Tag Archives: 1984

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Throwback Thursday: the Indiana Jones “Find Your Fate Adventure” books!

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Here’s another happy Christmas memory — the Find Your Fate Adventure  books featuring Indiana Jones.  I was happy indeed when Santa brought these.  They were first published by Ballantine Books in 1984 and 1985, and they were basically Choose Your Own Adventure books in which you teamed up with Indy in the same type of archeological adventure you saw in the movies or in his comic book series.

Like most series of this type, they were penned by different authors and tended to vary in quality.  The second book, “Indiana Jones and the Lost Treasure of Sheba,” was authored by Rose Estes, who wrote some terrific title in the Endless Quest series, TSR’s own excellent take on the format in the Dungeons & Dragons genre.  There also were several written by R.L. Stine, they were reprinted in the 90’s following his popularity with his Goosebumps series.

I had the first four that you see below.  I seem to remember one being kinda bad, but I’m not sure I remember which.  It might have been Andrew Helfer’s “Indiana Jones and the Cup of the Vampire.”  (It was whichever book portrayed the reader as Indiana Jones’ cousin, who he repeatedly addressed as “Cuz.”)  The other books were damned great fun, though.  I do remember Estes’ “Lost Treasure of Sheba” being quite good.

I never owned the fifth book you see below, and never read it.  I can’t resist including it here, though, simply because of its title — “Indiana Jones and the Ape Slaves of Howling Island.”  If that isn’t the most interesting title in the history of western literature, I don’t know what is.  I’m 45 years old, and I would snap that up right off the bookstore shelf if I saw it.  Somebody should have gotten a raise for that one.

 

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Cover to “Ronin” #4, Frank Miller, 1984

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DC Comics.

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Throwback Thursday: “Airwolf” (1984-1987) and “Blue Thunder” (1984)

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“Airwolf” (1984 – 1987) and “Blue Thunder” (1984) were part of the decade’s fad of building TV shows around incredibly high-tech vehicles — sports cars, helicopters … even a preposterously conceived “attack motorcycle.”  (Does anyone else remember 1985’s lamentable “Streethawk?”)

“Airwolf” was a decent techno-thriller produced by CBS.  (It was revamped in its final year and relaunched on the USA Network.)  It had great action sequences, a likable star (Jan-Michael Vincent) and seemed written to appeal to an older audience, with a fairly sophisticated and morally ambiguous overall story setup.  And goddam if it didn’t have a kickass theme — even if it’s a bit of an earworm and leans heavily on  the snythesizers.  (It was an 80’s thing.)  You can check it out in the first clip below.

“Blue Thunder” was ABC’s putative competitor, I suppose.  It was an adaptation of what I remember to be a pretty respectable 1983 feature film with Roy Scheider, but the show only ran for a single season.  I hardly remember it.  (As you can see from the second clip below, though, it had a pretty interesting cast, including Dana Carvey, Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith.)  I’ve never heard anyone bring up “Blue Thunder” nostalgically either.  I do remember that my friend Keith was a fan — he and I got into a spirited debate once about which could defeat the other in an aerial battle.

If Hollywood wants to recycle everything from the 1980’s … how the hell did “Airwolf” escape its radar?  (No pun intended.)  I would love to hear Ki: Theory update that killer theme.

 

 

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A short review of “Miracle Mile” (1988)

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“Miracle Mile” (1988) actually came highly recommended to me.  And that’s perplexing, because this is a pretty bad nuclear war thriller that I’d only grudgingly rate a 4 out of 10.

The script is terrible.  We know that from the film’s opening minutes, when it attempts to establish Anthony Edwards as a likable protagonist by showing him performing impromptu stand-up for schoolchildren on a field trip to a Los Angeles natural history museum.  (He is not a chaperone for the field trip, or connected with these schoolchildren in any way.  He apparently just hangs around alone at museums to inexplicably crack jokes for children he does not know.)

From there, we follow an abortive, cloddishly written romance between two mostly unappealing characters.  (Mare Winningham is the other half of the romance doomed by the impending apocalypse.)  I won’t bore you with the details about the ensuing end-of-the-world thriller, except that an implausible plot device gives the nascent couple and a handful of secondary characters advance knowledge of the nuclear missiles that will hit Los Angles in just more than an hour.

Even the acting was mostly poor.  Surprisingly, this includes the performance by Edwards himself, who has shown nothing but talent in every other role in which I’ve seen him.

The movie comes close to redeeming itself near the end.  Its obligatory chaos-in-the-streets set-piece is surprisingly well done for an otherwise mediocre film, and there are a few good lines when the couple reunites at the movie’s finale.  I suppose you can also have a lot of fun spotting a bevy of other character-actors from the 80’s and 90’s.

I … can’t actually recommend this, though.  I can’t remember the last time I was this disappointed by a film that my friends insisted was great.  Check out 1983’s “Special Bulletin,” instead.  Or, better yet, hunt down Britain’s superb nuclear war mini-series, “Threads” (1984).

 

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Throwback Thursday: Nena’s “99 Red Balloons” (1984)

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The 80’s were a weird time in a lot of ways.  Pop culture’s answer to the threat of global nuclear annihilation was a really cool, really catchy song with an upbeat tempo that topped the charts.  (Full disclosure — I don’t know much about music, and I’m not sure I’m using the term “upbeat tempo” correctly.  If I’m not, you can totally call me on it.)

Nena released “99 Luftballoons” in 1983 in Germany, it was released a year later in America as “99 Red Balloons.”  Wikipedia taught me some interesting trivia this afternoon — the group was actually pretty unhappy with the loose translation of the Americanized lyrics, and all but disowned them.  Nena performed the song only in its original German, even when the band was on tour in England.

Maybe we need a catchy pop song to teach the perils of nuclear brinksmanship to the current president.  Or, better yet, set something to the tune of one of those Looney Tunes cartoons.

 

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A very short review of the pilot for “Iron Fist” (2017)

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They said that Netflix’ “Iron Fist” (2017) was bad.  They were … mostly right, at least as far as I can tell from the pilot.  I’d rate the first episode a 4 out of 10.

This episode was a thinly scripted collection of common tropes, cluttered with clunky exposition and weird, improbable plot points.  (A friendly homeless man helps the hero by googling key information for him on a stolen iPhone?)  The show even managed to be briefly boring in parts.

“Iron Fist” has the depth and hastily concocted story of an 80’s primetime action show.  But I don’t mean that in a fun, nostalgic way, I mean it in a bizarre, awkward way.  I was actually reminded of Mystery Science Theater 3000 lampooning 1984’s ninja groaner, “The Master.”  In fact … don’t “Iron Fist” and “The Master” have a similar story setup?  There are some weird parallels, if you think about it.

Look … it wasn’t all bad.  The fight choreography was actually damned good.  I don’t know if that was actor Finn Jones performing the Kung-Fu, or a stunt double.  But it was believable and a lot of fun to watch.  It was nicely shot, too — the vibrant visuals had an appropriate comic-book feel, and were better than those that I would expect from this show’s companion series, “Daredevil” and “Jessica Jones” (2015).

I also submit that Jones is great in the role of the titular hero.  He’s a decent actor, he’s well cast in the part, and I find Danny Rand to be a surprisingly likable protagonist.  I just hope that “The Defenders'” new team-up places him in the hands of a better set of writers.

 

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Don’t buy George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

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Not if you’d rather read it for free, that is.

I keep reading that it raced to the top of various bestseller lists at the end of January.  (And I can’t imagine why.)  That’s just great, but it’s also available to read for free at various places online.

Here’s one:  Nineteen Eighty-Four.

 

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“It was always at night — the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.

“For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

“they’ll shoot me i don’t care they’ll shoot me in the back of the neck i don’t care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i don’t care down with big brother ——”

 

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A very short review of “Coherence” (2013)

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James Ward Byrkit wrote the screenplay for “Coherence” (2013), then filmed and directed it on a shoestring budget in his living room.  And the result is pretty impressive — this a trippy, unusual, and unusually cerebral science fiction thriller.  I’d rate it an 8 out of 10.

The movie portrays eight friends at a dinner party who find their sense of reality frighteningly altered after a comet flies overhead.  I really can’t write much more than that without spoilers — even this movie’s central story device is best arrived at as a surprise for the viewer.    I don’t even want to name which “science” serves as the basis for the “science fiction” here, as that would be a big hint as to what transpires.

It’s pretty good.  The thriller elements here are creepy.  And it’s a wonderfully intelligent “what-if?” story that other reviewers have compared to “The Twilight Zone” episodes.  (I myself … mostly kept up with it — I was sometimes a little murky about the strategies adopted by the group to address their predicament.)

The closing minutes are damned good.

I’d recommend this to sci-fi fans looking for a unique, dialogue-driven brain-buster.

Hey, just for fun, consider this — the refreshingly intelligent “Coherence” employs the exact same MacGuffin as one of the stupidest, overrated cult “classics” of all time — 1984’s “Night of the Comet.”

 

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“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

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Today is the Ides of March.

I suppose that Marc Antony’s speech from “Julius Caesar,” below, is the Western World’s definitive treatise on sarcasm?

I haven’t read it in its entirety since 10th grade English at Longwood High School.  In doing so now, I’m surprised at how many pop cultural references to it spring to mind:

  1.  The entire speech is beautifully riffed by the eponymous blade-wielding arch-villain in Matt Wagner’s incredible “Grendel: Devil by the Deed” (1993) as follows: “Friends, Romans, city folk — listen to me or I’ll lop off off your ears.  Let’s bury your Caesar and then let’s appraise him.”
  2. I’m guessing that Charles Bronson’s “The Evil That Men Do” (1984) is a reference to the third line?
  3. In at least one episode of “The X Files” in the 1990’s, the Well-Manicured Man angrily refers to the traitorous Syndicate as “these honorable men.”
  4. In one of his later novels (2002’s “The Bear and the Dragon,” maybe?) Tom Clancy describes a pregnant Chinese factory worker as being “made of sterner stuff.”  (I can’t remember which book, but for some strange reason I can remember that line.  Weird.)

 

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

 

— from William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

 

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Are there any lovers of dark, dystopian literature on your holiday gift list?

Then please consider surprising them with “The Pustoy,” an outstanding book of poetry by Philippe Blenkiron.  It’s a science fiction and political epic in poetry format, describing future Britain’s rule by a genocidal dictator who scapegoats an underclass to facilitate his rise to power.  It’s quite dark, and I quite loved it.  Click the link below to read my review last year:

A frightening future, skillfully envisioned — God help “The Pustoy.”

“The Pustoy” is also easy to purchase in either paperback or Kindle format.  You can find it at Amazon right here:

“The Pustoy” at Amazon.com

I suggest that this would make an excellent gift for lovers of books like George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-four” or Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”  And its format in verse would make it an even more interesting companion book.