I was joking around on Facebook just yesterday about “The Six Million Dollar Man” (1973-1978). I would have been a baby when this originally aired, but, like a lot of Gen X’ers, I can remember it pretty well from reruns. (I am linking here to the Potentium Youtube channel.)
I still remember being a little kid and trying to make the show’s (indescribable) signature sound effect when lifting something heavy.
“Spacehunter!” Hot damn, this movie captivated me as a kid. And I didn’t even get to see the 3-D version in theaters in 1983; I caught it through the magic of VHS a couple of years later. (By the way, I am linking here to The Duke Mitchell Film Club on Youtube.)
“Spacehunter” is often derided as a ripoff of the “Star Wars” films, but I don’t think that’s fair. It really is its own thing.
It is by no means “a great movie.” As you can probably tell from the trailer, it’s a pretty cornball B-movie. But a hell of a lot of work went into the sets, makeup effects, special effects and creature effects. “Spacehunter” is fun as hell if you are a kid at heart where monsters are concerned. There is one scene that got under my skin in the 80’s, and it’s still creepy today — it involves deformed, singing mutant children throwing bombs at our heroes from the cliffs above.
This movie was also only the second feature film for a young Molly Ringwald. She’s actually really good in the role, no matter how bad her dialogue gets.
If you can stomach the 80’s cheese and you can find a copy of this, I actually recommend it as late-night viewing.
This popped up on Twitter the other day. Behold one of the biggest pains-in-the-ass of my childhood.
As you can see from my response, we called these “hitchhikers” on my native Long Island. A lot of people from the northeast chimed in that they likewise remember the appellation.
People elsewhere know them as “travelers,” “stickers,” “bindies” and (drum roll please) “Satan’s Spurs.” That last one is truly inspired.
Welp. I guess I’m “old as shit.” Cap guns weren’t even really an 1980’s toy, as far as I remember. They’re something that I mostly associate with the tail end of the 1970’s. Oh, we definitely played with toy guns in the 80’s — every kid had a rifle to grab in case a game of “army” broke out. But we didn’t bother with caps by that age. (And Wikipedia tells me that the toy’s popularity declined along with the popularity of cowboy TV shows in the 1970’s.)
There also seems to be some confusion out there about whether cap guns are legal. They’re fine — just so long as they’re manufactured with an orange ring at the end of the barrel, so that authorities can tell that it isn’t a real gun. (That law was passed in 1988, and it seems like a good idea.)
Cap guns aggravated the hell out of adults. (The only more pernicious gift for a child was a musical instrument.) For you millennials who are unfamiliar with the toys, there’s a breakdown of how they work at this theatrical weapons site. (But it does make the toys sound a hell of a lot more dangerous than I remember them. Yikes.) The caps contain an explosive mixture called “fulminate;” we kids thought it was actually gunpowder. (And we wondered whether it was possible to make a cannon if you carefully dissected and emptied a million caps. None of us ever got around to so time-consuming a project, despite its allure.)
My older brother had a replica antique cap pistol; I thought that was pretty neat. I’m pretty sure it is the one at bottom right in this picture.
It looks like the kind of thing that you could only buy at a Disneyland or Disneyworld gift shop? Come to think of it … there were a few items in our house growing up that inexplicably were Disney theme park stuff. (That’s where that totally awesome Randotti Skull came from.) I’m starting to think maybe my parents took my siblings to Disneyworld without me. Maybe it was that one week they sent me upstate to my aunt’s house.
Photo credit: By Hmaag – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76166977
God, I loved these movies back in the day. It’s silly, but they were one of the things that made me want to become a news reporter when I was a kid. I actually saw the second movie first, in the theater — and then found the first movie on VHS at my local mom-and-pop video store.
I’ve heard good things about the reboot with Jon Hamm, though I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve also never read the original novels by Gregory McDonald, and I feel like I ought to remedy that.
I found a couple of videos online the depict The Roosevelt Island Tramway around 1980. (The picture below of the tram arriving in Manhattan dates from 2006, as I couldn’t find any vintage public domain photos.)
The first video I am linking to here was posted by Richard Cortell; he completed it as a long ago student project for The New York Institute of Technology. Parts of the video are quite dark, but it’s still a terrific glimpse in New York City’s past.
The second video is also Cortell’s; this one is dated 1980. It focuses more on life on Roosevelt Island — the tram is seen only at the beginning and end.
I’ve never been on the tram — or to Roosevelt Island. But just seeing it brings back memories of my early childhood. My Dad used to occasionally take me on trips to New York City, and I remember seeing it depart from 60th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan. I was pretty damned awed by it.
But I didn’t ask to ride on it. My Dad took me to all sorts of places in NYC that were fun for a kid, but the sight of that hanging tram car made me pretty apprehensive. Hell, I’m not sure I’d want to ride it as an adult. (There was a malfunction in 2006 that left 80 people trapped up there for around 90 minutes.)
I didn’t know it at the time, but the tram would have actually been relatively new at the time that I saw it (and at about the same time Cortell filmed his videos). It opened in July of 1976.
Postscript — there is actually a shot of the tram in that old “Million Dollar Movie” intro that everyone loves. It’s right at the start, five seconds in.
Photo credit: Kris Arnold from New York, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
I am linking again here to the Youtube channel for Hugo Faces, for a nifty Christmas greeting from CBS in 1982.
Hey, look! It’s Ed Koch!
I am linking here to the Youtube channel Hugo Faces, which is a treasure trove of 1980’s local television clips for Long Island and elsewhere. That Carvel ad is as priceless as it is cheesy.
These aired on WCBS.
Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy this 1984 holiday commercial from Carvel Ice Cream. (I am linking here to the Youtube channel for The Museum of Classic Chicago Television.)
This is from 1988 — it was my speech when I ran for president of the International Student Organization at Longwood High School.
I even had buttons made up. I was quite the extrovert back in those days (and a nerd too, in case you hadn’t noticed). But I wasn’t exactly Marcus Antonius, even if I wanted to be.
Note the use of a dot matrix printer! 😀
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 