I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

THIRTY DAYS, THIRTY YEARS, THIRTY BORING STORIES...

My Eleventh Year (10 years old)
October 2nd, 1984, to October 1st, 1985

Since the year I had Mr. Wadsworth so dominates that part of my life, and did long before I found out about the molestation charges, I hardly remember a bloody thing about the next academic year. I was in Grade 4, and, at Edgewater, that was the start of French Immersion for those of us that took that option, meaning the majority of classes were conducted in French, with English, phys. ed, and, I think, Moral and Religious Education done in English. Sadly, this probably means that I spoke better French when I was 10 than I do now (though I read more for pleasure in French now, even if it's mostly just French-translations of manga). My teacher was Mme. Mollica, and, while I remember roughly what she looked like (Italian, curly hair, maybe around 35 at the time), I don't seem to have much in the way of specific memories. Which is probably a blessing, since I went so long with the entry about my tenth year. I remember I drew a lot of Transformers, even for class assignments, and that's about it. That also could be the year we started having music classes with Mr. Bethune, where he taught us songs like "An Indian Summer Day on the Prarie" and "Yellow Bird". I think that was probably also the year that Mr. Bulow started taking us outside more, for team sports and for skiing. Oh yeah, I also traded a lot of Wacky Packages stickers with Wade A.

I think that was also the year that they started cutting the budget for schoolbuses, so that those of us who lived within a mile or so had to walk, and I live a little over a kilometre but not quite a mile from Edgewater, so, while the walk would take me about 15 minutes today, it took around 25 minutes when I was 10. But it was a blessing in disguise as I no longer had to travel on the bus with Robby B., so, while I still wasn't popular with his kiddy gang, I was no longer beaten up.

In October 1984, I also got my very first pair of glasses, since I had a weaker left eye. I got to miss school for the day and go downtown, though I remember very little about the actual eye exam, which must have been a "Number 1 or Number 2, 1 or 2" kind of affair, but I remember, I got home and MuchMusic, which was only a couple of months old at the time, was on the television and I saw Martha and the Muffins' freaky "Cooling the Medium" video with the guy with the missing eyes (which was just a bad chromakey effect, but it was only 1984, so music video special effects didn't need to be good). Anyway, I didn't actually wear my glasses much for the first few years, but I didn't really need to back then except for long distances.

I went to my last Cub Camp, summer Cub Camp, in Contrecour, Quebec (the only one I attended with my brother, Nick), but didn't have that good a time. I remember I didn't care much for the way they dumped the toast into a bucket like manure, so I just boycotted all food except for the Coke and candy I brought in my bag. Also, I remember I was enrolled into summer daycamp, which was held at Nôtre Dame de Lorrette elementary school near Olympic Park, but I think there were only about two or three anglophones there and all of the counsellors were Francophones, and I think I gave up after a week, but I was already getting too old for that shit anyway. I remember, though, that my brother Nick, his friend Michael, and Warren, a kid we babysat, were still all in it, and one time they snuck off to pick raspberries in the woods in the long-gone vacant lot behind Olympic Park and got in some trouble.



That particular year, I got a Pepsi can novelty AM/FM radio from our local Radio Shack, and, in the summer of 1985, a lot of nights, I just stayed awake most of the night listening to music on the now defunct CFCF 600 radio station, whcih used to run music all night, and, thanks to CanCon regulations, I never need to own the Guess Who's "These Eyes" on CD because I have it permanently burned into my "temporal lobes". Also, they played Richard Harris's "MacArthur's Park" at least once a night, probably because, at 8 minutes long, it's the perfect song to play when you need to go to the bathroom (at least it would be until Guns N'Roses 10-minute "Coma" was released 6 years later), not that they had any on-air personalities overnight outside of the news breaks. (And, yes, that's right kids, Richard Harris sung bad novelty songs before he played Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films.) Another thing I remember clearly was that used-General Motors king Harold Cummings had that one rap ad they played at least once an hour:

If you want a car and you've got little to pay,
Get the next best thing to a new Chevrolet,
A used car with a Harold Cummings "O.K.",
See Cummings, see Cummings today.

[Some other verses I only remember snippets of]

You get a much better value, my, oh, my,
If you see Harold Cummings before you buy."

I think eventually, CFCF 600 switched from the "Magic Memories" format to having the overnight broadcasts of the syndicated Larry King Show and Jim Bohannon on the weekends.

Speaking of cola-related stories, that was also the year that Coca-Cola introduced "New Coke", and I was a pretty early convert, and one of the few, actually. I loved the taste of the stuff and continued drinking it even after Coke relented to the pressure and brought back "Coca-Cola Classic". They still kept New Coke, later called "Coke II", going where I lived until 1995, at which point it disappeared from Montreal-area stores and I switched to being primarily a Pepsi drinker. (Supposedly, they still sell Coke II in "Chicagoland", so maybe I ought to visit there sometime.)





One comic book I got into was Marvel's Power Pack, a comic about four grade school siblings, Alex, Julie, Jack, and Katie Power, who come across a dying frinedly alien one day who transfers to them his powers, and they use their powers to battle foes, alien and human alike. This was a rare Marvel comic to be created by two women, Louise Simonson and June Brigman, and actually had a sensibility not unlike what I also appreciate about Sailor Moon, kids trying to have a normal childhood while being burdened by the heavy responsibilites their powers bring (while, at the same time, being unable to talk to their own parents about their secret lives... at least for the better issues of the series). I think the first 20 issues of around 50 or so were better than the rest, when they tried to intergrate it too much into the existing Marvel Universe, and have crossovers galore just to sell more comics. Eventually, I stopped caring much about Marvel, at least "modern Marvel", when I realized that they weren't self-contained stories but rather ongoing soap operas with spandex, muscles, and powers, and, when they did crossovers, sometimes it was very difficult to know what was happening if you weren't familiar with the "mythology" of the other series. While I grew disillusioned with Marvel, I would still buy a graphic novel collection of at least the first 20 issues of Power Pack, where the storytelling was quite tight. (Here's another good article about Power Pack, from where I stole the cover scan.)

Here's a fun bonus (thanks Google Image Search): the Power Pack kids, in civilian clothes, drawn manga-style, from this site which includes many drawings of Japanized Marvel characters. I don't *think* this is the first page of a Power Pack doujinshi... at least I hope it isn't (though not all doujins are hentai).

I also started reading both Cracked and Mad. What can I say? I found them amusing at the time.



Almost certainly, the Japanese cartoon ultimately responsible for planting seeds in my mind eventually leading me to seek out more anime a decade or so later was Robotech, which I have already discussed when Pierre Bernard talked about his difficulty finding DVDs of it on "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage", so I don't really need to describe it again. Just, I can't believe that I got up before 7 a.m. on a Saturday just to watch 2 episodes of Robotech on WVNY-22... these days, if I'm awake at all then, I'm often just going to bed.

Robotech was really the first anime I watched where I had some vague idea that the cartoon was actually from Japan, even if Carl Macek hid that fact very well in the credits, which mostly just listed the people who did the dubbing and re-writing.



Sing us to victory Minmay, I mean "Minmei"!

Another anime I liked was Tranzor Z, which was really the Japanese series Mazinger Z. I also watched a tiny bit of Voltron, which was really two Japanese series combined into one, (Hyaku Juu Oh) Go Lion (Hundred Beast King Go Lion) and, Armored Squadron Dairugger XV.

A lot of American cartoons I liked back then were actually animated in Japan, mostly by Toei or by Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS), like Muppet Babies, Dennis the Menace (the mid-80s one with the voice of the late Phil Hartman as Mr. Mitchell), Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, that Hulk cartoon, and G.I. Joe, which I didn't care much for at first, until I noticed just how goofy some of the episodes were, like "The Gods Below" (the episode wherein they meet Osiris and Set and other gods in the Egyptian afterlife), "Cobra CLAWS are Coming to Town" (which I discussed on my "Top Ten Christmas Episodes" list last year) "The Viper is Coming" (wherein Barbecue keeps on getting mysterious phone calls from the "Viper" which they think are clues and which, coincidentally, lead the Joes to secret Cobra facilities like Cobra Recreational Base number three in Antarctica, "where they can play table tennis and swim in the Cobra Commander gymnasium, eat lunch in the Destro dining room or watch the Cobra Cuties in the Zartan entertainment center." Then they find out that the "Viper" is just the window wiper, who has a comical European accent.). So much comic potential, as Something Awful has realized with analytical reviews of the episodes "Lasers in the Night", "Twenty Questions", "Red Rocket's Glare", "Cobra Stops the World", "Primordial Plot", "Money to Burn", and "Cobra's Creatures". G.I. Joe is also a frequent source of humour for X-Entertainment, FenslerFilms has memoriably re-edited the "Knowing is Half the Battle" PSAs (my top 5 are "PSA 05", "PSA 07", "PSA 10", "PSA 13" (just weird, man), and "PSA 19"), and my brother, John, used to do something called "Gay G.I. Joe Theatre".

Like I said yesterday, I was also big on The Transformers, both in toy and cartoon form, though I really only liked the first two seasons of the cartoon, when it was set in the "present". One thing about the toys: I had a lot of nice Transformers, but they either broke really easily, like Trailbreaker, who was my early favourite, or I had them get stolen very quickly, like none other than Autobot leader Optimus Prime, though the asshole that stole that one didn't take the trailer.

I liked some other car-related cartoons that year too, like Turbo Teen and DiC's Pole Position, with the theme song that had the characters talk over the singers half the time, making the lyrics difficult to decipher, though the final line was obviously written by Ed McMahon "Hey-Oh! Hey-Oh! Hey-Oh! Hey-Oh! Hey-Oh!". (You can get an MP3 from this page.) As for prime time, I mainly kept on watching the shows I mentioned in the past two installments with the addition of The Cosby Show. I think Miami Vice was on just too late for a school night. Also, I got introduced to The Benny Hill Show through reruns on WVNY-22 at 7 p.m.

All in all, not a terribly eventful year compared to the previous year. I filled my head with a lot more pop culture and not so many actual life-experiences.

My favourite movie released between October 2nd, 1984, and October 1st, 1985?

Another one of my top eight films:



But I'm already running a day late with these things and I can't think of anything particularly original to say about it and I want to talk about some more "cult" movies, so I'll just link to the main Back to the Future fan site and leave it at that.

Several of my favourite "cheese" movies were released this year, including Lifeforce, relatively big-budget (by 1980s standards) cheese with space energy zombie vampires infesting London, created using expensive full-scale sets at Elstree Studios and detailed miniatures, and lots of creature models. It's from Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the credited director for Poltergeist (though, supposedly, he was high a lot of the time and producer Steven Spielberg had to pinch hit as director). And I love the "prime minister" scene, with the nonchalant secretary offering the two astronauts tea while chaos and carnage is ensuing outside (not realizing that she's about to have her energy sucked out by an already-infected prime minister, who is not Margaret Thatcher), and the London Underground scene creeped the hell out of me, considering that my England trip was still relatively fresh in my mind at that point. Plus, it's got naked Mathilda May!

Since I'm someone who thinks the Bond movies are great when they're over the top and cheesy, I'm actually rather fond of A View to a Kill, which I discussed last December.

Paul Reubens as Pee-Wee Herman went all over the United States to find his stolen bike in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, a film that's imaginative without getting too pretentious like so many of Burton's films from the past decade or so are. Pee-Wee finds out that there is no basement in the Alamo, which is a mission in San Antonio, and another great cult film set in San Antonio is Cloak & Dagger, a film starring Henry Thomas as Davey Osborne and some girl who is a Drew Barrymore lookalike who accidentally get themselves involved in the dangerous, often fatal, world of international espionage all because of a seemingly innocent-looking Atari cartridge. And you get to see a hell of a lot more of San Antonio than you did in the Alamo scene of Pee Wee's Big Adventure, and it's got Dabney Coleman in a duel role as Davey's father, Hal Osborne, a recently-widowed airline pilot, and as Davey's "imaginary" friend, Captain Jack Flack! And it's a lot more unflinching in its portrayal of the consequences of violence than modern kiddy spy movies like Spy Kids and Agent Cody Banks. This would be an excellent film for X-Entertainment.com's Matt Caracappa to review, but it's sadly still not available on DVD.¹ (Okay, this was actually released in August 1984, but I forgot to mention it yesterday.)

I really gotta rewatch Sesame Street presents: Follow that Bird sometime.

No discussion of cult films from 1985 would be complete without mentioning Richard Donner and Steven Spielberg's The Goonies, a film whose lasting value I underappreciated until I watched the feature-packed 2001 DVD and was won over by the naturalistic performances of the children. Plus, you just don't get kids films where they're brave enough to do statue dick jokes anymore.

So, in honour of that film, I will now present this special feature where Chunk spills his guts and tells us everything.

THIRTY DAYS, THIRTY YEARS, THIRTY BORING STORIES...
(Chunk from Goonies edition.)

Everything?

EVERYTHING!

Everything... okay, I'll talk. In third grade, I cheated on my history exam. In fourth grade I stole my uncle Max's toupee and glued it on my face when I played Moses in my Hebrew school play. In fifth grade, I knocked my sister Edie down the stairs and I blamed it on the dog. When my mom sent me to the summer camp for fat kids and then they served lunch I got nuts and I pigged out and they kicked me out. But the worst thing I ever done... I mixed a pot of fake puke at home and then I went to this movie theater, hid the puke in my jacket, climbed up to the balcony and then, t-t-then, I made a noise like this: "hua-hua-hua-huaaaaaaa", and then I dumped it over the side, all over the people in the audience. And then, this was horrible, all the people started getting sick and throwing up all over each other. I never felt so bad in my entire life.



¹ Though someone started a petition to get Cloak & Dagger on DVD, to which I say "godspeed", even if Internet petitions are worthless.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 10:03 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

THIRTY DAYS, THIRTY YEARS, THIRTY BORING STORIES...

My Tenth Year (9 years old)
October 2nd, 1983, to October 1st, 1984

Please do not be offended at the following story. I do not want to trivialize anything that happened to some of my classmates, but I will give my own experience as I remember it before providing context.



My Third grade teacher was Mr. Wadsworth, and the year I had him was the best year for me in elementary school. Mr. Wadsworth didn't want to be too formal and stuffy and told us to call him "Dave" so that we would look to him as more of a friend than as a teacher. He liked to play the guitar a lot, teaching us to sing songs like "Moonshadow", "Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown", "Farewell to Nova Scotia", and "One Tin Soldier". We had weekly spelling tests, and, if we got three or four in a row "perfect", he would give us a Canadian silver dollar. In one corner of the classroom, he had a fascinating menagerie of creatures like a large snapping turtle and one of those "Siamese fighting fish", which he'd told us was so fierce that it could jump from aquarium to aquarium and even crawl on the floor a little just to snack on other fish. He took us on frequent field trips, to places like the Dow Planetarium, and he would buy us Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's, and he'd frequently show us movies like Marlo Thomas's Free To Be You and Me, teaching gender freedom. And one time we went camping in the soccer fields. He also had a great sense of humour and would sometimes play songs like "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Eat It". I hardly have a bad memory of Mr. Wadsworth myself; as far as I can recall, the worst thing that happened was that he spoke to me because some Indian kid named "Jabeer" or something said that I had called him "Jabba the Hutt" on the schoolbus, but I didn't even know who that kid was, so he had me confused with someone else. I think I excelled academically when I was with Mr. Wadsworth; I remember writing one story about Lassie that went on for at least ten pages, and I remember that I was at the top level of those SRA reading program cards we used. Another time, I had come back from Swim/Gym (which I will talk about later), which took me out of class weekly for about 2 hours, and Mr. Wadsworth had written H₂0 on the board and was asking people what it was, and I was the only person who knew it meant "water". If you ask me my opinion of Mr. Wadsworth based solely on my memories, I would have said he was a terrific teacher, because I had a blast in his class.

Unfortunately, David Wadsworth was also an active pedophile, arrested in 2000, after which some of his victims from my school came forth with more accusations, to which he pled guilty for molesting eight students (and, in 2002, admittted to assaulting another thirteen students). He was sentenced to five years in jail, but was released last year, I think to a halfway house of some sort, and he was looking for a job as an accountant. I can't find much about the case on the Internet, but there is this one English-language page on an anti-spanking site that goes into some detail. I would never accuse school officials at my school of being inactive, but I do get the idea that a couple of teachers had some supsicions about Wadsworth but couldn't prove anything. Most notably, I remember once, my grade 5 teacher, Mr. Drury, addressed the class, in English (I was in French immersion, so this was unusual), saying that, if we had any problems we couldn't tell anyone else about, we should write them down on a paper and hand it to him. I didn't know what to make of that at the time, but, in retrospect, it would make perfect sense that he asked us to do that because he wanted proof to be able to get the police to investigate Wadsworth, if that's why he was asking us to do that.

Anyway, I don't know who his victims were in my grade and I'm not going to wag my finger at him because it has already been four years since the truth became public and I simply don't think that I could write a condemnation of him now without it coming across as trite. I can't forgive him because he never did anything bad to me so I'm not really in a position to offer (or deny) forgiveness to him in the first place. All I can really say now is that I think it's unfortunate that my own positive memories of Mr. Wadsworth do not jive with the reality several of my classmates were experiencing at the time and leave it at that.

Another thing about the academic year was that, as a kid with poor coordination, I was sent to Swim/Gym, which was cool because I got to miss two hours of class a week, but I was so ahead of my classmates academically at the time that it didn't hurt me one bit. It was over at John Abbott College's Casgrain Building, where they have both the huge gym and the swimming pool, and, in retrospect, was probably the "lab" portion of a course designed to teach athletic therapy. I don't remember much about the "gym" portion of the programme, other than that one of the other kids there was Michael M., the mentally-retarded kid from my kindergarten, but I remember the "swim" part very well, because, no matter how much I tried, I never could actually make my body float without the assistance of "water wings" or other floatation devices. That's probably why I wouldn't make a good flight attendant. Also, after the swim, we were to get changes in the Casgrain locker room, and I always kept my swimming trunks on and changed in a toilet stall, but I do remember all the naked college students walking around and being fascinated by how "big" they were compared to me. Also, there was a sauna room that I would sit in for a few minutes, even if it did reek of stale chlorine inside.

In my personal life, one day in October 1983, we were driving east along Highway 20, and, in a long-gone vacant lot just before Baie d'Urfé shopping centre and the intersection with Morgan road, we saw a dog wandering in a ditch. She was a very mixed-breed dog that was obviously mainly terrier but I think her colouring was closer to that of a German Shepherd. We took her home and dried her off and I think we put an ad somewhere for a "lost dog" since I remember one person coming to our house, but she was in tears because that wasn't her dog. So, even though we already had Penny Pooch, we kept her and named her "Lucky", since she wasn't killed by the traffic on the 20 (the main highway between Montreal and Toronto; it becomes the 401 in Ontario). Also dog-related, Penny had her first litter of 6 puppies in February 1984, and we gave them all away through ads. My mother thinks, or thought, that one of the people who took advantage of our free puppy offer was Elizabeth Manley, who won the silver medal for figure skating at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, but, in retrospect, it was probably just a girl who looked somewhat similar, since 4 years between seeing the girl once and seeing Elizabeth Manley at the Olympics is still a sizable period of time.

In December 1983, about a week before Christmas, there was an ice-storm or something like that, and the power, in Pincourt at least, was out for three days, but I don't think it was nearly as cold outside as it was in January 1998, when Montreal got the mother of all ice-storms and our power was out for almost a week.



In the autumn of 1983, I also became a Cub Scout, and, that academic year, I went to both Winter Cub Camp, at Camp Kinkora, where I was on a team that won a silver in a toboggan race (that particular weekend had a "Winter Olympics" theme, since the Olympics were concurrently being held in pre-war Sarajevo), and Summer Cub Camp, at Camp Tamaracouta, where we slept in tents the first night, but it was raining so hard that we slept in a cabin the other night. Gee, we had fun being "lost" in the woods in the pouring rain, though I think the troop leaders were pulling our legs and knew exactly where we were. I don't know why, in that photo (which I cropped to avoid getting in trouble with Alan M., who is in an amusing pose with our "Akela"), I felt the need to endorse Coca-Cola or why I got someone to hold my Garfield doll behind me. Yeah, I was into Garfield big-time by then, thanks to both the collections of strips and to the prime-time animated specials featuring the voice of the late Lorenzo Music.



Other TV shows I was into, besides those I mentioned in previous entries: this was the season that I first got into Family Ties, and, no, I wouldn't say that Alex P. Keaton, the Michael J. Fox character, is the primary reason I am a rare Canadian who supports the Republicans now, but, certainly, he set the foundation as to get me to think of the Republican Party in a more positive way than most Canadians do (even if I didn't quite realize he was meant to be satirical; it was still more even-handed a portrayal than most straw-man "Republicans" you see on TV shows nowadays). I also do remember watching such X-Entertainment.com-reader favourites as Saturday Supercade, the show with the Frogger, Donkey Kong (with the first animated appearance of Mario), Q-Bert, and Donkey Kong Jr. animated shorts, the Space Ace cartoon, Rubik the Amazing Cube, and The Littles (which, thanks to The Incredible World of DiC, you can watch several episodes of online at Yahooligans TV). I also liked... well, at least watched (since it was puzzling and I didn't know what to make of it) Dr. Snuggles, which I discussed back in February. And, for people tracing the origins of my anime fandom, this was the year that Videotron finally got TV Ontario, so I watched Polka-Dot Door (which, at 9 years of age, I was *already* much too old for, but I watched it to make fun of it), Today's Special, Kidsbeat, the news show for kids which showed short clips from music videos, which, in the days shortly before MuchMusic arrived on the scene, was how I knew which songs were popular (like Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)"), aaaaaaaaaannnnnnnndddddddddd... the cartoon Belle and Sebastian, about a boy in the Pyrenees searching for his mother with the help of a huge white dog, which was actually an English re-dub of Belle et Sebastien from French-language public TV, which, in turn, was a localized version of the Japanese anime series Meiken Jolie, which was an animated retelling of the 1960s French Belle et Sebastien TV series, based on the series of books from French actress and writer Cécile Aubry. Since the cartoon was about France, it was another cartoon that I didn't realize was actually Japanese.

Another toy and cartoon franchise which hit North America in a big was in 1984 was The Transformers, which ties into the next story just a little bit.



In the summer of 1984, my brother Nick and I went back to England for three weeks, while my parents and the two youngest siblings went to Toronto). We flew on British Airways Lockheed L-1011 TriStar's both ways, from Mirabel (CYMX) to Heathrow (EGLL) and back, and stayed with our grandmother and Uncle George in Wimbledon, Merton, London, the first week, then went up to Northampton to stay with my Uncle Jim and Aunt Celia, then up north all of the way to Guisborough, in the Borough of Redcar and Cleveland near Middlesbrough, to stay with my Uncle Peter and Aunt Janet for a few more days, and, finally, we went south to Canterbury in Kent to stay with my grandfather, Charlie Rimmington, who had a big black dog. I forget everything we did, but, in London, we went to the London Zoo, where my most distinct memory is that they now had Slush Puppies in England, the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tower Bridge, a Thames River cruise, Greenwich Observatory, the Cutty Sark, and possibly the London Transport museum and the Tower of London. In Northampton, I remember going Sunday shopping at the open-air market near Grosvenor Centre, and we went to some sort of county fair with a yelling drunk guy angry at me and Nick for being "foreigners" (even though we were born in Britain). We also took a sidetrip to Warwick Castle. I remember that we bought a mechanical bird thing that actually "flew", I remember waking up "late" one morning, and my cousin Andrew welcomed me back to the world of the living, and I remember playing Jet Set Willy and Valhalla on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum system (yeah, the graphics are fairly primitive, but they were miles above the quality of the Commodore Vic-20 my father had bought us the previous spring... wow, Radar Rat Race and Lunar Leeper, except those are the Commodore-64 versions in the links, not the Vic-20 versions which were even more primitive... well, now I don't have to do a paragraph about that). And we went to a restaurant called Huckleberry's Hamburgers that tasted exactly like McDonald's. I don't remember much about Guisborough... except that I had a dream in Guisborough when I went to a WH Smith store, and some "Men in Black" type government spooks took me round back and talked to me about things and then made me forget what happened, and, for years, I was wondering if it was a dream or real, perhaps something to do with my UFO experience in 1981, but, the next time I travelled to Guisborough 13 years later in 1997, I found out that there was no WH Smith store in the town, so it could only have been a dream. (It was a lot less "real" than my UFO memory anyway.) In Canterbury, we visited Canterbury Cathedral, and the huge open-air shopping district around the cathedral, and we took a sidetrip to Portsmouth to visit the H.M.S. Victory and my great-uncle, the painter Eric Rimmington. Also, my grandfather wanted to take us to some fish-and-chips place, but we insisted on McDonald's... though I still love McDonald's today, I kind of regret doing that since my grandfather died in 1987 and I never got another chance. (Though McDonald's UK was offering banana milkshakes back then, which were damn good.)

How does this story all tie-in to Transformers? Two ways; first, it was my brother, Nick's, 8th birthday was while we were there, so my mother packed some presents including the Decepticon leader, Megatron, which was a rather detailed model of a Walther P-38 complete with silencer and scope. But our luggage went through a security check without incident... I don't know if they just missed that or whether they could easily tell that it was just a toy. Also, my mother gave me either $30 Canadian or £30, with which I was supposed to buy souvenirs, but I skimped on the souvenirs, and, when I got back home, I went to Wise and bought myself the Decepticon Soundwave, the tape-recorder with the mini-cassette-robots, Rumble and Buzzsaw. I was a bit disappointed to find that it didn't actually work as a tape recorder, but, still, it was a cool toy.

One other lame story related to my England trip was that my mother gave me some gum and licorice for the flight to England, except I somehow assumed I was meant to spread it out over the course of the entire three weeks, as though there wasn't any candy in the candy-loving country of England, so I just took nibbles at a time.

My tenth year was defninitely the most eventful year of my childhood, and this may be the longest entry, at least until that other year I hinted about in the introduction.

My favourite movie released between October 2nd, 1983, and October 1st, 1984?

Hot damn, 1984 was packed with films I like!

You have James Cameron's Tech-Noir classic, The Terminator (which, obviously, I didn't see for several years after it was released), Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis's Ghostbusters, one of the all-time great comedies when Bill Murray gives the performance for which I think he will be remembered the most, Dr. Peter Venkman, Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street film, a truly great horror movie full of dark comedy (by the way, I still got to get around to reviewing Freddy vs. Ghostbusters sometime), Joe Dante and Steven Spielberg's Gremlins, which is another dark comedy (but a cute and fuzzy one too, which they made kiddy storybooks out of, even if several people died in grisly-but-amusing ways) and it takes place at Christmas, which is always a plus for me, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which, while even I admit that it is the weakest of the original three Indiana Jones films, is still a lot of exciting, silly, sometimes ghoulish fun, and which provided lots of footage used in the imagination scenes of Muppet Babies, which was, in turn, based on a sequence from The Muppets Take Manhattan, another decent 1984 film (of course, they started Muppet Babies well before The Muppet Takes Manhattan was released, so the baby sequence in the film is almost certainly a commercial for the then-upcoming animated series).

1984 was a landmark year for anime too, with Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which was so popular it was what led to the creation of Studio Ghibli in the first place, and Haruhiko Mikimoto's big-budget, beautifully-animated Macross: Do You Remember Love, which is an alternate retelling of the events of the SDF Macross series (a.k.a. "Rick Hunter" Robotech) which has been explained as what it would be like if they made a movie about those events within the Macross universe, they get the major facts straight but fudge a lot of the small details. (Annoyingly, Macross: DYRL has yet to be released properly in North America, even 20 years after it was released in Japan, because of various rights issues.)

But which film do I like more than any of those? I pretty much said it in the previous installment, didn't I?



Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer is still my favourite Japanese anime film, where Mamoru Oshii, whose work is often so deep that it's pretentious and largely inaccessible to a casual viewer, lets his imagination run free, but, since it's based on an existing series, Oshii's pretentious excesses are kept in check by being forced into a framework where the story still has to be fairly accessible to the average Urusei Yatsura viewer, so, in some ways, he has to make compromises to fit in the pre-established characters into his framework where life is indeed a dream and time is meaningless. Also, he wanted to focus this story on the human characters and not the aliens except for Lum (and her cousin Jariten/Ten-chan), since the fanboys would have revolted if she wasn't present, so it's an entirely different take on the show than in most Urusei Yatsura episodes.

I have a half-written review based on the new Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer "Collector's Edition" DVD which I fully intend on finishing "sometime", but, until then, you can always read my review from almost 5 years ago.

Also, the autumn of 1993 was when we got our first VCR, and, for the first couple of years, we rented from this really crooked place called "Tri-Ade Video", that bought one copy of a movie and rented out copies of it. I did always find it a little suspicious that the movies I rented usually had a couple of seconds of WPTZ-5 (NBC) logo right at the beginning, like they were taping over stuff they taped off television, or just that was the channel they were usually on just before they began "dubbing". They got closed down by the cops after a couple of years.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 9:51 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

FLORIDIANS ARE BRACING FOR IVAN!

Because, you know, they're afraid that there will a Men Without Hats concert and Ivan Doroschuk will sing a song that isn't "Safety Dance".

(Actually, I like the MWH song "O Sole Mio" better, but nevermind.)

posted by Steve Brandon @ 5:17 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

THIRTY DAYS, THIRTY YEARS, THIRTY BORING STORIES...

My Ninth Year (8 years old)
October 2nd, 1982, to October 1st, 1983

1983 was the first "borderline" year, a year I thought of, from a vantage point of several years in the future, as being when the era of me being a little kid stopped and the era of me being an older kid, or, in other words, a "preteen", started. I don't remember why I thought that way, since, from the vantage point of now thinking back on my whole life, 1984 was much more monumental for various reasons you shall read about tomorrow and on Saturday.

I was in Grade 2, and my teacher was Mrs. Mackey, who, from what I hear, died a couple of years back. :(

I honestly don't remember much about Mrs. Mackey, just that she was a nice woman with a Scottish accent, so she would pronounce "Wolf" as "Woof", and I don't think she was too "au courant" with politically correct terms for minorities and called blacks "coloured people", though she probably didn't mean anything bad by that. (I mean, the NAACP does stand for "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People", so it was an acceptable term at some point in history, just it was outdated, even when I was a kid.) Incidentally, not that I ever reached the point where I was calling anyone "nigger", but, yeah, I did have a few (completely inconsistent) racial attitudes when I was that age that I got from other stupid kids and which I'm not too proud of now, so, if you ever read this, Joy-Ann, I apologize.

Also, she was horrified at the amount of Coca-Cola I drank. Some people even started a rumour that I put it on my cereal, which isn't true. I said I had it "with" breakfast, not that I put it "on" my breakfast. She came up with some sort of "Coke programme" where I was only to drink one glass a day, but I don't think my parents cooperated, or, if they did, they gave up on implicating it pretty quickly since I liked the stuff so much.

In February 1983, I think there was the first and only teachers' strike that affected me to any great degree. We were off school for three weeks, which was a wonderful break from all the bullying.

Speaking of bullying, and I forgot to mention this yesterday, my mother did speak to Mr. Morgan, the principal, about it and he was a sweet old man but he was completely ineffective in doing anything about it, possibly because the parents of the bullies had a "my child would never do that" kind of attitude. In one assembly, he gave a message that was, basically, "Play only with those kids who want to play with you", but the bullies weren't going to listen to that.

Another thing about that academic year that sucked was that, I think, only three people from Ms. Guilbault's class got to be in the same class as me in the second year. Lucas E., the kid that stuttered badly, was (he'll feature prominently in a story a couple of days from now)... I don't even remember who the other kid was. So, a lot of my nascent friendships from grade one were interrupted, and I was very shy and it was difficult for me to make friends, especially when so many people in the class seemed to have known each other since Kindergarten, so I felt like an unwelcome outsider.

Oh, yes, one weird thing about my grade 2 class was that I don't think Edgewater elementary had enough students for three full grade 2 classes, so my class was actually split with a grade 1 class, so Mrs. Mackey had to intergrate 2 different curricula. I do remember becoming friends, very briefly, with this one grade one kid named Levko, and, for some reason completely unknown to me now, I became convinced that the guy had amazing hypnosis powers. I know hypnosis is just a psychologial phenomenon now, still not one hundred percent explainable by science but pretty much believed to be an intense state of concentration when the mind is in a relaxed state and able to focus easier on specific instructions, but, back when I was 8 years old, it seemed like a really cool form of magic that existed in real life, and I kept on bothering him to hypnotize me so I could see what it was like. That probably annoyed him to no end, but I think he moved away by the end of that year, so, if I was an unpleasant memory to that guy, at least it was a mild, short-lived unpleasant memory.

Why was I so interested in hypnosis at a young age? I think I can explain it, at least partially. (Too Much Information warning, highlight to read) I liked a lot of comic books and cartoons that occasionally featured hypnosis as a plot element, especially Richie Rich. And I thought that Ricky B., the kid who lived across the street from me, looked a bit like Richie Rich and he had a similar name. Anyway, this kid would frequently just pull out his penis and start peeing on his lawn, and his penis was circumcized, which is something I don't think I had encountered up until that point, and I found it fascinating, and got what were early proto-gay feelings thinking about it, not that I really knew what was happening. So the short answer is that Ricky turned me on, and he reminded me of Richie Rich, who I associated with hypnosis, so, as a result, I got a fully-formed hypno-fetish at a young age, and the very act of being hypnotized was erotic to me. I think I asked him to hypnotize me too. Also, I didn't know about circumcision back then, so I assumed that what he had done was just pull his foreskin back, and this encouraged me to... umm... take action to make certain things on myself a bit more flexible, so I can thank Ricky for motivating me to get over my juvenile phimosis. Another thing about Ricky was that there was a large but shallow crack between his driveway and the pavement of his front steps, and he had a "rule", that, for some stupid reason, me and Nick went completely along with, that any toys of ours that fell in the crack were now "his". I think I lost several good Hot Wheels that way, before I figured out to not play Hot Wheels with Ricky.

One of the girls in the grade one portion of Mrs. Mackey's class, who was quickly skipped ahead to grade two because she was rather bright, was Kelly T., and, in November 1982, she invited me to her seventh birthday party, which was nice. Unfortunately for me, I took that to mean that she was interested in me romantically, but, while she didn't mind me as a friend, the romantic feelings were never reciprocal in that way like they were with Jennifer H. in grade one. So I had an unrequited "Ralph Wiggum loves Lisa Simpson" torch burning for her for several years. I didn't think she had hypnosis powers, but, for a while, I was convinced that she was a witch, but a "white" one, and she had magic coursing through her veins. Why did I think that? Because I liked reading comics about "Li'l Sabrina", who was the kiddy version of Archie Comics' Sabrina the Teenage Witch, in the days long before they made a live-action sitcom version with Melissa Joan Hart and the fake-looking "Salem the cat" puppet, and, for whatever reason, Kelly reminded me of Sabrina.

Yeah, Pierre Bernard will probably be thrilled to know that I was fairly into Archie comics in 1983, since the graphic designer, best known for his work with Late Night with Conan O'Brien, did lettering for several comic book publishers, including Archie Comics, in the early 1980s. And Archie Comics are especially popular in Canada, in both official languages, Archie titles being the only comics we can buy in most supermarkets. I don't want to be too cyncial, yes, Archie and friends do live a naïve, sheltered existence in an ideal community (one with very few minorities back in the day, though that may have changed by now), but a eight-year old is not asking for too much in terms of social commentary or "relevance" from his reading materials, and I enjoyed what I was reading, which is all that was important. And the stories of "Li'l Jinx", the main page-filler character in the world of Archie, were at least more entertaining than those of "Li'l Lotta" or "Li'l Dot", Harvey's "page-filler" characters. (I didn't care much for "That Wilkins Boy", the other Archie Comics page-filler, though.)



Another comic book I enjoyed was Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew, DC's early-80s attempt to put out a "funny animal" comics. My favourite character was Pig Iron, who I think was a vague parody of Colossus from Marvel's The Uncanny X-Men.

In 1982, actually within the span of the previous installment (I think in August 1982), we got a dog, Penny Pooch, who was the "daughter" of Heather, a West Highland White terrier from down the street, though Penny's father was a poodle. We loved the dog, but our tabby cat, Felix, couldn't stand her, and one day, around October 1982, he just ran away, never to be seen again.

Because of Reagan-era deregulation, striking down Federal Communications Commission regulations enacted in 1971, in response to the popularity of the Hot Wheels cartoon, to prevent toy companies from sponsoring productions of cartoons based directly on their own toys, toy companies once again got into the animation business in a big way, leading to the "golden age of toy cartoons" (at least it was a "golden age" if you're the sort of person who enjoys reading X-Entertainment). The first such cartoon to become popular was Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which I enjoyed, though not as much as some of the toy cartoons that would arrive a little later.



My parents upped my bedtime to around 9 p.m., so I could watch early primetime programming, and got into Knight Rider, "a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist", in a big way, seeing as how I like cars at all. But most of you would remember that show, and it was pretty formulaic, so there's not that much to say about it. Other than that, if anyone wanted to buy me the first season Knight Rider DVD boxset, I wouldn't take it back to the store. I enjoy watching the reruns late at night even now, and spotted Ken Foree, from Dawn of the Dead, in one episode they played the other week. I also enjoyed The A-Team, and, of course, Diff'rent Strokes, though I think I got into that one more through daytime reruns than in the evening.

I gotta mention Saturday mornings, just because 1982-83 was the season that ABC replaced Schoolhouse Rock with Menudo on ABC in-between cartoons, and I remember the "I like to da-aa-aa-ance, I like to da-aa-aa-ance" song so well (but I looked on a Best of Menudo CD and couldn't find "I Like to Dance" listed as a track title, leading me to believe that these songs were exclusive to ABC). This was also the year that Reading Rainbow started on PBS, but I can't find any screencaps of the original live-action/animated beginning with the butterfly and the dragon and the astronauts. :'( My favourite memory of the first season was when LeVar Burton visited those computer animators, who did a form of animation that was actually closer to painting than 3D graphics like TRON had, and they made the animated Chinese dragon boat "sink"... ooh, wow, primitive animation like an 8-bit videogame cutscene, but it wasn't like anything I had seen up to that point, so I was impressed.

That's all for now, but, if you enjoyed my stories today, here are some books movies you might also like, but you don't have to take my word for it! (Well, you do have to take my word for it, I just wanted to make a lame Reading Rainbow in-joke segue.)

My favourite movie released between October 2nd, 1982, and October 1st, 1983?

Pretty obviously,



Yep, I'm one of the few people who like Return of the Jedi better than The Empire Strikes Back, since I find the set-pieces more impressive and I like happy endings. I thought that "most people" preferred RotJ until I got on the Internet and saw that one scene from Clerks. I'm content to be in the minority on that one. This is also the first film I'm mentioning in this spot that I actually got to see in the cinema during its initial run in 1983; I was just barely old enough to see The Empire Strikes Back when it was released, but my siblings weren't, and my parents weren't going to take just me to see it. We have the Return of the Jedi LP record soundtrack, and I grew to love the Ewoks' victory celebration "Yub Nub" song. Unfortunately for me, one person who didn't like the "Yub Nub" song was... George Lucas, and he replaced it in the "Special Editions" with some generic victory music. GODDAMN IT, GEORGE! I WASN'T PARTICULARLY BOTHERED WITH GREEDO SHOOTING FIRST, BUT YOU DON'T FUCK WITH THE "YUB NUB" SONG! PUT IT BACK IN! NOW! Thank God I have a LaserDisc player, so I can watch the original versions of the Star Wars films with decent video quality. But I'll probably get the Star Wars DVD set eventually regardless, even if I'm half certain that Lucas eventually will relent to pressure and put out the original versions on DVD next time he wants a large chunk of money.

It would probably be very, very wrong for me to link to a page with an mp3 of the original "Yub Nub" song, but you can hear a heavy metal version of the "Yub Nub" song here.

Fun fact: My bed still has a Return of the Jedi blanket on it!

Also, 1983 saw the release of the first theatrical Urusei Yatsura film, Urusei Yatsura: Only You, better known as "Mamoru Oshii's *other* Urusei Yatsura film". For this one, Oshii was pretty much just following orders and he basically made an extended version of a typical Urusei Yatsura episode, with lots of alien hijinks, so this film lacks the artistic depth of Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer, but it's still a lot of fun, and I love all of the musical segments, especially the great opening theme segment, "I, I, You & Ai", with Ataru's friends and nemeses all reacting badly to receiving Elle's "wedding invitations" (and the cute alien penguin mailman pedalling along, completely oblivious to the anger he's causing by delivering the invitations). And it's got an "out of the blue" Graduate reference!

One other anime film released in 1983, and I didn't particularly care for it myself, was The Professional: Golgo 13, which was mostly a collection of static shots with minimal animation. I think it's worth mentioning simply because of the one computer-animated segment, featuring a skyscraper and some helicopters, that looks very primitive now but had very sophisticated CG by 1983 standards, far more detailed than the CG in TRON. You can see a couple of screencaps on this page.

Finally, though this is technically a mini-series and not a movie, 1983 also saw the broadcast of V, about which Matt Caracappa has recently written a great review. That mini-series kicked more butt than any mini-series since, and you can still see the influence in sci-fi that came later, especially Independence Day.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 9:52 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

PIERRE BERNARD'S WISH MAY BE PARTIALLY GRANTED:

From "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, (Thursday, July 15th, 2004, though, technically, it was the early morning of the day after):

"Bottom line, America, the Cartoon Network should get rid of Case Closed, replace it with one of the shows I mentioned or bring back Cowboy Bebop with his nerve-calming jazz music!"

From the article "Cartoon Network Anime Updates" from AnimeNewsNetwork.com:

"Cartoon Network also stated that they do not expect to license any more Case Closed. The first two seasons, 51-episodes, of Case Closed are currently scheduled to air on Adult Swim."

So, Pierre, it's still on the air for the time being, but it appears that the show is not the success that Funimation and CN were hoping for, so you may be getting at least part of your wish soon.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 7:58 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

KIDS! MORE INCENTIVE TO TAKE UP SMOKING!

I found out about a certain page from KinFreon over in the F*ckin Otaku forum.

If you know about the Japanese OS-Tan phenomenon, with Japanese artists taking operating systems like Windows ME and personifying them as cute anime girls, some other site has done the same thing, only with cigarette brands. (Hint: If you can't read Japanese kana, hold your cursor above each link and check the bottom of the screen to see what the name is.)

I love Marlboro-chan!



I'd love to get some of these characters on t-shirts, just to piss off the anti-smoking gestapo types¹, though I bet this sort of humour wouldn't even be legal in Canada.

¹ By "anti-smoking gestapo", I don't mean those of us who really just don't care for smoking, I'm talking about the type of people that get overly zealous and annoying about it who think ridiculous things like how they think just seeing a tobacco company logo will make people who have never smoked before want to start. I don't think I would ever smoke, but it's a choice consenting adults make regardless of the risks, just as I like to eat Big Macs even though I'm fully aware that they aren't exactly the healthiest food in the world.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 7:36 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

THIRTY DAYS, THIRTY YEARS, THIRTY BORING STORIES...

My Eighth Year (7 years old)
October 2nd, 1981, to October 1st, 1982

(By the way, don't forget to read yesterday's installment, which was delayed because Blogger wasn't working properly yesterday evening, otherwise, you'll miss my UFO story.)

Now that I was living in Pincourt, I had to start off fresh in a new school, Edgewater elementary school, mostly with kids that had known each other for at least a year. I was in Grade 1, Room 3, and my main teacher for most subjects was Ms. Guilbault, though I also had a French teacher, Mr. Lessard, a music teacher, Ms. Brenda (?), and a phys-ed teacher, Mr. Bulow (my P.E. teacher through all of elementary school). Our principal was Mr. Morgan, and we had assembly in the gym each Monday morning, an assembly which included, and this would be unthinkable today in a Quebec public school but it was fine at the time, singing a few Christian hymns from a hymnal and then saying the Lord's Prayer. I think the hymn Mr. Morgan preferred, at least of those we sung, was "God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall". You have to keep in mind that, back when I was a kid, Quebec public schools actually were still organized according to religion, Catholic and Protestant, rather than by language like they are today.

I don't remember that much about Ms. Guilbault's class; I think my most distinctive memory was that the class was unofficially divided according to which book series we were assigned in English class. Those of us precocious readers ("the smart kids"), got Surprise, Surprise, a book about some kids doing... things... I forget. The slow readers ("the dumb kids") got a series called Mr. Mugs, a series about a dog, I think it was a sheepdog. There was a third intermediate-level book series, but I don't remember what it was called. I know, from an adult perspective, especially as an adult who has, in fact, studied basic developmental psychology, that "the dumb kids" is absolutely not a fair assessment, since kids develop at different speeds, but that's the way I thought of them at that age and, in the early years of elementary school, I was one of the smartest kids in the grade, so I was a little cocky in that regard. I didn't ever actually call them that to their faces, of course, I just kept my opinion to myself.

Another thing I liked was Sun-Maid Raisins, you know, in the little red box with the picture of the young woman with the grapes in the yellow circle representing the sun. The box is so iconic, I don't think I need to put a picture of it up here, but, for those of you who are completely clueless, see the logo on their corporate site. I had one little box each day for recess, and, over the course of a school year, that adds up to about 180 boxes. I didn't toss the empty boxes out, I kept them inside my desk, and made little cities. I think there may have also been an empty carton or two of "Lait École" school milk in there too. After a while, I noticed everything I put in my desk began to smell a little rank. I couldn't figure out why. (I think Ms. Guilbault made me clean out my desk eventually, but not for a long time.)

I was also obsessed with Ms. Guilbault's marks for "correct". You see, instead of checkmarks, she did this letter thing that looked like it was a "G" for "Good" but also a "C" for "Correct. For whatever reason, I attempted to draw it myself, and would do it over and over hundreds of time, never getting it correct, always making it too curvy. Since I suck at describing it, I made a stupid diagram so you can see what I'm talking about, if you're a glutton for knowing inane, picayune, small details of my childhood, but, if you weren't, you wouldn't have made it this far. :)

I don't remember much about Mr. Lessard, other than he usually wore a blue or purple pullover with yellow arms, and we sung songs like "Les Animaux de ma Maison" and... nope, nothing. I frankly don't even remember how much of the actual French I understood. Ms. Brenda, which I'm not sure was her last name, it might have been her first name, had a kissy monkey doll, and I remember more about the doll than I do the actual music. Mr. Bulow was great, but I had him for seven years and don't remember too much of what we did in the first year, though I remember, at some point within the first few years, he taught us the Mexican Hat Dance, we played some game under a giant canvas "parachute", and there was an imagination game of some sort called "Charlie Balloon". And I think, for activities requiring music, he played Juice Newton's "Queen of Hearts" a lot, though I'm not 100% sure about the accuracy of that memory because so did my father at home.

Also, I continued with my physical therapy by leaving class on, I think, Tuesdays and Thursdays for half-an-hour or so to work with these two women who did exercises with me in the Edgewater cafeteria. All I really remember was that I got a sticker every week, including many of old cars, which I liked in a big way. Although I think I had a much stronger British accent than Nick did, since Nick wasn't quite a year old when we came to Canada, I didn't get sent to speech therapy but Nick did.

I never could make friends too easy, being shy and somewhat of a loner (probably what you'd call "Asperger's Syndrome" these days), but Chris R. made the best effort to get close to me in my early years and I went over to his house many times and we... umm... listened to Hall and Oates as well as Sheena Easton? Again, I don't know if it's just my brain mixing up memories, but my early memories of Chris are intertwined with the songs "Private Eyes" and "Morning Train". Another song I really liked back then was Dolly Parton's "9 to 5", which, when my mother went to a laundromat in Ile Perrot to do washing, I would always play on the jukebox. (That laundromat also had pinball machines, so laundry day was fun for me.)

Also, I had another kiddy "girlfriend", Jennifer H., who was from Barbados, but I think she was white. Possibly she was mulatto, come to think of it, but, if she was mulatto, she had blonde hair. I had a "birthday" party in 1981, though it was actually held closer to Hallowe'en, and we had a bunch of people over and we actually kissed. Ooh. And that was my last kiss with a girl who isn't a relative. Jennifer was in a different class in grade 2, and, after that, I think she moved away from Vaudreuil, where she lived. :(

Nick and I were also friends with Ricky B., the youngest of three boys who lived across the street. I have a little to say about Ricky, but I'll save it for another entry where it would be more relevant. Ricky's oldest brother, Robby, was very anti-social, and, as as a young kid who lived very close to him (and took the same school bus), I was an easy and obvious target for his anger, and he routinely beat me up on the bus, sometimes assisted by a couple of other neighbour kids that, in retrospect, probably didn't really have much against me but were following what Robby told them to do out of fear. My father tried setting him straight once by paying him to mow our lawn, but he only did about half of it before quitting, though my father paid him anyway so that he wouldn't do anything to our house, though, eventually, he did, writing "Sit on It" in liquid paper or white paint on the side of our house, which was there for many years until we renovated our house in 1997 and covered that wall with siding. Also, this one time, I think when we barely knew him, we invited him into our house and several items from my father's Rubik's Cube collection (various variants, official and unofficial) went missing. In later years, Robby and his allies would wear denim jackets with "The FALCONS" written on back, and me and Nick would invent lurid tales of the Falcons' giant headquarters "fort" in the woods, surrounded by a moat, but, in retrospect, probably the only thing that "gang" had was their jackets and a couple of packs of cigarettes. I remember being at Cubs at Edgewater one evening and Robby was making out with his girlfriend, who I think he called "Dee Dee" or something, in the playground and being an asshole to us Cubs, who were supposed to be there. Another time, when he was in his young teens, he held a knife to his father's throat and I think the police had to talk him out of slicing. Eventually, that family moved, I think to Oshawa, Ontario, and, Robby supposedly got into some sort of accident that game him some brian damage and actually made him nice. I don't know how much of that is true. If you are reading this after I'm finished the whole month and want to trace why I started to dislike school and procrastinate and get "sick" so often, I think fear of Robby was the initial instigator.

"Lame segue leading to a jumbled, meandering paragraph" time... speaking of troubled teenagers, this was the era of Pac-Man fever, so the local shopping centre here in Pincourt (then called "Centre d'Achats Ile-Perrot", though now it's "Le Faubourg de l'Ile") had an arcade, located roughly where Librarie Boyer is now, only it was a grimy place full of "bad influences", and admission was limited to people over 14, if I remember correctly. The place was closed down by 1983 or so, probably because of open drug dealing. What I'm getting at is that I didn't have much of a chance to play the "classic" videogames, at least during the first era. We had one of those Radio Shack Pong clones and that was about it. I never got an Atari or an Intellivision, and we didn't have a home computer back then. So, my experience with videogames back then was pretty much limited to the following: Videotron, the only cable company serving my area, used to have, on Cable 33, this one channel where, in the daytime, they showed children's programming, mostly dialogue-and-copyright-free eastern European cartoons like "Peter", this series about a kid with orange hair and glasses and a dog and they came up with wacky inventions (hmm... sounds suspiciously like Mr. Peabody and Sherman, only the dog didn't talk though neither did the boy), and also National Film Board shorts in both official languages like "Les Tacos"/"Soapbox Derby" (the one set in Montreal where I remember the kids having a party where they passed around cigarettes and orange Crush, and this one kid peed on a fence, and there was a soapbox race somewhere) and a few old reruns of French-language educational shows from the 1970s like Les Oraliens. This was about the closest thing we had to YTV on cable in Montreal in those days, and it was only local. What does this have to do with videogames? Well, in the off hours, they had these videogames that people would call in and play with their touchtone phones... there would be a screen with a bunch of text and a phone number you would call and you'd hear the person calling in talk to the guy running the games and then you'd see the game as controlled by the caller. I remember that we would be fascinated by this one game, which was a rip-off of the old arcade games Defender, with a spaceship flying over a landscape, and Gorf, with an orange floating monster who would show up sometimes. Even though this had graphics that probably made Super Mario Brothers seem like, maybe, Sonic & Knuckles in comparison, we'd watch this games being played for extended periods of time because we weren't used to videogames. We were very easily amused.

My mother also let us stay up a little later, maybe as late as 9 p.m. some nights, and let us watch some non-kids shows on PBS, like Cosmos and The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. Safe entertainment for kids, right? No! Carl Sagan talking about what will happen to the sun and the universe from a total athiest scientist perspective was pretty depressing stuff for a 7 year old (and still frightens me, thinking of a cold void with no solid matter and no hope), and I didn't realize that the Vogons, who demolish the Earth in the first episode, weren't meant to be taken too seriously as alien monsters, and, after seeing the show, I read the book version, and it said that the attack came on a Thursday, so, each Thursday, I was a bit afraid that the Vogons would zap us all. My mother liked listening to the Cosmos soundtrack, largely by Vangelis, who also did the Chariots of Fire theme.

Speaking of my mother, the autumn of 1981 was the only time the Expos ever made it to post-season play as division champions, due to an abbreviated season because of a strike, so my mother became a baseball fan listening to the National League finals, which the Expos lost on Blue Monday, October 19th, 1981. And, speaking of sports, this was one of the years I tried soccer, but I really didn't understand what was going on. I also went to English-language daycamp over at Shamrock Park that summer, and horrified one of the counsellors by telling her how much Coca-Cola I liked to drink; she told me it would rot my teeth and my stomache... pphh, right.

I'd say I don't have anything else to say, but the truth is the opposite. But I've said enough for an overview of my life as a seven year old.

My favourite movie released between October 2nd, 1981, and October 1st, 1982?

Kind of a "meh" year.

I could never get into Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, or The Dark Crystal, while TRON is just crap with innovative graphics, and I've kind of gone off E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (even before Steven Spielberg tried to re-imagine his own film by deleting the terrorist references, changing the guns to walkie-talkies, and made E.T.'s puppet face too expressive).

I guess, for the sake of naming something,



But Wrath of Khan isn't even my favourite Star Trek film, First Contact is, and, for Trek films with the original cast, I like The Voyage Home best.

One film I hated as a kid but which has kind of grown on me is Annie, and... I can't think of anything else.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 7:59 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

MY OFFICIAL BIRTHDAY DVD WISH LIST...

Not that I think any of my actual relatives read this thing anyway, since they haven't mentioned certain things about myself I've mentioned here but never actually talk about, but, just in case, I made a DVD Wish List, which I've posted in my Rotten Tomatoes Journal, since you can view (and print out) single entries there.

This is in declining order of importance, by the way.

By the way, I've been having problems with Blogger over the past two days, where I can write but not always post. Both yesterday's and today's installments of "30 Days, 30 Years, 30 Boring Stories" should be up by evening.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 1:48 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

THIRTY DAYS, THIRTY YEARS, THIRTY BORING STORIES...

My Seventh Year (6 years old)
October 2nd, 1980, to October 1st, 1981

Yup, this was the year I finally went to Kindergarten, which was rather convenient for me since the school where my Kindergarten was, Beacon Hill elementary, was directly across Elgin Crescent from my townhouse, with just the playground and soccer field in between. My kindergarten teacher was Ms. Judy Steiner, who won the Friends of Children Award from the Canadian Association for Young Children a couple of years ago, and I think there was a physical sciences teacher named Mr. McGee or McGill or something.

I had my first kiddy girlfriend, Mary S., with who I think my "relationship" was heavily inspired by Richie and Gloria from Richie Rich comics. I was also friends with Michael M., who had a problem that, in retrospect, was probably mental retardation. Also, there was a guy named something like Brian or Bruce or Darren with who I might have become best friends had we stayed in Beaconsfield; I think his father was some sort of producer with CFCF-12 or something and I even went to his house a couple of times. I feel a little bad I don't remember his name.



I was a precocious reader, like I said yesterday, so I remember that I would often get pulled out of class to talk to some specialists who listened to me read books, especially famous British illustrator Quentin Blake's Monster series (written by Ellen Blance and Ann Cook). I wasn't particularly attuned to physical education, unfortunately, so they sent me to frequent sessions over at Cedar Hill elementary school in Pointe Claire with some sort of physical therapist named Ms. Davis.

(Too Much Information warning: highlight to read.)I know this is probably weird to mention, but the clearest thing I remember from my Kindergarten year, at least at school, was this one time where we went to the indoor municipal pool over at the large arena near Beaconsfield library and town hall, which of course would be the first time I saw, at least that I remember, girls my own age naked, since we all changed together. Now, I had a young sister, so I already knew the plumbing, but I remember being repulsed yet intrigued by the "crust"... even today, I'm not too sure what that was. Other fond memories I have are the time we all watched The Muppet Movie in the gymnasium, back when watching movies in school was a big deal because they had to bring in an actual theatrical print since videotapes were still fairly rare (and actually more expensive than the earliest LaserDiscs, then called DiscoVision), and I remember going to Parc Safari over in Hemmingford, though the main thing I remember about that is, of all things, the Pepsi I had; Pepsi cans in Quebec back then didn't have a pull tab, they had this thing with raised "buttons" and I remember having difficulty opening it, and then I remember that I couldn't finish the entire can, even though soft drink cans back then were only 280 mL, not 355 mL like they are today.

Also, because I was small and very thin (as hard as the "thin" part is for me to believe today), they, meaning either school officials or my doctor, were kind of worried that I wasn't developing properly physically, so they sent me off to Montreal Children's Hostpital for a barrage of tests, which included, one time, drinking what I assume now was some sort of solvent with a radioactive isotope in it and then they made me lie under some sort of X-ray machine or scanner for two hours, and I remember looking up and seeing them adjusting the instrument that was scanning me, which made weird square and rectangle shapes in the "lens" window thingie. I don't think they ever actually discovered anything wrong, though.

If you've been paying close attention, you'll remember that I said that my father came to Canada to work with Canadian Pacific; I think this was the year he switched to doing whatever he did with computers back then at Bell Canada, where his office, at the time, before they built the white "twin towers" of Bell Canada and Banque Nationale on de La Gauchitière and Beaver Hall Hill in 1983, was in the grand old Sun Life Building on Mansfield, which was the tallest building in the British Empire when it was finished in 1931 at 26 storeys and a height of 122 metres (400 ft).

He got his own terminal for home, however, this was 1980, so it was the kind without a monitor, it just printed paper. I remember, on the weekends, he'd play a really primitive online text version of Dungeons and Dragons, and he'd have long strips of waste paper (by "strips", I mean the kind you could tear off into individual letter-size sheets, which, of course, were excellent to use the backs of for drawing, and, since I could have several sheets attached together, I liked to draw elaborate street layouts for my Hot Wheels cars to drive on, and I remember that these roads followed a complex set of rules, where I didn't allow "dead ends" and I didn't allow a road to touch the same road twice, which was kind of an abstract mathematical idea, now that I think about it.

Once, my brother Nick and I were exploring the vacant lot behind the Club West Island tennis club, which has long since been built over with townhouses, and we saw something that looked like a light green tomato, so we decided to invstigate. Nope, not a tomato but a wasp's nest, and we got stung many times each, and Nick was alright but I swelled up badly, not enough to take me to the hospital, but certainly enough to keep me looking swollen for weeks.

Ths was the year I experienced my very first disappointing cartoon adaptation of a comic I liked, which was, of course, Richie Rich, being about the only comic I had read up to that time; Hanna-Barbera made Richie several years older, and replaced his Tuxedo top with a stupid (but easier-to-draw-repeatedly) red sweater with a big yellow R on it and they replaced his shorts with straight pants. And they always made the skanky maid robot Irona sing "I've been working on the railroad"... what's the deal with that? I think the only thing this series was notable for in the long run was that the voice of Gloria was performed by Nancy Cartwright, who would, a decade later, go on to be the voice of Bart Simpson. (A much better Richie Rich cartoon, more or less faithful to the character designs in the comics, aired in the mid-1990s.) Another cartoon I liked, because I was an idiot kid who didn't know any better, was Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, the cartoon where they travelled Bill & Ted style through time along with Cupcake, a girl from the future, and Mr. Cool, Fonz's annoying dog. Compared to this shit, the cheesy 1960s Spider-Man cartoon, which I also enjoyed and I would have mentioned yesterday but forgot, was fucking Fantasia. And this was the era in which the nearby border stations were only just beginning to experiment with weekday afternoon cartoon programming, so they showed a lot of old copyright-lapsed Porky Pig cartoons, as well as Tom & Jerry, and those Harvey cartoons which included not just Casper the Friendly Ghost, but also those cartoons that were a humourous look at some subject, like the Mississippi river, for example, which always ended with someone, like "the mouth of the river", telling you to sing along to the bouncing ball. My mother could never quite figure out how I knew the lyrics to all of these 1940s and 1950s songs like "Ain't She Sweet".



Christmas was very special that year... not only did I score a Hot Wheels "Scorcher Chamber" set, but that was the first year I saw Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, and which is still one of my top three Christmas episodes of anything, and, as a Christmas special, right up there with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Ah, I was so happy to get that on DVD last year.

One minor seed that was planted in my mind was that I heard Chuck Mangione's "Feels so Good" on the radio a lot, then I hardly ever heard it again... until King of the Hill came along where Chuck Mangione, playing himself, became an occasional recurring character, so having that one annoying piece of music I couldn't identify haunt my brain for some 16 odd years did pay off in the end after all.



My bedtime back then was usually between 7 and 8 p.m., but I remember that my parents took me to a Guy Fawkes Day party at one of their friends's house in Hudson, which I know must have been a day early, November 4th, 1980, since I remember that a TV was on and Ronald Reagan was sweeping the electoral college, not that I knew details, just that some guy named "Reagan" had beat that "Carter" guy they always talked about on the news. (And, if you're wondering if I have any memories from that long ago pertaining to Canadian elections, namely Prime Minister Joe Clark's minority government losing a confidence vote and calling another election where he was defeated by Pierre Trudeau's Liberals, the answer is "no".) Of course, as much as I admire Reagan now, back then, I didn't have any sort of opinion, and I know the adults in my life probably didn't think too much of him.

The oddest experience of my entire childhood occurred at some point within a few days one way or the other of March 21st, 1981. It was night, and I had been put to bed but was awake, drinking a glass of water, when I felt compelled somehow to look up at the sky. I saw a bright light high up in the sky, and it split in two, and one half of the "star" started to descend, becoming larger and larger until I could see that it was... well, a flying saucer. There were about two or three concentric rings of lights on the bottom, and it slowed down for the last few metres before touching down on Alton Drive between my bedroom window and the Club West Island health/tennis club, next to the T-junction with Amherst. It wasn It wasn't a large craft, maybe about 15 feet in diameter at most (it was narrow enough to land on the street) and 7 or 8 feet tall (the top was well below the sightline of my bedroom window on the second floor of the townhouse, though the lawn slopes slightly, maybe a couple of feet), though the to of the craft, which was a very cliché silver disk, had a blinking red dome, which I remember reflecting off the back of the stop sign on Amherst and the health club. Why was I the only one to see it? Possibly they were manipulating time so that whatever they were doing would be in a fraction of a second to most people on Earth, except for myself, who they chose to observe. Or they could manipulate everyone except me to look away and not drive there at that exact moment. Anyway, I'm not going to embellish the story... I didn't see any little green men, and my memory stops a few seconds after the craft was fully on the ground. Was it just an intense dream inspired by television or movies? Possibly, but it is worth noting that I hadn't seen either Star Wars or Close Encounters of the Third Kind at that point. Anyway, I actually kind of like that the truth of whether or not this was real is very ambiguous in my mind. That was one of my biggest specific problems with Spirited Away, that, when Chihiro got back to the car with her parents, you saw it covered with branches and dirt, like the car had been there for a long time, meaning what happened to Chihiro actually did happen and wasn't ambiguous, when it should have been left ambiguous, like in My Neighbour Totoro or like my own fantastic experience. (By the way, if it was real, I'm one of those people who believe that the so-called extraterrestrials are, in fact, humans from Earth, just they're from tens of thousands of years in the future and they're studying their ancestors.)

Since we were now a family with four children, my parents decided that the townhouse would be too small for us and they looked at several houses but settled on one in Pincourt, because Pincourt is on Ile-Perrot, just off Montreal island, and the municipal taxes are much lower. In June 1981, I think it was on the 26th, we moved to the house where we still live to this day (but not for much longer). At the time, Pincourt wasn't too well-developed, so, one negative for me growing up about living here was that, at the time, there wasn't any real community arena so I missed out on a lot of sports. We've had a lot of construction here over the past couple of years, though, and we now have a new arena only about 100 metres from my house, near the new high school and library. Much too late for me. Also, one thing that would have been cool for is that we had an actual Montreal MUCTC (Montreal Urban Community Transit Commission, now MTC) bus go along 5th avenue about once an hour, but, only about a year or so after we moved here, they cut the bus, and we haven't had regular bus service since. We have the AMT train, which is a lot better than nothing, but they only have that a couple of times a day in each direction outside of rush hour, and the bus would be much closer to walk to. Still, it was a nice community, and we had a big yard and woods nearby to explore and even a huge rock on our front lawn and a "sandpit" that was really what remained from under the swimming pool that had been destroyed by lightning.

I'll leave it here for today.

My favourite movie released between October 2nd, 1980, and October 1st, 1981?

Another fanboy upset:



(Ah, good to see the Twin Towers on the cover, even if Metropolis in this film wasn't shot in New York but rather in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and in Pinewood Studios in the U.K.)

Yeah, Superman II is a bit of a mess consisting of scenes Richard Donner shot simulatanously at the same time they were shooting the first, since they were planning on shooting both movies at once before Warner got nervous and demanded they concentrate just on the first one, and scenes the credited director Richard Lester shot to fill in the blanks, but it's worth watching just for the big fight between Superman and Zod, Non, and Ursa in the Times Square-like set built on a huge soundstage at Pinewood alone.

I also like Raiders of the Lost Ark, just not as much as Superman II (or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and The Great Muppet Caper. ANd I like the goofy appearance right at the end of For Your Eyes Only by an actress, Janet Brown, playing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the only time in the James Bond series as far as I remember that they had an actor playing a current real-world politician, but a female prime minister was still a novelty in 1981.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 4:18 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

THIRTY DAYS, THIRTY YEARS, THIRTY BORING STORIES...

My Sixth Year (5 years old)
October 2nd, 1979, to October 1st, 1980

This would be the year I started Kindergarten, right?

Wrong¹... as you know, my birthday is October 2nd, and the birthday cut-off date for getting into Kindergarten, at least at the time, was actually September 30th, so I had to stay in nursery school for another year (while, if I had been born September 30th, 1974, I would have been able to start Kindergarten in 1979), where I remember that I had a friend named Chloé or whichever variant of the name she used, and another one named Glen. One specific memory I have of that year of nursery school was that, on Saint Patrick's Day in 1980, they attempted to serve me apple juice or water coloured green with food colouring, but I refused it because I thought it looked disgusting. Haven't been too fond of Saint Patrick's Day since, though that might have something to do with me being a British citizen.



By June 1980, we had been in Canada for three years, so my parents started the process of applying for Canadian citizenship, and, on September 2nd, 1980, I became a Canadian citizen, though all I really remember about the process was going to some government room and shaking a judge's hand. I'm still a duel citizen who retains my British citizenship, though, and can go back to England anytime I want (and the thought has occurred to me a couple of times, and there are things I like better about Britian like how convenient it is to travel pretty much anywhere in the country with their efficient rail system and just how neat and vibrant London is, but I'd miss some small pleasures of life in Canada like the great shopping centres we have, and being able to watch American television straight off the antenna... anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with my bio).



Probably the thing that happened to me that year that had the most lasting impact on me in terms of planting seeds in my head, though I wasn't aware of it at the time and the seeds wouldn't really bear fruit for another decade and a half, was that this was the year that I first saw Battle of the Planets (later known as G-Force, a cartoon about five superhero-type kids in costumes with a bird design protecting the world from the plans of the evil Zoltar, some guy in a blue mask with two large spiky things I think were supposed to look like cat ears and surprisingly full lips for a man, which I think CFCF-12 showed for a while (if not, it would have been on one of the American border stations, like WCAX-3 (CBS), WPTZ-5 (NBC), or WVNY-22 (ABC)). Little did I know at the time that the cartoon was basically a heavily-edited version of the Japanese anime cartoon Ninja Science Team GATCHAMAN (Kagaku Ninja Tai GATCHAMAN) with the more extreme violence and most of the death removed and the robot dog 7-Zark-7 and a "ready room" and some new backgrounds added by American animators. (Not that I have a problem with them "sanitizing" the show for North Americans, especially in the days prior to there being dedicated cartoon cable channels, but this subpage of the previous link explains some of the differences in more detail, and here's more about the androgenous Katse/Zoltar/Gallactor) One episode, that had mechanical peacocks in India going around hypnotizing people making them evil, made me afraid that I'd see these hypno-peacocks coming towards my house right up Amherst Road... I think people's eyes went blank when they were under the influence of the peacocks; that freaked the hell out of me. Anyway, I'm not going to give you some spiel about how that cartoon made me respect anime for its mature, arcing, storylines and dealing with death in a manner unlike any cartoon I'd seen, because I don't remember how much of that was retained, and, even if some did show through, I was way too young to appreciate that, and I most certainly had no idea that the cartoon was from Japan. (After Goldorak (Mazinger Z) and Albator (Captain Harlock) became popular on French language TV in Quebec, I falsely assumed that cartoons that looked like Battle of the Planets came from France!) I guess the true impact it had was to make me more conditioned to accept other cartoons drawn in a similar style, and I would indeed, but not for several more years. Aside from the 1994 Gatchaman OVA series, pretty much a "remake", I haven't seen it since about 1981, so I can't give an opinion of this show any more specific than I already have. I just wonder if, if I hadn't seen Battle of the Planets, whether I would have gone on to be an anime fan as an adult? Probably, if it hadn't been that which planted the seed, it would have been one of the other shows I saw a couple of years later which I will discuss when I get to them. Since I couldn't find a decent picture of the show that showed not just the G-Force/Ninja Science Team but also Katse/Zoltar in some detail, here's a bonus pic, though I think in this shot, s/he looks more like a character straight out of The Tick, not from an anime.



Also in 1979-1980...



I was a precocious reader, so that was the year I got into Richie Rich in a big way. I loved reading about Richie, his girlfriend, Gloria, his butler, Cadbury, his dog, Dollar, his limo-driver, Bascomb, his inventor, Professor Keenbean, his mean cousin, Reggie van Dough, his... umm... other mean cousin, Mayda Money, and his comedian friend, Jackie Jokers. Characters I didn't like so much: his robot maid, Irona, for being an ugly skank (to this day, I don't particularly find French Maid outfits sexy because of her), his best friend, Freckles, for being poor, Freckles' friend Pee-Wee, for being boring, his chef, Chef Pierre, for always saying "Sacré bleu!", and especially all those goddamned page-filler characters, often from other failed Harvey comics, like Li'l Lotta, the fat one, Li'l Dot, the girl who liked dots (haha), Gerald, who was that other rich kid who dressed up a lot like Richie except he had a cap and glasses. Goddamn it, if I wanted to read your adventures, I would have bought your comics! You just made me waste a dime out of the 40 cent cover price, and that's before the exchange rate! Assholes! Same goes for you Stumbo the Giant and Baby Huey in Casper the Friendly Ghost comics! I liked it when Richie and Cadbury put on their superhero costumes and became... umm... Super Richie and Super Cadbury! And they had a few comical villains like the Onion, who ate onions and then breathed on people, and Dr. N.R.Gee ("energy", get it), a brilliant scientist who got into a lab accident of some sort and whose head turned into a giant red lightbulb. Also, I liked the lame movie and TV parodies of movies like Jaws and Carrie and TV shows like Charlie's Angels and Happy Days they did starring Jackie Jokers; for someone who had to go to bed after Pulse with Bill Haugland, they were my main reference point for late-1970s pop culture. Plus, while violence was minimal, Richie Rich comics occasionally ventured more into Tintin territory, where you had villains who sought weapons of mass destruction like disintergrator rays (which I guess were meant to symbolize nuclear weapons) or a device which could duplicate anything (including armies and weapons; meant to symbolize the arms race), so, while gun violence wasn't common, it did happen a few times. And a lot of the stories featured hypnosis as a plot element, which always fascinated me. To bring this paragraph to a close, Richie Rich sometimes would go visit Casper the Friendly Ghost, however, before you think this is the answer for the common theory that Casper is the ghost of Richie Rich, I should point out that it was always revealed to be a dream.

By the way, to show you how nuts I am for accuracy, I originally was going to use this picture of a Richie Rich digest to illustrate my childhood love for the series, until I noticed that it had the 1986 Richie Rich logo and I wanted a cover exactly representative of the era in which I was reading it.

I can't talk for too long about it, but another show I liked was 3-2-1 Contact, which started in 1980, and I had a proto-crush on Trini, who was played by Ginny Ortiz. I liked the week when Trini was stuck in the desert when her car broke down, and I think at the end, the Goodyear Blimp came to save her. And the time they all met KISS, as in the band with Gene Simmons. And I liked the lame adventures of the Bloodhound Gang. This guy's blog entry has an MP3 of the kickass disco theme song hidden somewhere on the page.

Speaking of crossovers, I think this was also the year that Mr. Rogers visited the set of The Incredible Hulk TV show and showed kids that there wasn't really anything to be afraid of, "The Hulk" was really just Lou Ferrigno in make-up with a few cheap transition effects. You can see a clip of that on this page (it's some way down, but just Ctrl+F "Rogers").

And I liked the 15-minute TV Ontario educational shows (shown on PBS stations WCFE-57 in Plattsburgh NY and WETK-33 in Burlington VT) like Readalong, Math Patrol (this is Sidney in his kangaroo suit, the only disguise we had in his size) and Read All About It (the show with Duneedon and the Coach House and the Herbertville Chronicle which I already discussed in this blog entry from last October), plus American educational shows The Write Channel (a.k.a. WORD-TV, the show with the Bug reporter best remembered for "The Club", the segment where they'd invite kids to send in stories and the club motto was "Palabra Jot") and Thinkabout and Inside Out (same link, not an error). And that map show with the guy with the mustache... goddamn it, what was it called? I've given this link before, but here's the TV Ontario theme page again. And here is Rick Ambrozic's TV Ontario page again.

Umm... also, we had a tabby cat named Felix at this point, though I really don't remember much about him, just cans of Pamper cat food.

Oh yeah, that winter, my grandmother came over to visit Canada, I think for the second time, and we also went down to Lake Placid NY, though I think it was actually after the 1980 Winter Olympics were over, because I remember looking at the flags and they looked kind of tattered. Having the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid was like Montreal got a second Olympic games in a row, since Montreal had the Summer games in 1976 (and they're still paying for it), and Montreal is the closest large city to Lake Placid, which, I think, is closer to Montreal than it is to even Albany.

Might as well end it here for today... I have something more interesting than just talking about TV shows tomorrow.

My favourite movie released between October 2nd, 1979, and October 1st, 1980?

Another one of my top movies...



I first saw Airplane! in 1983, though it was a version taped right off television, so most of the sexual and drug references and all of the swearing was removed. I don't think I got to see the whole movie until I got it on video for Christmas 1989. I love the wacky humour and the dated, but amusingly so, pop culture references, and Otto the inflatable autopilot, and Leslie Nielsen interrupting every minute or so saying "I just wanted to tell you both, good luck! We're all counting on you." and Peter Graves asking the kid increasingly homoerotic and pedophilic questions like "Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?" And, when I'm landing in Flight Simulator, I like pretending I'm Robert Stack as Captain Rex Kramer, telling Ted Striker from the ground to "Sound your alarm bell now! Put down thirty degrees of flap! Alright, Striker, now listen to me. Remember your brakes and switches. Get ready to flare it out! etc..." And the score by Elmer Bernstein, who just died a couple of weeks ago, is still one of my favourites, even if it was supposed to be bad. (I don't know if that means he failed at what he was trying to accomplish with this film or not.) By the way, the Polish movie poster for Airplane is just too weird.

Random fanboy: "But, Steve, surely The Empire Strikes Back is your favourite film from this year of your life?"

Me: No, it's not. And stop calling me "Shirley"!

But it's still a pretty good film, I'm just one of the minority of Star Wars fans who actually prefers Return of the Jedi, for reasons I think I'll give when I get around to it.

Also, I should give a shout out to The Muppet Movie, and Peter Sellers in Being There... come to think of it, looking at my life as I've written it out so far, I think I may be closer to Chance the Gardener/Chauncy Gardener than I care to admit. :P

¹ Well, technically this indeed is the year I started Kindergarten, but, for each year of my life, I'm only writing about the stage of education I was in for the bulk of the year, October through June, not just the September right at the end.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 8:21 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

THIRTY DAYS, THIRTY YEARS, THIRTY BORING STORIES...

My Fifth Year (4 years old)
October 2nd, 1978, to October 1st, 1979

My parents didn't believe in daycare, and, back in the 1970s, I think kids that went to daycare were the exception, not the rule, but I did go to preschool, which, back then, was called "nursery school" though the term seems to have gone out of fashion, over at Beaconsfield United Church, and my teacher was Mrs. Matthews, a woman who seemed like an old lady to me at the time, but may have been as young as 40 or so. (Likewise, I really liked watching Captain Kangaroo in that era off WCAX-3, the CBS affiliate in Burlington VT, and, at the time, I thought that Captain Kangaroo himself was a very old man, so I was a little surprised to read last winter, when Bob Keeshan actually died, that he was only 76, which means he would have only been around 50 or 51 at the time I was watching the show.) Anyway, I don't remember that much about the daycare, especially not the first year... I think I had a friend named Denise, and I didn't like naptime much and (Too Much Information warning: highlight to read) I remember seeing the penis of a boy named Walter (yes, I say that because that's all I remember about him, that he had a penis. Even though I have one too. And the association was so strong that I thought about the name "Walter" for years whenever I looked "down", almost like I thought that was the word for "penis". Guess it was the first time I ever saw one not on me or one of my baby brothers.).

I was also friends with Tracy C., who wasn't from my daycare but who was the middle daughter of "Auntie Lynn", my mother's friend, and I remember her and I playing this game when she would crawl on me and pin me down, I guess like a wrestler, and I know that probably sounds a little dirty, but what do four years old know? I don't think there was any sexual aspect to it, it was just normal rough play.

Also, my earliest memories of Fairview Pointe Claire shopping centre, the largest shopping centre in Montreal's West Island suburbs, often have me going with Lynn rather than my own mother, for whatever reason. Believe it or not, kids, back then Fairview was just one storey (the second storey was added in 1985) and didn't have the skylights it has now (I think Fairview had some skylights, but they didn't stretch from one end of the mall to the other), so it was a darker place. And Fairview's "anchor" stores were the now-defunct Eaton's department store in the west (where Sears is now), the now-defunct Simpson's store in the east (where the Bay is now), and the now-defunct Steinberg's supermarket in the north (where... umm... that home decoration store is now, I think), and Fairview didn't have that fourth arm stretching south where Sears used to be before Eaton's closed in 1999 and then where Les Ailes de la Mode attempted to make a go at it before it failed and left a large depressing empty department store. So many other stores from Fairview are now gone, a trend that started with the closing of all Oglivy stores except for the large landmark downtown Montreal location, followed soon by the Pascal's hardware store, which had this complex wrought iron interior facade with a lot of tools even a couple of things with hinges like mailboxes that children could open and close, Simpson's, Steinberg's, Woolworth's, Marks & Spencer's, and Eaton's; the recent closings of Smithbooks (formerly W.H. Smith) and Compucentre (replaced with CompuSmart) at Fairview were the last links to stores I frequented as a child that were still open.

My Christmas memories as a kid are largely centred around Fairview, which had very elaborate displays with mechanized animals and people very similar to the old display they still put up every year in the front window of the downtown Oglivy's (different from the ones they've used from the past decade or so, with the ugly mechanized kids with the fat rosy cheeks)... it was probably Santa's village, but Santa takes a backseat in my Fairview Christmas memories to the mechanical animals, and the my visual memory of the entire village was framed with the large Eaton's store looming in the background with people looking down at us from their tables in the restaurant on Eaton's second floor... goddamn, that memory is magical.

And, kids, as unbelievable as it seems, before 1986, the area across Saint John's boulevard (boul. St. Jean) where Complexe Pointe Claire (the shopping centre with Maxi et Cie. supermarket and Chapters bookstore) is now was a vacant lot, so no Toys R' Us and, as such, the best place in the West Island for a four year old boy to go was to the long-defunct Toy World toy store at Fairview, which was great for those small rectangular games made by Tomy that had a clear plastic front and usually featured manipulating one or many tiny metal balls, and Hot Wheels' stuff, since my mother introduced me to Hot Wheels on my fourth birthday and soon, just like Richie Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums, I had a huge collection of cars and tracks and sets, and looked forward to getting those packs of four or five cars with the really nice box (much nicer than the bubble packs they have now) where the cars were arranged horizontally, facing the large plastic "window", almost like a mini-auto dealership. Toy World is long gone, and it probably sucked compared to Toys R' Us (or even Wal-Mart, which didn't open in Kirkland until 1995), but, to a four year old, it's the place you never want to leave.

My Uncle Jim and Aunt Celia and I think my cousins Andrew and Martin came over to visit us that summer, and we went to Quebec City for a few days and stayed in a motel so generic that it's the motel pictured as the typical "motel" in Grolier's New Book of Knowledge encyclopedia from 1981¹, I shit you not. I remember odd things about that trip: having to pay to watch television, and that we had Kentucky Fried Chicken (Poulet Frit Kentucky) in the really old barrel with the orange band at the bottom and the flesh-coloured Colonel Sanders (who was still alive back then, though he only had another year or so to live), and I think we had to share a bathroom with the room next door (note to Best Western lawyers: I'm not 100% sure about that one), where my aunt and uncle and cousins were staying, but I remember very little about the actual trip inside the city; I know I went on the funicular, and I remember a little bit of the boardwalk on Dufferin Terrace outside the Chateau Frontenac, but that's about it.

Also, the summer of 1979 was the summer that I had an operation, to fix up "a little thing in the wrong place", as my parents put it. In other words? Yup, Cryptorchidism, or, an undescended testicle with a hernia. So, I went to Lakeshore General Hospital in Pointe Claire for a few nights to have an "orchidopexy," and I went in a semi-private room where I got to play with toys and eat ice cream and have my mother read books to me, and, at some point, I had the actual procedure done, and I remember them putting the anesthesia cup over my mouth, and, yes, I did have one of those intense anesthesia nightmares where I saw the doctors, except they were all covered with dark veins like monsters. Anyway, it's a common procedure, but I think mine was a little more compicated than most, because while the web page I linked you to says that "[a] small incision is made in the groin and on the scrotum", my own scar goes well up onto my penis, meaning the split at least a little of it open like an overcooked hot dog (wince). I think my penis was orange and black for a few days and my mother had to help me pee.

The other thing that happened to me that year was that my final brother, John, was born on August 10th, 1979, a day I remember because that was the day my father had to go to the town of Valleyfield, around 50 km southwest of Montreal, to do something driver's license-related, Valleyfield being where one of the main driver's testing centres in Quebec is located, and I think my father took us to look at the Beauharnois Canal a little bit.

TV shows I enjoyed in the era: The New Pink Panther Show, The Bugs Bunny & Road Runner Show, Superfriends, the old Filmation Batman cartoon, Clue Club (one of Hanna-Barbera's rip-offs of their own Scooby Doo; hear the theme song here), Scooby Doo), Sesame Street, The Friendly Giant, Mr. Dressup, Mr. Rogers' Neighbourhood, The Electric Company², Captain Kangaroo, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, The Price is Right, Family Feud, and The Flintstones, which, as people who lived in Montreal will remember, CFCF-12, in the days when it was only a CTV affiliate and not a network-owned station, showed every day at noon for years and years and years, up through my late teens (early 1990s), at least. And I have my first memories of watching the news, Pulse with Bill Haugland (who is still on the air, though the title was changed to CFCF News when CTV bought the station), hearing tales of things I couldn't possibly understand happening in far away Afghanistan.

Hmm... I've written way too much, at least without images to break it up. I'll try and be more concise tomorrow.

Special Feature: Things that scared the shit out of me as a 4 year old.

3 things:

1. When I was watching Mr. Dressup and Ernie Coombs wandered from his "living room" area to the area to the right of the "Tickle Trunk" when he did stuff that was sort of like a kitchen only you never saw appliances, just a counter. Why did this scare me? Because of the "Wise Old Owl"... it was a picture, but it talked! And its eyes moved! "Twit de Whee, Twit de Whame, what scared me as a child was pretty lame!"
   
2. When Costas the barber had his barbershop in the Baie D'Urfé shopping centre (before he moved to Pointe Claire Village in the 1980s) and would greet us each and everytime me and my brother Nick passed it... obviously, he was trying to be friendly, but I was, and still am, pretty goddamned shy and this just made me uncomfortable.
   
3. I used to have dreams about this rolling rock that was sometimes accompanied by a gorilla and it would always chase me and it could roll under doors somehow, and I guess I didn't want it to flatten me. One day, when I was about 6, I dreamt I took the rock to court and the dream judge man did something so the rock couldn't chase me anymore. I swear I'm not making that last bit up.

My favourite movie released between October 2nd, 1977, and October 1st, 1978?

I talked a lot about a shopping mall, so this choice is very appropriate.



I'm somewhat cheating... I know the Italian release date was September 2nd, 1978, but I already had Close Encounters of the Third Kind as my favourite film from my fourth year, so I'll use the American release date, May 11th, 1979, since it's a film shot in the United States and set in the United States.

Since I've written so much already today, I'll copy and paste my thoughts on some reasons I like the original Dawn of the Dead, taken from my review of the not-as-good-but-still-great "remake".

I certainly don't deny that there is a "consumerist zombie" subtext in the original, and I don't agree with the general view that consumers are mindless manipulations, but I can just choose to ignore that reading of the film, and, and here's something most liberal readings of the original Dawn of the Dead just ignore, there's satire for conservatives too, with the liberal talk show host in the TV studio refusing to listen to the simple advice of the scientist to shoot the brains of the zombie out or to decapitate their heads, with the host bringing up all sorts of silly objections about treating the dead with "dignity". Even in that most extreme of circumstances, he still feels the need to question authority, and it's the lack of respect of the simple advice the authorities give that is killing everyone in the cities, while the gunowning residents of the small towns are cooperating in a friendly way with the military and having a great time blasting away the zombies.

Also, it's one of the scariest horror movies ever, because it takes place in a very modern setting familiar to most North Americans, not some Transylvanian castle, or a clichéd "haunted house", or an Egyptian tomb, and, yes, it's very funny too. And it's great fun seeing them live out a lot of people's secret fantasy... living in a shopping centre with access to everything in it and no one else to share it with (until the marauders come). The remake, which only shared a premise, was a little more realistic as it recognized that the food would go "off" within a few weeks, but the first one was filmed at an actual mall, Monroeville Mall, so the setting feels a little more "real" than the remake, which was largely filmed on a set.

Also from this year, I still think that Richard Donner's original Superman film is the best superhero movie ever made (though I am very pleased to say that Spider-Man 2 comes within striking distance), and Alien is worth a mention too.

And, as an anime fan, I would be remiss not to tell you that Hayao Miyazaki's Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro is about the first theatrical anime film worth giving a damn about, at least if you're only a casual anime fan.

¹ For the people who have to look this stuff up, the Motel is Motel L'Aristocrate, now the Best Western Hotel L'Aristocrate (after heavy renovations), in the Quebec suburb of Ste. Foy, and it was featured on page 259 of volume H in the 1981 edition of The New Book of Knowledge, in the article "HOTELS AND MOTELS" by Albert E. Kudrle of the American Hotel and Motel Association. Not that anyone else is this obsessed with ridiculously small details as I am.

² Damn, Sesame Workshop, formerly Children's Television Workshop, forced David C. Horowitz to close down his excellent Electric Company website, with a "Cease and Decist" letter. Of course, it is their intellectual property and their prerogative, so they can do that if they so choose, but some of us who *liked* the show as a kid and *like* reminiscing about that sort of thing might not view that as the most positive course of action if they want us to have a positive opinion about their organization. At least there's the Web Arcived Electric Company page. I just hope that Sesame Workshop doesn't use such strong-armed tactics on all of those pages with video clips from Square One TV like "Angle Dance"...

posted by Steve Brandon @ 8:56 PM 0 Comments Links to this post