I mentioned “Streethawk” (1985) a couple of weeks ago during that discussion of that 80’s fad where futuristic vehicles were the stars of TV shows. This ran for a single season and depicted the adventures of a police officer riding “an all-terrain attack motorcycle designed to fight urban crime.”
This was the very height of 1980’s cheese — or the very nadir, depending on how you look at it. (I was a pretty impressionable kid, though, and I loved “Streethawk.”) And star Rex Smith was not an ugly man, but always seemed to have dopey expression permanently plastered to his face.
Wasn’t there sort of special signature move that Smith’s character had, where he popped a wheelie and actually spun the bike like a dradle at the same time? So that the bullets or whatever it was firing would fly in every direction? (Because cops typically require indiscriminate suppressing fire in every direction in order to “fight urban crime.”) I could almost swear that was a recurring action sequence on this show.
As I explained last year, monster movies were simply a part of Thanksgiving if you lived in the Tri-State region around New York City between 1976 and 1985. This was due to WOR-9’s “Holiday Film Festival” broadcast, which actually also extended to the day following the holiday after the lineup’s first year. (People just called it the “Monster Movie Marathon.”)
As a kid, I was a hell of a lot more thrilled with the monster movies than anything being served for dinner. (Remember, video stores only began arriving the early 1980’s. Before that, you usually had to catch a movie on television if you wanted to see it at all. It’s why every house had a “TV Guide.”)
“King Kong vs. Godzilla” (1962) was one gem in the marathon. (Or, at least, it seemed like an amazing film to a gradeschool boy.) I was raised with the enduring myth that this Japanese film had two endings — an American version where King Kong prevailed, and a Japanese version where its native Godzilla was the victor.) My Dad told me that, and I remember being fascinated that a movie could have two different endings. I actually only learned just now, writing this blog entry, that it was a particularly widespread urban legend — stemming from an erroneous report in “Spacemen” magazine. The American version of the film had tons of alterations, but the outcome was essentially the same — King Kong won.
There were always a few more Godzilla movies on the day after Thanksgiving, too. “Son of Godzilla” (1967) was one of them; that was always hit with the kids. (I could swear at some point there was a cartoon adaptation in the early 80’s.) It was weird how 80’s kids apparently loved that ostensibly “cute” character; the adult in me today swears that “Son of Godzilla” looks like an upright, reptile-shaped poop. (Seriously, check out the second clip below.)
“Godzilla vs. Megalon” (1973) was another one I seem to remember being pretty thrilled with. I was even occasionally scared of the giant monsters in flicks like these. (Hey, I was a little kid.) Even as a first- or second-grader, though, I was smart enough to question why these movies were weirdly inconsistent. (Why was Godzilla a bad guy who destroyed Tokyo in one movie, but the “good monster” that the Japanese rooted for in another?)
I’m learning now that “Godzilla vs. Megalon” was the target of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. I’m going to have to hunt that one down.
“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.
“Bigfoot and Wildboy” (1977 – 1979) is another obscure TV show that is perhaps best forgotten. It was a segment on something called “The Krofft Supershow” in 1977, I think, before the segments were re-edited into a half-hour program. I became a fan of it as second grader in the fall of 1979. (Or maybe I watched its reruns in third grade, in 1980 — to be honest, this was so long ago that I hardly remember.)
They don’t make TV shows like they used to. And that’s a good thing. “Bigfoot and Wildboy” seemed to rely heavily on three ingredients: an utra-cheesy 70’s score; truly terrible special effects (even for the time); and lots of shots of its two title characters either jumping, or running at the camera in slow motion. (I actually just watched a few minutes of the full episode you see posted below.)
I was pretty preoccupied with “Bigfoot and Wildboy” when I was very young. I remember having to make journal entries in the classroom, in which we could write and illustrate anything we wanted. (It was precisely the sort of open-ended journal writing exercise with little academic value to which I’d be subjected, occasionally, throughout my school career — even in my college poetry class.) But we were allowed to select our own topic in the second grade, and that was at least some fun for an imaginative kid. The nuns (it was a Catholic school) sometimes prodded us to write about real-world events; 1979’s Space Shuttle Columbia, for example, was high on their list of suggestions.
Given a blank slate, though, I tended to write almost exclusively about imaginary characters and monsters — peppered, perhaps, with intermittent entries about dogs. I distinctly remember drawing Bigfoot and Wildboy one day. (If memory serves, we wrote and drew in our journals after recess, maybe to get us refocused.) I drew them leaping over a fence and running toward the viewer. (Seriously, the show had a lot of shots like that. Check out the opening credits below.)
I remember a nun looking over my shoulder and inquiring delicately about the giant hairy humanoid and the half-naked boy … when I explained the characters to her, she suggested with (uncharacteristic) patience, “Tomorrow, let’s try to write about something from the real world.”
We were chatting about obscure TV shows a couple of weeks ago after I shared a post about “Manimal” (which I was surprised to find lovingly remembered by some otherwise sane people). I was shocked when someone else remembered “Cliffhangers,” which ran for a single season on NBC in 1979.
Dear God, did I love this show when I was a first grader. I hollered whenever it came on; I’m pretty sure my Mom was amused by that. I think this is technically the first prime-time show I was ever a fan of. (Yeah, I ended that last sentence with a preposition; it’s my damn blog.)
“Manimal” (1983) was an infamously bad TV show. It was so bad that it became a routine punchline on “Mystery Science Theater 3000” about a decade later.
I dunno. I remember being pretty keen as a kid to watch this dude turn into a panther. (Panthers, by the way, were kind of a thing for a while in the 1980’s — on posters, stickers, notebooks, etc. The girls had their unicorns and the boys had their panthers.)
When I was in the first grade, I absolutely loved “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” It was, technically I guess, a dystopian science fiction story in which a contemporary astronaut is frozen for 500 years, then returns to a post-nuclear earth. Its feature-length pilot was created by Glen Larson, who also wrote the pilot for “Battlestar Galactica” the preceding year. (Weird trivia — Wikipedia informs me that this was released theatrically, along with “Battlestar Galactica” in limited theaters.)
Of course I didn’t realize this at the time, but “Buck Rogers” was pretty bad. It was horribly bad. Indescribably bad. It was even bad by cheesy 1970’s TV sci-fi standards. You can actually find full episodes on Youtube, and I started one, just on a lark. I could only watch about one minute, maybe less — plus that soul-deadening clip of “Twiki” in the second video below. Seriously, it’s as though Larson was intentionally giving the worst script he could come up with to NBC as some sort of prank. (After being told to resuscitate the heroic Buck, one advanced futureperson advises another, “He’s liable to be not too coherent.”)
About Twiki — that little guy fascinated a lot of very young kids in 1979. For a while, it was all the rage for us to do our “deeby-deeby-deeby” Twiki impressions.
The 80’s were a weird time in a lot of ways. Pop culture’s answer to the threat of global nuclear annihilation was a really cool, really catchy song with an upbeat tempo that topped the charts. (Full disclosure — I don’t know much about music, and I’m not sure I’m using the term “upbeat tempo” correctly. If I’m not, you can totally call me on it.)
Nena released “99 Luftballoons” in 1983 in Germany, it was released a year later in America as “99 Red Balloons.” Wikipedia taught me some interesting trivia this afternoon — the group was actually pretty unhappy with the loose translation of the Americanized lyrics, and all but disowned them. Nena performed the song only in its original German, even when the band was on tour in England.
Maybe we need a catchy pop song to teach the perils of nuclear brinksmanship to the current president. Or, better yet, set something to the tune of one of those Looney Tunes cartoons.
I remember learning to use the card catalog in grade school in the 1980’s. It was intimidating for a young kid. The teacher made a big deal out of it, and those long, light brown wooden cabinets looked positively monolithic. They looked as though they were holding difficult math problems in their uniform, ordered little drawers, in the same manner as the mute Sphinx might hold impossible riddles.
And I still remember how surprised I was at how easy it was. You only had to remember one of three things: author, subject or title. And the alphabet took care of the rest. Every kid knew the alphabet. It was a bizarrely empowering experience for a young, nascent nerd.
No, we didn’t have the Internet. Hell, we didn’t even have the Internet for research purposes when I was in college. I remember driving with Tom (the other most befuddled member of Mary Washington College’s psychology program) an hour and a half to Charlottesville to research our term papers at the University of Virginia. That was a long drive.
This is a shot of me and my alum Dave at the site of the “Lost Colony of Roanoke” during Spring Break 1994. A bunch of the seniors at Mary Washington College’s New Hall trekked down to North Carolina’s Outer Banks that year; this is one of the places we stopped along the way.
Dear God, that was one of the most enjoyable trips of my life.
What the hell were Dave and I doing below? Performing a skit? I can’t remember. I was a really, really weird kid, and Dave was also pretty out there.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 