Tag Archives: Throwback Thursday

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Throwback Thursday: “I’m Gonna Wash that Gray Right Outta My Hair”

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These early 80’s Clairol ads, of all things, came up on Facebook — after I lamented the waves of gray that have flourished across my head with astonishing suddenness.  (I swear this seems like something that happened overnight.  I honestly thought that there something wrong with my eyes, or maybe the bathroom light.)

I remember this little jingle quite well — it’s catchy, and there were a few variations of the 1980 TV spot that you see below.  I never knew that it was a send-up of a number from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” — “I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Outa My Hair.”  For some reason, my friends thought that was really funny.

 

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Throwback Thursday: the “Galaxy 1” children’s science fiction books

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Harriette Sheffer Abels’ “Galaxy 1” books appear to be fully consigned to obscurity — I don’t have a single friend who remembers them.  They were published by Crestwood House in 1979; I certainly loved the ones I found in my elementary school library in the 1980’s.  And that says a lot, because I was a kid who loved the fantasy genre far more than science fiction.  (I had an older brother who played “Dungeons & Dragons,” and Ralph Bakshi’s animated take on “The Lord of the Rings” had captured a lot of kids’ imaginations since 1978.)  I remember how pleased I was to discover anthology-style books that featured the same cast of characters on different space-based adventures.

I’m pretty sure that “Mystery on Mars,” “Medical Emergency,” and “Silent Invaders” were among those that I read.  My favorite, however, was “Green Invasion,” which featured alien vines that grew uncontrollably and crushed anything they could ensnare and tangle.  Lord knows that was a scenario I re-created with my G.I. Joes at home.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “The Singing Cave,” by Eilis Dillon

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Eilis Dillon’s “The Singing Cave” was another favorite childhood book of mine for the obvious reasons — a young boy explores a seaside cave and discovers a Viking skeleton, complete with a sword and armor.  That pretty much hit all the right notes for me when I was in early gradeschool in the 1980’s.  (Some sort of age-appropriate young-adult mystery unfolded after the skeleton disappeared, possibly involving the townspeople, but I don’t even remember that very well.  What thrilled me and stayed with me was the kid finding a armored Viking skeleton in a cave.)

The book was published first in 1959 in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber; Dillon was Irish and the story was set in Ireland.  It was released here in America the following year by the now defunct Funk & Wagnalls — the same company that produced those huge reference books that Gen X’ers remember lugging around before the arrival of CD-Roms.  (Funk & Wagnalls is a name I haven’t heard in a very long time.  It turns out they quite bein’ a thing in 1997.)

I went through one hell of a Viking Phase when I was a kid.  (I suppose it wasn’t too different from other kids wanting to be pirates.)  I was thrilled with stories about Leif Erikson, and I was pretty happy that his last name sounded like my first.  It would be years later when my parents told me that I was actually named after another Viking, Erik the Red, albeit very indirectly.  (My parents like the name featured in the “Erik” cigars television commercial.)

I might have talked about this at the blog before, but I even constructed my own “Viking ship” with the kid next door when I was very young.  It probably wasn’t seaworthy; it was really just a wooden pallet with some two-by-fours nailed together as a mast, and a white sheet for a sail.  (Where had we gotten that sheet?  It seems to me that if I’d stolen it from the laundry, I’d have gotten into some trouble for that with my Mom.)  Bizarrely, my friend and I etched a bright red Spanish Cross on the sail  — even though that emblem had nothing to do with the Vikings.  You kinda can’t excuse our stupidity because we were kids … we’d seen plenty of pictures of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in school.

My Dad also cautioned me and my buddy that our Viking ship might not float.  (The hindsight of adulthood assures me that it definitely wouldn’t have floated, but my Dad didn’t want to dash our hopes too abruptly.)  He explained to us patiently in the backyard that in order for something to float, it had to “displace its own weight in water.”  And … I actually understood that, surprisingly enough.  It’s probably the only physics lesson I’ve understood in my life.

In fact … I don’t think we even had a plan in place for moving that boat from the backyard to the water.  We were so enamored with the concept of shipbuilding that we kinda didn’t think things through very far at all.

 

 

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So I smack-talked Donny Osmond in a recent “Throwback Thursday” post.

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(I was talking about ABC’s “Donny & Marie” show from the late 70’s, which I really enjoyed as a tot.)  At the time I suggested they the Osmond siblings were immortal vampires because they are still performing in Las Vegas.

I take it all back.  I was just reminded that Osmond is the unnamed dancing man in the 2008 “first take” video for “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “White & Nerdy.”  Have you seen the way this guy mugs and dances for three minutes straight?  He’s hilarious.  And he’s a goddam force of nature.  He’s like Spider-Man 2099.  He’s cooler in that three minutes of video than I will ever be.

Besides, I’m old too.  I feel certain I was told at some point years ago that the guy was Osmond, yet I completely forgot about that when I discussed the show.  I also don’t know if “throwing shade” has fully replaced “smack-talking” in the vernacular, or even if the term should be hyphenated.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine,” by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams

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Hot damn, did I love this book when I was in grade school.  I’d be surprised if any of my friends remember it, because it was published in 1958 … I’m not sure how it wound up in my hands in the early 1980’s.  The eponymous “homework machine” depicted in the book was a 50’s-era computer owned by Professor Bullfinch, who was Danny’s mentor or father figure or … something.

This was actually the third in a series of “Danny Dunn” books published between 1956 and 1977.   I read one other — “Danny Dunn and the Fossil Cave,” which I also liked a lot.

The authors were Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, and they were quite good at their craft.  Danny, along with his friends Joe and Irene, were pretty relatable characters to a kid in the second grade.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” (1977-1979)!

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“The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” (1977-1979) is another show that I remember fondly, if very vaguely, from my very early childhood.  It ran on ABC for a scant three seasons (over a two-year period), and that sounds positively odd to me, because my memory has morphed it into something that seems like a much bigger part of the 1970’s.

I also remember it being two different shows, but that maybe makes sense — the first season of the program had a weird format in that you saw a standalone adventure of the Hardy Boys one week, and then a Nancy Drew outing the following week.  (The characters, of course, were based on the young adult books written respectively by Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene.)  They eventually went on to have adventures together,  Wikipedia tells me, although Nancy Drew had a reduced role, and was eventually dropped altogether in the third and final season.

Wikipedia also tells me that the show’s third season portrayed the Hardy Boys as … adults?  And that they were agents of the Justice Department?  And that the Season 3 premiere saw the younger brother’s fiancee killed by a hit-and-run driver?  I definitely don’t remember that — and it seems a little darker from what I remember of 1970’s primetime television shows.

I loved the show, even if I was too young to follow its relatively simple stories well.  (I would have been in either kindergarten or the first grade.)  But it was a program intended for “big kids” (my older siblings had the books), and that made it wonderfully cool to me.

I moved onto the books myself, by the early 1980’s.  I loved those too.  The two that I remember are “The Secret of Wildcat Swamp” (with the Hardy Boys) and “The Secret of the Old Clock” (with Nancy Drew).  It was the Wildcat Swamp adventure that inducted me into the club — you see that snarling mountain lion on the cover?  That was utterly enticing to me when I found the book in the bottom of the closet I shared with my brother, when I was … maybe in the third grade, I guess.  (It looked a lot like the “saber tooth tiger” baddie in that Aurora model kit that I loved so much.)  I kept pondering that scene and wondering what the outcome was.  (Did they even have guns?!  Would the dad or whoever that was protect them?!)  One day, I finally accepted the challenge of reading what seemed like a very long book to me at the time, and I wasn’t disappointed.  That’s the power of a good book cover, I guess.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “The Gong Show” (1976-1980)!

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Chuck Barris’ “The Gong Show” (1976-1980) was another show I remember vaguely (but quite fondly) from when I was in kindergarten or the first grade.  (It aired its original run between 1976 and 1978, and then was syndicated the latter two years.)  I still remember laughing uproariously at its weird acts, and it might have been one of those shows that ended just before my 8 PM bedtime.

The idea was this — a panel of three celebrity judges would view a handful of amateur talent acts, and would bang the titular gong if an act was so bad that they decided they couldn’t allow it to continue.  (Along with legitimate talent, the program deliberately fielded acts that were weird or just plain bad.)  What’s interesting is that this seems like a very tame precursor of contentious current reality shows like “American Idol” or “Britain’s Got Talent,” which are still going strong since their advent in the early 21st Century.  “The Gong Show” was a lot more laid back.

 

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Donny & Marie” (1976-1979)!

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You think that 80’s kids are old?  Well, I also have memories of the 1970’s; after all, they fully occupied the first seven years of my life.

And I remember “Donny and Marie” (1976-1979), which ran on ABC.  It was a sanity-challenging, Kafkaesque combination of disco, country music, family entertainment, themed-comedy skits, sequined outfits and … ice-skating.  Which made it either the height of 70’s cheese or the very nadir of Western civilization — you decide.

I’m embarrassed to admit here that I loved it, even if I was a tot at the time.  (Hey, if you’re five or six years old, then the sight of Donny being a non-threatening goofball on stage was the very height of hilarity.)  You can see what I mean in the second clip below, if you can stomach all four minutes of it.

What’s interesting about this show is that it was kind of a dinosaur in its time … variety shows had been on the decline for a while in the late 1970’s, and were already being supplanted by the situation comedies that would become the trademark of the 1980’s.  Bizarrely, NBC tried to launch Marie in her own solo variety show during the 1980-81 television season, but it just didn’t catch on.  It was cancelled after seven episodes.

What’s truly crazy is that Donny and Marie are still performing in Las Vegas.  I kid you not.  Google it.  You can even see them tonight at The Flamingo.  There’s at least a chance that they’re immortal vampires.

Postscript: I at first typed “Donny and Maurie” in that blog post headline, and I feel certain there’s a terrible joke hiding there somewhere about Donny hearing the results of paternity test on “Maury Povich.”  That would make a great “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Laverne and Shirley” (1976-1983)

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Rest in Peace, Penny Marshall.

This is one of only a handful of TV shows that I can remember watching as a tot in the late 1970’s.  “Laverne and Shirley” (1976-1983) was the kind of of thing I’d see in my older sisters’ room.  My Dad and older brother watched war movies, westerns and monster movies, but my two sisters preferred considerably lighter fare.  Two that they watched a lot at the time, if I recall, were this show and “Donnie & Marie” (1976-1979) — about the scariest thing you could find playing on their black-and-white TV was “The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” (1977-1979). (One of my sisters had a crush on actor Shaun Cassidy; I think there was a poster of him in their room.)

I loved “Laverne and Shirley” when I was that young.  Lenny and Squiggy were my favorite highlight of any episode, even if I was sometimes confused about whether they were meant to be “good guys” or “bad guys.”  I was in kindergarten, and not altogether bright, and I thought that men who wore black leather jackets (Fonzie notwithstanding) were usually “bad guys.”  I also remember thinking that hippies and motorcyclists were the same group of “bad guys” because they disobeyed God or something … my confusion at the time resulted from some vaguely moraled born-again Christian comic books I’d happened across somewhere.

I also remember recognizing “Laverne and Shirley” as being related to another show that a lot of kids back then loved — “Happy Days” (1974-1984), of which it was a spin-off.  This might have been the first time in my life that I was aware of two live-action television properties occupying the same fictional universe; I’d already seen it happen in the movies with the various incarnations of “King Kong” and “Godzilla.”

Here’s what makes me feel old — for both “Laverne and Shirley” and “Happy Days,” I probably watched a lot of the episodes when they were first broadcast, and not just in re-runs (although “Happy Days” was also played in syndication endlessly throughout the 1980’s — it remained a fixture of daytime television).

And I only just realized writing this that Lenny was played by the priceless Michael McKean.  As an adult, I know him primarily from his brilliant turns in “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984) and “The X-Files” (1998-2018).  He’s 71 now.  Wow.

 

 

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Throwback Thursday: 80’s Toys!!

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I happened across this video last night from Youtube user RAVN52AOL, and just had to share it.  It’s six minutes long, and it’ll really take you back when your old favorite toy comes up in the montage.  I think it’s the Duran Duran song that really ties the whole thing together.  [UPDATE: I have just been indignantly informed by another 80’s kid that the song is by Simple Minds — not Duran Duran!!  Apologies!!]

Tonka Trucks — I haven’t heard those mentioned in a long time (although, admittedly, they were around for a looooong time before the 1980’s).  My best friend next door had a fleet of the big metal things; they were always scattered around the bulky square sandbox that his Dad built for him in his backyard.  That kid loved his Tonka trucks.