Remember being in school and the teacher wheeled the TV/VCR cart into the room? You knew that it was going to be the most amazing part of the school day. Well, this time around, I go back through my memories of watching educational films in school. Starting with kids movies and Afterschool Specials in elementary school and up through AIDS education films in high school, I go through the movies I remember the most.
So we all remember the Energizer Bunny ads from the mid-to-late-1980s, right? The first one were simply the bunny drumming and rolling and not stopping. Then, the commericals got creative; they’d start with ads for fake products and thent he bunny would interrupt (“Still going … nothing outlasts Energizer”). For its time, it was a pretty innovative idea for a commercial. I’m not going to say that it ushered in an era of humor or parody in commercials or anything; maybe it did. But there were definitely a few copycats.
The one I remember the most was, for, of all things, TV Guide.
It’s kind of weird to me that TV Guide had commercials. After all, it was one of those things that was always just … there. You know, that digest-sized magazine you threw around and sometimes read just beyond the listings (or in my case, always read the articles). But in the early Nineties, they launched their own ad campaign using fake commercials. I don’t know how many there were, but I do remember one, a music video named SKUM and the song “Screaming at the Top of Our Lungs.”
So in case you are wondering, the band in the commercial doesn’t exist. A comment from 11 years ago made by YouTube User @rhino6849 says:
This was written played and sung by Chuck Duran. We were in a band together called Loud and Clear which was quite a departure from this.Sorry to disappoint some of the metal heads but this was written with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. I was on the floor laughing the first time he played it. Funny stuff!
p.s. That’s an actor, not Chuck.
Another user, @painebobby, adds, “Chuck sang and played guitar But did not write it.”
And even Chuck Duran himself, whom I found on the website “Demos That Rock”, has posted about it in some places. He is also a working voice-over artist who has a podcast about that work. One of his guests was E.G. Daily, which is pretty cool.
For me, the commercial still holds up, especially because of the over-the-top nature of the video. I’m not sure if GWAR was getting any rotation on MTV (this is about a year or two before Beavis and Butt-Head premiered), but that’s what it reminds me of. With a … tap … of Spinal Tap (I’ll show myself out).
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.”
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!”
I have to go school supply shopping this week, and my kid has finally hit the point in his academic career where, after years of giant, unwieldy binders filled with reams of loose-leaf paper, he’s decided to just pick up some five-subject spiral notebooks. I knew this day would come and I’ve been praying for it. The spiral-bound notebook is such a perfect school supply. In fact, it’s so great that it’s the subject of two of my favorite poems, Eve L. Ewing’s “To the Notebook Kid” and Ted Kooser’s “A Spiral Notebook”.
I encourage you to read both in their entirety, starting with Dr. Ewing’s poem and ending with Mr. Kooser’s, because they reflect upon different ends of life. Ewing’s line about “the ocean/you keep hidden in a jacked-up five star.” is about potential, promise, youth, and sets up a great closing stanza; Koozer laments, “It seems/a part of growing old is no longer/to have five subjects, each/demanding an equal share of attention,” although even he hasn’t lost some sense of that youthful wonder.
To this day, I still write drafts in spiral notebooks. It’s mostly a comfort of habit, as I’ve been filling “creative writing journals” since I took Mrs. Taber’s creative writing class in my senior year of high school; however, it’s also something that has always felt right to me. There’s something more intimate to me about writing in a notebook than typing on a laptop, and even if you don’t agree with me there, I’m sure you can agree that writing in a notebook with its lack of open browser tabs is certainly less distracting than a laptop screen.
I made the notebook transition when I got to high school as well. It’s possible that I had binders in the ninth grade, but I was definitely full notebook by the time tenth grade rolled around, having started with that classroom-issued yellow paper with blue lines in first grade off of which you could never erase cleanly before moving on to huge binders full of college ruled loose-leaf and the “Midvale School for the Gifted” Far Side cartoon blown up to 8-12 x 11 as a cover and finally to the spiral notebooks. Yes, I occasionally had to use composition notebooks, which I hated because you couldn’t tear out the pages cleanly and couldn’t fold over as nicely as a sprial-bound; and I dabbled in the Wireless Neatbooks that were not neat and usually fell apart within a few weeks after they were purchased; but those spiral notebooks became the staple of my school supply shopping*.
Most of the spiral-bound notebooks I’ve purchased over the years have been your basic-model five-subject college ruled notebooks. But every once in a while, I splurge and buy a Five Star.
With a durable plastic cover that measures 9″x11″ with 8-1/2″x11″ sheets, the Mead Five Star maintains its neatness through quite a bit of abuse; plus, with pockets at each subject divider, it’s heavier than your average spiral-bound five-subject notebook. It’s a piece of equipment, not just a school supply, and the price shows in the craftsmanship, as it’s not going to look completely destroyed by February, something demonstrated in the commercials.
Now, I probably wasn’t thinking about that when I was in high school, but I did take note of how “together” everything stayed within a Five Star as opposed to the notebooks that I had whose covers had fallen off and were stapled to the books’ first pages. Also, the amount of crap that one can cram into a locker always astonished me. My high school had the lockers like you see in The Breakfast Club: a long locker with a coat hook but also an attached “cubby” for textbooks. That’s where you shoved your lunch bag and I’m sure where a number of my peers shoved whatever contraband they were bringing onto school grounds**.
Anyway, that durability was a trademark of Five Star’s ad campaign throughout the early Nineties, and in one commercial, they managed to not only hit upon all of the “silly ways this thing can be abused” ad trope, but also the “cool Gen-Xer ’90s teen” trope (I linked the commercial here, but play-through is disabled so you’ll have to watch it on YouTube).
Commenters on the YouTube video have pointed out that this is Todd Alexander, who played Rob on the PBS series Ghostwriter. That was a little after my PBS-watching days, but it’s still a cool connection to be able to make. Anyway, what I love about this is the way that Rob is yet another “cool teen in a cool room”, living the kind of suburban life that we were all sort of living, or at least wished we were living in 1994. He’s got his earphones in, he’s got his drumsticks going, he’s got a basketball hoop set up and always makes the shot. I was never this cool. Then again, you can’t exactly be cool when you ask your parents to buy you a two-drawer filing cabinet for your bedroom.
Mead would extend the whole Five Star concept into a line of school supplies, including backpacks, making the brand a huge flex for the teens … at least according to this commercial (again, play-through has been disabled so you have to watch on YouTube).
The actor is Christian Hoff, a former Kids Incorporated cast member who has had a long career as a character actor on television series throughout the last few decades. I’m not sure who the girl in the commercial is except that they were clearly going for a Career Opportunities-era Jennifer Connolly with the look. And he’s another typical ’90s teen guy, the douche who thinks he’s all that because a pretty girl looks at him for more than a split second. Of course, the joke being that it’s his school supplies that have her attention. Is the message here that having Five Star is going to get you noticed and maybe even in with the ladies? I’m … not exactly sure. If it was, then I missed my chance because had I bought a lot of Five Star back in high school, maybe I would have actually gotten a date.
Damn cheap basic notebooks.
* To this day, I remember my first trip to Staples in East Islip. My friend Rich had bought a three-inch Avery binder with a plastic window and that’s what I’d wanted for eighth grade. It was like Randall walking into Big Choice video in Clerks. I wanted everything.
** We had the privilege of not having to deal with overzealous local police departments who thought it would be fun to bring drug-sniffing dogs into the school on a semi-annual basis. At one school where I taught, this was the “code yellow” lockdown, and oh man, I could go on about the inequities of punishment that resulted from those searches.
In 1996, the Sayville, NY-based punk band Wasted Time released their only album, “When It Was Fun.” To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the CD’s release, I’m interviewing the lead singer (and one of my oldest friends), Chris Lynam. We talk about the Long Island music scene of the mid-’90s, what made him want to play music, the band’s history, and the music he’s making now.
Talk Hard! Steal the air! In 1990, the cult film Pump Up the Volume was released and it proved to be a formative movie experience for many teenagers of the time. So, 31 years after it came out, I sat down with Michael Bailey to take apart the film and see if Hard Harry’s words of rebellion still hold up.
This time around, I’m back to looking at my history with music by going deep into the early 1990s and my early teens, recollecting those nights I spent in my room listening to the radio and rushing to hit record so that I wouldn’t have to wait for the station to play that Brian May song. I talk about the stations I grew up listening to, the tapes I made, my unfortunate music choices, and how I learned about what was popular (and what wasn’t) before I finally got my own CD player.
So the picture above isn’t of my exact radio, but it is the radio I owned and used to tape all of those songs. It’s the Sony CFS-230 cassette-corder boombox. I got this for either my birthday or Christmas sometime in the late 1980s and it was eventually replaced with a cassette/CD player that I received for my fifteenth birthday.
And here is the Spotify playlist that includes the songs I featured in the episode. Enjoy!
The “Joes captured behind the Iron Curtain” storyline continues as Outback, the one who got away, escapes and fights his way across the border in G.I. Joe Special Missions #6. As always, I take a look at the comic and give it a review. Then, I spend time talking about the Stephen King novels published in 1987, especially his fantasy story The Eyes of the Dragon.
NOTE: There were some technical issues with the audio and I may sound a little digitized and underwater. Hopefully, I will resolve those issues by the next episode.
They were cool, they were hip, they were the “in” thing, and they lasted all of three months. They were fads.
Slap on a bracelet, flip a water bottle, hug your Beanie Babies tight and join me as I take a look at seven huge youth-driven fads (with some old people getting into it) from the mid-1980s until today. I examine the background behind each, some of its effects, why they were often banned from schools, and how they died out.
The “Joes captured behind the Iron Curtain” storyline continues as Outback, the one who got away, escapes and fights his way across the border in G.I. Joe Special Missions #6. As always, I take a look at the comic and give it a review. Then, I spend time talking about the Stephen King novels published in 1987, especially his fantasy story The Eyes of the Dragon.
They were cool, they were hip, they were the “in” thing, and they lasted all of three months. They were fads.
Pop Culture Affidavit 