Tag Archives: Throwback Thursday

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Throwback Thursday: “The Last Unicorn” (1982)

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“The Last Unicorn” (1982) is an 80’s film that you don’t hear quite as much about in nostalgia circles.  My sister took me to see it in the theater when I was in second or third grade.  It probably wasn’t the first choice of a movie for a kid whose heroes were Sgt. Rock, Conan the Barbarian, and Ka-Zar the Savage.  (Seriously, I read a looooot of comics as a little boy.)  But my sister was the one with the car keys.

Come to think of it, there might have been a dearth of options.  If memory serves (the 80’s were a very long time ago), there were generally fewer films at the local multiplex for the younger set.  “The Last Unicorn” might have been the only children’s movie that happened to be playing.  (I think the market has expanded quite a bit since then.)  I really liked it, though.

“The Last Unicorn” had a hell of a voice cast — including Alan Arkin, Christopher Lee and Mia Farrow.  The animation (to my eyes, at least) looks like strictly average stuff — except for the title unicorn and the monster antagonist.  Those look quite good; they look fluid and natural.  The backdrops are pretty good too.

The monster’s name here is “The Red Bull,” which is probably funny now, given the eponymous modern energy drink.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “The Dark Crystal” (1982)!

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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.

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Throwback Thursday: the original trailer for “Blade Runner” (1982)!

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I sent this trailer to a pal of mine after he told me he couldn’t remember if he’d seen 1982’s “Blade Runner.”  (The poor, benighted soul!)  As you can see … the trailer is a bit crude by today’s standards.  It’s just a loose montage of key scenes in chronological order — with narration that is obviously performed by a store-brand knockoff of Harrison Ford.  (I am linking here to the Movieclips Classic Trailers Youtube channel, by the way.)

You can kind of tell how Warner Bros. wanted to market the film as a standard action-thriller, instead of the moody, stygian sci-fi meditation that it is.  And you can kind of understand why general audiences didn’t turn out for the movie while its cult following gained so much steam later.

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Throwback Thursday: “Charley Chimp!”

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This is takin’ it waaaay back — people were joking about creepy vintage mechanical toys on Twitter, and it totally reminded me of the mechanical monkey I had when I was not much older than a baby.  It was originally manufactured and marketed as “Musical Jolly Chimp” between the 1950’s and the 1970’s by Japanese company Daishin C.K., according to Wikipedia.  But it was resold under various names on the street in New York City.

My guess is that my father picked it up for me after work in the 1970’s.  (He was a municipal bus driver in Manhattan.)

It was loud.  It did scare me — but I also remember loving it too, and it remained in my toybox for years.  (Maybe I had a split personality as a little kid or something.) 

Anyway, you can see the thing in action over at Youtube, courtesy of echelon16.

 

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Photo credit: YuMaNuMa, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

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Throwback Thursday: postcard from Mary Washington College, circa 1930-1945

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Print postcard, linen texture.

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Throwback Thursday: “The Secret Hide-out,” by John Peterson (1965)!

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John Peterson’s The Secret Hide-out was absolutely one of my favorite books growing up — and with good reason.  As I’ve noted on this blog before, I and the other boys on my street placed paramount, enduring importance on whatever iteration of our “club” that we had going — whether we had a viking club, an explorer club, a “ninja clan,” or whatever.  (Did other groups of boys act like this?  I honestly wonder.  The human instinct for affiliation ran pretty strong at an early age for me and my neighbors.)

Anyway, this book was a goldmine for a second grader with our particular brand of preadolescent tribalism.  It was about a trio of boys who find a mysterious “club handbook” behind a stone at two of their number’s grandmother’s house.  The handbook outlines club minutes, membership tests, and the location of the titular secret hideout — along with instructions on how to craft the masks, spears and shields — and with whistles made out of paper.  (I swear to you that those whistles were easy to make and that they really worked quite well.)

Anyway, The Secret Hide-out was a 1960’s book that my brother would have brought home from school in the 1970’s — probably from one of those Scholastic Books fairs.  It wound up in my hands by 1980 or so.  I am by no means the only person who remembers this book; it was a favorite for a lot of people.  There’s even a Facebook page dedicated to it.

There’s even a sequel, as it turns out — Peterson wrote Enemies of the Secret Hide-out a year later.  This time out, the Amazon description informs me, there is a rival club of boys who try to appropriate the clubhouse.  (I know from boyhood experience that such conflicts were entirely common.)  I might have to hunt that one down someday ona lark.

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Throwback Thursday: “The Odd Couple” (1970-1974)!

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Does anyone else remember “The Odd Couple” (1970-1974) growing up?  I was too young to remember its original run, but it played endlessly in reruns in the early 1980’s.  For a lot of us, it was a show our parents watched.  It was based on an eponymous 1965 Neil Simon play, and Tony Randall was absolutely a household name.

Hearing that theme song — and seeing those priceless shots of early-70’s New York in its opener — absolutely takes me back to my gradeschool years.  I can practically smell dinner cooking in the kitchen.

Turns out it didn’t have a lot of cultural staying power — with my generation, at least. When was the last time you heard someone make a pop-culture reference to “The Odd Couple?”  Yet people still fondly remember things like “The Partridge Family” (1970-1974), “The Six Million Dollar Man” (1973-1978) and “Voltron” (1983-1985).

 

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Throwback Thursday: “The Lone Ranger” (1949 -1957)!

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No, I obviously don’t remember “The Lone Ranger” during its initial run between 1949 and 1957.  (At least I hope that’s obvious — I’m a couple of full decades younger than that.)  But I absolutely do remember this show’s reruns from when I was a baby … maybe around 1976, if I had to guess?  I would have been about four years old.   (I was five when my family moved out of that house in Queens, New York, to rural Long Island.)

I know that people who claim early childhood memories are often viewed with skepticism — I get it.  (And I think many of us are more prone to confabulation than we’d like to admit.)  But I’ve actually got a few memories from when I was a toddler — and this is one of them.

I can remember my Dad putting “The Lone Ranger” on in the tiny … den or living room or whatever, to the left of our house’s front door and hallway.  You see the part in the intro below where the horse rears up at the .31 mark — and again at the 1:53 mark?  That was a verrrrrry big deal to me as a tot.

Go ahead, tell me I’m nuts.  I can take it.  You and I live in an age in which conspiracy theories have gone completely mainstream.  If I share something online that seems implausible to others, I figure I’m in a lot of company.

Anyway, I pretty much forgot about The Lone Ranger after that.  There was a 1981 television movie, “The Legend of the Lone Ranger,” that was remarkably well done — especially for a TV movie at the time.  I remember being pretty impressed with that — its plot-driving scene where the good guys get fatally ambushed was unexpectedly dour.

But I never bothered with the infamous 2013 film.  I occasionally enjoy movies that everybody else hates — something that earns me a lot of ribbing on Facebook — so maybe I should give it a shot.  Hell, the trailer makes it look decent.  And HBO’s “Westworld” has really whetted my appetite for westerns … which is weird, because “Westworld” is decidedly NOT a western — that’s sort of the point of its central plot device.  But still.

 

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Throwback Thursday: Quicksand!!!

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Yep.  As the meme below (from Geek Club) suggests, 70’s and 80’s kids were led to believe that quicksand would be a far greater threat than it actually was.   The warnings I accepted as the direst were those from the swashbuckling jungle explorers that I admired.

See Issue #7 of “The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones” below, for example.  (It happened to Indy at least twice in this comic series.)  And Frank Buck found himself in a similar predicament in “Bring ‘Em Back Alive,” which I’ve mentioned previously here at the blog.)

I even asked my Dad pretty earnestly once about how I should escape quicksand if I ever fell into it.  (I fully planned on becoming an explorer when I grew up.)  Believe it or not, the smart son-of-a-gun actually had a decent answer for me.  I can only remember it vaguely, but I’m pretty sure you were supposed to tread water and try to float on the silty surface of it.  You were NOT supposed to step down into the bog-like mud beneath your feet — it was the suction there that would do you in.

Resourceful man, my father.

 

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Throwback Thursday: Lincoln Logs!

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Believe it or not, I had Lincoln Logs as a first grader in 1978 or so … they might have even come in a bucket like this one; I can’t quite remember.  (I think there was a weird merchandising trend in the 1970’s in which toy sets and puzzles came packaged in tubes.)

The Lincoln Logs were made of wood!  (God, the idea that I once owned wooden toys makes me feel as old as … Lincoln, I guess.)  Here’s some weird trivia for you, if you remember these — they were invented in 1916 by John Lloyd Wright, who was the son of famed architect Frank Loyd Wright.

I’d moved on to fancier things than Lincoln Logs fairly quickly — my parents had started me on Sears’ Brix Blox by 1980 or so.  (They were basically budget Legos, but they suited me just fine.)

Lincoln Logs never really went away during my early childhood, though … they would turn up in bits and pieces for years at the bottom of my toybox, my closet, my box of army men, whatever.  If you gave an absent-minded kid like me anything that included dozens of small parts, then they were destined to haunt the house in perpetuity.  There was sort of a permanent intermittent presence of Tinker Toys at my house too — you could sort of think of those as Legos’ surreal, cubist, crazy cousin.

Actually. let me qualify my admission above.  I might have scattered my small toys a lot as a little boy, but I pretty assiduously kept my G.I. Joes and their guns together.  That was a serious matter.  And I’d like to think I had a fairly good track record.

 

 

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Photo credit: By Jesse Weinstein (JesseW) – Own work. (ID# 4b-2f), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=803043