I am linking again here to the Youtube channel for Hugo Faces, for a nifty Christmas greeting from CBS in 1982.
Hey, look! It’s Ed Koch!
Tag Archives: CBS
Throwback Thursday: “Mazes and Monsters” (1982)!
“Mazes and Monsters” (1982) was one of the 1980’s’ weirder television events — it was a made-for-TV movie that was a hysterical cautionary tale about “Dungeons & Dragons.” It was based on a novel by Rona Jaffe that was ostensibly a fictionalized version of a real case, in which a Michigan college student was supposedly driven insane by the role-playing game three years earlier. (The media reports that sensationalized the boy’s disappearance in 1979 were subsequently debunked, so Jaffe’s book was based on what was essentially an urban legend.)
“Mazes and Monsters” was weird and dumb. It was a pretty labored melodrama based on a thin, reactionary premise, and it actually wound up being a depressing story. But its infamy has earned it a kind of ironic, enduring devotion from 80’s pop culture nerds.
And here’s the kicker — it starred Tom Hanks, in his first leading film role, at age 26. Hanks played the sensitive, unstable undergrad who was pushed over the edge, and he actually did a good job with the material. If you’re curious, the entire movie is available for free right here over at TVfanatic.
I never really played D&D. I was a third grader when “Mazes and Monsters” aired on CBS, and by the time I reached high school, role-playing games had been supplanted by video games. I’m not even sure D&D ever had a massive following in my little stretch of New York’s suburbia anyway. My older brother played regularly with a couple of his friends, but the game was hardly spoken of by anyone else. It just never caught on with kids in my age group.
But this movie was something people talked about. They thought the danger it depicted was real. Seriously, look at the newspaper ad below. (Somebody over at Youtube commented that the film was basically “Reefer Madness for D&D,” and I thought that was pretty funny.) Here’s the thing about the world before the Internet — there was obviously no fake news spreading like wildfire online, and that was a very good thing. But neither could you instantly debunk an urban legend. (We still had a few, back then.) If you heard that D&D could make teenagers psychotic, you couldn’t check Snopes.com to verify that. (Encyclopedias were also giant-ass book sets that they advertised on TV, but that’s another story.)
Throwback Thursday: “Wizards and Warriors” (1983)!
I suppose that “Wizards and Warriors” was what passed for “Game of Thrones” in 1983. Except it was cheesy as hell (which of course meant that I loved it as a fourth grader), and it didn’t last longer than eight episodes.
It was CBS’ mid-season replacement for my beloved “Bring ‘Em Back Alive” (the Bruce Boxleitner retro adventure series that I’ve written about here previously), which was cancelled due to low ratings. “Wizards and Warriors” ran in its 8 PM time slot, and then itself was cancelled due to low ratings, so it never saw a second season. (I believe both shows were competing with NBC’s ratings juggernaut, “The A-Team,” which every kid in the world loved except me. I was weird.)
“Wizards and Warriors” was really just an obvious effort to capitalize on the popularity of the “Dungeons & Dragons” role-playing game. The show was campy stuff. The pilot episode, which you can watch in its entirety over at dailymotion, was entitled “The Unicorn of Death.” It dealt with a time-bomb hidden inside a princess’ birthday present, which strikes me as a pretty surprising plot for a sword-and-sorcery program.
It had a cast that went on to better things, though. One was Julia Duffy, of “Newheart” (1982-1990) fame. Another was “Grease” (1978) veteran Jeff Conaway, who most 80’s kids will remember from “Taxi” (1978-1983). The dastardly villain of “Wizards and Warriors” was played by the terrific character actor Duncan Regehr, a “that guy” actor who popped up in a lot of genre roles in the 80’s and 90’s. Here’s the thing about Regehr — I want him to be a real-life bad guy. He’s got an absolutely sly, suave, villainous face and manner — and his name just sounds like a villain’s name. If he’d left acting to commit a series of high-profile crimes in the real world, that would be wickedly, awesomely meta.
Throwback Thursday: “Airwolf” (1984-1987) and “Blue Thunder” (1984)
“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.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 