YES, we looked like this — and we looked ****ing AWESOME. We need to bring this whole style BACK.
My only concern about this meme is that it originates from the 1980’s Memory Lane Facebook page, and I was dressing like this at Mary Washington College in the early 1990’s. Was I just behind the times? Maybe that was why people looked at me funny.
But I was big man on campus with these. I had people literally congratulating me on my pants — and that has not happened once since the 1990’s.
My Dad took me to see “The Dark Crystal” when it came out in 1982. I remember looking it up in the newspaper’s movie listings — and deciding on it even without knowing much about it. (That was just how we did it in those days — we used “the phone book” and TV Guide as well.)
Hot damn, did I love this movie. If you’re familiar with the 1980’s at all, then you know that “The Dark Crystal” was a surprisingly dark tour de force for Jim Henson, showcasing his ability to create a detailed and truly immersive alternate world. (Modern CGI just wasn’t a thing yet — it arguably made its first appearance in 1989’s “The Abyss.”) And you can’t really grasp the sheer spectacle of Henson’s world designs without seeing this movie on the big screen.
Okay, the Apple Jacks commercial below is a pretty regrettable example of 1980’s cornball marketing buffoonery. I’ll tell you what, though — I have fond memories of that wicked-cool glow-in-the-dark Wacky Wallwalker that came as the cereal box prize. (I am linking her to the DJ Nurse Annabella Youtube channel, by the way.)
Had I gotten mine as a prize with Apple Jacks? I guess. I know my mom had returned from the store with these for me once or twice. (They were the non-glowing variety, but they were still fun as hell.) She only partly regretted her decision when it became apparent that they left vague streak marks on white walls. When these cheap toys started losing their key adhesiveness, all you had to do was wash them with soap to make them sticky again. That might have had something to do with it.
That definitive treasure trove of information, Wikipedia, informs me that Wacky Wallwalkers are made from “elastomer.” And they raked in about 80 million dollars for the Japanese-American inventor who bought the rights to the toy around 1983 from their prior owner in Japan.
I swear I want to play with one of these right now.
This is just another strange ad campaign from the 1980’s — Spuds Mackenzie was the mascot for Bud Light. People went nuts for the dog — the campaign spawned a ton of merchandising. (People in the 80’s got worked up over the damnedest things.)
In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess here that I myself owned a Spuds MacKenzie button at the close of the decade. I wore it on my dark gray denim jacket — along with a bunch of other arbitrarily selected buttons that I thought made me look extremely cool. (It was a late-80’s thing.) Hell, I even wore that jacket-and-button ensemble during the first semester at Mary Washington College.
Weird world — Spuds was actually a female dog. She was a rescue dog, and she was named “Honey Tree Evil Eye.” (I feel certain there is an interesting story behind that.) And Mothers Against Drunk Driving lobbied against the ad campaign as it allegedly targeted children.
I just cannot be partial to slasher films. It’s never been my preferred horror sub-genre to start with, and, at this point in my life, these movies have become so predictable and devoid of story that I often find them boring. There are exceptions — some of the the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street” films (1984- 2003) and “Child’s Play” (1988) were grotesquely creative and had terrific supernatural setups that were well executed. But even the attraction of John Carpenter’s original “Halloween” films (1978, 1981) is still mostly lost on me.
With all of that said, I’ll still say that my horror fan friends were right when they told me that 2018’s “Halloween” was a superior sequel. It looks a lot better than the segments I’ve seen of of the campier followups in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
It’s far better filmed and directed, it’s occasionally scary and it benefits from a very good cast. (Jamie Lee Curtis is of course quite good as the film’s heroine and perennial “final girl.” I’m also always happy to see Will Patton on screen, and I like Judy Greer a lot.) The script occasionally shines unexpectedly, too — the screenwriters have a truly impressive talent for making minor characters vivid with funny throwaway dialogue. (One of the three screenwriters is actor-writer-comedian Danny McBride, who I liked quite a bit in 2017’s “Alien: Covenant.”)
I’d be lying, however, if I told you that I wasn’t occasionally bored by this latest “Halloween” — simply because its basic, boilerplate plot and conclusion seem endlessly redundant with those of other slasher films. There are few surprises toward the end — one “gotcha” moment was especially nice — but the overall story is just too tired. I’d rate this film a 7 out of 10 for its merits, but I can’t actually get excited enough about it to recommend it.
I was actually very surprised when I discovered this week that Carvel Ice Cream wasn’t a small, local chain that inhabited only my native Long Island. I hadn’t heard word one about Carvel since I was a kid; I always assumed that the strange, ubiquitous TV and radio ads for “Cookie Puss” and “Fudgie the Whale” were strictly a New York thing. But there were 865 stores throughout the United States in 1985; my friend in Texas even recognized the name.
I think my confusion is easy to understand, considering the weird ads that I mentioned above. The first thing that most people remember about Carvel usually isn’t the chain’s crude looking novelty ice cream cakes. The first thing they remember is founder Tom Carvel’s voice, which you can hear in the videos below. It … did not please the ear. Polite people almost always describe it as “gravelly;” the less charitable remember it with descriptors such as “phlegm-filled.”
The latter folks are not wrong. Seriously. I cringed when I heard it as a kid, no matter how much I loved the store’s wares. (And I did love it; it was an absolute treat when my parents took me there.) It sounded like a man dying of a chest cold was trying to sell me ice cream. I even remember my parents talking about it.
Carvel was a independent personality who insisted on recording the ads himself since 1955, and he recorded them unrehearsed — even going so far as to set up a production studio at his company’s headquarters, according to Wikipedia. Carvel Ice Cream was a true small-business success story, and many credit the brand’s popularity with Carvel’s extemporized, conversational voiceovers — even if they were awkward.
And that kind of makes sense. The commercials were memorable. Maybe the owner’s voice evoked images of Stephen King’s superflu in “The Stand,” but that didn’t dissuade you from visiting a store for its trademark soft-serve ice cream. (You figured he wasn’t actually working the counter, where he could cough into your dessert.)
I took this video a few hours ago, just before that brief thunderstorm over Roanoke. This looks like one of those AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) planes that the military uses, doesn’t it? (See the dish-shaped radar device atop it.) It was circling the area.
I remember seeing these in the 1980’s as a kid on Long Island (along with plenty of F-14 “Tomcats” buzzing our neighborhood), because Grumman Aerospace had a major plant out in Calverton. They actually designed and tested new fighter jets there — which the kids thought was pretty neat.) The AWACS aircraft were the planes that could detect incoming planes or missiles from Russia. (Nowadays, Senate Republicans would block funding for that sort of thing.)
I suppose this could be a civilian plane … I can only imagine that the radar technology has other applications. I honestly don’t know.
Here’s another ad that was a permanent fixture of comic books in the 1980’s. I myself was never interested in joining the advertised “Olympic Sales Club;” nor did I want to “GO, GO, GO WITH CAPTAIN “O”!” [sic].
I found this ad pretty patronizing, with its generic champion hugging his demographically diverse charges in the upper left-hand corner. What kind of superhero was “Captain O” supposed to be, anyway? Was he the protector of the company? The guardian of the kids who went door to door selling its wares? The hero of … salespeople generally? To me, this was really just an example of adults pandering to kids as though they were idiots.
But ads like this fueled a lot of conversation among grade-school boys. It really made it seem like you could earn some cool prizes for selling only a moderate amount of greeting cards or stationary. (The radio-controlled cars and planes were what all the boys eyed most eagerly.)
And 80’s kids often prided ourselves on our sales skills. Most of us had sold things door-to-door for school-related fundraisers — it was just a very common practice at the time, even if it seems needlessly dangerous to me as an adult. When I was in second and third grade at Catholic school, we annually sold candy bars door-to-door. If memory serves, we weren’t even required to do that for any particular fundraising purpose, like a school trip or a sports team. I think it we were just turning a profit for the school, in addition to what our parents were paying them in tuition.
I also remember seeing ads in my older comics that recruited kids to sell “Grit,” which was some sort of periodical that was oddly billed as a “family newspaper.” But I think that was primarily a 1970’s thing, and was just before my time.
Ah, The Johnson Smith Company Catalog — the Holy Bible for little boy pranksters, magicians, spies, collectors and monster lovers everywhere. The goofy novelties I’ve written about here at the blog could all be found among its fabled pages — even if they frequently lay outside the limits of what my boyhood allowance could buy. (Note the “Greedy Fingers Bank” top left in the third picture below, for example. This is the same wind-up toy that was occasionally advertised as the “Novelty Coffin Bank.”)
As the pages below show, you could buy anything from “X-Rays Specs” to smoke grenades to itching powder to Halloween masks to “Whoopee Cushions” to “Joy Buzzers.” There were dozens of dubious “how-to” books as well, for would-be practitioners of such arcane pursuits as Kung-Fu or hypnosis. And there were some risque items aimed clearly at adults — primarily decals and clothing. (Does anyone under 40 remember “iron-ons” for t-shirts? That was actually more of a 1970’s thing than a 1980’s thing.) The Halloween masks, especially, were the stuff of legend among me and my friends. But the “deluxe” masks cost $25, if memory serves, which was well outside my grade-school price range.
Goddam, but this catalog stimulated a kid’s imagination. When it arrived in my mailbox, it seemed like a magical, exotic tome from some parallel universe where everything was made up exclusively of monsters and ninjas and gadgets. Adding to its mystique was the fact that I never actually sent away for it — I wound up on the company’s mailing list around 1979 after buying something from the back of a comic book. I forget what that fateful inaugural purchase was. It might have been the “Sea Monkeys” that I wrote about two weeks ago, but I have a feeling it might have been stamps. (I fetishized stamp collecting for a lengthy period of my early childhood, and was elated by those 500-stamps-for-$5-type offers that you sometimes found in comics.)
The scans below were downloaded from Pinterest; it looks like the first two are from the 70’s and the third one is from the 80’s. But they’re both representative of any catalog that I received from 1979 through the early part of the next decade. The small pages were crowded with random ads, mostly in little black-and-white boxes. The pictures of the products were frequently just drawings, and often did not convey the real value of what you were buying. (Remember, this was a vendor that sold “X Ray Specs.”)
The Johnson Smith Company is still around, too. (They’ve been a thing since 1914 … I have no idea how the modern Internet marketplace either helps or hurts a company like this.) But you can find them online right here. I just ordered a catalog.
Yeah, you know the drill. “Sea Monkeys” were a complete ripoff, because they were nothing like the charming humanoids featured in the ad below, which most of found towards the back of our comic books in the 1970’s and 1980’s. They were some variation of “brine shrimp” — tiny crustaceans that looked more like bugs than little nuclear families of smiling mer-men.
I was a little less disappointed than most kids upon receiving my “Sea Monkeys,” and adding water to discover the barely visible creepy-crawlies. I’d developed an obsessive fascination with all of the oddities advertised in comic books — not to mention those in the fabled Johnson-Smith Company catalog — and my father had patiently endeavored to teach me about false advertising. (He debunked the legendary “X-Ray Specs” for me, for example, and explained to me that the term “genuine replica” meant that a coin was fake.)
Although he warned me beforehand, Sea Monkeys were something he thought I should also see firsthand, as a learning experience. So I sent away for them. (My father might have given me the money; I can’t remember.) And they were indeed underwhelming, after the kit arrived at my household weeks later. Rural Long Island had plenty of ponds — I could have just snatched up a bunch of water bugs and brought them home and called them “Sea Monkeys” with equal plausibility. (I brought home some tadpoles once to discover a #$%^ing terrifying species of water spiders or something had hitchhiked along in the jar. I arrived at that discovery at night in my room — it was one of those things I didn’t tell my mother about.)
The story of Sea Monkeys gets a hundred times stranger when you read up about their bizarre creator — the dubious “inventor” Harold Braunhut. He appears to have been some kind of cross between P. T. Barnum and “Jurassic Park’s” John Hammond, along with … maybe a little Richard Spencer?
Braunhut “invented” the infamously nonfunctional “X-Ray Specs” that I mentioned above, for example, along with novelty pet kits like “Crazy Crabs” (they were simple hermit crabs) and “Invisible Goldfish.” (The latter were less substantive than the “pet rock” of the 1970’s; Braunhut simply sold you an empty fishbowl and fish food.) He raced motorcycles under the name, “The Green Hornet,” according to his Wikipedia entry, and he turned his home into a wildlife conservation. And he’d gotten the idea for marketing “Sea Monkeys” from the popularity of ant farms. (I suppose that makes a strange kind of sense.) Seriously, the guy’s life was full of weirdness.
He was also a neo-nazi. And that was especially odd, because … he himself was Jewish. He even legally changed his name at one point to the more Germanic-sounding Harold von Braunhut to fool his unlikely Aryan pals. (There are a few interesting articles out there about the man; here’s a great one by Evan Hughes over at The Awl.)
I really want to believe that Braunhut’s (well-documented) involvement with white supremacy groups was one of his many cons. Surely he was simply trying to swindle them somehow. He had, after all, sold weapons to the Ku Klux Klan. Couldn’t he simply be hobnobbing with the Nazis as an undercover inventor trying trick them out of their money? Why would the marketer of “Invisible Goldfish” be above such a thing?
I’m not sure why I am unconsciously going to such great lengths to exonerate the inventor of “Sea Monkeys.” After all, he ripped me off when I was nine. Yet here we are.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 