Tag Archives: Throwback Thursday

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Throwback Thursday: the 1982 3-D broadcast of “Revenge of the Creature!”

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Here’s another Throwback Thursday post that is a relatively obscure, but might be a treat for my fellow HNAM’s (Horror Nerds Approaching Midlife).  Who remembers the nationwide syndicated broadcast of 1955’s “Revenge of the Creature” in 3-D in early July 1982?

Your parents had to pick up the 3-D glasses for you from a local Pizza Hut or 7-Eleven, I think …  This was a pretty big deal, especially if you were a nine-year-old boy, as I was.  My good old Dad got the glasses for me, and he patiently explained to me how depth perception the 3-D technology worked.  Good Lord, how I looked forward to this.

And I wasn’t disappointed.  I remember the effects being actually pretty damned good.  I was thrilled.  It was my first 3-D movie.  (In fact, it might actually have been the only 3-D movie I’ve ever seen …)

The Neato Coolville website has a far better account of the event than I could write — check it out right here:

http://neatocoolville.blogspot.com/2007/10/1982-television-event-revenge-of.html

The movie itself, in 3-D format, is also on Youtube.  I’d love to view it on my laptop, but I don’t have any 3-D glasses handy.  I might have to rectify that with my next Amazon purchase.

 

 

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Throwback Thursday: Celebrating the 5th of July!!

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We actually have two holidays in a row coming up, because the 5th of July is celebrated by expeditious suburban 8-year-olds everywhere.  Or, at least, it was a big deal to me in the 1980’s.

When I was a kid, I discovered a lovely truth about life very early on — adults partying in the street after dark sometimes dropped things and did not pick them.  This includes things that kids are not supposed to have — including fireworks.

Until the day I die, I will never forget the smell of spent firecracker powder in the air of a July 5th morning.  (That almost sounded like an “Apocalypse Now” joke.)  To a boy like me, it was the smell of sweet, sweet opportunity.  I was a habitual early riser, and I annually ran right past my “Sgt. Rock” comic books to grab my bike and scour the neighborhood.

Among the burnt black smears in the street and the spent, discarded “Roman Candles,” there were inevitably a few fireworks that weren’t lit off.  You needed a good eye, as a kid — spent, burnt fireworks littered the ground like confetti, and you had to look carefully for those with fuses.

There were always “Black Cats” or “TNT’s” to be found — those were just plain, regular firecrackers.  But they still brought a hell of a lot of joy to a pre-teen, and you couldn’t beat the price.  (Bear in mind, Virginians, that the sale of fireworks is illegal in New York, so they were much harder for a young boy to find.  My family always somehow laid hands on a few pack of firecrackers or “Jumping Jacks,” but they weren’t exactly plentiful.)

I found larger pieces, too, when I was very lucky.  The crown of my collection was a perfect, unlit M-80 that somebody had dropped.

I realize that all of this sounds vaguely pathetic.  But I was an opportunist, and Netflix hadn’t been invented yet.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Cricket” magazine

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I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when some friends of mine remembered “Highlights;” does anyone remember “Cricket?”

This is still being published.  (I thought it was a 70’s thing, since I haven’t seen or heard of it since I was a young boy.)  It’s a literary magazine aimed at older children — I had a couple of copies flapping around my bookcase or closet for years.

There was one issue that had an illustration of a young girl riding her bicycle on a pier, and there was a shark in the water swimming along below her.  That drawing both scared me and piqued my interest in … 1978 or 1979 or so.  I couldn’t read it — the story was just beyond my reading level.  This is an incredibly obscure online query, but if anyone knows the title of that story, let me know.  It would really tickle my nostalgia.

 

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Throwback Thursday: Highlights magazine.

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When I was a little boy, “Highlights” was the only thing even remotely fun about going to the doctor’s office.  And because that was the only place I ever saw it, I thought that it was a special magazine that you could only get to see at the doctor.

 

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Throwback Thursday: the most 70’s-tastic screenshot ever!

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How’s this for a pop-culture artifact?   It was shared recently on Facebook by my friend Conrad.

This is a screenshot from 1977’s “CHiPs,” that weekly, family-friendly, primetime police dramedy in which a pair of affable California Highway Patrolmen would never even draw their sidearms over the course of an hour-long episode.

And, yes, the period marquee in the background is indeed advertising the original “Star Wars.”

Even at the age of five or six, CHiPs was too goofy for me — despite the fact that Shawn Degnan, my best friend next door, frequently recommended it.   Shawn and I did agree on the show’s contemporary, however — “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” (1979-1981).

 

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Throwback Thursday: the McDLT

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Why on earth did MacDonald’s discontinue the McDLT?  Sure, it had a stupid gimmick.  And it seemed to have so much lettuce and tomato that I used to think of it as “the saladburger.”

But it was good.  Hey, it takes a lot to get a guy like me to order anything resembling a salad.

I have no idea why the commercial below features George Costanza singing and dancing like he’s in a Michael Jackson video.  The 80’s were a weird time.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones” comic books

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No, I’m not talking about the Marvel Comics adaptation of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981); I’ve written about that separately here at the blog.  This was a regular ongoing comic book title between January 1983 and March 1986.

And every issue of it was a mind-boggling pleasure for a fourth grader whose favorite hero was Indiana Jones.  I remember issues one and two waiting for me after school one day, displayed upright on the kitchen table.  My Dad had picked them up for me.  (He was constantly trying to help me with a problem that had plagued my childhood — I simply never owned enough comic books.)  These were a departure from the “Sgt. Rock” comics that my father usually bought for me, but damn if they weren’t a thousand times better.  I was stunned by the very concept of them.  “Raiders” was a … COMIC BOOK now!?

Of course the plots were derivative of the film.  Ninety percent of the places Indy went, an ancient artifact or temple held a terrifying secret, often unleashing a power that could control or destroy the world.  And only Indy’s superior knowledge of archeology — or just his sheer pluck — would allow him to employ it to vanquish the bad guys.  [Spoiler warning for “Raiders,” by the way.]  The writing was damn good, as far as I can remember.  And we got to see Marion, Sallah, Marcus Brody and even Captain Katanga again.

You see that cover where Indy is on the wing of a plane?  That bad guy just might be one of the Hovitos … I can’t remember well enough to be sure.  At one point this adversary steals Indy’s whip and tries to use it against him.  (It doesn’t turn out well for him.)  In fact …I think it was the scene you see on the cover.  I’m not sure why the artist depicted a grappling hook instead.  I remember the villain’s line being, “It would be fitting for such a man to die by the sting of his own weapon.”  I have no idea why I remember that dialogue after 35 years (and little else about the issue).  The mind is a funny thing.

All of the covers were damn cool.  I happen to love that final one  you see at the bottom.  That was Indy’s adventure at Stonehenge.  But the first two covers you see are the ones that I would eventually like to get framed, someday after fame brings me opulence — those were the ones waiting for me on the kitchen table that day in 1981.

 

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Throwback Thursday: Balsa Wood Gliders

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This meme says the “THE 70’S,” but I encountered a little boy playing with something kind of like a balsa wood glider yesterday!  I told him how much I loved these when I was his age.

His was a bit fancier — it might have been made of thin plastic.  The gliders that I received from visiting aunts and grandparents were like the mostly unadorned balsa wood jobby that you see below.  It came in a long plastic sleeve like the one pictured, and you had to assemble it yourself.  (It wasn’t quite as high tech as the X-Box.)

Loop-de-loops were damn fun.  It was slightly less fun seeing it snap off a wing or fin after a nosedive.  Note to any well meaning aunts or uncles who might spy a balsa wood glider, if they’re still around:  buy a couple of them for that kid in your life — these things break easily.

 

 

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Throwback Thursday: T.S.S. in Middle Island, NY

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This “Throwback Thursday” post is one to which only my longtime fellow Long Islanders might relate.  And it’s really more of a bittersweet news item …  I signed onto Facebook the night before last only to see this message from a great old friend from the neighborhood:

“They tore down the old T.S.S. today.”

Yes — that’s “T.S.S.,” as in Times Squares Stores, even though nobody ever called it the latter.  And “T.S.S.” is an appellation that only the 40-and-up-ish crowd would recognize, I think.  Everyone else thinks of it as “the old K-Mart.”  But in the late 70’s and early 80’s, it was a sprawling local family discount store.

I and other Longwood High School kids have a hell of a lot of memories from there.  I remember accompanying my parents there during their shopping expeditions when I was .. maybe the age from Kindergarten through the third grade?

“Warehouse”-type club stores weren’t really a thing back then.  T.S.S.’ immense space was truly impressive to a little boy; it seemed like a world unto itself.  We all remember the toy section — that was where I browsed wistfully through the very first Star Wars figures — I’m talking the original toys released in connection with the 1978 and 1980 films.  I still remember them arrayed along the racks in their original packaging — Lord only knows how much those racks of unopened original toys would be worth today.  I’m also pretty sure that’s where my parents picked up those Micronauts figures I got for Christmas one year.  Come to think of it … I’ll bet the majority of my Christmas presents were bought there.

I also vividly remember the bedding department, for some reason.  I think it’s because I really took a liking to some Charlie Brown bedsheets I saw displayed there.

But more than anything else, I remember the weird entranceway — they sold concession-style drinks and snacks on both sides, the better to appeal to children to beseech their parents.

There’s a neat little blog entry, complete with the store’s original TV commercials,  right here at LongIsland70skid.com:

http://www.longisland70skid.com/tss/

T.S.S. was such a vivid, memorable part of my early childhood that it was pretty damned depressing for me Tuesday to discover its eventual fate.  I’m not talking about the sprawling space being razed.  I’m talking about the goddam dystopian state of disrepair into which the entire commercial property fell.

After some long intervening years during which the space became a K-Mart, the building just went to hell after that doomed chain went as defunct as T.S.S.  Tuesday’s Newsday article, below, should give you the rundown.

And the rundown isn’t pretty.  Over the past decade, it seems that the “hulking eyesore” of a building was the site of squatters, drug users, and encroaching wild plantlife.  If you have fond childhood memories of the store, then do not perform a Google image search for the location, as I did.  It’ll show you a massive, vacant monolith of a building on a vast, overgrown, dangerous looking lot.  It looks frikkin’ postapocalyptic.  And it’ll make you sad.

And if that weren’t enough, a murder victim was found this past Saturday in the woods just next to the site:

“Middle Island vacant K-Mart demolished days after body found,” by Carl MacGowan, Newsday, 4/5/16

They say you can never go home again, huh?

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“You see, I’m Irish — but I’m not a leprechaun!”

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“You wanna fight?  Then step up and we’ll get it on!”

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

And Happy Throwback Thursday, too.  House of Pain’s “Top O’ The Mornin’ To Ya” dates from 1992.  It actually has a pretty nifty “Return of the Jedi” reference, for you Star Wars fans who currently rule this little thing called the Internet.

And the song is memorable to this comic book fan for being a great intro track for Colin Farrell’s Bullseye in 2003’s “Daredevil.”  I actually am the rare (or possibly unique) individual who really likes that movie.  I bought it on DVD, and I’ve seen it more times than I care to publicly admit, given its ignominy.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15qc3_joy5A