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Throwback Thursday: 1980’s urban legends on Long Island!

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I mentioned last week when I wrote about “Mazes and Monsters” (1982) that the pre-Internet age still had its share of urban legends.  They were definitely a part of 1980’s kid culture in my little stretch of New York suburbia.  (Would they be suburban legends, then?  Borderline-rural legends?)  They were bandied about most often during the summertime — maybe because there were long, idle days when grade-school boys had little to do beyond swap the scary stories they’d heard.

A lot of it was predictable horror-movie fare — we’d all compared tales about prowlers who killed babysitters, or babysitters who killed their charges, or about a friend’s cousin’s neighbor’s classmate who’d discovered a razor blade in the their Halloween candy.

Some of the legends stemmed from our geographic area.  There were the giant turtles, for example, that emerged from the Long Island’s waterways to stalk our neighborhoods — that one I actually believed (and still do).  A fellow Cub Scout and his Scoutmaster father had both seen one, and if there’s one person you trust when you’re a Cub Scout, it’s another Scout and his Scoutmaster dad who backs up his story.  And every kid had heard about the Amityville Horror house.

Another local myth was the “gangs” who tore through our imaginations as nefariously as we thought they tore through the region’s woods and marshes.  (In addition to farmlands, Long Island has plenty of protected woodlands and wetlands.)  There were definitely adults who went into the woods to break the law — I think it was primarily drug users and underage drinkers, and people who dumped cars illegally and then stripped them for parts.  There were a few deep-woods graveyards, for example, of rusting white Volkswagen “Bugs.”

But in our fecund imaginations, the petty criminals who’d left them there were gangs of bikers and hippies and devil-worshippers and ruthless car thieves, who just might kill a few young kids if they found them playing army or going on a hike.  (All of us occasionally ventured miles into the woods for such avocations, while we told our mothers that we were only going to the next block.  If you were a boy in my neighborhood who didn’t lie to his mother to leave the area, you were considered a wimp.)

When you’re in the second or third grade, bikers and hippies and devil worshipers and car thieves all blended together in your mind into one single nebulous group.  (As an adult today, if I ever met someone who was a biker, a hippy, a devil worshipper, and a car thief, I would be thrilled to interview them for this blog.)  We’d found evidence.  There were frequently peace signs spray-painted on or around the junked cars we liked to play on; it was just a motif of the prior decade that was still a popular graffito.   One of our number gravely explained to the rest of us that it was actually a coded symbol for Satan — if you turned it upside down, the lines in the circle represented the head of a goat.

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Throwback Thursday: “Mazes and Monsters” (1982)!

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“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.)

 

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