This Weekend’s Five brought to you by a panic attack.
I was killing time, waiting for that gangsta-wannabe-misogynistic-piece-of-crap that is the soap opera I occasionally watch, to come on…sitting through another soap opera. Â A long-time fan favorite was lecturing the latest seventeen-year-old soap hunk he didn’t realize was his own son (Soap Action 101!) on how not to be an “Eddie Haskell”. Â Of course, the kid had no idea what the old guy meant.
And it struck me, hard. Â In time all cultural references fade. Â And some day, not soon, but soon enough, the last of the generation for whom “Eddie Haskell” was shorthand for “interminable suck-up” will be gone.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!
But until that day, let us all rejoice in the cool things and the dork things that comprised our growing up. Â Lunchboxes? board games? music? movies? Â Tell me five of the cultural touchstones that take you back to when you were a kid!
5. Mary Poppins (the soundtrack LP): Pre-video. Â And I’m not sure if I saw the film in the theater more than once. Â But my mom and dad had the record, and I listened to it so many times that I knew every song, word-for-word, before I was five. Â I would sing “Sister Suffragette” at the top of my lungs. Â And baby, I was gooooood!
4. The Munsters: I used to watch The Ten Commandments just to see Yvonne DeCarlo without her Lily make-up.
3. The Archies: Loved the cartoon (as we called it then – not “animated series”, bah!), loved the records, loved the spinoffs…”Sabrina the Teenage Witch” did not originate with Melissa Joan Hart. Sabrina was an Archie spinoff — she was the Marilyn Munster of a family dubbed “The Groovy Ghoulies”. Â They had their own show and their own music and everything.
2. Toast’em Animals: Like Poptarts, but with animals instead of frosting. Â The elephant was chocolate.
1. 45 rpm records: You could buy plastic gizmos that fit in the hole in the middle, so you could just pop ‘em on your record player without using whatever came with the system. Â I have no idea why this was desirable. Â I only know, the last time I moved, my collection disappeared, and no plastic gizmo, nor Time-Life collection, will ever repair the hole in my heart.
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1.) Saturday movies. Mom gave us each 50-cents, which was enough for the movie, a box of popcorn and a soda. There was usually a short or a couple cartoons, followed by the movie. Mom was good for about three hour’s free time, or so.
2.) Ford Country Squire Station Wagon. Our summers were on the road. Mom, Dad, 6 kids and the dog, with a Coleman pop-up trailer in tow. I so related to “Family Vacation’ when it came out.
3.) Stingray Bicycle. I was king of the road with the banna seat and hi-rise handle bars.
4.) Soldiers of the World army sets. these were sets that had a helmet, grenade, weapon, and one or two other items to play army with th your friends. You could get WWII german, Russian, American or Japanese.
5.) “Monkey Division” weapon sets. I had a plastic scale mortar that used a heavy spring to launch blue-plastic mortar rounds. A friend had the bazooka, others had booby-trap sets, etc. My old gang had some hellacious wars in the lower pasture.
Bonus: I remember what a PITA seat belts were when they became mandatory. It limited how many people you could get in a car.
The monkey divison?!? You’ve got to be s#!tting me? I thought my parents were the only ones who got that stuff. I had a bazooka. I always coveted the kid across the street’s toy Thompson sub machine gun. Just like the one on “Combat”.
Oh yeah… we had as much firepower as kids as an NVA Battalion.
Here’s the Monkey Division Catalog. This is the same Mortar as I had. You can sometimes find this stuff on ebay.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/60585948@N00/3907762603/in/photostream/
THat is awesome. Kids miss so much cool stuff now days. To hell with a Wii…get these things for them and set them loose in the yard! Fun for hours!
Interminable? Nah. You’re thinking of how he always greeted “young Wallace’s” parents. Sneaky, yes; and, shallow, oh yeah! If even Ward was fooled (“He’s so polite, it’s almost un-American), you gotta know that Eddie was the Supreme Sycophant! Definitely my favorite character on the show!
I wish Ken Osmond wouldn’t have been so typecast, and had won other parts as he grew out of “Eddie.” We might have had another Steve McQueen or Nick Adams!
1. The Wizard of Oz – in the days before VCRs, you had one shot at seeing this every year. It was an event.
2. Star Wars on LP. Reduced to just dialogue and sound effects, 45 minutes was plenty of time. If you had some action figures, you could re-enact the whole movie.
3. 8-track tapes. My first album was Billy Joel’s ‘The Stranger.’ Scenes from an Italian Restaurant would just get going, and ka-chunk ka-chunk! the track would change. Then you could hear the rest of the song.
4. Changing the TV channel with a pair of needle-nose pliers because you turned the knob too fast and it came off in your hand. (This would spark the wrath of Dad.)
5. Transistor radios with one earphone. For anyone under thirty, they were like half of a set of iPod earbuds, except they stayed in your damn ear.
HA! 8-tracks! I built my own 8-track system for my room with a player from a wrecked car, a 12-volt power supply from Radio Shack, and a pair of Radio Shack Minimus Speakers. Had to use a large rubber band to hold the cartridge in place, but other wise it worked like a champ. Looked ugly as sin, but hey… it worked!
Mike, we had one of those special TV sets with the needle nose pliers because we wore out the knob. And in those days I was Dad’s TV remote. He jokes that he only let me leave home because he got a real TV remote.
I remember the knobs coming off! And it would spark the wrath of Mom who came home from work at 5:30. Dad was running the plant on second shift. Wonder what he’d think of the flat screen TV.
Jarts/Lawn darts — in a time when personal responsibility meant something, a side-yard family fun-time favorite and to quote my father, “Gawdammit, pay attention!!!”
Video arcade — as obvious as this is, wasn’t until Wanks sparked this topic till I realized how quickly we went from the tail end of the pinball era to Space Invaders to Galaga to Dragon’s Layer (the interactive grand-daddy) to Ataris in the home to Apple home computers to Sega Genesis to Wii. As a 12-year-old 40-year-old, do I love being able to have video games available the second I roll out of bed? Absolutely, but there’s still nothing like having a pocket fulls of quarters and heading to the arcade. That hole in the heart Wanks mentioned about 45s? The day Penn State’s Playland, a tri-level arcade containing all the classics (and new stuff and pinball), closed its doors forever was my Mola Ram moment.
Van Halen — there’s a bit in my stand-up routine that never failed until last fall, my comfort-zone fall-back if I hit a snag with the audience: “Let me tell you about Van Halen when they had David Lee Roth … the foist time!” Always a huge laugh till this crowd of early 20-somethings stared at me like I was 20-30 pounds overweight (hmmmmm). Dave and Eddie are huge, pathetic caricatures now, but trust me, blackhawk, David, Kit, et al. There was a time when Van Halen roamed the earth and nobody could top ‘em.
Home movie projectors — never as easy as popping in a DVD of a vacation, or gathering around a flip-phone for an “instant moment,” another family activity that usually meant high comedy as dad set up the screen while mom corralled three energetic boys. Though ultimately blasphemous, I know, really miss those “Gawdammits!!!”
“When I was a boy… When I was a boy, like I’m an armadillo now.”
BILLY CRYSTAL
5. Planet of the Apes – The movies and the 70s TV show. We had a black and white TV in our basement in the 70s, where my brother and I could watch whatever my parents weren’t watching. We had no concept of TV programming and what show was scheduled on what day or time. We thought it was just luck if we turned the set on and got Apes. The child’s version of the Roulette Wheel.
4. Thunderbirds – I still love this show and play it for my students who love it too. Whenever I hear the, “5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 … ” intro, it takes me back.
3.Evel Knievel lunch box – I still have it but the thermos is long long gone.
2. Caps – Remember those reddish rolls of tape with the explosive dots on them? Whenever we hit the penny candy store we’d get a gang of candy (swedish fish, candy buttons, Charleston Chews, candy necklace, wax lips, candy cigarettes, etc.), and a box of caps. We’d eat the candy while sitting in the street banging the caps with a rock.
1. Jiffy Pop Popcorn – I was surprised to find that they still make this. I found some in a store down here and popped some up for my students on a hot plate. They went nuts when the foil on top started growing.
5. Planet of the Apes – The movies and the 70s TV show. WE had an old black and white TV in our basement in the 70s, where my brother and I could watch whatever my parents weren’t watching upstairs. We had no concept of TV programming or what day/night or time a show would be on. We thought it was just plain luck when we turned the set on and got Apes.
4. Thunderbirds – I still love this show and after playing it for my students they’re nuts about it too. Whenever I hear that, “5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 … ” intro, it takes me back.
3. Evel Knievel Lunch Box – I still have it sitting on top of my ‘frige, but the thermos is long gone.
2. Caps – Remember those yards of reddish tape with the explosive dots on them? We used to walk down to this store near our house to get penny candy (swedish fish, candy cigarettes, wax lips, candy buttons and necklaces, UFOs, Charleston Chews, etc.) and a box of caps. We’d sit on the side of the road eating candy and banging the caps with rocks.
1. Jiffy Pop – I was surprised to find that they still make this stuff. I bought some and popped it in school on a hot plate for my students and they went nuts when they saw that foil start to bulge.
1. Roger Staubach, Cliff Harris, Tom Landry, Randy White, Drew Pearson… the Dallas Cowboys of the 1970s… NFL Football in general.
2. white bread. I had a PBnJ on white sandwich the other day at a deli (on a lark) and it took me way back. I like all kinds of bread — even whole wheat — but it ain’t white bread. You could take 2 slices and ball them up… yum.
3. My son and his friends have this fancy bike ramp where they jump smoothly every time… pussies… we had bricks, plywood, and this insanely high hilly street where you could scream down and jump. I think we re-created Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon or Caesar’s Palace jump thousands of times — with no helmet and half the brain damage.
4. Apropos our “Days gone by” post yesterday it seems I grew up in the last best time to be free and safe in small town West Texas… bikes, guns (BB and .22) — sorry birds!, and hours of unbroken time.
5. Cherry bombs, M-80s, bottle rockets, and Black Cat firecrackers… fireworks today BLOW — and not in the good way.
Before my Dad died, he gave my nephew a great big package of M-80′s. After he died my sister was sitting on her deck and a cop shows up. Pretty soon sis discovers her son is out driving around with his friends putting M-80′s in mail boxes and blowing them up. Nice mail boxes, like Packer Helmet mail boxes. Anyway: The cop then asks where our dear old Dad was. Well of course sis replys he passed away two weeks ago. I am very sure Papa has chuckled about that incident everyday up in Valhalla. It was like his ode to his own youthful indescretions which were legendary. (Something about being chased by a guy he and his best friend had doused in water while he was in his top down model T or some such car and the boys were on bridge)
Great idea for a list, Wankette!
First, I have to acknowledge that I heartily agree with many of the memories mentioned in the previous comments:
-Jiffy Pop is still a wonder to me
-Wizard of Oz on TV – yep, once a year just like DeMille’s Ten Commandments. I find myself anticipating the ad breaks when I see the Wizard now. You know, right when the Lion goes through the window after seeing the Wizard?
Now for my list and keep in mind I was a tomboy. I found playing with dolls dull and didn’t understand playing dress up. I was sure that the boys were having more fun than the girls.
1. Evel Kenievel – I’ll see Matt Helm’s lunch box and raise him the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle with the Evel figure (still have the helmet too). Those great Saturday afternoons waiting for Evel to make those jumps were unforgettable.
2. Johnny West toy set. Not the original set that came out but the early 1970s set. I had the buck wagon, horse and all the accessories. I still have Johnny and he’s nearby as I write this.
3. Going to my grandparents farm a few miles away from our house. I’d spend the whole day with my cousins fishing, getting dirty and generally getting into mischief all while staying on their big spread of land.
4. Saturday morning cartoons. Bugs Bunny was my favorite. I’d watch most of them until Land of the Lost came on. I watched Land of the Lost but even as a kid I knew it was cheesy.
5. My first bicycle. The first that wasn’t a hand me-down with rust. It was an early style motocross type and was pretty rugged. We had many adventures and I rode that thing all over the place. I’d ride it to the local gas station to get my grape Hubba Bubba on Saturdays. My dear mother even let me ride it in the house because I got it in the winter and couldn’t wait to ride it.
Oh boy, am I going to be dating myself here:
1. The A-Team. I had a Mr. T action figure. My dad had a Murdock action figure. We huddled around our tiny TV and watched every episode of that awesome show. I’m hoping the movie will be at least entertaining, but it’s hard to recapture the chemistry those four actors had.
2. The Princess Bride. My sister and I must have watched it a hundred times. Still the perfect mix of swashbuckling action and comedy, and I could definitely relate to the Fred Savage kid getting grossed out every time the story got too mushy. I still have a man-crush on Cary Elwes to this day, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
3. Top Gun. Saw it in the theater, at 7 years old, and I still remember the adrenalene rush I got from watching these guys fly their jets around and blow the bad guys up. How sad that my future children are going to grow up in the age of depressing liberal movies like Green Zone instead of great patriotic popcorn flicks like this.
4. I’m going to second TCW on Saturday Morning Cartoons. Kids these days get cartoons all day long, and can pick and choose what they want to see. Meh. We got up early on Saturday while our parents slept in, grabbed a bowl of stale cereal, and got our cartoon fix for the week: Thundercats, He-Man, My Little Pony, Voltron (which Power Rangers later ripped off), etc. And of course, the fun was all over when Soul Train came on. Those soulful bastards.
5. Metal playgrounds.
HA! I forgot about Soul Train being the official ending to the Saturday morning fun. And I concur with the A-Team…I had a Face doll and my friend had Hannibal.
Allow me to date myself with the Saturday morning TV-a-thon (and God bless Boomerang):
The Superfriends (Wendy, Marvin and Wonderdog before Zan, Jana and Gleek, but ooh the Malhavoc episode with the latter trio), Hair Bear Bunch, Laff-a-lympics, Flintstones, Space Ghost (pre-hipster late-show host, with a young Tim Matheson voicing one of his kid sidekicks) Speed Buggy, Scooby and the Harlem Globetrotters (the live action guys a whole other “when I was a child…” thread unto themselves), Hong Kong Phooey, Jabberjaw, Plastic Man, Thundarr the Barbarian, Captain Caveman — basically Hanna-Barbera.
…and in the live-action world, Shazaam/Isis and Land of the Lost (damn you, Sleestaks, aka lifelong nightmare-inducers).
1: Johnny West, hands down one of the coolest toys Matel I believe ever created. I had the original Johnny West, the new one in blue, Pat Garrett, Black Bart, Jane, Jane’s neice, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, George Custer and all of the Horses…I MEAN ALL OF THEM! It was so much fun.
2: Holly Hobby. I didn’t have one but it was the sound track to a lot of cartoon watching after school.
3: The Bionic Man and Woman…had both toys.
4: ISIS. OK how many people remember that ridiculous show? Or SHAZAAM?! That was not only a show but a saying.
5: My Dad’s varios station wagons that always began to smell like wet Labrador, mud, and dead fish. The rule was don’t sit in the back seat or you will come out covered with sand.
Yay! Another Johnny West lover out there. Mine has that thing in his back to make him draw his gun fast…it’s the all blue one with brown vest. I sold his horse on eBay for a good profit but I can never part with Johnny.
And Shazaam! I had forgotten about Shazzam! and Isis. Good memories. Thanks for reminding me, Steph. You’re so cool! You would have been way more fun to be around than the girls I knew growing up.
I was in love with Isis when I was a kid.
I just wanted to get up and watch the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Show! And the debates about who was cooler on Super Friends Batman or Superman? 2nd grade baby!
I also had Breyer horses. TONS OF THEM! Barbie…not so much. Oh and my niece got the Sunshine Family in 76 when I got my first Breyer horse, the “fighting” Stallion. (Big white horse rearing up…very cool)
I didn’t have Breyer models myself but I recently sold my friend’s collection for her on eBay. The fighting stallion was very cool indeed. I learned to appreciate them as I sold her collection. Those collectors are serious and I had to learn a lot about them to be able to sell them. Taking pictures of them was really fun. I posed them on a fake grass mat.
I had the Sunshine Family too. That’s as close as I came to having girly dolls. I mostly would put the family in their vehicle and crash them and haul them away in my Tonka ambulance.
LOL! You’d crash them LOL! Cool thing about the Breyers is that I made bridels and halters for them out of my Mom’s yarn. My Dad gave me some strips of vinyl and I made saddles and stuff. Also felt blankets. used strips of old white cloth for bandages on the race horses legs. Then I got the real stuff from Breyer. My sister found all of them not too long ago and she may send a few along to me later this year but I have no idea where I will put them. I don’t want to sell em though.
My brothers and I would get bored with the way we were supposed to play with the toys and crashed everything too. We would toss G.I. Joe up in the air just to see what ridiculous positions he’d land in. I lost my Evel figure in the ceiling insulation in the basement of the house we had in Maine. I threw him up and he never came down. I gave up on findig him because the fiber glass particles from the insulation was killing my hands.
Revell, Hawk and Monogram model airplanes. Yeah, the fidelity of the models is SO much better today. But as a kid given me a tube of glue, a model kit and an enclosed space and I was in hog heaven…hey wait a minute.
Baseball in the spring/summer, Football in the fall. I was always going to practice or games. Never seemed to play on temas that were that great except for a couple of years, yet I still had fun. Imagine that.
Estes model rockets. I always worried about shooting down small airplanes that would happen to wander over just as we launched. Maybe we shouldn’t have got out to the airport to enjoy that hobby.
Saturday lunch with mom at the Whataburger. My dad was a letter carrier so he worked on Saturdays. Me and mom would go to the Waterbuger down the street from our house for lunch every Saturday.
Riding my bike to the bowling alley to play video games and pinball. If I had money left I would by some krinkle cut french fries and a Dr. Pepper. Awesome I can taste it still.
We did Estes Model Rockets for a Science project and my Dad helped me put mine together. Lets just say we kicked butt.
Here’s a cool site to help us remember the fun of the 1970s.
http://www.plaidstallions.com/
I love that site. Reminds me of the figures Mego used to put out like Planet of the Ape, Star Trek, and Marvel/DC superheroes.
Soul Train DID ABSOLUTELY signal “It’s time to get out of your pajamas and start the day!”
And how could I have forgotten my Spider Bike, purple, with a black banana seat. Prolly one of my best bday presents ever.
Thanks for the website TCW — fun stuff. Reminded me of my Barbie Trade-in debacle…I’d've been set for life if I hadn’t taded in my original Barbie for one with a “twist & turn waist”…sounds porn-y, now.
Also: any girls out there remember 16 & Tiger Beat magazines?
OMG I had a spider bike to! It was dark blue with a white and blue flowered banana seat!
Glad y’all like the site. Good memories. I sold a few of my sisters-in-law Barbies a few months ago and among them was a Sport and Shave Ken. He came with a marker to apply a ‘beard’ and a razor to shave him.
I wanted a Big Wheel but Mom wouldn’t allow it. She hated the noise the wheels made so I had to make do riding my cousins.
Dear GAWD I think my niece had that Sport and Shave Ken doll.
American Bandstand was the primer, Soul Train made me a man.
OMG the website TCW posted has BIG WHEELS! How awesome! I loved mine. those were the DAYS!
GREEN MACHINES!!!!
These are 5 things I remember, and miss because they were important for some reason.
1. The 1964 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 that I learned to drive in. The little vent windows up front, the button on the floor for turning on the high beams, AM radio only, and a Rocket V8 engine. This was the first car we had with power brakes and my mother nearly sent us through the windshield many times before she got the hang of it (no seat belts then).
2. My first bike, a “Skyrider.” It had a picture of a satellite on it. In the late 50′s lots of things had satellites or rockets on them. The Space Age was a big deal. On the day John Glenn orbited the earth the teachers extended recess for us so they could watch the live coverage on a a TV they had in the teachers’ lounge.
3. Fallout shelters. When I was a Cub Scout we once had to go around the neighborhood distributing leaflets about where the nearest fallout shelter was. Ours was at Holy Trinity School. Some neighbors built fallout shelters of their own.
4. Scale model kits. AMT made the best car models. Their ads featured a cartoon called Kool Kat or something like that. Revell made the best airplane models. I hung them from the ceiling in my cellar (not a basement – a cellar).
5. Swimming wherever you wanted. On riverbanks, off of bridges, in ponds. We lived near the Chesapeake Bay and there were rivers everywhere. We could ride our bikes to two of them. They’re all surrounded by housing developments now. I also miss real diving boards that were 20 or 30 feet high. Now in hotels you can’t even dive off the side of the pool.