When Brett was little–and I mean preschool-aged–they used to think that seasonal graphics on the weather report were the most hilarious things ever. The winter forecast had a snowman. Thanksgiving had a turkey. And Christmas, of couse, had a tree.
It doesn’t take much to keep a four-year-old entertained, but it made me think of when I was younger and I used to look for the same thing when I was watching the local news. I wasn’t a news junkie or anything when I was in elementary school, but for some reason I came to know who all of the personalities were, especially the sports and weather guys.
The other thing I always loved seeing were the holiday bumpers. If I happened to be watching television on Thanksgiving Day, there would be a “Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at channel 5” message at some point during a commercial break. The same could be said for Christmas and New Year’s. It got to the point where I was such a dork that I looked forward to seeing them every year.
I haven’t been watching television on the holidays in recent years, although I do see them from time to time. So, in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d look at a few that I found on YouTube. They’re all from the New York area, which is where I grew up.
The first is from WNBC 4 in 1977. Obviously, I never saw this when it aired because it’s from the year I was born. But in itself, it’s an interesting relic of television past–the quick bumper for a show that will be on later in the week. There are still some iterations of this around, but they usually have to do with local news shows and not locally programmed specials. I guess it’s also a fun fact to point out that up until I think about the mid-1990s, the Rockefeller Center Tree lighting was a half-hour show that wasn’t cheaply produced per se, but didn’t have the “network special” aspect it does these days. Plus, the feel of this–a still and a muffled narration due to 1977 television quality–has the feel of staying up past your bedtime.
Next up is WPIX 11 from 1984. I’m nto sure when this was first recorded because I found it on YouTube in several places, all with different years listed. I’m not surprised that it appeared several times over the years; WPIX was one of those stations that recycled stuff like this -and would re-air stuff from the Eighties way into the Nineties. What makes this interesting to me are three things: its length (it’s nearly four minutes long), the overtly religious content, and the fact that the guy speaking at us is the general manager of the station. Who these days–or at any time, really–knows who the heck the general manager of a television station is? I mean, for a second, I thought this was the PathMark guy.
Anyway, I wonder if this would even fly today. Because aside from the message, who is going to devote this much time–this much ad space–to something like this?
This one, from WNYW Fox 5 in 1998, is an example of a type of promo I’d see frequently–the idea that the people on the local news were a kind of family (and maybe by extension your family?). Like I said at the top of the post, I developed a knack early on for recognizing the people who were on television, and over the years I remember noticing when someone on one station moved to the other or even moved up to the network, like Al Roker or Sam Champion.
I live in a much smaller market these days and for a long time, the familiarity of the people on the news is still a valued commodity. I don’t know for how long, though, especially since local news stations keep getting bought out and staff is being reduced (my local weekend news has completely disappeared, for example). While I’m not going to flip a table if the weather guy changes again (because they change all the time), promos like this are nice in an age where the news seems less and less friendly.
And finally, there is the WNBC Sing-Along.
WNBC — 4 New York — is the New York City area’s undisputed champion of station promos. There’s more to write about at a later time, but right now is the time to look at one that’s been a tradition for a very long time. Granted, I have not watched television in New York in a few years, so I can’t tell you if that’s true, but I know that well into the 2010s, the entire WNBC staff would gather outside of 30 Rockefeller Center (which is where the station broadcasts from) and sing Christmas carols. The promo would air in 30-second and one-minute forms and would be just another commercial in a commercial break. And me being the dork that I am, would always look to see who I could name whenever it came on. This one’s from 1994 when I would have been a senior in high school.
Seeing this and all the reast always meant that Christmas break was coming and for a little more than a week, I’d be able to turn school off and enjoy a lot less structure in my day. Thinking about them now helps me recapture that feeling as I leave work behind and try to have a happy holiday season.
So if you’ve been watching enough of the Paris Olympics, you’ve seen enough footage of Parisian life and culture and you’ve inevitably heard the “Can-Can.” I think it was used in the opening ceremonies, in fact. And we’re all familiar with it, right? We can even picture the dancers from a place like the Moulin Rouge doing their high kicks to the song. Well, unless you’re like me and every time you hear the tune, you hear: “Now, Shop Rite does the can can selling lots of brands of everything in … cans cans.”
Yes, I realize that I have a problem. But really, when you think of it, we all have commercials that get stuck in our heands, and I even talked about some of my most memorable ones back on episode 97 of the podcast. And on that episode, with the exception of Crazy Eddie and a Roy Rogers commercial, most of the commercials I talked about in that episode were for national brands. When it comes to this Shop Rite commercial, people in maybe five states in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic part of the country are going to recognize that jingle, just like we also recognize character actor James Karen as “The PathMark guy”:
Again, who gets that except for people in the NY-NJ-CT Tri-State area?
Sometime in the Nineties, before the Lifetime Network took complete ownership of suspenseful TV movies, the networks–especially NBC–ran a slew of them and several were aimed at teens. They’d had success during the late 1980s with a bunch of kids/teen TV movies, such as Crash Course and Dance Til Dawn, but I would imagine that the shift to drama happened because of the popularity of teen television drama in the first half of the decade. The biggest things on television for adolescents were MTV’s The Real World and Fox’s Beverly Hills 90210, both of which provided enough drama (and in the case of the latter, soapy drama) that the network probably thought they could pull an audience.
I’ve seen bits and pieces of a number of these movies over the years, many of which star Tori Spelling, but also featured actresses like Tiffani-Amber Theissen, Kellie Martin and Candace Cameron and had titles like The Face on the Milk Carton or Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? In the fall of 1996, they put another one out, Lying Eyes, although this one stars Cassidy Rae, who at that point was probably best known for a recurring role on Melrose Place as well as its spin-off Models, Inc. She plays a high school senior named Amy who gets involved in an affair with a much older guy and then someone starts stalking her and …
… I honestly have no idea why, but I have not only seen this movie three times (once for the sake of this blog post and twice prior), but it’s stuck with me ever since it first aired nearly thirty years ago. I’ll try to get to that after I run through the plot.
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.”
It’s time once again to dive into The Uncollecting! In this year’s episode, I take a look at the PBS series Legacy List With Matt Paxton along with articles that explore the “legacies” of our generations’ past, like brown furniture and memorabilia collections that are left behind. I also give my own update on how this now long-running project has been going.
One of the things you have to remember about Friends when it premiered is that the six members of the cast were made up of five “Hey, It’s That Guy!” actors and Courteney Cox, and wasn’t wholly unique in its presentation–Fox had been doing Living Single at the time and NBC had hits with thirty-something sitcoms like Seinfeld and Mad About You, so aging the main characters down but giving them the “adult sitcom” plots that had worked for the other shows made sense. I can’t remember if the show was a hit at first because I picked it up about halfway through its first season; I’d been watching My So-Called Life on ABC and returned to NBC after that show’s cancellation. Once I did, however, I recognized every one of the cast members from other shows: Jennifer Aniston had been on the short-lived Fox sketch show The Edge, David Schwimmer had been on The Wonder Years; Matt LeBlanc had played Kelly’s boyfriend Vinny on Married … With Children (and its spinoffs), and Lisa Kudrow had been and still was playing the ditzy waitress on Mad About You.
And then there was Matthew Perry, whom had shown up in a number of places over the past several years, especially on television. I’d seen him as a tragic, pressured rich kid on Beverly Hills, 90210; as Christina Applegate’s put-upon boyfriend in Dance ‘Til Dawn (which I reviewed in episode 136 of the podcast); as Ami Dolenz’ skeezy prom date in She’s Out of Control (a movie I should look at in the future); and Carol Seaver’s dead boyfriend on Growing Pains. But most importantly, I knew him as the guy from Boys Will Be Boys.
A retool of a sitcom called Second Chance, Boys Will Be Boys debuted on the Fox network on January 16, 1988 and starred Perry (then credited as “Matthew L. Perry”) as Chazz Russell, a typical suburban teen in California whose best friend is an Italian greaser named “Booch”. Chaz is the nice play-by-the-rules guy with a solid head on his shoulders while Booch is a borderline criminal. And if this sounds familiar to you, that’s becuase the creators were going with the Richie Cunningham/Fonzie dynamic. Rounding out the cast were Randee Heller (the mom from the Karate Kid movies) as Chazz’ mom, and Demian Slade (the paperboy from Better Off Dead) as Eugene, who I think was the slightly younger neighbor (it’s not defined in the episode I watched).
The intro is pretty much everything you’d expect from a generic sitcom on the Fox network in 1988: T&A shots, a synth and sax theme song, some “hijinks” taken from episodes, and … well, I don’t know how to describe the title card and camera effects for this montage, but it’s got 1988 written all over it:
A number of the show’s 11 episodes (it was cancelled after the end of its first season) are available on YouTube (because really, who is going to come for the copyright on this thing), so I watched the premiere, which is typically formulaic. As he’s cleaning up in the garage after mowing the lawn, Chazz is approached by his hot new neighbor, Debbie (who’s wearing as little clothing as any extra on a Fox show would wear back then), who wants to borrow his weed whacker. They wind up making a date for him to “show her the sights” around California. But then a problem arises: Chazz can’t get the car because mom needs it. So Booch steps in to help, and with Chazz’ $500 secures … a Corvette. That we know from the jump is stolen, and even Chazz thinks so. But then Debbie walks into his garage and drools over the car, so he decides to take it out for just one night.
Of course, the two of them get thrown in jail and are placed in a holding cell with a bunch of tough biker gang-looking guys (I swear that there was just a pool of these actors for sitcoms back in the 1980s) and one pleasant-enough looking guy in a suit. And if you’ve watched enough dumb sitcoms like I have, you know that the guy in the suit is the most dangerous, which he proves to be when he tells the boys that he’s been accused of killing seven people but it wasn’t him and was “Mr. Bunny” who did it. Mr. Bunny, by the way, is a hand puppet, so we’ve got the Fox sitcom version of the Batman villain The Ventriloquist and Scarface (even though I think this predates them). Anyway, mom bails them out and later on she and Chazz have a heart to heart talk and the episode ends.
When I was 10, my friend Tom told me about this show a few episodes into its run, and since it was on at 8:00 on Saturday night, I would be allowed to stay up and watch it (I had a pretty strict 8:00 bedtime back then). Of course, it was on against The Facts of Life, a show that I watched on the regular because of its daily reruns on the same channel. So I’m pretty sure that I didn’t pick up Boys Will Be Boys until later that spring when its timeslot changed to 8:30 after Fox’s 8:00 airing of Family Double Dare (oh, and that’s a whole other tangent and blog entry, let me tell you), and that meant I only watched about four or five episodes of the show after it went off the air that May. For some reason, I remember the two of us having arguments over whether Boys Will Be Boys was a better show than The Facts of Life, which are the kind of stupid arguments you have when you’re 10 years old. I’m sure our attention shifted to action movies or the Mets or something pretty quickly. I know I forgot about it and would only think of it when Perry showed up in something else I watched; in fact, I’m sure he was my very first “Hey, It’s That Guy!” actor.
Watching the show again, 35 years later, I obviously don’t see a “brilliant but canceled” or “hidden gem” of a television show. But I do see where we’d eventually get to Chandler Bing. From the very first scene, Perry gives his character the same neuroitc insecurity that his Friends character had, even if Chandler’s sarcasm isn’t there. Perry’s physical humor and his reactions to the situations and dialogue in the episode foreshadow his comedic acting skill; in other words, he stood out enough on a crappy show to be someone to remember.
Hearing of his passing this weekend was sad for a number of reasons. Having been a fan of Friends through pretty much its entire run, I was well aware of Perry’s struggles; moreover, it’s always sad whenever an actor from my generation passes on when they’re too young to do so. Perry had the familiarity that a lot of television actors (especially those from sitcoms) do, and while I can’t say that I considered him a “friend,” it definitely feels like a classmate or someone from the neighborhood is gone.
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!”
We’re back to the world of Paper Girls with the release of Amazon Prime’s new series. Once again, Stella joins me to talk about the show and we give our takes on the characters, the story, and its faithfulness to its source material.
Without fail, every year, we take down the Christmas before on on New Year’s Day. Symbolically, it represents the fresh start that January brings, even if the rationale behind it is more practical and we just want to get all the crap put away before going back to school and work. It’s not an exciting activity either, unless you find spending a couple of house putting things back in boxes and then hauling heavy bins up the attic stairs exciting. But honestly, how could this be more exciting? It’s just putting away decorations.
Unless, however, you’re a Canadian music video channel. I give you the MuchMusic Tree Toss:
While I obviously didn’t grow up in Canada, Cablevision began carrying the channel sometime in the mid-1990s, giving us Long Island teenagers a welcome third option for getting music video content. And it couldn’t have come at a better time since VH-1 was still playing lighter fare, MTV had The Real World and Road Rules stuck on permanent rerun, and as the decade wore one would turn into a solid retro music channel* and the other a showcase for boy bands, teen pop princesses and faux-edgy nu metal.
I could go into everything I found cool about Much or all the bands I discovered because of it, but I’ll save that for a future podcast episode and focus on just the tree toss. I will say that the fact that Much had veejays broadcasting from a street-level studio who actually had personality (because, let’s face it, Carson Daly always looked like he was counting seconds on the clock and waiting for the check to clear) made the music video experience in Toronto seem so much cooler. Or maybe it’s because they were a lot like the MTV I remember going over to watch at my friends’ houses in junior high and high school (before my parents got cable). At any rate, tossing a used Christmas tree off of the studio’s roof seemed like the type of stupid that cooler, fun-loving people would want to do or that my friends and I were likely to try.
That’s because we sort of did.
While we never had the pleasure of throwing a Christmas tree off of a building, my college roommates and I did spend our sophomore year living on the eighth floor of a hi-rise apartment complex that our college had converted into a dorm. And right below the living room window of that eighth floor dorm room was a construction dumpster. I don’t know whose idea it was, but once we discovered that the window opened all the way out, we’d cap off a night of drinking by throwing bags full of empty beer cans out the window and into the dumpster.
It wasn’t the wanton destruction of property that you would expect from your average fraternity house, but it was something that probably would have gotten us into some sort of disciplinary trouble (okay, definitely) and may have even resulted in our ejection from campus housing (which was less likely). And I wouldn’t be writing about it if we did it one time and then moved on to games of quarters, around the world parties, and sneaking kegs into the dorm**. Instead, we decided to do this the nerdiest way possible, which was to have a procedure to prepare the bags for deployment and then track our throws on a poster we hung up in the dorm room kitchen.***
Trash throwing was strictly a late-night activity done usually on a weekend and very often after many beers–we had bought and drank the 30-pack of Icehouse, and we didn’t want our RA to find a garbage can full of empties in our room****. We had one of those huge Rubbermaid trash cans, the ones you would store in your garage, and used lawn and leaf bags for the trash. This was key because the volume the bag could hold combined with the bag’s thickness meant that the throw was more likely to be accurate and the bag would most likely stay intact upon arrival in the dumpster. And to ensure that the bag didn’t open up on the way down, my engineering-major roommate would reinforce the bag’s opening with duct tape. That way, there wasn’t any mess to clean up on the street below.
According to the caption in my scrapbook, this was a night in April 1997 when we threw a record 20 bags of trash. Note the Phillies Blunt and Clerks posters, which were very common in mid-Nineties dorm rooms.
Preparing the bags was followed by lookout. We’d check the hallways for anyone who might get us in trouble (i.e., another floor’s RA doing rounds), then shut the lights off and look out across the building’s parking lot to see if we could see any campus security or passers-by. When given the all-clear, each of us would grab our bags and take turns tossing the trash.
Now, just as there was a specific preparation procedure, there was a technique to successfully landing a bag. We weren’t just chucking stuff out of an eighth-floor window for the fun of it; we were actually taking out the trash. If any of us missed the dumpster or the bag exploded and trash landed on the ground, a few of us would go downstairs and clean it up. The dumpster was about 14-16 feet long and 7-1/2 feet wide***** positioned perpendicular to the building. So we had a margin of error when it came to length but a tighter fit when it came to width.
A good throw, therefore, required finesse. You couldn’t just drop the trash because you risked it falling short of the dumpster, and you couldn’t heave it too hard because it might go too far forward or drift sideways. After all, this was a contest of precision and not strength, so what you had to do was hold the bag out in front of you using both hands, position it over the dumpster, and give it a quick shove as you let it go. This would send it forward just enough for it to float over the dumpster’s center and hopefully guaranteed a straight shot. Heavier bags were better because you could feel the force of the shove against their weight as opposed to the lighter bags, which often led to an overthrow. At least that’s what I found to be the case.
When the bag left your hand, it arced for a moment and seemed to hang in the air for a millisecond before it began the plunge. Sometimes, we’d hear the flapping of the plastic bag as it dropped; other times, there was a whoosh. But each time, there was the sound of impact, which would be a soft crash if the dumpster was full or an incredibly loud boom if it was empty. And if you listened closely enough, you could hear the cheers from the eighth floor.******
In fact, one of those incredibly loud booms nearly got us caught one night, as we threw a bag, shut the window, and a few moments later saw flashlights pointed in our direction. We all hit the deck and scattered to various corners of the dorm room as the phone started ringing. Despite being drunk and scared, I managed to sound completely baffled when someone from campus police mentioned things being thrown from our window and the front desk attendant reporting an explosion. While I was on the phone, another campus police officer knocked on the door and I heard my friend telling him the same thing, then inviting him in to take a look. I panicked for a moment and then got off the phone to see him checking out no evidence whatsoever–in the time it took for me to answer the phone and bumble my way through that conversation, my friend had put the screen back in the window, set up the display of empty beer bottles we kept along the windowsill, and hid everything else.*******
To bring this back to the MuchMusic Tree Toss, I was home on winter break during my senior year in December 1998 and channel surfing when I came upon Ed the Sock dressed in a tuxedo anchoring that year’s events. I was immediately transfixed–they weren’t going to do what I thought the were going to do, were they?
Oh, they were.
The crew–one of whom included Rick “The Temp” Campanelli, went up to the roof of the studio, positioned the tree on the ledge, and then tossed it over, setting the tree alight (and one year–either ’98 or ’99, almost took Rick’s face off). It would then land in the dumpster. Okay, if you watch the clip above, you know that it rarely actually made it into the dumpster. Then again, I can’t imagine that the Much crew put as much thought into the accuracy of their toss as we did our trash tossing. Had we been in charge, my roommate would have done the proper equations to compensate for the thrust of the pyrotechnics. Still, the motivation for the Tree Toss was obvious–we’ve got the time to fill, we’ve got nothing better to do, and the tree and the dumpster are there.
I am not sure when Much stopped the Tree Toss–the last one I remember seeing was probably 2000. I did get the channel in Arlington for a while, but it was only at certain times of the day and was gone pretty quickly. The same was true for trash tossing–after the police incident, we didn’t toss it very much except for a “last hurrah” right before spring semester finals. The following year, we were in a different building without any accessible dumpsters.
In a still from the Tree Toss retrospective video embedded above, the MuchMusic tree flies out over the studio parking lot en route to the dumpster.
But I did get the chance to go to my old dorm room one day in my junior year when one of the residents called me to say that they had received some mail with my name on it. I headed over, thanked them for hanging onto the mail for me, and before I left, I pointed to the dumpster window and mentioned that it opened out all the way.
“Oh, we know,” one of them told me.
“Nice,” I replied.
* That is, when VH-1 wasn’t playing Shania Twain videos between reruns of the Shania Twain episode of Behind the Music.
** I’d held on to the box for my computer’s monitor and we quickly discovered that it fit a pony keg. One roommate’s fake ID got us the beer; the box got us past campus security.
*** Lest you think we bought poster board for this, we tore down one of those ubiquitous “get a MasterCard” posters that were all over campus in late August and wrote on the back of it with a Sharpie.
**** To be fair to my sophomore year RA, she was awesome in that she didn’t give a shit as long as we didn’t draw too much attention to ourselves.
***** Just to be clear, I never measured the dumpster. I simply Googled “dumpster dimensions”.
****** Watching it from the ground was hilarious, and I’ve often wondered if anyone from the floors below ever glanced out the window to see a random bag of trash go whizzing by.
******* Oh don’t look at me like that, every college dorm room had its “various brands of beer bottles” display. Sometimes there were several varieties of empty Absolut bottles.
It’s a holiday-themed follow-up to last episode, as Amanda joins me to talk about what we watch on PBS during the holidays. From European Christmas Markets to Rick Steves to GBBO, we talk about all of the programming that brings us comfort and joy in December.
Pop Culture Affidavit 