PBS Is Buried Deep Within Your Psyche...Part I

No words today...just some flashbacks from PBS.  Remember any of these?  I had forgot about Vegetable Soup until I stumbled across it this afternoon...It had puppets riding around in what looked like a wooden rocket...Anyone?

Nothing like remembering something that was lost for so many years, huh?  And for the record, the Villa Alegre theme rocked...

The Next Comic Book You Read Just Might Be Your Own....

I just spent twenty minutes in the parking lot of a local college with a colleague, looking over one of his students comic book collection that was for sale.

This was a new one for me. 

He called me yesterday, saying that one of his science students had a massive collection that she was looking to get rid of and if I would be able to swing down to the college and play Antique Roadshow, since he was rather new to the whole comic book game.  I looked over the boxes, told him what I thought a fair price was, and let the magic happen.  He eventually settled on a box of CAPTAIN AMERICA comics for sixty bucks that he said he was going to give his son to get him started with his own comic book collection.

Thank god for people like my friend.  Comic books are the greatest things in the world.

Now, all of you that are currently brewing arguments about how they are childish or not real literature, let me stop you right there and pop that smug little bubble...

Comic Books are literature.  Period.  THE SANDMAN, PREACHER, FROM HELL...I'll put those up against Moby Dick anytime as far as style, content and story go.  Hell...Time Magazine put out their top 100 novels of all time and Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's WATCHMEN made the list, right beside The Great Gatsby and To Kill A Mockingbird.  If you say comics are not literature you haven't read one since you had trouble processing the storyline of that RICHIE RICH book that took you four days to read back when you were seven. 

Comic books are modern American folklore.  They have provided us with the modern day, spandex coated versions of John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Casey Jones and Johnny Appleseed.  Much like these legends, comic book characters grow, evolve and change every time the story is told - keeping just a nugget of what made them unique in the first place but adopting tones which make them relevant for the era - the heroes are alive and reborn with every new issue.  They transform and face the challanges of the day...be it the above mentioned CAPTAIN AMERICA knocking out Nazis in the 1940's or SPIDERMAN standing in shock at ground zero on September 11th, 2001.

Reading a comic book is no different than watching Christopher Nolan's THE DARK KNIGHT, reading Stevenson's Treasure Island, or seeing what Dilbert will say next in the morning paper.  Comics are for children and adults.  It is escapism.  It is a ghost story told around a campfire.  It is as American as Rock n' Roll, baseball and apple pie.  It is fun.

Go buy a comic book.  Now.

Adventure - or - How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Red Dragon

All hail the king of the fantasy games...ADVENTURE! Published in 1978, Adventure had it all and did it better than most modern games.  It was one of the first games that had a multi-screen world to explore, allowed the player to establish a inventory and then move those items from one place to another, and it gave the world the first known easter egg in a video game.  It also provided 9 year old me one of my earliest uses  of the words "shit", "fucker", "fucking red dragon" and the timeless "fucking red dragon bitch". 

Adventure was a mean mistress for the first time player.

The goal was to get the magical chalice back to the castle.  You controlled a square.  I'm not going to mince words here...you were a fucking square.  There is no amount of persuasion that will convince me that you were a knight, or the village hero, or even some kind of blockheaded dwarf...you were a square.  Of course, you had to go over Hell's half acre to find the chalice, using keys to unlock different castles, a magnet to attract items that were hard to reach, and a sword to kill dragons who would, at the drop of a hat, do their damndest to swallow you with one bite.  If you managed to avoid the troubles and grab the chalice, you had to be on your toes for the bat.  The bat would fly by with an item in it's possession and swap it for the one you had.  So, if you had the chalice and were ready to win the game, the bat could take it from you and leave you with something else...starting the whole quest over again.

Of course, the big thing with Adventure was the easter egg.  Back in the day, Atari didn't give their programmers credit for the games they created.  Eventually, they revolted, told Atari to piss off, and many of them formed the gaming juggernaut known as Activison.  Before that, Adventure creator Warren Robinett had a different idea on how to stick it to the pixelated man.  He planted the world's first easter egg in Adventure.  If the player did the steps in the correct order, they saw this....

After all is said and done, all of you WOW players should get down on your knees and thank whatever elven god you believe in for the creation of Adventure.  Go ahead and give it a shot...afterwards you can tell me about that fucking red dragon bitch.

R.I.P. Christopher Mayer

Christopher Mayer Died.

For those who don't know, Christopher Mayer was one half of the unluckiest duo in the history of television.  Along with Byron Cherry, they made up the team that replaced Tom Wopat and John Schneider for the 1982-1983 season of The Dukes of Hazzard....



Christopher Mayer (left) and Byron Cherry (right) as Vance and Coy Duke.

 They were unlucky in the sense that they were flat out rejected by the viewing audience as the "new" Duke boys.  After a contract dispute with the powers that be, Wopat and Schneider were sidelined and their characters were written out of the show with the excuse that they were now NASCAR racers.  Enter cousins Coy and Vance...

Now, who wouldn't have jumped at the chance to be in one of the hottest T.V. shows of the time?  Unfortunately, their time in Hazzard was limited as the "real" Dukes showed up after Wopat and Schneider's  contracts were settled.  Mayer and Cherry were swept under the pop culture rug and both lived in a realm of obscurity.

He was 57 years old. 

Stick your Grape Nuts up your...

Where the Hell did my monster cereals go?

A few days ago, while sporting my Count Chocula T-shirt, a teenager told me, "Ya know, they don't make that anymore". 

"Really?" I snorted.  What did this punk know...no one would have the balls to pull the plug on the monsters.

Later that evening I learned the ugly truth. 

General Mills decided to release Frankenberry, Count Chocula, and Boo Berry ONLY during the Halloween season.  For some reason, this made sense to them.

The pleasure and pure joy of knocking back a big bowl of Frankenberry and then sucking down the chemically altered pink milk, will now only be bestowed upon me one month out of the year?  Bullshit.

If Fruit Brute was still in the monsters clique, General Mills wouldn't have touched 'em...because nobody messes with the Brute.

Which brings me to my next problem with the cereal industry at large...where did our prizes go?  I say "our" prizes because that is exactly what they are...OUR.  Don't assume that the prizes were just for children - I'd knock little Billy out of the way for some cool Batman swag at the bottom of a box of Cap'n Crunch.  Some parents got their knickers in a twist because little Johnny wants the box of Sugar Covered Crack Balls with the fluorescent Arthur Ashe figurine inside, and now we all have to suffer?  The complaint is very similar to the one leveled against McDonalds and their Happy Meals - How the toys unfairly lure the children into their restaurants.  The prizes in the cereal were a unfair advertising ploy to get kids to pressure their parents into purchasing the cereal.

You're damn right it was. 

My mother made healthy meals every night.  Sometimes I would rather have eaten what the dog was having, but I powered it down just the same.  When I did get a box of Coco Puffs or Fruit Loops, it was a fucking miracle.  Oh yeah...I pressured her to get it....especially if there was a Star Wars prize inside...that played a huge part in my pressuring process. 

However, my mother was (and still is) a damn good parent.  She had (and has) the ability to say "No".  Which is what all of these whining parents and watchdog groups lack.  If you are a parent and can't handle your kid whining about what cereal they want or how bad they need that really cool Power Ranger with the Kung Fu grip, they please call DHS so they can take them away...don't call Snap, Crackle and Pop and ask if they can remove the My Little Pony stickers from their box of Rice Crispies.

Ok...I'm going to get out the big Tupperware bowl, pour me a 50/50 mix of Honeycomb and Sugar Smacks, douse it with some chocolate milk and watch some Superfriends...

Confession Time...

Hi.  My Name is Travis and I love bad variety shows from the 1970's.  Now let us be clear here - The Carol Burnett Show? Fantastic television.  The Donnie and Marie Show? Avocado colored, shag carpeted crap.  I love them both, but the monumentally BAD variety show has always struck a chord with me.  It's hard enough to tell jokes, put on skits, and do a little song and dance for the audience.   However, when it's a train wreck, that makes it even more special.  This is the basis of our case study for this evening...

The year is 1980. The television landscape is changing. The era of the variety show has past.

Nobody told this to the President of NBC Fred Silverman though.

Due to Pink Lady's huge success in Japan (no, really...they were HUGE in Japan), the evening news in the states ran a bit about them. Silverman saw it and instantly saw a chance to have a hit on his hands. So, he brought the girls over (translator in tow since neither one of them spoke a lick of English), teamed them up with unfunny funny man Jeff Altman (I guess he is best known for his ground breaking work on THE DUKES OF HAZZARD as misunderstood renaissance man Hughie Hogg), and cashed in every favor he had accumulated in Hollywood in order to get A-list celebrities such as Greg Evigan, Sherman Hemsley, and Florence Henderson to appear. The result? A cringe worthy display that ran for 5 whole weeks. It usually started like this...

 
The girls would sing a couple of songs and appear in a few skits over the course of the show.  Any acting they did had to be scripted to the letter and then set in stone.  Knowing very little English, the girls learned their lines and when to say them.  Anything else from their end just wasn't going to happen. 
 
Five weeks in and Silverman discovered what America already knew: Pink Lady and Jeff sucked.  There is no other way to say it.  Sucked, sucked sucked.  Jeff Altman went back to his bad comedy (if you look hard enough, you can get him to perform at your corporate gig) and Pink Lady preformed off and on until 2005, when they gave their farewell tour.  No tears though.  Last year they announced their plans for a comeback.
 
The retro gods at Rhino have released the whole series on DVD.  I dare you to Netflix it...

Ok...Time to get back on the blogging horse...

Very shortly.  Until then, here is a picture of the Fisher-Price Little People Hospital.