Tag: nostalgia (Page 2 of 11)

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

October 23, 2018 / DB

Each November I tell myself, “Self, you should really watch more than just the “Thanksgiving Orphans” episode of Cheers this year. Then I debate whether to just watch the rest of season five, which I own on DVD,[1] or dive into the entire series on a streaming service. And, every year, I end up just watching that single episode around Thanksgiving.

Last spring I came across the article I’ve linked to below. I read it and hung onto it, just in case one year I finally started watching old Cheers episodes.

Well, my friends, this is that year!

Last week I started Cheers from season one, episode one and am about halfway through the first year of TV’s greatest ever comedy.

A few takeaways:

The pilot was magical and perfect. Sometimes when you go back and watch the pilot of a classic show, it seems very different than what followed. Over-acting, unformed characters, things that were tried and discarded for other elements that became staples over time. S1E1 of Cheers avoids those errors. It is smart, funny, confident, provides origin stories for its key players, and plants all the seeds for what would come over the next 10+ seasons.
As I’ve watched season one, I’ve laughed at some of the technical elements that were lacking in TV back then. The camerawork is strange. Sometimes scenes are out-of-focus, or the camera is hunting through a scene to find the proper focus. Sometimes in stationary scenes the camera shakes. Today, those scenes would be reshot until they were perfect. And the sound was terrible. Some lines are inaudible because of noise from elsewhere on the set. Other lines, spoken off-camera, were clearly dubbed in later and are presented at a much louder level than the rest of the audio. I assume all of this is because of the big, open set that used boom mics that, back then, just couldn’t lock in on the desired actors without getting into the frame.
Ted Danson had a weird skin tone in season one. He was super tan, but whether because of the lighting or the cameras or just the deterioration of the tape over the years, he has a strange, greenish tone to his skin that makes him look ill.
I’ve laughed most at Coach’s lines. Back when Cheers was still something people talked about, I argued that Coach was a way better character than Woody Boyd. I still stand by that. Coach is an utter delight, and the closing scene of episode five, “Coach’s Daughter,” remains one of the greatest moments in the series’ history.
That episode highlighted what Cheers was so good at. It was a comedy – a barroom comedy for crying out loud – that was never afraid to offer intelligent, emotionally impactful scenes.

That leads me to the link. Last night I watched “Endless Slumper” and re-read the article after. As good as the closing scene of “Coach’s Daughter” is, “Endless Slumper” ends with an even more powerful moment. The author of the piece is right: you can feel the delicious tension in the audience in the 30 seconds when Sam is contemplating whether to take a drink or not. There is an intensity in the performances of Ted Danson and Shelly Long that the show had not offered before. But, as the show would do time-and-again over the years, it didn’t oversell the moment. There was always a release without stretching the drama out too long or turning it into a cheesy, “lesson” moment.

When Cheers Became Cheers: An Appreciation of ‘Endless Slumper’

My summer rewatching of The Office petered out in season five, when the show began throwing in the mid 80s instead of the low 90s. I’m pretty sure I’m in for Cheers for awhile, now. Or at least until it begins to disappoint, although I’m not sure that will happen.

How quaint! ↩

Is There Anybody Out There? Anybody At All?

September 20, 2017 / DB

Well this checks a few boxes for me.

General 80s nostalgia
80s pop culture and political sub-categories
Nuclear obliteration
And Kansas City/Kansas references

Yep, The Day After was a pretty big deal. And, perhaps, as relevant today as it has been for nearly 30 years.

The Day After traumatized a generation with the horrors of nuclear war

My favorite family story about The Day After was of some college friends of my parents who lived in Lawrence when the movie was being filmed. They showed up for the open casting calls but weren’t selected. They found out where they were filming one day and drove their VW back-and-forth on the nearest street with the 4-year-old waving every time they passed, hoping to show up in the background of a scene. When the movie finally aired, they were disappointed not to see themselves out of focus behind John Lithgow.

The videos embedded within this story are definitely worth your time, too.

Looking Back

September 12, 2017 / DB

I wrote this yesterday, but forgot to post it before heading out for an afternoon of kickball.

I believe M is coming home with an assignment tonight to ask S and I what our memories of September 11, 2001 are. Her social studies teacher wrote her memories of that day on her whiteboard and shared a pic of it on Twitter, along with the warning our kids would be asking questions tonight. So, in between my normal Monday errands and tracking the remnants of Irma – hoping my in-laws’ home in Jacksonville will be dry and damage-free when they return from their European trip in a week – I’ve been thinking back 16 years.

I think most of our initial memories are of when we first heard what was happening, where we were, who told us, etc. And then how we followed the events of the rest of that morning until we all settled into a daze after the second tower fell.

As I think more about that day, I get to the evening. And the part of the day I keep thinking “Somewhere in here are the seeds for a decent novel,” but have never tried to hash out.

My evening of 9/11/01 was different because I was with a group of people that kind of went off the rails a little. That week was my employer’s annual conference that brought people in from all over the country. A group of us who worked together, but were scattered from Texas to Oregon, had planned a dinner on Tuesday for weeks. Despite the day’s events, the out-of-towners insisted on keeping our dinner reservation. Probably so they didn’t have to sit in their hotel rooms and watch the footage over-and-over.

We went to Manny’s, the now defunct Kansas City Mexican food institution. As I recall we all pounced on the pitchers of margaritas as soon as they hit our table. I’m pretty sure everyone was pretty well lit before we ordered our food. And we continued to hit the tequila hard. While the rest of the restaurant, which was serving a rather light crowd, was reserved, quiet, and somber, we were loud and laughing and likely obnoxious. I don’t remember anyone saying a word about what happened on the east coast, but instead carrying on just like it was any other night.

I also remember the other diners giving us looks. Not angry looks, but more “Why are they so happy?” looks. After making eye contact with a few people who appeared to disapprove of our revelry, I stopped looking around. Even in that moment I had a feeling that when this dinner ended and I went home, nothing might ever be the same again. If the other dozen or so people I was sitting with were down for a night of ignoring the horrific attacks for a couple hours, I was gladly along for the ride.

Things did get a little dicey as we made our way out of the restaurant. We were splitting the ticket so had to do that up front near the bar. We were kind of loud – a couple people could barely stand at this point – and President Bush was about to speak. Several folks at the bar loudly told us to knock it off. Those of us who were in halfway decent shape tried to shuffle the more impaired members of our group out the door to avoid things getting really ugly.

And then the night was done and reality hit.

Somewhere in there is a book, I bet. Maybe someday I’ll be able to find the thread that leads out of that night into a bigger story.
***
Two years ago C came home with a 9/11 homework assignment that was several questions to ask parents about 9/11. One of the questions was “How do you think life has changed in the US since 9/11?” There was a broad, poli-sci answer I could have given which was probably too much for a third grader. The answer I did give was that I didn’t think life had changed all that much. Airport security is different. No one close to me has served overseas, so I haven’t had to live with the fear of a loved one serving in harm’s way. And even then, I feel like the War Against Terror has always been in a distinct pocket in our culture. We get constant reminders about the troops, but I don’t think America in the ‘00s and ‘10s feels like a country at war the way it did during previous wars.

My answer might change if that question comes home tonight, though. I think Trump is a direct effect of 9/11. No, I’m not saying he’s a sleeper agent for al qaeda. While fear has always been a part of American politics, I think 9/11 both institutionalized perpetual fear and broadened its effects across the country. People were fearful, and rightly so, of the next attack, of anthrax, of anything that seemed a little hinky for quite a while.

Eventually, we settled down. Well, most of us did. But that fear remained strong in a significant part of the electorate, and eventually attached itself to things that had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism. The raw hatred for Barack Obama grew from this fear. The rejection of modernism, of science, of the progression of civil rights all grew from this fear. The Tea Party movement solidified that fear, both against Obama and more broadly against the modern welfare state, and injected it directly into our political process.

The blueprint was in place: if you say the right words loud and long enough, even if they have no basis in fact, you can mobilize an extremely angry and motivated segment of the electorate. Trump was the perfect – and only – candidate to capitalize on this fear. An empty, soulless man interested only in himself, who was willing to say, do, and attach himself to anything that moved his brand forward. He came along at the exactly right time, and against the exact right set of opponents, to blow that fear up into something that carried him to the presidency.

Make no mistake, not everyone who voted for him did so because of the wave of fear he capitalized on. But in US presidential politics, where mobilizing a tiny swath of the electorate can tip a national election, those folks who had lived in fear since 9/11 were the difference in Trump winning the White House.

Good Old Days

May 11, 2017 / DB

I came across this piece on Twitter and really enjoyed it.

Gone The Way Of The Zambezi Zinger

The Zambezi Zinger was awesome. It didn’t have huge drops, didn’t loop, didn’t go insanely fast. But all those turns and the consistent speed through the ride were tons of fun. I kind of forgot that you didn’t even strap into the cars. You just sat 2–3 deep and that kept you from flying out.

There used to be a terrible video from the old Zinger on YouTube. I couldn’t find it, but did find a new, high quality one from the Zinger’s new home in Colombia. I’d fly there right now just to ride it again!

A 30 Year Tradition

November 23, 2016 / DB

I realized a few weeks back that this year is the 30th anniversary of my all-time favorite TV episode, Cheer’s “Thanksgiving Orphans,” which first aired on November 27, 1986. I taped the show that night and held onto that tape for years. Somewhere along the way the tape either gave out or I lost it. I recorded it again sometime in the late 90s or early 00s, and it became an integral part of my Thanksgiving celebration. The year we found ourselves without a VCR, I sprung for the Cheers season five DVD collection. Every year in November I say to myself that I’m going to revisit that entire season. Every year, I watch just the one episode.

My love of the episode has become a bit of a running joke for those of you who follow me on Facebook. I usually make an announcement that I’ve poured myself a nice distilled beverage and am about to put the DVD in. Some years I post a few of my favorite lines. One year I “live blogged” my viewing, sharing roughly half of the show.

It’s always been something I’ve done on my own, though. S watched it a few times in the early years we were together. But although she finds the show funny, she doesn’t have the enthusiasm for it that I do. So she’s let me enjoy it in solitude.

This year, though, I’ve decided to bump up my viewing a few hours and will let the girls watch with me. They’ve never seen Cheers before, so are coming in blind. I told them this afternoon that it was my favorite show when I was growing up, we drove by the location it was based on when we were in Boston, and there’s a big food fight. That got them interested.

I’ve always thought my love of “Thanksgiving Orphans” was unique. When I remembered this was the 30th anniversary, I went searching for articles about the show. I found the three I’m sharing below. I was pleased to learn that I’m not the only person who thinks it is likely the best episode of one of the great shows of all time, and stands on its own as one of the finest half hours of comedy.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

A Cheers family Thanksgiving ends in a big mess

Summer sitcom rewind: ‘Cheers’ – ‘Thanksgiving Orphans’

Food Fight! The Messy True Story Behind the Classic ‘Cheers’ Episode, ‘Thanksgiving Orphans’

Long Overdue

September 7, 2016 / DB

Hall & Oates somehow just received their Hollywood Walk of Fame star last week. Which makes total sense. You know, an act that was in its prime 30 years ago just getting their recognition now.

Honestly, it’s staggering if you scroll through the list of entertainers who previously received stars and compare some of their careers to H&O’s. Maybe there was some conflict back in the act’s prime that prevented them from accepting a star; Hall can be notoriously prickly at times.

Despite the rather odd timing, I was pleased that they finally got their star, even if it is a pretty meaningless award for them in 2016. I don’t know that I ever stopped like Hall and Oates. Maybe I didn’t always publicize my love for their music, but neither did I skip their songs when they popped up. I will always listen to their greatest hits when they come up on Spotify, SiriusXM, or even terrestrial radio.

From an article about the guys getting their star, I was led to this genius piece from earlier this year. I agree with it 100%: Hall and Oates are not a guilty pleasure, and if you like music, you can’t not like Hall and Oates.

Jerry And The Gang

September 2, 2016 / DB

We didn’t travel much when I was a kid. Summer vacations for me were just trips to my grandparents’ homes in central Kansas for anywhere from two to six weeks. So I was pretty much always home Labor Day weekend, with three days to kill before school started on the day after the holiday. Since my mom was generally working two jobs, she’d go in both on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend and on Labor Day itself. So I was stuck at home, with four channels of TV to entertain myself.

But actually three channels, since Labor Day weekend meant the Jerry Lewis telethon knocked out one station for most of the weekend. Sadly, that station was the one our TV, which was in our basement, picked up best. Despite my general lack of interest in any of the entertainers Jerry paraded out, I often found myself watching anyway. And, man, did I hate it. A bunch of has-beens and never-weres rolling out to banter with a cheesy comedian. Even if I recognized the good cause behind the whole thing, whatever entertainment value the show offered was lost on me.

I think my experience mirrors most of my generation’s. Even if you traveled on Labor Day weekend, or had cable years before I did, you still ran across the telethon at some point, and likely hated it as much as me. Maybe you went to see your grandparents and they loved Jerry, or hoped that Frank or Johnny or some other old favorite would pop in, and thus kept their TV tuned to the telethon for your entire visit.[1]

Like most old, kitschy things, though, today I can watch clips of the old telethons and at least chuckle. They hold no nostalgic value for me, but they do recall a time not terribly long ago when our popular culture was dramatically different than it is today.

So this AV Club collection of notable telethon clips was a good way to spend my morning.

The utter insanity that was The Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon

I had an aunt and uncle who often hosted a Labor Day gathering that did this. The TV would be cranked up in the family room, and if an especially appealing guest strolled onto the stage, all the adults scampered back in to watch. ↩

Farewell to VHS

July 27, 2016 / DB

So after this month, no more VCRs will be produced. Wait, they were still making VCRs? I guess there are probably some folks out there with shelves full of movies – purchased or taped from TV, professional and personal – who were never interested in buying them all again in a digital format, or didn’t want to invest the time and effort to convert them to digital.

I know I still have some tapes stored in a cabinet in our basement. Some of those tapes hold great sentimental value, even if I haven’t watched them in 20 years or more. There is a single tape that holds the 1988 NCAA national championship game on it. After the game is a couple hours of post-game coverage from CBS, CNN, and local stations in Kansas City. And after that, I have random coverage of the parade to honor the newly crowned Kansas Jayhawks, speculation of whether Larry Brown would leave KU for UCLA, and other local sportscasts from that week. I think that tape is just about full. It would be fun to watch one more time.

But the video I’d most like to watch is one my buddy John N. and I made our junior year of high school. For our creative writing class we wrote and filmed a parody of the movie Colors, a dark, gritty look at the LA gang scene that starred Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. We loved that movie because it was probably one of the first mainstream feature films that embraced hip-hop culture. I’m not sure how well the movie has held up, but I bet I could listen to the soundtrack today and still love it.[1]

Anyway, we decided to make a suburban version of Colors, which we cleverly called Colours. Our version followed the major plot lines of the original, just dropped into our sleepy, Kansas City suburb. Instead of slinging rock, the drug of choice in our film was cherry Pez. We included a drive-by shooting and battles between the cops and gang members, only we used water guns rather than real weapons. There’s a dramatic scene in the real movie where, in the midst of a gun battle, the guns of a cop and gang member simultaneously jam as they aim at each other. They struggle to clear their weapons and reload so they can get the first shot off. We stole that scene too, but in our version the combatants ran out of water and had to dip their “water-type Uzis” in buckets to reload.

We filmed the whole thing in one afternoon following school. When one key “actor” failed to show, we sent a crew up to school to recruit someone who would shoot baskets for a few minutes then get blasted in a drive-by. So a sophomore none of us really knew had a bit part in this grand cinematic effort. We had parts of scenes get wiped out when our camera person forgot that her family’s video camera would back up 5 seconds each time she stopped filming.[2] But it ended up being pretty much what we wanted: funny and fun to do.

Looking back, I wonder how we didn’t get invitations for immediate entrance into the USC film school.

My favorite memory of Colours, though, came from our teacher. She had not seen the original movie, and in order to fairly grade our project, she thought she should. So she went to the theater with several viewings of our flick fresh in her mind. She told us later that people were staring at her in the theater because she was laughing out loud at appropriate times. She couldn’t help but think of our comedic take of certain scenes nor contain her laughter.

I believe we got A-’s.

I may need to find that tape and make sure it gets digitized before it’s too late.

I checked, it’s not on Spotify. I could only cobble together about half of the tracks from checking each artist. I bet I have it on cassette, though. ↩
WTF?!?! ↩

Memorable Events

July 18, 2016 / DB

Summer continues to fly by. We’re just three-and-a-half weeks from school beginning. Today is our annual trip an hour north to watch the girls’ cousin show his pigs at his county fair. Taking the city kids to the county fair is always fun!

Last week we watched Apollo 13. The act of watching it was nearly as epic as the flight of Apollo 13. One of the girls learned about the flight at school way back in the winter. When I told them there was a movie about it, they all wanted to watch it. I checked our library’s website, saw the Blu Ray was checked out but due back soon, so I put a Hold on it. We were first in line. I told the girls we’d probably get to watch it in a week or so. That week went by, no disk. Then another. And another. And another. I’d check every few days to see our hold status still listed as pending, and the disk showing it was past due. After about six weeks, we figured whoever had it lost it or damaged it to the point where it was unusable. We kind of forgot about it, never even checking Amazon to rent it there. Then on July 8 I finally got the notice that the disk was available for pickup. Weird.

The girls liked it a lot. There were many moments of me having to explain different parts of it. After the movie, I looked on several sites to see how much dramatic license Ron Howard took with the story to translate it to film. I was pleased that with minor exceptions, and a few composite characters, the movie was pretty faithful to the real story.

I also had to explain to them what the space shuttle was! How crazy is that? I remember first reading books about space and astronauts in first or second grade, when the Apollo program wasn’t that far in the past, and the space shuttle was undergoing tests. Now our kids are growing up in an age where regular, manned space flight doesn’t exist.

Talking through the Apollo 13 flight, and the history of space flight in general, got me thinking about a meme from a couple weeks ago that was popular around the web: what was the first major news story that you remember? Common responses from folks in my general age range were the Iran hostage crisis and the Challenger disaster.

My mom worked at a TV station in the late 70s. And I had a TV in my room as early as when I was 7.[1] So I was watching Walter Cronkite on a nightly basis from a pretty early age. After thinking it through, I’m pretty sure the first major news event I have vivid memories of was the Jonestown massacre in November 1978. That’s a fun one to have stuck in your head.

Our girls have a very different connection with the news than I did as a kid. My grandparents always had the radio tuned to the local station and shushed everyone at the top of each hour for the news bulletin. My mom’s parents sat at their kitchen table all day with the TV on. Lunch and dinner were consumed to the noon and 6:00 news. And then I always had the news on in my room once I got my own TV.

We rarely watch the news with our girls. We don’t get a newspaper. And so many of the major news stories of this summer are ones we discuss quietly away from their ears. I wonder what major event they will remember most when they get older and look back on their childhoods.

Benefits of being a *Latchkey Kid*: I guess my mom figured an old black-and-white TV in my bedroom would keep me out of trouble. ↩

Summer ’78

September 23, 2015 / DB

I’m loving a lot of things right now, pop culturally. I took a long bike ride this morning and mentally wrote at least 10,000 words about the new Ryan Adams album. We’ll see if I can make something coherent out of those thoughts to share here. I just finished an amazing, if flawed, book that took me nearly a month to get through. I also finally started watching Veep, which is fantastic.

And then there’s this little gem. It’s charming enough on its own. But if you were a child of the late 70s, I think it resonates a little more. I remember my neighbors and I making our own Millennium Falcon out of random cardboard boxes we taped together. And then there is the hilarious, but completely accurate, co-mingling of various toys. Who didn’t throw army men, a dinosaur, or a stray Barbie into your Star Wars action figure games? Whatever was around and could serve a purpose became part of your Star Wars universe.