This picture inspires pure nostalgia for 1980’s rural suburbia. I swear there is something so cool about the wood paneling and thick carpet.
Note the game console. I still remember talking with rapt interest with other kids about which Atari cartridges their family had.
This was taken at North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 1994. Pictured at right is the indomitable, inimitable, irreplaceable Dave Kline, of Mary Washington College fame. (Yes, his fashion sense was legendary.)
Who is the goofy guy at left? I have no idea.
Anyway, what a trip that was. I’m sure I’m not the only one of my dormmates who remembers it fondly.
When I was sixteen years old and working at McDonald’s, we would throw cheese at the break room ceiling like this. We tried other foods too (we had high hopes for the pickles), but I think cheese was the only reliable standby. Good times.
Actually … I might have been younger when I worked there. I would have been able to drive back and forth with a driver’s permit at sixteen, if memory serves? And McDonald’s had a van that picked up the younger employees who couldn’t drive.
Play this song with your eyes closed, and it transports you right back to the 80’s. Hey, it’s a lot easier than what they did in “Avengers: Endgame” (2019).
The Wiz might be something only my fellow New Yorkers will remember — it was a regional electronics chain in the metropolitan area. Get a load of that electric typewriter for just $99.00.
Though everyone in my Long Island neighborhood saw commercials like this on TV, there weren’t any Wiz locations near us. That territory had been firmly staked out by the far older P. C. Richard and Sons, The Wiz’ competitor.
Be warned — the jingle here is an earworm.
Here’s just a nifty newspaper advertisement for WOR-TV Channel 9’s annual Thanksgiving monster movie marathon — about which I’ve posted once or twice before.
I actually remember nearly all of this lineup from watching in the 1980’s! The three big-gorilla flicks came first, in glorious black and white, with the Godzilla entries after. (The only movie below that doesn’t ring a bell for me is “Godzilla vs. The Bionic Monster.” I must have missed that one.
Here’s a weird bit of pop culture — a 1983 ad for General Mills Monster Cereals. I might never have actually had Boo Berry — and I remember eating Franken Berry only once or twice? But Count Chocula was a sugary morning delicacy in my household growing up.
It frequently had the best toy surprises waiting at the bottom of the box too. (Do cereals still have those?) I was utterly thrilled that one summer when I got my hands on the the Monster Cereals ink stamps — though, if memory serves, I actually had to save some proofs-of-purchase or something and send away for them in the mail.
Anyway, thanks to the SaturdayMorningFever Youtube channel for this upload.
And if weird Monster Cereals trivia is your thing, then you ought to read up on Quentin Tarantino’s reverence for Fruit Brute.
“Dark City” (1998) maybe wasn’t quite as perfect as its most ardent fans make it out to be, but it was still a damned good film — creative, original and caliginously artistic. (It occasionally suffers somewhat in comparison with its spiritual cousin, “The Matrix,” which changed the very medium of movies only a year later.) And what a cast — William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly, Kiefer Sutherland and Rufus Sewell!
I saw this movie on VHS around … 2001, I think. I remember being eager at the time to see the inimitable Hurt — I’d grown up with films like “Gorky Park” (1983) and “The Accidental Tourist” (1988). It was only later in life that I really became a fan of Sewell — after his tour-de-force performance as the Nazi villain in “The Man in the High Castle” (2015-2019).
And how can you beat Connelly as a nightclub crooner? My girlfriend sent me a gem that she found on Youtube — Connelly singing an alternate version of her musical number in the movie, Giovanni Polimeni’s “Sway.” (It’s the second video below.)
By the way, I am linking tonight to Media Graveyard and Polimeni’s Youtube channel.
Classic early 90’s tune.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 