There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #3 – Goolie Get-Together by Toadies (1995)

It's 1995, folks, and I've got big problems. I love Saturday morning cartoons and I especially love Saturday morning cartoon theme songs. I have some of the songs in various places in my record collection. I have the original album by The Archies from my youth, and I also have a pair of 7" singles by The Banana Splits that I ordered from Kellogg's cereal boxes when I was five years old. In the mid-'80s, the wisely named TVT Records put out a series of albums called Television's Greatest Hits, that were completely comprised of nothing but TV theme song after TV theme song. I had a few volumes of Television's Greatest Hits, and included on there were a great many scattered songs from Saturday morning cartoons, but still it wasn't what I really wanted. There was just something missing...

It turns out that the "something missing" was a compilation album entirely made up of new renditions of some favorite themes and occasional "in-show" songs from cartoons of my youth, all performed by current bands who may or may not have ever heard the songs they were being asked to perform. (More on that notion later in the piece. A-ha!... Yay, foreshadowing!)

And late in 1995, that very album arrived in the form of a CD and long-form video called Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits. Cartoon Network, naturally, was involved in the promotion of it all, which included an airing – on a Saturday morning, nonetheless – of an 90-minute-long show (with commercials; the album itself it 65 minutes in total) featuring videos for the songs on the CD. Producer-composer Ralph Sall supervised the project, and brought in a lot of big names from the alternative and punk music worlds to take part. Somehow, most of the pairings of musicians to cartoon theme work out surprisingly well. At their worst, they are merely passable with nothing truly egregious to my ears (Collective Soul sounding like they are staring straight ahead having to do the theme to The Bugaloos; face to face basically walking through the Popeye theme); at their best, the matches seemed to have been made in some form of pop culture heaven.

The Ramones riffing perfectly through Spider-Man., with Joey closing the song by singing the last syllable of the hero's name as "Ma-yan". (No, not Mayan...) Helmet thrashing forcefully through Gigantor. The Reverend Horton Heat picking his demented way through that complicated and heart-pounding Jonny Quest jazz score before switching gears halfway through to get all yokel goofy by singing Stop That Pigeon! And do you mean to tell me that honey-throated Matthew Sweet didn't sing the original theme song to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? You could fool me. I'd ask if we could go back and insert Sublime's dub remix of the Hong Kong Phooey theme onto the original cartoons, but it would mean wiping out Scatman Crothers' swell voice, and I couldn't bear a world with any less Scatman Crothers than we already have.

Deep in the Saturday Morning album, I discovered its true revelation. At the time, I and the rock radio world were in love with an eerie, hard-hitting song called Possum Kingdom from a band in Fort Worth, Texas called Toadies. (Not the Toadies...) Truthfully, when I first heard Possum Kingdom, the vocals reminded me so much of Robin Zander's way with a song that for about a month, I thought Cheap Trick was making a comeback. (The dynamic between rhythm section and guitar was very different than Trick's, so it couldn't have been. But still...) When I found out for real who the band was, I rushed out to buy their album Rubberneck, and if I haven't listened to the album around a thousand times, I must be pretty close. It is in regular rotation (if I really have a regular rotation anymore) on my music devices and computer, and I also follow the band's new stuff to this day.

But somehow, even with how much I enjoy Toadies' music – and with singing along to the repeated "Do you wanna die?" part of Possum Kingdom, a song that has served as the template for a hundred rumors – the band's cover of Goolie Get-Together just might be my favorite song by the group.

But first, for the uninitiated. the Groovie Goolies...

The success of transplanting the squeaky-clean students of Riverdale High from the comic pages to television meant that Filmation's The Archie Show (1968-69) would bounce around for another decade in one form or another. The show would stretch into The Archie Comedy Hour for 1969-70, and add Sabrina the Teenage Witch to its cast, giving her a showcase in her own segments within the hour. The following year, Sabrina got a title spin-off while the rest of the Archies carried on in their own series in other forms. But Sabrina shared the 1970-71 season with a gang of gag-spewing monsters called The Groovie Goolies. Once that show was a hit with the kiddies, in the following season, the Goolies split to get their own show for a single season, while Sabrina (like Archie before her) carried her own series for several years.

I said the Goolies had their own show for a single season, with only 16 half-hour episodes produced, but they were all over the Saturday morning schedule throughout most of the '70s in some form. It is always amazing how few episodes there are of some series that have carried on for decades sometimes. The Jetsons was a single-season show in 1962-63 with only 24 episodes produced, but that one season was shown for years on end. It wasn't until the mid-'80s that Hanna-Barbera finally produced another season of new stories, even with its continued success with a succeeding generation. Likewise, Jonny Quest ran its mere 26 episodes starting on September 18, 1964, exactly one week after I was born. If you are thinking, "Hey, Rik was a Saturday morning baby. No wonder he loves cartoons so much!", then you would be wrong. Jonny Quest premiered on a Friday night, facing a prime time audience with a focus on reaching adults, just as The Flintstones and The Jetsons did before it. That the kids lapped it up was pure gravy. By 1967, with the Saturday morning cartoon market finally in full bloom (it started small in the early '60s and built up stronger each year), Jonny Quest finally reached its long run before an audience mostly made up of kiddies, including myself.

Back to the Goolies, I probably watched every incarnation of every Archie series as a kid, and while the show is a little harder to watch today, I really loved the Groovie Goolies back then. Part of the appeal, of course, was my natural inclination towards monsters of all types. The Goolies were less of a family like the Munsters and Addamses, and more like a monster club operating out of a castle (Horrible Hall) on a desolate clifftop. That sounds ominous, and the trappings are meant to invoke a certain amount of spookiness, but the Goolies were just pure silliness. Even the name "Goolie" has been altered from that of "ghoul" – which means "An evil spirit or phantom, especially one supposed to rob graves and feed on dead bodies." [Oxford, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ghoul.] Hardly the fare of Saturday morning TV where there were likely censorship boards who looked out for these sort of things, and I suspect the softening of "ghoul" to "gool" renders the original definition a more babyish appearance and sound.

The main characters were Frankie, an obvious nod to the famous monster of Frankenstein; Drac, the scariest of the bunch (even some of his closeups kind of get to me today), but who serves as the primary and mostly congenial host of both Horrible Hall and the TV show; and Weirdo Wolfie, a slang-spewing hippie-werewolf hybrid who who wears shorts and sandals and rides a skateboard. There a couple dozen other supporting characters who pretty much run the gamut of monster archetypes, outside of a zombie, which would fall into the ghoul category for kiddie television and pretty much off limits. (Also, the zombie renaissance was just in its earliest stage as Night of the Living Dead only came out roughly two years earlier.)

The Groovie Goolies show was also very current in its style, as it mostly operated like a kid version of the immensely popular Laugh-In, then still enjoying its original run on TV. There was little in the way of connective tissue from one scene to the next, with little to no plot at all. Largely, the show was one blackout gag after another, broken up by a couple of musical performances in each episode. There were even specific sequences devoted to Laugh-In-style gags – Weird Window Time – but then the rest of the show would be one joke after the other. Other segments would theme schoolhouse lessons and bedtime stories, but they really were just more scenes for a series of quick gags. Like viewing old episodes of Laugh-In today, the hit-to-miss ratio of the Goolies show is pretty heavy on the miss side, but then again, the Goolies get an excuse for being designed to appeal solely to 7-year-olds. I dearly loved the stupid jokes as a kid, and I can easily soak them in now in the same way that I look back at my old Topps monster trading cards and still have fun reading the lame monster jokes. Or even listening to old Lenny Bruce "Mama, Mama" jokes...

Then there was the Goolies' music...

As I said, each episode of the Groovie Goolies contained two songs. The first song would be "sung" by an all-star monster band that contained Frankie, Drac and Wolfie. Frankie played the drums and xylophones using bones for drumsticks, Drac played a pipe organ a la The Phantom of the Opera, and Wolfie strummed a lyre-designed guitar. However, most of the poses and animation were used from song to song, so is little to no attempt toward having either their lip movements or musical actions match whatever song was being played. In fact, there is so much reused footage that occurs from show to show that you can probably shuffle the episodes, select four or five, and it is likely you will have seen all of the actual animation used for the entire series.

There were several other bands that played within Horrible Hall, which is why I said it feels more like a club where all the monsters hang out than anything. One of the other bands would usually be seen "playing" the second song in each episode, though sometimes the vocals for those second songs would sound exactly the vocals for the main monster band (though not in all cases, such as with the mummies, who had distinct vocals at times). As to those other bands, they were: The Mummies and the Puppies (featuring, quite literally, three mummy musicians and four dogs who also play along; the name is an obvious rock reference and shouldn't need elaboration); The Rolling Headstones, which are three gravestones that somehow play musical instruments; a three-skeleton group called the Bare Boned Band (too bad The Grateful Dead was taken); and finally, the Spirits of '76, a patriotic trio of colonial ghosts.

Now, the theme song to The Groovie Goolies was very well-known to me, as it would be eventually to my two little brothers as well, as they grew up with year after year of some version of the show. Here's how the original tune went in this clip from the show...

But there were several other tunes from The Groovie Goolies that stuck in my head as I came out of childhood and grew to be, well, nothing but a larger child. The chief earworm in the group was the howling call of "... and Weird-o Wolf-ie!!" which sprang from a song about the main monsters on the show called Frightening Frank, Dangerous Drac and Weirdo Wolfie aka The Monster Trio. (Sadly or not, I am still prone to saying that phrase at any given moment should something trigger it in my memories.) Another strong contender for my favorite as a kid was the song Chic-a-Boom. I remember the puppet theatre that my father built which had enough room for all three of us to stand inside it. As a result, we would often turn the construct around and use it as a full stage on which to pretend to play rock band. I recall very clearly we Johnson Boys singing along with "Chic-a-Boom! Chic-a-Boom! Don'tcha just love it?" many times on that stage or just when we played in general. And I always really liked songs like Monsters on Parade and The First Annual Semi-Formal Combination Celebration Meet the Monster Population Party... look, if you are going to have a place full of every type of monster, you had either be ready for either a parade or party... or both. And you can bet there will be songs that come out of it.

The truth of the matter is that I could pick any of the thirty-plus songs that were played on The Groovie Goolies show and place them on one of these mixtapes, and no one would blink about it, nor would I. The show was about monsters that (mostly) sang about monsters or monster-related activities. But the song that stuck with me the most over the course of the past 40 years was that damned catchy theme song. However, which version should I use. The actual show version of the theme song is less than a minute long, which just never felt long enough. The album version released in 1970 – which featured three guys in really bad monster makeup on both the front and back covers, but still had images from the TV characters too – has a much longer version of the TV theme (at 3½ minutes) and it is one of the rockier songs on the record, even if it is really only a country rock rave-up that turns into a sing-along. But it was the only version I had for a long time. And I didn't know I needed another one.

Enter... Toadies

When Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits came out, I went hardcore into pushing it on my friends. It became part of an all-night animation fest that I held at my apartment in 1995, in which the plan was to end up on Saturday morning having to watch the promotional special while we all ate breakfast cereal. This is after we spent about a dozen hours watching all manner of Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, and other cartoons through the night. (Most slept through a chunk of it, of course... we were all working people and many were college students in those days.) The reaction to the show itself in the morning was tepid at best, mostly because it was ruined by host Drew Barrymore and her friends doing the same thing we were doing, by breaking into the middle of the individual videos in the special with their own giggling and dopey commentary. Dammit, we were trying to do that, Drew! Get your own animation festival! Or at least one that doesn't intrude upon mine! I know the intent was to be post-post-post-everything and oh so cool by laughing at popular culture and nostalgia, but all it really did was piss off the people who legitimately wanted to hear the music (and possibly buy it). And for Drew Barrymore-hating me, it just made her look like that much more of a self-absorbed asshole.

Regardless of stupid interruptions, the Saturday Morning special did have some pretty groovy videos within it, Most often, the best videos were the ones where the songs were already the more successful translations from past to present. The Violent Femmes' video for Jet Screamer's classic Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) (from The Jetsons) was favored over most of the other, with the jumpsuit-wearing Femmes pretending to play in front of rear-projected Jetsons footage and looking like they having a great, goofy time while also looking just about as uncomfortable and out of place as they did when they made a cameo on an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch a few years later. Helmet does a fantastic video for Gigantor, and the appearance of the band (in muted color) playing in front of the black and white cartoon explosions from the cartoon make their video arguably the most dynamic of the bunch. Liz Phair looks like she is genuinely having a ball doing The Banana Splits theme, all while wearing a go-go dress. Juliana Hatfield was pretty much born to sing Josie and the Pussycats.  And as always, the Ramones have the superpower of being... well, the Ramones, and thus they are able to team up with a certain web-slinger to make sure that their video for Spider-Man becomes a hell of a good time.

And then we come to Toadies covering the Groovie Goolies. But first the video...

Toadies
Goolie Get-Together
(Written by Linda Martin and Janis Gwin)

[Chorus 1]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

[Guitar solo]

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together!

[Chorus 1 repeat]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Everybody shout!!!

The words to Goolie Get-Together are devastatingly simple, but after all we are only being invited to join a bunch of monsters at a party. You don't want to make the invitation too complicated or nobody will show up to the gig. The single verse is repeated twice in the song, and there are two variants on the chorus; the first one is only repeated at the tail end of the song, and we get version 2 of that chorus thrice overall. Also note that while the song is titled Goolie Get-Together, the words "Goolies get-together," with the name of the group pluralized, is actually sung in the song (and appear on the official lyric sheet that way too).

It is the performance by the band Toadies that is the remarkable thing here. While, of course, the recording of the song took place in a studio (Planet Dallas), the sound of the song has a true live feel to it. I have heard full, actual live albums that sound less "live" than this track. Adding to this feel is the video, which is one of the few (if not the only one) in the special that incorporates stage footage of the band actually performing the song they are covering in the special. The footage is edited into the video, naturally, so you don't see an unaltered performance; instead, in the MTV style, it is chopped up and lightly tossed with footage of the Goolies mucking about and causing all sorts of chaos. The Toadies stomp about on stage and work the song hard, while the screen seems to ripple and flash as if being threatened by a lightning storm.

And in the song, lead singer Todd Lewis imparts almost as much passion into singing about a cartoon monster party as he does to singing about coming from the water, swearing he won't backslide and become the hypocrite he seems to fear becoming, or convincing a girl to self-immolate to join him in the afterlife. Dare I say he brings the song actual gravitas? He makes it sound like his band really is performing at Horrible Hall and have committed to coaxing a crowd inside to join in all the ghoulish, silly fun. You can almost feel the sweat and hum of the club, and as Lewis grips his guitar and dives into another chorus, you think, "Yeah, I wanna join the Goolies at their get-together..." The song hypnotizes me nearly every time into believing that I am at that clubhouse, ready to become one of the crowd. It's the best rendition on the album, built out of what might be one of the lightest, simplest songs covered on it.

Even Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) has more lyrical depth to it than Goolie Get-Together, and half the song is just "Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah" sung relentlessly. Getting back to what I said at the beginning about the bands participating in this album not necessarily being fans of the songs they are covering, I had the pleasure of being allowed to hang with the Violent Femmes in the green room of their show during one of their appearances in Anchorage, Alaska. Singer-guitarist Gordon Gano asked me if there were any particular songs or rarities that I would like to request that evening, and I said, "Maybe it's a longshot, but Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah?" Gordon gave a sly smile, shook his head, and said, "Man, the last time we played that song was when we recorded it for that album." 

He told me later that he really didn't know the song or the show growing up, and that they selected the song from a list of potential songs for the album. I asked him to play T. Rex's Children of the Revolution instead (which the Femmes had released as a single off their third album, The Blind Leading the Naked, in 1986). They did, and I was happy; it was really a killer show. But the crowds would really go nuts if they ever did play Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah.

If only they understood the power of the animated side...

Why I Couldn't Miss Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice... Pt. 1

[I began this piece a couple of days before Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice hit theatres on the evening of Thursday, May 24th, and finished it well after seeing the film twice already. When I began writing this, the film was already hitting crazy lows on critical mass sites like Rotten Tomatoes due to the accumulation of generally poor to middling reviews from movie critics, and even before the film was going to be seen for the first time by the public, the so-called "fan"-boys and the appropriately named trolls had already pretty much taken the film apart without seeing a frame outside of the trailers. While none of this was going to sway me from my impulse to see the film at my earliest possible convenience -- the reasons why are the thrust of this piece -- seeing that a couple of my long-time friends were not only proclaiming in advance they were not going to see the film, but were ferociously adamant about it, set me to muse upon the situation.]

There is a viral video going about lately that you can find by searching for "The Avengers 1978," though I have seen several different variations under alternate titles. In this video, we are presented with many clips of Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby from their portrayals of The Incredible Hulk and David (not specifically Bruce) Banner from the popular TV show on the late '70s and early '80s. We also see Reb Brown in his star-spangled garb and ridiculous motorcycle helmet as Captain America, featured in a pair of television movies (also from the late '70s). All well and good up to this point.

The year "1978" in the title gets thrown off the track greatly then by the appearance of a fur-laden but still mighty Thor; while he does come straight from an appearance with the Ferrigno/Bixby Incredible Hulk, the clips are from the 1988 TV movie titled The Incredible Hulk Returns (a full decade after 1978). The Iron Man used in The Avengers 1978 gets us closer to the stated year, although it is nowhere close to being the Marvel Comics hero. It is actually David Ackroyd as Exo-Man, the titular hero of a 1977 NBC television movie about a paralyzed scientist who builds an armored suit that allows him to walk again and eventually fight the mob on the streets of his city.

As for the rest of the "Avengers" in this comedic trailer, we get:

• The Black Widow: short clips of a red-haired female in a red outfit (hardly the real Natasha Romanova's fashion choice) doing some clumsy martial arts combat against an assailant. Origin unknown to me at the moment.
• Loki: various shots of Paul Lynde doing his trademark "sneer and snicker" schtick, sadly without audio of one of his usual catty comments. (Great casting idea though...)
• Hawkeye: Alan Alda from M*A*S*H (who else could it possibly be?)
• Tony Stark: a large mustachioed gentlemen of '70s vintage fills in for Iron Man's alter ego and woos women at a cocktail party (or two).
• The Destroyer: Not sure if they are meant to imply Drax the Destroyer of Guardians of the Galaxy fame, but what we get here is Gene Simmons of KISS fame playing his fire-breathing Demon character from KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. We also get a couple of quick shots of KISS with Paul Lynde himself on Lynde's amazing 1976 Halloween special.
• Nick Fury: In at least one version of this video meme, clips of David Hasselhoff playing Fury in an early '90s television movie have been inserted.

The trailer is displayed to the viewer as a "CBS Late Movie" complete with the attendant fanfare music and graphics expected in such a presentation. The joke is obvious, and admittedly, humorous on a first glance. Of course, my geekiness gets the better of me, and I can't but help to point out where they have erred in their attempt, a futile effort on my part that nevertheless becomes emboldened when reading too many comments on Youtube for the different visions of this meme where it becomes clear that the bulk of the millennials viewing these clips are mainly taking the videos at face value, and thinking that The Avengers 1978 was a real show. My guess is that even the Hawkeye Pierce joke is also totally lost on the majority of them. Le sigh...

But The Avengers 1978 fake trailer is not why I am here today. It certainly makes up a small portion of the kindling for this fire o' mine, but it is not the real reason. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is the reason. Or, specifically, the perception of the critical lambasting of the film in advance of the film even coming out is the real reason.

I get that everyone has their take on why or why not they want to see a film. While I might believe that someone's particular stance is grounded in obstinacy or sheer bullshit, I also cannot denounce any opinion they may hold as invalid (at least not publicly). Conversely, I don't want someone to discount my opinion in the same manner. We all have our likes and dislikes, and we use them to color our decisions throughout our existences, both in matters important and trivial. And so I am not going to pick out a particular instance or two that might have riled me recently, nor am I going to do battle against the critical establishment, for in stating what I already have thus far, I must by all means consider each of their opinions in this matter as equally valid in viewpoint and execution.

What I am going to tell you is why there is not a chance in any imaginary hellscape that I would even think of missing out on seeing Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice in a movie theatre.

And The Avengers 1978 fake trailer is one of the reasons why.

The silly little fake trailer is nothing more than simple fluff, meant to entertain while gathering pageviews and comments on whatever social media page chooses to host or post it. But for certain members of its audience -- namely, me -- The Avengers 1978 hit home in an unexpected way.

An actual Avengers comic from 1978

During the year of 1978, I jumped from thirteen to fourteen years of age, and I was a big comic book geek. While I read comics for much of my young life at that point, I didn't really start collecting them until early in 1977. From the start, my favorite Marvel comic was The Avengers and my favorite DC books, naturally, were the Batman titles. Throughout 1978, not only was I beginning to amass what would turn out to be a huge comic collection, but I was also fully immersed in Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, Ray Harryhausen stop-motion, Hammer horror films (but monster films of all stripes really), Topps baseball cards for all of the major sports (and even the non-sport varieties), and reruns of older TV shows such as Star Trek, The Wild Wild West, Dr. Who, Get Smart, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and my all-time fave and obsession since I was a toddler (quite literally), the Adam West version of Batman. And then there was the prime time television of the day...

As a tried and true comic and also science-fiction fan, my TV obsessions that year definitely included such fare as The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, Mork and Mindy, The Amazing Spider-Man, Battlestar Galactica, Logan's Run, The Bionic Woman, and especially The Six Million Dollar Man (which ended its run early in that year). I also partook of non-genre shows like Fantasy Island, Starsky and Hutch, Baretta, The Love Boat, WKRP in Cincinnati, M*A*S*H, Family, Eight is Enough, Soap, Three's Company, and Charlie's Angels. There were also Saturday morning cartoon shows like The All-New Super Friends Hour/Challenge of the Super Friends, The Krofft Supershow, The Fantastic Four, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour, Jason of Star Command, Space Sentinels, The Godzilla Power Hour, Space Academy, and The Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour/Tarzan and the Super 7 (amongst far too many others). 

What it comes down to is... I watched a lot of damn television as a kid. And scraping away the non-genre junk (from all the other junk), it became clear that wherever super-heroes, super-villains, monsters, or aliens of all stripes might appear -- and no matter which format or time of day or night -- I would find them. Sure, even at that tender age, I wished that some of the animation in the cartoon shows was better. I was always angry that none of the animated shows had a design half as good as the much older (but still often in reruns) Jonny Quest, then and now one of my fave shows of all time. And I was always frustrated that the live-action shows were always so stunted in showing off the powers of its heroes and villains, or in the rather limited scope of special effects (at least until Battlestar came along).

But we took what we could get. When a TV movie featuring Dr. Strange came on, my fellow comic buddies and I jumped on it like it was made of solid gold, no matter the actual quality of the film. It just didn't matter. The aforementioned Exo-Man was a big deal to us when it came on (though once it was on, it was no longer a big deal; it was a pretty shabby affair, as you can tell from the clips in The Avengers 1978 trailer). Short-lived shows like the very silly Holmes and Yoyo and the more serious Future Cop came and went, but we watched them all in the hopes of see something new, something different, something cool... and something heroic.

In 1978, we got Superman on the big screen, and man, was it a big deal. I still have promotional magazines for the film's release in my collection (included an over-sized jumbo magazine that DC itself put out and the requisite set of Topps trading cards). And when we sat in the theatre and saw the new, charming Man of Steel portrayed perfectly by Christopher Reeve (still the standard) fly for the first time, well, even without being told that we would believe he could do so by the advertising, we really did believe it for a short time. Or at least we were willing to suspend our disbelief long enough to enjoy the experience, even though we were already too touched by Star Wars and the new media concentration on how special effects were created in that day to not see the men behind the curtain. The magazines told us everything, but the effect did still work on us -- because we wished it so -- and it was bigger and better than any superhero effort to that point. We loved it.

Most of the time, however, it was me and my comics alone. Lacking a live-action source for most superheroes (or even an animated one), I read and reread each issue devotedly. In my mind's eye, I treated each comic as it were the latest episode of that hero's television show. The next step was a tad insane. Obsessed with TV listings at that age (even memorizing the times and stations of every prime time program and many of the daytime ones), on paper I constructed my own networks that were to be rivals to television's (then) Big Three. There was a DC and a Marvel network, and I delighted in plotting out prime-time schedules, pitting particular comics against one another in the same time slots. I even had a network for the non-Marvel and DC titles, where Richie Rich, Casper, Archie, and Charlton Comics got their fair shake as well. Whatever I was reading at the time, they got a "show".

In this dream comic television universe, Batman almost always ran concurrently against Captain America and the Falcon, and of course, the Justice League of America always faced off against the Avengers, and so on... Studying the TV ratings announced in the local paper, I was already attuned to which nights were the most popular ones, and tried to adjust my "hero" networks in the same way, putting what I perceived to be stronger shows on the nights that drew the bigger ratings to do battle against the most popular "real" shows.

In this way, when I actually read the comics, they came to life even more for me, since I was now perceiving each one as an actual live entertainment. I would even write out brief synopses for each issue to put in my bogus TV Guide to entice the would-be viewer into watching that "show". And this alternate television universe in my mind also extended to the movie world. Multi-issue arcs, of the time the Avengers were often prone to, were feature films to me. 

My superhero network world collapsed after a year or so, mostly due to maturation (albeit slight) on my part. We grow up and get distracted by other things. Comics were still a major component of my lifeblood; the extra time in my late teens was spent in building fake TV schedules was put into more worthy projects like writing, music, going to actual movies, obsessing over girls (and all of its attendant weirdness), and drawing my own comics. But even though I was growing up, there was one aspect of childhood that I never outgrew: I still felt the world was seriously lacking comic book entertainment beyond the printed page.

I never fell out of love with the fantastical onscreen. Straight through the rest of the 20th century, every major science-fiction, superhero, fantasy, and horror project was treated with equal fervor and excitement before it either came out to theatres or arrived on the television screen. And then, once it was released and viewed, likewise treated with either the acclaim or disdain appropriate to its result. This leads to situations where The Last Starfighter, Krull, and Megaforce all seemed equally interesting in concept in advance of their release in the 1980s, but then I discovered that -- in my opinion at the time (and now), and in order -- that one was a thoroughly marvelous entertainment, one was dull and too derivative in conception, and the last was an insipid pile of horseshit. But I chose to go see each one on the same neutral grounds, and if I didn't come out with the same positive opinion of each one, well, that's mostly on me.

No matter how I felt about them afterward, I was happy to go see all three in the theatre. It doesn't come down to idiotic statements like "I want my money back" or "I wasted two hours of my life that I'll never get back"; you know, the rote things that people who don't take ownership of their actions say when they are upset about the consequences of a simple night out at the movies. No, I chose to spend my own money and see all three films, and it wasn't the excellence of the films in which I was investing those few precious dollars... it was the experience.

Buying a movie ticket doesn't guarantee that you will enjoy the film that is showing on the movie screen that day. It is a contract between you and the theatre owner that you have rented space in one of their seats, gives you access to their refreshment counter (where you will encounter further, sometimes ridiculous fees for usually mediocre food), and allows you the chance to see the featured film at the specific time printed on your ticket. It doesn't say anything about actually enjoying the film; you are basically purchasing a night out at the movies, and whether you end up enjoying the experience or not is up to you.

No one gets refunds on a ticket to the baseball game when the home team doesn't win the game. You are going to the game to see two teams play each other. You are going for the experience. Just like with a movie, your happiness over the few hours you have spent there may depend on the outcome of the game, but that is merely your perception of the event. The doofus next to you in the stands -- or in the same theatre row -- may have had a wonderful time overall.

For me, even seeing a crappy film in the theatre is still an experience worth having. Seeing what you believe to be nothing but top-notch films all the time may sound great, but what it does is whitewash the results of what you are seeing. You have to have a little bit of the bad with the good on occasion to make what is good seem even better. You have to mix it up. Megaforce is a truly terrible film, but we actually had a terrific time making fun of every horrid moment on the screen -- in a pre-MST3K way, since it was only 1982 -- and every stupid line delivered by a truly out of his element Barry Bostwick and company. Once an audience is unified in its belief that what they are seeing is beyond even the help of the most proficient editor in the world, the results can be a ball. 

But the biggest thing for me is that when I went to a film in those days, it was more about the communal experience of seeing a film -- any film -- with my friends. The film really didn't matter; it was about sitting in the dark with my best pals and having a good time. Popcorn, soda, red vines... if the movie turned out to be fantastic, all the better. Beyond this, then and now, the movie theatre has become my church. It is where I go to work things out for myself, to perhaps catch a few minutes of quiet in the dark, and just let a movie wash over me while my mind clicks away in the background. (Sorry, unlike many people who prefer that a movie let's them "not think" for a while, I cannot do that.) Sure, I prefer to go see a film of which I might be anxious to check out, but when I need to escape to the theatre, it can be any film. As a result, I do often see movies that are considered subpar on a critical level.

So I learned how to deal with those potential disappointments when encountered on the big screen. Beyond becoming simpatico with a crowd and firing back at the screen (something which totally violates my movie-going code of the past 25 years and which I would never do these days), I learned that the best way to combat ill feelings towards a film was to write them about them; to put these experiences down on paper, and learn to cast a critical eye towards anything that I was watching. Whether or not anyone else was going to read what I had just spilled out on paper (and in those early days, nobody was reading anything that I wrote, even myself), the point was to get it out of my system.

Now, one could say that there is little difference between what I taught myself to do over the years in writing about my movie experiences, and what people were doing in advance of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Weren't they also getting out their disappointment onto, if not paper, then on the internet, and probably on Twitter or Facebook, for the world to see? Well, yes, they were, but there is a critical difference between what I do and what they were doing...

... I wait until I have actually seen a film before I start deciding if it is the worst thing I have ever seen or not.

[To be continued...]

That Familiar Cathode Buzz: So They Weren't Quite Stars...

Ask me why I am the way I am, and I don't have any creepy priests or abusive parents to whom I may point. OK, I did grow up watching and being obsessed with Richard Milhous Nixon, so he might count. Just like anyone, I faced my share of adversity, but overall, that really had little bearing on my shaping as a human-sized monster.

Nah! Like so many others, I was raised on and programmed by the popular media of whatever age it was. Some of it quite excellent by any measure, but mixed in with the excellent were far too many lame movies, too many idiot comic books, too much bad music and way, way, way too much horrible television as a child. Of course, each one of us subjected to such travesties remembers those wonders of our youth with a magical sheen glowing about the edges of each and every item, no matter how rotten they may now seem to modern eyes, even our own.

 

In the past year or so, I slapped a cassette copy (from the original cassette) of the Hudson Brothers second album, Hollywood Situation (released the same year as this show) into the cassette player in my brother Otis' car. Having heard it about a zillion times over the years (I would listen to it once or twice annually just for fun), I have grown quite accustomed to its lightly Beatle-esque, power pop charms, but my brother had not heard it in nearly thirty years. In fact, despite the fact we used to air-guitar along with it and wrote puppet shows around the songs as kids, he didn't remember it at all. Not even their biggest hit, So You Are A Star.

I was actually saddened by the whole affair, but I wasn't counting in the fact that I had subjected myself to it on a regular rotation in the intervening years, while Otis had basically been on the other end of a media blackout concerning the Hudsons. After all, they pretty much disappeared from view after their sole headlining feature film Hysterical (which I also own, by the way) flopped... until Bill's estranged daughter Kate hit it big in L.A. But at that time in my youth, in much the way that D. Boon spoke of punk rock and Bob Dylan, the Hudson Brothers were the Marx Brothers to me. Before I knew who the Marx Brothers were. Before I knew that the comedy I was watching on The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show was mostly second, third and sometimes fourth-hand schtick lovingly borrowed from other comedians and acts, including the Marx Brothers.

And this was slightly before I realized how much I needed the Marx Brothers in my life. So the Hudson Brothers weren't quite stars. For me, they were moderately decent placeholders until the real thing came along...

[Notes: Murray Langston is much better known as The Unknown Comic, and the chief reason that "forever puppet-mad me" loved the show was Rod Hull and his amazing Emu. More on them at a later date...]

That Familiar Cathode Buzz: The Curse of Saturday Mornings...

Because I am connected so deeply (and wrongly, and somewhat against my will at this point) to a childhood misspent in front of an RCA television, things like this happen:

Raw Meat and I are knocking out problem after problem at work, and in the midst of this, we tend to throw one-liners back and forth. Raw Meat says something quite out of left field to me, but the word "space" is somewhere in there, and so I call him a "far out space nut."

Why? Because the phrase is stuck in my head. Why? Because I watched every goddamn program on Saturday morning television for years and years. When the shows I really liked went to reruns, I watched the shows I didn't watch the first time. I saw them ALL. And I saw a Sid and Marty Krofft show starring Bob Denver and Chuck McCann called:


 
Raw Meat had never heard of the show, owing to his not having been born at that point in time (1975). And because he was born in another land far removed from our crappy Saturday Morning television shows. When I described the show to him and showed him a picture or two on the internet, he said "It looks funny."

I replied, "No, but it sure seemed that way when I was eleven."