nostalgia

The Remains of the Eighties

For my 18th birthday, I got a $25 gift certificate to Tape World.

It was 1995 and I hadn’t bought a cassette in at least a few years. But in The Smith Haven Mall, there was still a store called Tape World. I’d never set foot inside of it and I don’t think anyone I knew had either. Sam Goody was right around the corner, sitting in prime position across from Aeropostale and The Gap, beckoning music lovers with its neon entrance and posters advertising the latest albums. Tape World was a blocky ‘80s-lettering sign above a thin store that was tucked between 5-7-9 and The Bombay Company. I actually had to check the mall directory to find it.

The Eighties didn’t so much end in 1990; rather, they slowly faded into obscurity, and that has me thinking about where they eventually went. Tape World, for instance, has its place in our cultural examination of the decade, as one of Michael Galinsky’s photos for The Decline of Mall Civilization shows a blonde girl with quintessential mall hair walking by the store and its wood paneling facade. A look through my memories of the malls near me (and yes, malls, plural–it was Long island) shows a number of places where time seemed to stand still well after the decade had changed over while simultaneously trying to keep up with the times. Gardiner Manor Mall had an ancient Sears, an Orange Julius, and a bridge to Stern’s. The South Shore Mall had Captree Corners, a late-1970s mini mart of small shops and a fountain I loved to throw pennies into when I was six. The Sun Vet Mall was where 1981 went to die.

Smith Haven, started out as a mid-century mall of the late 1960s with fountains, Alexander Calder sculptures, and the low-lit atmosphere that I associate with the era. It was a twenty-minute drive from Sayville and when I was little, I loved going to “the mall with the fountains.” However, it underwent a massive renovation in 1987 and emerged with a brighter neon-tinged and mauve-tiled palette that has come to typify the Eighties.

The renovation was hyped even as it was going on. When the mall was getting its makeover, there were radio commercials that sang “We’re building the place of your dreams … Smith Haven Mall!” Later, the commercials changed to “Your wildest dreams will come true … Smith Haven Mall!” I don’t know what “wildest dreams” can come true at Jean Country or Casual Corner, but I will take their word for it. The mall was also the home to a local news special on WLIG 55, “At the Mall With Drew Scott.” It remains one of the more amazing artifacts of 1980s Long Island as did the mall itself until it underwent another renovation in the mid-2000s.

That’s probably why it’s always stayed alive while so many shopping malls have died. A hot place in the Eighties, Smith Haven was also a destination for Nineties mall-ness because it had a Gap, Aeropostale, Structure, Express, Limited, Eddie Bauer, Bath and Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, Disney Store, and Warner Brothers Studio Store. But it was still Eighties building that held onto that part of its identity with stores like Tape World; Sssassy, which was a real-life version of Over Our Heads, the store from the last few seasons of The Facts of Life; and the cutlery store Hoffritz. Because honestly, nothing is more Eighties than a store devoted entirely to cutlery.

Sssassy in Smith Haven Mall, probably in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Photo was taken from siteride on Flickr.

The faded Eighties aesthetic in the era of grunge was simultaneously out of place and in line with those who have come to be known as “Xennials”. Stuck between our cool older Generation X and annoying little Millennial siblings, the Xennial microgeneration is the middle child–ignored because mom and dad had already done everything for those older siblings and the younger ones were showing much more promise. We were raised by people going through the motions, wearing hand-me-downs and finding ourselves too old for anything new. I don’t think it was spurred on by anything other than bad timing. We had our peak teenage mall years during the first Bush recession where the economy and the housing market both bottomed out, especially on Long Island, so that meant that development and progress were put on pause and we did our best to use our fading institutions of commerce.

Ironically–appropriate for the Nineties, I know–this made parts of Long Island feel like a museum exhibit. In recent years, there has been a ton of McMansioning and townhome development. But in the late 1990s, there was still a lot left over from decades past. My grandmother’s neighborhood in New Hyde Park had houses that had remained unchanged since the 1950s. Downtown spaces in Patchogue, Amityville, and Huntington still resembled their 1950s and 1960s selves. Sayville Pizza looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1975. Even as a kid, I wondered what ghosts were sending echoes through their halls and walls, and whatever patina or grime covered the Island led me to associate authentic with “worn.”

Of course, such things do not always last, especially when the economy improves and developers can give yet another facelift to a mall or neighborhood. The candy-colored late 90s and the housing boom of the 2000s meant knocking down the useless buildings to put up Target (as they did with the Gardiner Manor Mall) or turning a shopping center property into a housing development. In some cases, the limited space provided by an area in Queens or Nassau County meant a creative way to drop a Barnes & Noble into a strip mall. In other, like in Suffolk County, you could bulldoze acres of woods to create an outlet mall. I’m sure nobody really noticed when Rickel and Pergament gave way to Lowes and Home Depot unless someone prompted them. It’s such a suburban aesthetic to embrace whatever is new. “They’re putting in a Whole Foods.”

Yeah, they give us a lot.

Image taken from one of those baitclick T-shirt ads that uses really bad photoshopping. You know the ones.

They’ve even given us the past, preserving the Eighties in places that are comfortable and happy–movies, marathon weekends on radio stations, your kids’ spirit week costumes. But it’s all cosplay and manufactured nostalgia put forward by those who stand to earn money or cache off of our memories: memes, influencers who pretend they “are Eighties”, bad TikToks of someone bobbing their head and pointing out that random items existed or making lists of cartoons “nobody heard of” yet every single commenter remembers. Yet, that’s the product of our culture, which is one that has been manufactured for generations.

Tons of ink has been spilled about suburbia, stripping down its vinyl siding to show the flaws underneath andI want to make some pretentious point about how because the Eighties were actually stripped of all substance and repackaged, we are stuck in a cultural Allegory of the Cave and the people who sold us the American Dream are making money off of that, but I’ll just look for where the past has receded and the decade truly remains. Because it’s not a place everyone goes. It’s in a paragraph of the last chapters of a U.S. history textbook. It’s documentaries buried underneath a pile of true crime exposés on second-tier streaming services. It’s in a bin in the attic, the back of a closet, or on the shelves and racks of thrift stores.

A few months ago, I was in one of those antique malls where people offload things that don’t qualify for an appearance on Antiques Roadshow but still think are worth more than a couple of bucks at a yard sale. Among stacks of old Corningware, old country albums, military ephemera, and old guitars were a number of video games, baseball cards, toys, and other things I recognized, like a Le Clic, a disk film camera that came in an assortment of colors, all of which screamed Eighties. These were more comforting than any meme or slapped-together neon wardrobe I’ve seen on a high schooler. They felt lived in and I could picture some kid with a questionable haircut wearing an Ocean Pacific T-shirt once collecting and playing with all of them.

In the ten or fifteen minutes I spent in Tape World thirty years ago, I stuck to Eighties music. I’d like to say that a store called Tape World demanded an Eighties music purchase, it was because CDs were expensive and I wanted to get the most out of my $25. The Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack on CD was just enough to allow me to dive into a bargain bin and fish out The 80s Rock + On, a K-Tel produced 80s compilation cassette that would live in my Walkman or the tape deck of my Hyundai Excel until I offloaded my cassettes in the mid 2000s. So yes, I did buy a tape at Tape World.

A Last Point in Elementary School

I wish I could have some profound way of starting this essay or even something or someone to tie it together, but the truth is that last week, I fell down one of hte more random Internet rabbit holes. Although I don’t know if this was a rabbit hole beacuse I was actually finding the answer to something and had some serendipity come along with it. Either way I think I am probably the only person in the world who does a fist pump the moment he discovers his sixth grade reading textbook on the Internet Archive.

The timing of my search for it does make sense, though. It was my last week of summer break and I didn’t have much to do on the day when it was pouring out, so I decided to look into some of the topics on the very large list of topics for possible blog posts and then remembered that years ago, I’d purchased a copy of The Mine of Lost Days by Marc Brandel. It’s a children’s/young adult novel published in 1975 that’s about a kid visiting relatives in Ireland and finding a group of children in a mine who are actually from more than 100 years ago. I remembered liking the book when I was a kid and had bought it because I had been looking for an answer to my very specific question: “What was that novel that was in Point?”

Point was a book published in 1982 as part of the Addison-Wesley Reading Program and at Lincoln Avenue Elementary was considered the highest level of reading book that you could hit. I was a high-achieving reader through all of elementary school, so I was pretty sure that as I was working my way through Green Salad Seasons in the fifth grade, I would wind up being one of those cool kids in sixth grade carrying around the elite reading book–and nothing says elite like a textbook with a unicorn on the cover. I probably had to cover it with a brown paper bag anyway.

Point‘s elite status lost a little bit of its luster when my sixth grade teacher, Ms. Frei, told us that everyone in the class was reading from it. Modern pedagogy says that this is probalby not a good idea (although to be fair, modern pedagogy gives you conflicting information on everything from instructional approach to whether or not you should put a poster on the wall), although now that I have been teaching for about 20 years, I see the case of having everyone read the same thing at the same time. Besides, she had us do a lot beyond simply trudge our way through a reading book story by story–there were book reports, research projects, and the occasional short story from a 1970 reading book called To Turn a Stone, which sounds like the most 1970 title for a reading book ever. I remember one story from that collection called “The Cave” where this kid who is in a gang befriends a homeless guy who lives in a cave and then his gang runs the guy off so they can use the cave for their new hideout. He winds up fighting the gang leader and getting kicked out, then makes a vow to join the other gang and get revenge. Between this and The Outsiders in the eighth grade, no wonder my generation was largely feral.

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 148: Déjà View

Set at the end of the 1980s, Déjà View is a coming of age novel with a supernatural elements, and joining me for this episode is its author, Michael Thomas Perone. We sit down to talk about his novels Déjà View and Danger Peak and the inspirations behind them.

Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit

Direct Download

Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

If you’re interested in learning more about the author or buying his books, there are links below.

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Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 144: Where Were You in ’62?

It’s the first of three episodes that look at the nostalgia subgenre of films, and I’m starting with the granddaddy of all of them, 1973’s American Graffiti. Directed by George Lucas, this is a seminal film and soundtrack that takes a look back at the teenage years of a generation, and along with me for this ride is The Fire and Water Network’s own Rob Kelly. So get comfortable on that tuck-and-roll upholstery, pour yourself some Old Harper, and crank up the jukebox as we ask “Where were you in ’62?”

Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit

Direct Download

Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

And if you want to hear what I think of the film’s sequel, More American Graffiti, check out this old blog post: Sometimes, More Isn’t That Groovy

“Kid 90” and the discoveries from Personal Archaeology

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.

Raiders!, Teen Movie Dreams and The Legend of Kung Fool

Raiders poster 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.

When Billy Joel Was Homework

We Didn't Start the Fire It’s been derided as one of the worst Billy Joel songs ever written, maybe even one of the worst ever, and when Christopher Bonanos of Vulture put it second to last in a comprehensive list of all of his songs*, he called it, “The biggest problem for the Billy Joel apologist, because it is so highly popular and inescapably bad.” But for me, a “We Didn’t Start The Fire” is important—while Billy Joel was inadvertently summarizing the entire Cold War in three minutes, I was taking my first steps into the world of collecting music.

Released on September 27, 1989, the song, which was the first single off of Storm Front, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the weeks of December 9 and 16 of that year and came on the heels of his monstrous 1980s grand slam of An Innocent Man, Greatest Hits Volume I & II**, The Bridge, and the Russia tour. That prior success and the chart-topping first single helped Storm Front go quadruple platinum, outselling his prior studio album, something that’s impressive for what is half of a good album, although the singles, especially “The Downeaster Alexa”, “I Go to Extremes”, and “And So It Goes” have gotten many a replay over the years.

Of course, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” overshadows all of those. Its verses are laundry lists of events and people from his then forty years, which Bonanos trashes by saying, “So much is wrong here: boomer-generation narcissism, the tri-state area-news myopia (‘hypodermics on the shore?’ ‘Bernie Goetz’?), the iffy rhymes (‘James Dean’ with ‘winning team’ and many others), the double mention of the Dodgers.” But the appeal was the challenge of memorizing every single reference, which while not as tough as, say, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” by R.E.M., was still a task, especially since Joel was not known for his ability to enunciate and it was years before I realized that “Dien Bien Phu falls” was not prnounced “Din din foo falls.”

To do so, I would need a copy of the song and while I was content to wait until I heard it on the radio and had a tape ready to record, but fate intervened in the form of Saturday Night Live and my junior high school.

In late September, NBC aired a huge prime-time special to celebrate SNL’s 15th Anniversary (which I covered in episode 45 of the podcast). It was, as these shows tend to be, a huge retrospective of the characters, comedians, guests, and sketches from the show’s history, and just about everyone in my grade wound up watching it, or at least that is what I could tell from the number of times we repeated lines in class for weeks after. This ultimately led to the last time I ever really dressed up for Halloween—my friend Rich and I wore gray sweatpants and sweatshirts and weight belts and went as Hans and Franz.

The costumes were a hit and we won “Funniest costume”*** and a $25 gift certificate to Record World, a record store in the Sun Vet Mall that even in 1989, when mall record and tape stores were still important destinations for teenagers, seemed like a relic of the decade before. The décor was deep brown shelving with gold carpeting that might have at one time held years’ worth of nicotine tar. The cassettes were locked behind glass cases, and the disaffected employees working the register stood in a perch, nearly inapproachable. Think Empire Records, but with paneling. Rich and I walked in and almost immediately saw the cassingle for “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, snatched it up, and then grabbed other tapes we were interested in. I can’t remember what else we got, but the minute I got home, that cassingle of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” went into constant rotation on the boom box with its partially broken antenna that sat on my bedroom dresser.

Later that winter, Rich and I, along with my sister, would set my parents’ camcorder up on the washing machine and record a music video of us lip syncing the song, using the mallets of a croquet set as guitars and microphones, which is something we’d been doing for a while****. And while my peers and I had no context for the majority of the song, we belted out the lyrics and many of us had to research them.

Now, I was never asked to do a research project on one of the song’s many allusions, but more than a few of my friends were, and it’s even Bonanos writes that he didn’t place the song last in the list because it made him learn something. I’m pretty sure that Joel didn’t intend to hand junior high teachers a lesson plan, but he did and even to this day, you can find online lessons available. Most of them haven’t changed much in 30 years—I don’t care if you add multimedia, you’re still looking up a song lyric and doing research. So whereas Boomers could wax nostalgic, their kids could be forced to learn about all of the important things in their generation’s lifetime. And for a generation as notoriously narcissistic as the Baby Boomers, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” was perfect fuel for the nostalgia that had been started by American Graffiti, ramped up with The Big Chill, and was chugging along with The Wonder Years.

Over the years, Joel has been asked about adding extra verses to the song but has declined, which I can respect, because he doesn’t need to. Future generations can take it upon themselves to follow it up, like Matchbox 20 did with “How Far We’ve Come”, a Gen-X spiritual sequel that has a similar sound (superimpose the final verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” over the song’s bridge, it fits perfectly) and a video that is flashes of events from the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. And I guess it’s appropriate that a band whose Greatest Hits album is called Exile on Mainstream is paying tribute to an artist who practically defined mainstream during their youth.

“We Didn’t Start the Fire” was the first cassingle I ever bought. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a watershed moment. Up until that point tapes were something I flipped through as TSS while my mom was shopping***** and I only had the few that I put on birthday and Christmas lists–Thriller; Born in the U.S.A. (which I wore out and had to replace); and the soundtracks to Footloose, Over the Top, The Karate Kid Part II, and Top Gun. Songs were something I heard on the radio and taped onto a blank cassette. As I made my way through junior high and then into high school, I’d start a music collection. And while my taste could be–and has often been–called into question, to this day I will still loudly proclaim, “Rock and roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore!”

* Last on the list was “The Mexican Connection”, a piano instrumental off of Streetlife Serenade that isn’t bad per se but is certainly a very deep cut.

** At some point in the mid-1980s, just about every household on Long Island was issued a cassette copy of Greatest Hits I & II and I can imagine those cassette copies of the album circulate in the area’s garage sales like currency.

*** I remember someone yelling at me that it wasn’t fair because the prize was supposed to some guy named Emil who dressed in a toga and I honestly don’t remember why he didn’t get it but it just sticks out at one of many “You didn’t deserve this, loser” moments from my formative years.

**** A video that no longer exists because I threw the tape away years ago.

*****When I wasn’t staring at Samantha Fox posters.

Candee Avenue Goes to War

The Entertech water hawk, which is the pistol that my friends and I called “The Scorpion UZI.” Whether or not that was an accurate description is debatable. Photo by Marquis de Zod. Used under cc license.

It’s the summer of 1987. Times are hard. In the hot weather, the kids of Suburbia are desperate for cold snacks and air conditioning, both of which are kept in short supply by parents who are insistent that they go outside. But outside has become a land of boredom–there are only so many places to ride, the playground is overrun by little kids, and the huge tree in the backyard at the latest wiffle ball. The situation seems desperate and there is nothing left to do but fight.

All right, so the summer boredom sometimes suffered by suburban children is not a good premise for a 1980s action movie, but there was a time about 30 years ago where my friends and I took our interest in GI Joe and extended it to our yards and the streets surrounding them. Granted, we had been playing pretend for years, reenacting superheroes, Voltron, and Star Wars on playgrounds, but that was fantasy, before we had seen Red Dawn and realized that we had to be ready to fight real-life villains like Mummar Gaddafi. And so, for our birthdays, we got Entertech water guns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU1b_F5ztX0

Now, we’d had water pistols before, usually the plastic-colored kind that came in multi-packs or that you fished out of a bin at Ben Franklin for $1.00. But Entertech was a whole new dimension of water warfare. These were battery-operated automatic guns which meant that all you had to do was fill the clip with water, slap it into the gun, and press the trigger. Once you did, you heard the noise of a small motor and saw the water come out in steady bursts until you ran out and either threw in another clip (you could buy extra clips) or went and got a refill. It was leaps and bounds beyond anything else we had seen until then and more importantly, they looked cooler than anything else we had seen.

Entertech guns looked like real guns. LJN, who manufactured the guns, from 1985 until 1990, gave them fully automatic rounds of 60 RPMs and a range of 30 feet and “realistic” looks. To an extent, anyway. I mean, nobody was going to mistake a kid with an Entertech RPG for a terrorist. But the realistic look and the fact that we were seeing moveist hat had guns just like it, such as Rambo (which Entertech would license at one point), made them incredibly appealing. My friends and I had the Water Hawk, which I believe was a reproduction of a TEC-22 semiautomatic Intratec or “Scorpion,” which is why my friends and I referred to them as “Scorpion UZIs.” And the advertising wasn’t false–they shot far and fired fast.

Unfortunately, without carrying around several clips of water, playing with all the functionality of the gun proved tedious, so what we often did was kept firing and pretending we were shooting bad guys or one another. The motor still worked as long as the batteries weren’t dead, so we could get sound effects going. And long after the batteries had died, rusted, and corroded because I’d stored the gun in the garage, it was still a prop for whatever adventures we devised.

My friend Tom’s backyard, which was huge, was usually the setting for those adventures. We would put on the military camo pants that we’d gotten from Thunder Ride–our local army surplus store–and would run around dodging enemy fire, or army crawling through the grass to find and ambush someone, or climb into the huge tree in his backyard to get into sniper positions or to jump out of the tree like we were Rangers, the best of the best. When we weren’t playing, we were at the local library looking up the various ranks and insignia in the World Book Encyclopedia or were photocopying pages out of books like Weapons of World War II by C.B. Colby. Like I said, we weren’t just pretending; we were training.

Unfortunately, this commitment to realism resulted in its fair share of controversy in 1987 and 1988. There is a line in Die Hard where Reginald Vel Johnson’s character talks a bout how he’s riding a desk because he shot a kid who was carrying a toy pistol. While this served to give some background to his character, it was also a rather timely reference. While this didn’t become a widespread phenomenon in the mid-1980s, toy guns being the cause of shootings or being used in crimes came to national attention.

In 1987, it literally spilled onto the airwaves when Gary Stollman managed to make his way into the studio of KNBC in Los Angeles and put a toy gun to the back of consumer reporter David Horowitz while forcing him to read what the Los Angeles Times called ” a rambling statement on the air about the CIA and space aliens.” Stollman was the son of a former KNBC pharmaceutical reporter and had managed to find a legitimate way into the building–according to 4:00 p.m. newscast co-anchor Kristie Wilde, he had obtained a security badge and had made himself inconspicuous on the set prior to walking up to Horowitz. The news director, Tom Capra, cut the feed, but not before viewers saw Stollman, Horowitz, and the gun:

The incident, which you can read about in the archives of the Los Angeles Times (“Intruder With Toy Gun Puts KNBC Off Air” and “Risk at NBC: Integrity of Newscast vs. a Man’s Life”), was probably the most high-profile incident and by 1988, legislation was being introduced in various states as well as at the federal level to better regulate the manufacture and sale of toy guns. According to a June 16, 1988 article in the New York Times (“After 3 Deaths, Realistic Toy Guns are Under Fire”), after a few deaths and crimes, several major cities–San Francisco, Memphis, Chicago, and Detroit–as well as states such as Connecticut, Michigan, California, Florida, and Massachusetts had begun banning the sale and manufacture of realistic toy guns (they also point out that black, blue, and silver guns had been banned in New York City since 1955). At the time the article was published, the Senate had passed a bill that was sponsored by Bob Dole that required toy guns to have bright orange markings and barrel plugs.

While the article quotes Gerald Upholt, who was the director of Gun Owners of California, as saying, ”Anti-gun types are trying to play on the emotional appeal of a few incidents. The real problem is that police officers may need a little more training,” the incidents and legislation were enough to spell the end of realistic toy guns on the shelves. Toys R Us said they wouldn’t be selling the guns and companies, including Entertech, changed their designs to be more colorful and fake-looking.

So the Entertech era didn’t last very long, and in the 1990s, Acclaim bought LJN and discontinued all of its toys, choosing to focus on the video game side of the company (probably because Nintendo would only license so many games per company per year and having two separate companies under one umbrella meant more games/more revenue). Autofire guns weren’t as in vogue by that time anyway because in 1990, Larami released a game-changing water gun, the Super Soaker (which is now manufactured by Nerf), a gun that had a huge water tank and used pressure to shoot incredibly far and with a more powerful stream than other water pistols.

My friends and I had stopped fighting the war by then, anyway. Our interest in G.I. Joe had faded, and while we were still watching our fair share of action movies, we were more in tune to what was happening in the world of the WWF. Today, kids still can buy Super Soakers but can also arm themselves to the teeth with Nerf darts, which are really good for shooting cups off of a picnic table but maybe not so much for a real-life Red Dawn.

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 76: The Robotech Episode

Episode 76 Website Cover In the mid-1980s, one of the seminal anime series to ever cross over to American television was watched by children across the country. Combining mecha with a love story and an intergalactic war, Robotech was a sweeping saga that makes it one of the most memorable series of the decade. For this episode, I sit down with Donovan Morgan Grant (The Batman Universe, The Next Dimension, Questions No Answers) to talk about The Macross Saga, and then I come back and take a brief look at the Masters and New Generation sagas.

iTunes: Pop Culture Affidavit

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Here’s some bonus stuff for you to check out.

First, my 2010 blog post about the Jack McKinney novels, “Mecha, Minmei, and a Decade-Long Fight for the Future.”

The original (1980s) intro to the cartoon, featuring images from all three series:

The Toonami intro (h/t to Donovan for sending me the link):

The current intro to The Macross Saga (as seen on Netflix):

The current intro to the New Generation (as seen on Netflix):

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 74: Well Everyone Else is Doin’ It …

Episode 74 Website Cover 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.

iTunes: Pop Culture Affidavit

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Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

And just for fun, here are the seven fads featured with some footage (where possible)

Bottle Flipping