Tag Archives: Throwback Thursday

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Throwback Thursday: 1990’s Nerd Nolan!

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This is from sometime in the late 1990’s.  I can’t remember which one of you guys sent me this photo, or its date.  But I’m running it primarily because of that old red t-shirt, which I loved so much that it nearly fell apart before I threw it out.

It was the “official” t-shirt of the Mary Washington College Department of Psychology, and I thought it was for one of the academic years I attended.  But … it looks like it says 1989-1990, and I feel like I even remember that.  (It’s a little hard to make out.)  I went to MWC just afterward, between 1990 and 1994.  I”m not sure what the story is here; maybe an upperclassman gave it to me?

The t-shirts were sold by psychology majors to raise funds for … something.  Was it a picnic at the end of the year, or a trip or something?  God, I’m getting old.

My only disappointment with that shirt was that I wore it for years without hearing a single relevant “Star Trek” joke.

 

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Pitfall!” for the Atari 2600!

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“Pitfall!” was quite the hit when Activision released it in 1982.  (I’m a little unclear on what I’m reading about the relationship between Activision and Atari … it looks like the former was a group of defected employees who were then sued by latter, but who then inadvertently pioneered the third-party-developer arrangement for video games.)

“Pitfall!” hit the shelves the same year that the priceless “Raiders of the Lost Ark” galloped through theaters, which I’ll bet helped with the popularity of the jungle adventure game.  But the game became a bestseller because of its own merits.  Wikipedia informs me that its took a lot of innovation by its creator, David Crane, to get his newer, more advanced graphics stored and operable on a 4-kilobyte game.

And I could kinda see that, as a kid.  “Pitfall!” was far sleeker and seemingly more complex than other Atari games my family had, like “Combat,” “Missile Command,” “Frogger” and “Donkey Kong.”  And it was a lot of fun.  See for yourself; you can play the original game for free right here at the Virtual Atari website.  (Seriously, the people who set up that site did something really cool for the rest of us.)

When I sat down to write this, I actually got my memories of “Pitfall!” confused with a later, more advanced side-scrolling PC game called “Impossible Mission.”  I played that in high school, and I loved it even more than “Pitfall!”  The two games look pretty similar; I wonder if anyone else gets them confused.

By the way, does that kid in the pith helmet in the ad below look familiar to you?  That’s because he’s none other than Jack Black, age 13.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Bosom Buddies” (1980-1982)!

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Here’s some more early Tom Hanks weirdness …  he starred in ABC’s cross-dressing comedy “Bosom Buddies” between 1980 and 1982.  The show ran for just two scant seasons.  I’m surprised at that, because I seem to remember it being a much bigger deal in the 1980’s — maybe just because it was a big hit at my house, when I was in second and third grade.  I wanted to be like the guys in the show, albeit without the cross-dressing.  I wanted to be grow up to live in New York City with my best friend and a beautiful blond girlfriend name “Sunny,” and get into zany hijinks.

I remember thinking that Hanks’ co-star, Peter Scolari, was the cool and funny one.  I thought Hanks was annoying, even if he did look like Billy Joel, whose music my older sister had taught me to really like.  (Joel’s “Glass Houses” album was stacked vertically with the others beside the living room record player, not far from where I watched this show on the family’s color television.)  And that is indeed Billy Joel’s “My Life” playing as the show’s theme song — but it had a different vocalist, for some reason.  (No matter how many times I hear it, that song will always take me back to the 80’s.)

Scolari’s career following the short-lived “Bosom Buddies” certainly hasn’t paralleled Hanks, but he’s still done a hell of a lot of television.  (Among many other things, he surprisingly starred as Commissoner Loeb in “Gotham” in 2015.  I didn’t see that one coming.)

As you can see from the opening credits below, the central plot device for “Bosom Buddies” was that the two guys had to pretend to be women in order to live at an all-women’s apartment building.  It only occurs to me now as I’m writing this that the show’s title was a double entendre.  I actually asked my Dad what the word “bosom” meant when I was a kid, and he gave me an answer that was accurate, if incomplete.  (He explained the colloquial meaning of the expression — a “bosom buddy” was a best friend, who you figuratively held close to you.  I subsequently told my best friend next door that he was my “bosom buddy” at one point.)

Yeah, I know it’s strange that I can remember a conversation from 39 years ago about an obscure TV show.  It’s weird what people remember.

 

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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.

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

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It’s here! It’s here!

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My Johnson Smith Company catalog has arrived!!  This is the first time I’ve gotten one in the mail in … 30 years?  35?  (I ordered it on a lark when I wrote that Throwback Thursday post a few weeks ago.)

What a trip!  The mail order company has definitely changed somewhat.  The catalog is far fewer pages now; as you can gather from the picture below, it’s closer in size to those free circulars that you can pick up outside the supermarket.

I was disappointed to see that there are fewer pranks and novelties aimed at kids.  (Whoopee cushions and X-Ray Specs, for example, are nowhere to be found.)  There are far more wares aimed at adults — they include a surprising number of sex toys for both men and women.  (The company adamantly asserts in bold red letters that these items are Non-returnable.)  There is an abundance of pro-Trump merchandise too — check out that “Donald Trump Life and Times Coin & Trading Cards Collection” in the second photo.

Ah, well.  You can still find some cool stuff.  Those “Alien” and “Predator” … “Body Knockers(?)” look pretty neat.  And that Mego “Nosferatu” doll is goddam spectacular.  (I had no idea that the Mego Corporation  was still making toys.)  I don’t know whether its eyes glow in the dark, but I really, really want to believe that they do.

 

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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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Throwback Thursday: “Wizards and Warriors” (1983)!

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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.

 

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Throwback Thursday: Tim Conway on “The Carol Burnett Show”

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Rest easy, Tim Conway (1933-2019).

 

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Throwback Thursday: Olympic Prizes or Cash!

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Here’s another ad that was a permanent fixture of comic books in the 1980’s.  I myself was never interested in joining the advertised “Olympic Sales Club;” nor did I want to “GO, GO, GO WITH CAPTAIN “O”!” [sic].

I found this ad pretty patronizing, with its generic champion hugging his demographically diverse charges in the upper left-hand corner.  What kind of superhero was “Captain O” supposed to be, anyway?  Was he the protector of the company?  The guardian of the kids who went door to door selling its wares? The hero of … salespeople generally?  To me, this was really just an example of adults pandering to kids as though they were idiots.

But ads like this fueled a lot of conversation among grade-school boys.  It really made it seem like you could earn some cool prizes for selling only a moderate amount of greeting cards or stationary.  (The radio-controlled cars and planes were what all the boys eyed most eagerly.)

And 80’s kids often prided ourselves on our sales skills.  Most of us had sold things door-to-door for school-related fundraisers — it was just a very common practice at the time, even if it seems needlessly dangerous to me as an adult.  When I was in second and third grade at Catholic school, we annually sold candy bars door-to-door.  If memory serves, we weren’t even required to do that for any particular fundraising purpose, like a school trip or a sports team.  I think it we were just turning a profit for the school, in addition to what our parents were paying them in tuition.

I also remember seeing ads in my older comics that recruited kids to sell “Grit,” which was some sort of periodical that was oddly billed as a “family newspaper.”  But I think that was primarily a 1970’s thing, and was just before my time.

 

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Throwback Thursday: The Johnson Smith Company Catalog!

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Ah, The Johnson Smith Company Catalog — the Holy Bible for little boy pranksters, magicians, spies, collectors and monster lovers everywhere.  The goofy novelties I’ve written about here at the blog could all be found among its fabled pages — even if they frequently lay outside the limits of what my boyhood allowance could buy.  (Note the “Greedy Fingers Bank” top left in the third picture below, for example.  This is the same wind-up toy that was occasionally advertised as the “Novelty Coffin Bank.”)

As the pages below show, you could buy anything from “X-Rays Specs” to smoke grenades to itching powder to Halloween masks to “Whoopee Cushions” to “Joy Buzzers.”   There were dozens of dubious “how-to” books as well, for would-be practitioners of such arcane pursuits as Kung-Fu or hypnosis.  And there were some risque items aimed clearly at adults — primarily decals and clothing.  (Does anyone under 40 remember “iron-ons” for t-shirts?  That was actually more of a 1970’s thing than a 1980’s thing.)  The Halloween masks, especially, were the stuff of legend among me and my friends.  But the “deluxe” masks cost $25, if memory serves, which was well outside my grade-school price range.

Goddam, but this catalog stimulated a kid’s imagination.  When it arrived in my mailbox, it seemed like a magical, exotic tome from some parallel universe where everything was made up exclusively of monsters and ninjas and gadgets.  Adding to its mystique was the fact that I never actually sent away for it — I wound up on the company’s mailing list around 1979 after buying something from the back of a comic book.  I forget what that fateful inaugural purchase was.  It might have been the “Sea Monkeys” that I wrote about two weeks ago, but I have a feeling it might have been stamps.  (I fetishized stamp collecting for a lengthy period of my early childhood, and was elated by those 500-stamps-for-$5-type offers that you sometimes found in comics.)

The scans below were downloaded from Pinterest; it looks like the first two are from the 70’s and the third one is from the 80’s.  But they’re both representative of any catalog that I received from 1979 through the early part of the next decade.  The small pages were crowded with random ads, mostly in little black-and-white boxes.  The pictures of the products were frequently just drawings, and often did not convey the real value of what you were buying.  (Remember, this was a vendor that sold “X Ray Specs.”)

The Johnson Smith Company is still around, too.  (They’ve been a thing since 1914 … I have no idea how the modern Internet marketplace either helps or hurts a company like this.)  But you can find them online right here.  I just ordered a catalog.

 

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