosing which one to ask for was going to be incredibly important.
I can’t say much about either RBI Baseball or Major League Baseball except that I played the latter a few times and remember it being a better version of Glitchball and the lineups used actual player names. But Bases Loaded looked completely different, closer to the game Hardball that we had seen on the Commodore 64 (and if you’ve seen The Princess Bride, you have seen it as well), which meant slightly more realistic-looking players. When Tom got the cartridge, we saw that each team had been programmed with strengths and weaknesses, and instead of having to write down our team record if we were trying to play a season (something we’d done the previous year with Glitchball), there was a password after every game. Even at the start, this was awesome, and when we got to the actual game, we were completely blown away, so much so that we immediately sat down and chose teams to play for an entire season.
Now, if you actually know the game, you know that’s quite a task. Bases Loaded has a 132-game “pennant race” one-player function (and a one-off “vs mode” two-player function), although you can clinch the pennant early by winning 80 games. But the trials of life ha not taken over for us as fifth graders and neither had most of the trappings of adolescence, so in 1988 we were ready to go the distance. Tom chose Jersey, the team closest to use geographically; I chose D.C. because their uniform’s colors were blue and gray and therefore as close to the Mets as I would get. The D.C. team had solid pitching and one superstar hitter by the name of Fendy, whose stats on the game were a .356 average with 50 home runs. But Jersey was something else because they had Paste.
Paste hit a walk-off three-run shot at the end of a recent game. Here he is high-fiving teammates on the Jaleco Diamond Vision.
With an unreal .467 average and 60 home runs, Paste was the power-hitting first baseman whose shadow loomed like Babe Ruth any time you had to face Jersey in a game. The team’s pitching was marginal at best, but that didn’t matter because you could always count on Paste being able to smash the ball. Many a time, I watched Tom get a runner or two on the bases and then settle in for some sort of monster at bat from his team’s star player, a pixelated baseball god whose home runs were the type that you knew were out of the park the moment you heard the clink of the 8-bit bat. I mean, I could get Fendy to hit a homer or two, but nothing compared to a Paste home run.
That’s not to say that he carried the team. Jersey had a deep order, including Bay, who batted cleanup after Paste and sported 30 of his own home runs, and a bench that had more than just your average schmos. It wound up being a boon to Tom, as he won every game we played in the season, although I don’t think we got past the twenty game mark before our interest faded. I do remember one time he had found some passwords–where he got them from, I don’t know–for both Jersey and D.C. that put us at game 36 or 37 and while Jersey remained undefeated, D.C. had a losing record. I was pretty pissed off about that and vowed to continue playing on my own, eking out a few wins and a couple of losses before finally giving up and throwing in the Ice Hockey cartridge so my fat guy could score 30 goals against Sweden.
The reviews of Bases Loaded that I found online are not particularly kind to it. They mention the superiority of Hardball, how slow the game play is, and how the fielding is quite terrible. All of those are valid points, but I don’t think that matters to a generation who gets instantly nostalgic when they see the word “Jaleco” on the spine of a Nintendo cartridge. For many of us, Bases Loaded was the first time we felt that we were playing a real baseball video game.
Even though the game’s title wasn’t on the cartridge, when you saw the word “Jaleco” told you knew exactly what it was.
Glitchball was a good afternoon distraction; Bases Loaded was a commitment. To win at that game, you had to manage your team and those of us who didn’t have the luxury of a Commodore 64 were excited and impress by the different stances and body types of the hitters (plus the different skin tones) and the throwing styles of the pitchers (I never really got the hang of those Dan Quisenberry-type underhand-style throwers). Plus, your pitchers got tired as the game went on, you could pinch hit, and the game would cut to the Diamond Vision when a home run was hit, showing the pitcher holding his head while the batter pumped his fist behind him. And there was also a bullpen car and when you hit a batter with a pitch, he might charge the mound and we’d see a fight play out on the scoreboard. I am sure that better games came along after or were available for other systems, but to us it was the crown jewel of NES baseball games.
It still has the magic, too. I sat down last week and began a season, this time as Jersey because Tom’s not here and I have my own cartridge, so I can pick whatever team I choose. I swept three games from Boston, the third of which climaxed with a three-run walk-off homer by Paste. Sure, Boston put up a bunch of hits on my pitchers and even 32 years later, I can’t field anything cleanly. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ve got endless time at home and a TV in the basement that I can use for 40 minutes a day until I see what’s at the end of the season, and know that Paste’s moon shots are going to be one thing getting me there.
Pop Culture Affidavit 