Author Archives: keithroysdon

About keithroysdon

I'm a lifelong writer of news, pop culture and fiction. Google me - I'm all over the place.

MTV Classic: The nostalgia channel you’re not watching

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If you were alive and had a cable TV connection in the early 1980s, you were probably watching MTV.

If you’re alive right now, in 2025, and have a cable TV connection, you’re probably not watching MTV Classic.

Let me explain.

When we moved a couple of years ago, we got a new cable TV connection – same provider, different channel choices – and I discovered an incredible time-waster, MTV Classic.

Even though you’re not watching, you can probably guess what MTV Classic shows: music videos from the 1980s and 1990s. The videos that aired on MTV and VH1 back in the day.

Some of the videos are truly classics. Some highlight just how awful a lot of the videos – which were sometimes treated as art by particular artists but were of course just promotional spots provided by record companies – were. Looking at them now, there are some fun examples that evoke nostalgia and some that exemplify how gratuitous and overblown a lot of music videos were.

MTV Classic shows one-hour blocks of 80s videos, heavy metal videos and 90s videos, etc. Just like the old channel, there’s no telling what will come up in four minutes.

There are no VJs, so no chance to discover the next JJ Jackson or Martha Quinn.

The funniest thing I learned while researching MTV Classic is that almost nobody is watching it. In TV audience terms, it’s really almost nobody.

Since the channel was launched in 1998 as VH1 Smooth – no, really – audience numbers have fallen off a cliff. The channel is available to 39 million cable households, apparently, but only about 14,000 viewers are tuning in at any moment. It is the least-watched English-language channel available to most cable subscribers.

I think some personality – or personalities – might help a little, but one thing MTV Classic does that could bring a few viewers its way is the tributes it airs to performers who have died. When crooner Tony Bennett died on July 21, 2023, MTV Classic ran a weekend of Bennett songs, including but not limited to his collaborations with Lady Gaga.

I’m guessing most people didn’t know that – if they even new MTV Classic was on their cable lineup.

Can we afford to plunge into nostalgia right now?

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For decades – heck, centuries – nostalgia has been a strong force in society. When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I loved old Universal horror films and the Marx Brothers. In the 1990s or 2000s, one of my barely-out-of-college fellow reporters surprised me once by mentioning James Dean. When I told her I was surprised she knew who the Hoosier movie icon was, the told me she’d had posters of Dean in her room at college.

So nostalgia has always been with us. Presently, look no further than all the nostalgia channels like MeTV that offer old TV shows, or modern-day series set in the past. We’re currently watching and enjoying “Call the Midwife” on Netflix, a series about, well, midwives in 1950s London (at least early on; the show moves forward in time in subsequent seasons).

Everything from “Happy Days” – which capitalized on 1950s nostalgia in the 1970s – to the History Channel – when it was less about knife-forging competitions and more about history documentaries – appeal to those of us who want to visit the past.

Make no mistake: The past, even the recent past, was not a good time for women, queer people and people of color. (Those times are hardly better now.) I always roll my eyes when people today long for “a simpler time” which usually means a time when people who looked like them were just fine and everybody else was getting the short end of the stick or worse.

So even while I’m enjoying the occasional retreat into the pop culture of the past as well as pop culture that is set in the past, before the Internet and cell phones and various threats to our way of life, I feel guilty about it.

Shouldn’t I be alert and tuned in to all the threats and transgressions we face right now? Is it advisable to dwell in the past when confronted with an uncertain future?

I bet you’re expecting me to say that it’s fine to take the occasional foray into the past for nostalgia’s sake. But I’m honestly conflicted about doing this. Yes, I know our problems will be waiting for us when we return from the depths of nostalgia, so we might as well take a breather once in a while.

But I honestly want to know: Is nostalgia the opiate of the masses, as was once said about religion? Is is deadly? Or is it a welcome relief from the walking feeling of dread of today?

‘Superman and Lois’ and goodbye to the Arrowverse

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At the time of this writing, only one episode remains for “Superman & Lois,” the CW series, and even as I type those words, it feels like I’m reaching back into the distant past.

That’s not the case, but it feels like it. The CW series “Arrow” began in October 2012 and, while it had some low points, did what no TV series has been able to accomplish before or is likely to accomplish again: Take a core group of DC Comics characters – Green Arrow and his supporting cast, and later the Flash and Supergirl and eventually Superman and many others – and make a vast, interconnect set of series and storylines about them. Though the aforementioned series and others like “Batwoman,” “Legends of Tomorrow” and “Black Lightning,” the producers called up some of the greatest and some of the most obscure supporting characters from DC comic books, cast them well and gave them not only their standalone adventures but crossovers, so many crossovers.

Every one of the 700 or so episodes – a staggering number – wasn’t all that it could have been, but most were perfectly entertaining stuff and had some moments that comic book geeks thought they would never see in a live-action form:

A race around the world between the Flash and, in this case, Supergirl

The League of Shadows/League of Assassins, Batman villains repurposed for Green Arrow, who became something of the Batman of this universe

Serious-minded stories and mostly-comic-book-authentic plots that even depicted the Crisis on Infinite Earths stories

Costumes that were a little bashful at first but that became flat-out geekgasmic comic-book-authentic eventually. (You know, it took a long time for Marvel to get Wolverine in that yellow outfit.)

The appearance of characters that we may never see in live action again – at least not done with this much integrity.

I’m giving short shrift to “Superman & Lois” here and I don’t mean to, but with the final episode of the final season set for December 2, we’re not sure how the series will play out, eventually. I can guess that it will end well; “Superman & Lois” has been, literally and figuratively, set apart for its entire run since 2021. Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tulloch got their start in their roles on Arrowverse shows, but once “Superman & Lois” began airing, the 50-plus episodes over four seasons took place on an alternate Earth from the rest of the heroes. It probably made it easier, this holding the series at arms length from where it began, as the other series were ending. I did miss some interaction with the other heroes, however.

There’s a lot to like about “Superman & Lois,” from the leads to the consistency of the (undoubtedly less expensive to shoot than Metropolis) Smallville setting to final-season portrayal of Lex Luthor by Michael Cudlitz, best remembered from “The Walking Dead.”

There’s been some very good live action DC Comics moments in the past few years, notably the Arrowverse series and the Titans series. “Superman & Lois” ranks up, up and away among the best.

‘House of 1,000 Dolls’ is vintage sleaze starring Vincent Price

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By the standards of the exploitation movies of just a few years later, there’s not that much shocking about “House of 1,000 Dolls,” a 1967 German-Spanish co-production starring Vincent Price as a magician who hypnotizes women during his nightclub act in Tangiers. The women end up in a house of prostitution, although there are considerably fewer than 1,000 women there. Unless maybe you count the miniature actual dolls that line one bookshelf?

“House of 1,000 Dolls” definitely qualifies as racy stuff for the period and it no doubt titillated drive-in movie audiences with its scenes of kidnapped women wearing bras and panties and filmy gowns.

And Price apparently was a little scandalized. This was during the period the actor was starring in well-remembered, full-color Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe tales and, according to one interview, Price was startled to learn that the makers of “House of 1,000 Dolls” were shooting more explicit scenes on the sets when his scenes were not filmed.

My favorite aspect of the movie, though, is the presence in the cast of an actor named Herbert Fux. He was an Austrian actor who, in addition to appearing in legit and semi-legit films, also appeared in some kind of porn films. And he was in politics as well.

As the old Smuckers commercials might have said, “With a name like Fux, it has to be porn.”

“House of 1,000 Dolls” is available via streaming and it’s worth it alone to see Price running around in a top hat and cape.

Highly recommended: ‘Film Is Dead. Long Live Film’

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“Film is Dead. Love Live Film” is a new (earlier in 2024) documentary film from director Peter Flynn and it captures a type of collecting and preservation of history that I have to say I’d not considered all that much before: personal film collecting. As in, scavenging and collecting and restoring and preserving and sharing a wide variety of films from the entire history of movie-making, from feature films to home movies to commercials to – well, you name it.

I just watched “Film Is Dead” on TCM, which has always done an admirable job of film preservation and popularization, and Flynn’s documentary calls attention to the private collectors of film – everything from 8 millimeter to 70 millimeter – who can become slightly obsessive about their hobby, which itself can be an artistic endeavor.

I’ve always known about the many ways film and films have been preserved and shared, with my first awareness of this coming when I was young and got an 8mm projector and some films. My goal was to get an 8mm movie camera and make my own movies – I really wanted to do my own version of “Dracula” – but the hobby, as long as it lasted, remained focused on collecting those minutes-long 8mm versions – released by Castle Films, but the documentary notes there were several companies – of old horror films. The Castle films I was familiar with were heavily edited versions of old Universal horror features like “Frankenstein” or sometimes just scenes.

This was in the 1960s and 1970s, so needless to say it was long before even truncated versions of the films were available to watch at home on video. The thirst to see old Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello or Boris Karloff films was great and coincided with the release of those books that reproduced hundreds of photos from films like “Psycho” along with the script. The 8mm films and those books were the only way most of us, who did not have access to 16mm films, experienced these movies when they weren’t airing on local TV.

The 8mm films are covered here, but the bulk of the documentary is about the film fans – maybe even obsessives – who dived in dumpsters to salvage films thrown away by movie studios and TV stations (something that happened often; tens of thousands of films from the Silent Era forward were lost forever) or bought them from other collectors or even stole copies.

For decades, the Hollywood studios frowned on, and with the help of authorities even prosecuted, private collectors of films. “Film Is Dead” recounts a lot of things I didn’t know, including that well-known film buffs like Rock Hudson, Mel Torme, Hugh Hefner and Roddy McDowall were targeted. “Planet of the Apes” star McDowall was in 1974 busted by the feds for “film piracy.” The documentary notes that the feds used McDowall as an example to anyone who traded and trafficked in private film ownership.

The hobby was “basically illegal,” as one collector points out.

Decades later, though, studios and museums were seeking out collectors who had copies – sometimes the last surviving copies – of films, features and shorts, commercials and those “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” intermission films from drive-in theaters, in order to help make them more widely available.

“Film is Dead” acknowledges that movie theaters are never going back from digital projection to showing films on film. But the resources of digital restoration and online sharing of films make it possible to see many of these works of art again.

The collectors in the documentary are very passionate about preserving films but also about sharing them with other people. And the film really emphasizes how cavalier the studios and TV stations were in throwing away and destroying or melting down (to recoup the silver in film stock) films once they were no longer of value. So much history was lost.

One collector depicted here gives his collection to a younger collector/museum/archive. Another turns over his collection to the Library of Congress. There’s acknowledgement, too, of the kind of thing I’ve seen in Facebook groups about collecting vintage comic books. These old collectors are wondering what to do with tens of thousands of comic books and what will happen to them when they die. Will they just be thrown away if their kids don’t want them?

Probably.

“Film is Dead. Love Live Film” is an engrossing and touching look at the history and current status of collecting film. It’s funny at times – there’s acknowledgment of what a dirty job salvaging old films is – and the toll it takes on collectors and their families, because collecting can be as much of an obsession as anything.

Flashback: Me seeing the original ‘Star Wars’ at the movies

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It will surprise no one to know that the original “Star Wars” movies were formative experiences for me. From the original in 1977 to “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980 to “Return of the Jedi” in 1983, the films – and more to the point at the moment – seeing them in theaters were a huge part of my life as a movie and science fiction fan as a teenager and young adult.

A couple of years ago, Stephen Danley, creator of the webpage Star Wars at the Movies, interviewed me for his podcast and page.

https://www.starwarsatthemovies.com/

We talked about the experience of going to see the originals first at my neighborhood theater in Muncie, Indiana, and later at the Eastwood Theater in Indianapolis with a group of friends.

Stephen’s entire podcast and page are fun, but here’s a link to the podcast. I come in at about the 24-minute mark, if I’m remembering correctly. Here’s the link, if this works:

https://www.starwarsatthemovies.com/podcast/2024/10/28/ep-24-the-eastwood-and-beyond

Enjoy this “Star Wars” flashback.

(The photo above is me from a few years later, not seeing a “Star Wars” movie and not even really seeing “A Nightmare on Elm Street Part II.” The newspaper took it as a publicity shot. I was the newspaper’s movie reviewer from 1978 to 1990.)

Halloween on TV, 2024 style

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Way back in the dark ages, before the Internet, I wrote about TV – we’re talking about the 1980s, so even pay-cable, as they called it then, was relatively new – and my favorite time of year to write about TV was the run-up to Halloween.

I’d been a dedicated watcher of Halloween-oriented TV in my childhood, watching late-night horror host Sammy Terry and, of course, the Charlie Brown “Great Pumpkin” special.

So by the time I was an “adult” and getting paid to write about TV for my local newspaper, I would devote one of my weekly columns in October to Halloween specials and movies we could look forward to seeing on the tube, Because this was before the Internet, I mostly relied on press releases sent via MAIL in PRINT from TV networks and Indianapolis TV stations.

So I’d list a Halloween week’s worth of TV. In October 1984, for example, I noted that the 1979 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” would air on Cinemax on October 31, followed by John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” “Alligator” and George Romero’s “Creepshow.”

I noted that Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, would host a four-hour block on MTV. I watched this a while back for a book I was writing, set in October 1984, and found it a very fun experience that included Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”

Now we have all the info we want, all the time, about what’s coming up on great cable channels like TCM – this October its star of the month is Bela Lugosi – and streaming services.

I’ve been catching a few fun old horror films and specials. What have I watched so far this month? I enjoyed rewatching the Tom Cruise “Mummy” movie from 2017 that was supposed to kick off “a new world of gods and monsters” for a Universal “Dark Universe” that would see revivals of all the classic films from the studio. We know how badly that went.

I watched “Halloween with the New Addams Family,” a 1977 special that was really misnamed because most of the cast of the 1960s series returned for this TV movie sequel.

I’m enjoying the Creepy Cinema series on TCM that kicked off with “Sudden Fear,” a little-seen 1952 thriller starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance.

One of the most enjoyable watches so far was “Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story,” a documentary from 2007 about the shock film director/producer who rivaled Alfred Hitchcock for the ingenuity of his films – and especially the gimmicks used to promote them, including “The Tingler.” I highly recommend this doc if you’ve never seen it. I found it for free on streaming.

And of course I’m watching as “Svengoolie” counts down to Halloween with double-features every Saturday night.

I’m almost certain that before Halloween I’ll rewatch that Charlie Brown special. It wouldn’t be Halloween without seeing t.

Attention Kmart shoppers … well, the few of you remaining … the last Kmart is closing

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I’m sure nobody else has used that “Attention Kmart shoppers” joke lately, huh?

Yes, news broke in the past couple of days that the last full-fledged Kmart store, on Long Island, New York, will close in October. That’s not surprising. The retailer has been on a steady path to oblivion since the mid-2000s, when the then-owner of both Kmart and Sears started stripping off parts and selling them. It was only a matter of time. Shopping trends and tastes have changed and mightier retailers than Kmart – at least mightier in recent decades – have passed away.

Trivia tidbit: 1962 was the year that Kmart – the discount version of longtime retailer S.S. Kresge – Target and Walmart opened their doors.

I come to praise Kmart, not to bury it. Well, I’m not sure I’ll be praising Kmart, but I will cite a couple of nostalgic feelings for it.

I grew up two miles out in the country from a couple of shopping centers, one of which included a Kmart. The stores – which also included W.T. Grant, a dime store when such things still existed – were the center of our shopping existence. Kmart was where we got a lot of our clothes and toys.

I was writing about business for the newspaper in the 2000s, when my town’s two Kmarts closed. For all their faults, they filled a void for local neighborhood retail that still hasn’t been filled.

I will always think of how my mom bought a vacuum cleaner from Kmart for my wife and me. It wasn’t a hint to clean our house! It was a much-needed tool.

A lot of people have waxed rhapsodically about Kmart’s sub sandwiches, its snack bar and most especially its Blue Light Specials, periodic moments during the store’s operating hours when a sales associate would wheel a blue light up to a particular area – next to a display of shirts, or candy, or hardware – and the announcement would be made of a limited time only special price. “Attention Kmart shoppers…”

Kmart was a good place for people to shop, especially poor people.

When I heard this unsurprising Kmart news, the first thing I thought of was the Calvin and Hobbes strip reproduced at the top of this post.

AAUUGHHHH! to the news.

Svengoolie: Nostalgia done right

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It was sometime in the early 1980s – after 40 years, I don’t remember exactly when – and my friends and I learned that our local cable company was going to stop carrying one Chicago TV station in favor of another.

Now, we were old horror movie and cable TV fanatics so we were doubly anguished to learn this meant we would lose our weekly broadcasts of “Svengoolie,” the long-running Chicago horror movie program hosted by the ghoul of the same name, played by Rich Koz. Koz had taken over from the original “Svengoolie,” Jerry Bishop, a few years before. Koz’ version of the amiable character – a creature of some kind who hosted old horror flicks from his dungeon – and the show were highlights of our week.

The three (sometimes four or more) of us had the brainstorm of trying to express our appreciation of Sven and his old movies and silly puns by sending him a telegram. (As if this anecdote could be any more pre-internet.)

We sent an email that referenced a joke from another current favorite, Lola Heatherton, a show-biz creature played by Catherine O’Hara on the sketch comedy show “SCTV.”

In our telegram – cue 1914 music – we told Sven how much we would miss him and, quoting Lola, told him, “We want to bear all your children!” It was a phrase Lola would gush to adoring audiences on “SCTV.”

Now Svengoolie has always read viewer letters on his show. He still does to this day.

And, unbelievably, Sven read our telegram, citing us by name, on the very last show of his we would be able to see before our cable ditched his broadcast channel.

Sven did seem a little confused by our out-of-the-blue Lola Heatherton quote. And who could blame him? He even made some comment about not understanding what the heck these people were saying.

Now of course we can watch “Svengoolie” every Saturday night on the national nostalgia channel MeTV. And Koz, forty years after our telegram and 30 years after he returned to the role after a brief break, is still doing it. He’s now accompanied by helpers like Gwengoolie, played by Sarah “Pinup” Palmer.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that Sven and his show still let us wallow in nostalgia – and puns – and in the best way possible: with knowledgeable and fond presentations of classic films. I thought about this recently when I was watching his presentation of “Dracula,” the 1931 original with Bela Lugosi. Sure, you could watch the Universal classic on streaming or disc. But this feels right.

Nostalgia can be a tricky thing. We can’t wallow in it. We have to live for today. Svengoolie gives us the perfect framing for nostalgia.

Thanks, Sven, and thanks, Rich Koz.

Batman and Superman animated shows different but excel

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In most respects, we live in fraught times. Some comfort can be found in two good Batman and Superman animated shows airing new episodes.

Yeah, that sounds like cold comfort for anyone worried about the state of the world.

But we take comfort where we can get it these days.

I’ve previously written here about “My Adventures with Superman,” a mostly lighthearted series that’s part of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block. The series is good, fun stuff, probably the best Superman-focused animated series since “Superman: The Animated Series” in 1995. (“Krypto the Super Dog” was good fun too, and hewed to Superman canon more than it could have been expected to.) The Superman animated series, part of the wave of animated DC heroes that included the truly great “Batman: The Animated Series,” “Justice League” and “Justice League Unlimited,” featured the work of Bruce Timm, Eric Radomski and Paul Dini.

The 1995 Superman series, like all of the work of those creators and other animation geniuses like writer Dwayne McDuffie (“JLU” and others), captured the comic book spirit of Superman: the forthright hero who deals with uncertainty at times but always does the right thing. “My Adventures with Superman,” pitched to a slightly younger audience than some of those earlier series, has the absolute correct tone.

And as different as Batman and Superman are, so are “My Adventures with Superman” and “Batman: Caped Crusader.”

The later series, ten episodes of which are available on Prime Video, debuting just a few days ago, is the latest in a long, long line of Batman adaptations that include live action and animation.

It’s no surprise that “Batman: Caped Crusader” is so good when you consider the show’s creators and executive producers: long-standing animation wiz Bruce Timm, producer J.J. Abrams, “The Batman” film director Matt Reeves and writer Ed Brubaker.

The series is an incredibly effective blend of Batman mythos and characters into a genre that’s always been a good home for the vigilante: noir.

In “Batman: Caped Crusader,” Batman operates in a shadowy world that’s clearly the 1940s, even more so than the stylized “Batman: The Animated Series.” There might be an anachronism or two, but the look and feel of the series is pure mid-century noir.

Batman – and alter ego Bruce Wayne – moves through a world of gangsters, cops both crooked and straight, crusading attorneys and prosecutors and increasingly, as the season progresses, more dangerous and outlandish criminals.

In the 10 episodes of the season, we see the deepest, most unsettling secrets of not only Gotham’s criminal underworld but of its upstanding citizens. We’re introduced to a number of classic Batman villains, but none more impressive than Harley Quinn, who isn’t played as a frenetic joker (pun intended) but as a soft-spoken menace.

The vocal cast is led by Hamish Linklater, who at times seems to be channeling the voice of the late, great Kevin Conroy but always makes the dual roles of Batman and Bruce Wayne his own. The supporting cast, especially Jamie Chung as Harley, is perfect.

“My Adventures with Superman” is lighthearted comic book fare and does a great job at hitting that tone. “Batman: Caped Crusader” is dark and menacing and is the best Batman adaptation in years.

We’re lucky to be able to see both right now.