Like a bunch of other people, I’m gonna mark the anniversary of MTV’s debut on this date, Aug. 1 1981, with a little bit of nostalgia.
It’s okay, I’ll be brief and get this over with as painlessly as possible.
One thing I won’t do here is bemoan the lack of music on modern-day MTV. I haven’t watched the cable channel in years. I do watch the MTV Classic channel sometimes, mostly for the 1980s videos.
I just wanted to say that, if you’re not old enough to remember, MTV was a cultural touchstone for most of us around a certain age in 1981. I was a child in the 1960s and grew to adulthood in the 1970s, but the 1980s was probably the most important decade of my life up to that point.
I was reviewing movies and a bunch of entertainment for my local newspaper from 1978 to 1990, so I feel tremendous nostalgia for the 1980s. I started full-time at the paper in the 1980s. At the very end of the 1980s – okay, early 1990 – I met my wife. In 1989, I started covering politics and government and sometimes crime, the turning point in my newspaper career.
It sounds cheesy to say it, but MTV and the music of the 1980s was the heartbeat of my life at the time. I didn’t discover it as a teenager, like most people, because it didn’t exist until I was in college. But it shaped a lot of my tastes and entertainment sensibilities.
My friends and I watched MTV and its competitors and cohorts – Friday Night Videos, music videos all night weekends on TBS – religiously. We hauled ass to get to a screen to watch Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video debut on MTV on December 2, 1983.
We were glued to our TVs on Halloween 1984 to watch Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, guest-host on MTV, playing odd and weird videos. I refer to that night in one of my novels.
MTV was notoriously slow to play Black artists. It quickly became a delivery system for advertising. Some of the most pretentious music videos of the era are hard to watch now.
But MTV was a huge cultural force not long after August 1, 1981.
In many, many ways, that was a vastly simpler time. But many things are better now. Nostalgia can be toxic, especially when people pine for “the good old days” that were decidedly not good for so many people.
But nostalgia is okay once in a while. We can enjoy looking back and remember to look ahead, too.
I’m not gonna do some revisionist thing and try to tell anybody that “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Woman” were ahead of their time and were ground-breaking science fiction TV series.
But I am here to say that a recent rewatch of some pivotal episodes of the former – the latter isn’t on a streaming service I subscribe to – left me impressed about how grown-up the shows were.
Yeah, no doubt, the shows were for a family audience, including kids, and episodes had that slow-motion running effect that probably every kid in the world imitated at some point.
So there’s no question what the aim of the shows was.
But rewatching some recently, I was struck by how realistic the shows were, in two big ways:
The bionic people were damn bitter, especially early on, at what the government did to them in rebuilding them.
And the government lackeys, including everybody’s pal Oscar Goldman, were manipulative MFers.
You know the drill on these shows, and probably even watched them first-run or in eternal reruns. I was in my mid-teens when the series began, and while I rolled my eyes at the shows, I appreciated there was some small amount of science-fiction TV that wasn’t reruns of “Star Trek.”
The original series ran for more than a hundred episodes over five seasons beginning in 1973. The “Bionic Woman” was introduced a season or two in and got her own three-season spinoff. Anyway, astronaut and colonel Steve Austin loses both legs, an arm and an eye in the crash of a test plane. Later, Jaime Sommers, Steve’s longtime friend and sometime girlfriend, loses both legs, an arm and an ear in a parachute jump.
Adventures ensue, and the series – preceded by TV movies – really leaned heavily into a James Bond- or “Mission: Impossible” mood early on. Before too long, the mothership series took on a much more sci-fi vibe and featured aliens and murderous satellites returned to Earth and, of course, Bigfoot.
What struck me was how pissed Steve Austin was that Goldman and Dr. Rudy Wells took it upon themselves to replace his assorted limbs and eye with a pretty definite expectation that he would be pressed into spy service. In fact, the original pilot does not feature Goldman but has a magnificently creepy government operative played by Darren McGavin.
At some point, McGavin even wonders out loud about keeping Austin on ice between missions, but his doctor (played in the pilot by Martin Balsam) says he won’t let that happen.
They were totally gonna Winter Soldier the guy.
That’s dark, but Austin’s depression and frustration at being turned into something not quite human is even darker. It’s not a season- or series-long vibe, like it would be today, but things are not all sunshine and lollipops after the first couple of episodes.
Don’t worry, there’s plenty of silly stuff, like bending steel pipes and jumping over walls, to come in the series. And there’s star Lee Majors’ awesome track suits, leisure suits and – late in the series – porn star mustache.
And Lindsay Wagner is much more adorable and smart and funny than I remembered.
There are worse ways to fritter away your vintage TV-viewing time than watching these bionic people.
It’s a weird thing, going home for the first time in 30 years.
I should say that I don’t really consider the house where I grew up, near Muncie, Indiana, home anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time. I’ve lived other places in the past 40 years and I consider them the more recent and relevant “home.”
So getting to see and walk through, for the first time in 30 years, the farmhouse where I grew up from about three years old didn’t really feel like I was home.
Nevertheless, I was filled with thoughts and memories I’m still trying to process.
My parents moved from the city to the farm sometime in the early 1960s. My dad, who had worked in a factory since about 1946, wanted to be a farmer in his spare time. My two older brothers were in high school and middle school and I don’t think I ever heard what they thought of moving out of the city and to the very rural area, with a small school system, at their age. I was a couple of years or more from starting school, and I kept in contact with my closest friend, a cousin about my age, so I didn’t feel too uprooted.
Besides, the farm was a great place to grow up. The house itself, dating to the 1890s, had been home to farmhands who worked for some large-scale farmers in the area. The house was very plain and no-frills: brick on the outside, plaster walls in the four bedrooms, kitchen and living room and twelve-foot ceilings that seemed very high to a three-year-old. One of my earliest memories is standing on the steps of a ladder, with my cousin, in that living room.
The outbuildings – a huge barn assembled with wooden pegs instead of nails and a grainery building – were wonderful places to play. My friends and I played out a lot of scenarios inspired by “Batman” and the spy shows of the day like “The Man from UNCLE.” If there was a spot we could jump from or hang from on a rope, we found it. Now that would seem nightmarish to the parents of young kids.
I wrote for CrimeReads about how the farmhouse – which was haunted, incidentally – helped shape my love for the scary and spooky in movies, TV and books.
By the time my parents moved to a smaller space in the early 1990s, I had lived in apartments and houses and made my own home with my wife and, a few years later, our son. My last few times at the farmhouse was to pack up my stuff – books, magazines, model kits – and take it along to my then-current home or trash it.
I lived in Muncie for most of the thirty years after my parents sold the place and I always wanted to go back and see if or how the farmhouse had changed. I didn’t until just recently, after I’d moved to Tennessee but was back in Muncie to see family still there and to talk about my books. My parents passed away many years ago.
My wife and I decided to stop at the farmhouse one night in June when we were in town. We pulled into the driveway and I was struck by how much had changed outside: more of my dad’s original 20 acres had been sold over the last 30 years, making for many more houses close by. The number of trees around the house had greatly increased and the wraparound porch had been finished.
The very nice current owner of the house came out and I noted that my dad had built the garage from the bricks of a downtown Muncie movie theater.
The woman couldn’t have been more nice, letting us in to walk around the place and gawk at what they and the previous owners had done: The kitchen had been expanded and moved, my parents’ bedroom downstairs had changed, the three bedrooms upstairs that had been for my brothers and I were somewhat different.
One of the first things I looked for was the toilet off the kitchen. For most of my life, you used that toilet at your own peril, as a foot or so away steep, vertigo-inducing wooden stairs descended into the basement, which was mostly finished in concrete but still had the aura of a horror movie set. The toilet stairs to the basement had been sealed off and it was a nice half-bathroom now rather that a Doorway to Hell with a toilet at the top.
I’m glad I went back and was happy to meet the owner, whose family has lived there for several years. The previous owners and the current owners have made their mark on the place so much that the inside is almost unrecognizable and you could drive past and not recognize the place from the 1970s aerial photo included here.
It was an odd feeling, a little satisfying and yet mostly unsatisfying, to see the place again. Unsatisfying because so much had changed. It wasn’t frozen in time. Really, it shouldn’t have been, and I’m glad it’s been home to others over the decades.
It’s not my home anymore. Yet it is, weirdly, still my home.
Like Batman or Spider-Man, Superman is a character familiar enough to get audiences to tune in but with a past that allows some exploration and surprising variations.
I’ve enjoyed the episodes I’ve seen so far of “My Adventures with Superman,” a fun series, squarely aimed at youngish viewers and longtime fans, airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block.
The show can’t quite measure up to WB Animation’s classic Superman tales of going on 30 years ago – and I’m not sure how it’s even possible that that much time has passed – “Superman the Animated Series,” “Justice League” and “Justice League Unlimited.”
I loved those series, have them all on DVD – remember those? – and my fondest memories are introducing those to my son when he was old enough to not be bothered by the animated violence. (His first action animation experience, along with “The Incredibles.”)
So while I’ll always have a fond spot for those series, “My Adventures with Superman” is really cute. And I don’t mean that term to serve as a disservice, or “sweet” either. But those are the first two thoughts that come to mind.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, “My Adventures with Superman” starts out as Clark Kent, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen begin their journalism careers as interns at the Daily Planet. It’s enjoyable that Clark is the most uncertain of the three, much like the character in the Christopher Reeve live-action film.
Superman is a character that’s open for varying interpretations, from Reeve’s quietly confident hero but bumbling Clark to the racket-busting Clark and Superman of the 1950s “The Adventures of Superman” to the kind and admirable character of the animated series of the 1990s and 2000s.
In other words, Superman is everybody’s Superman, and as long as an animated series or live-action film gets right his innate goodness and his unflagging desire to do the right thing, that’s a good Superman tale in my book.
In late 1968, I was buying Marvel comics after getting an introduction to them from a neighbor.
The powerful images and what-seemed-to-me powerful storytelling made an impact on me, Not the least reason was that I loved – and still do – team stories. Avengers and Fantastic Four were my favorite comics.
So Avengers 57 (the final page of which can be seen above) wowed me.
Roy Thomas’ writing and John Buscema’s art were breathtaking in the next issue.
What we couldn’t know at the time was that the comics would influence, decades later, big-screen Marvel adaptions. The world that Captain America, Iron Man, Vision, Black Panther and even Spider-Man lived in was a shared one. Cap and Panther were friends. The Avengers clashed sometime, but they were Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
The team-ups had already been strong, of course, but only grew stronger after this.
Don’t ask me how this happened, but I’ve been watching a lot of zombie movies lately.
When I’m not watching movies or a TV series for an article I’m writing, my tastes in viewing are offbeat, but even I wasn’t prepared to watch so many zombie movies.
The other day, I watched “Zombies of Mora Tau,” a low-budget flick from 1957 whose only well-known star was Allison Hayes of “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” fame.
Not long ago, I wrote about a pair of zombie movies, including “King of the Zombies,” from 1941, that basically told the same story as “Zombies of Mora Tau” – zombies arise on a remote island. (The difference was that in the two earlier films, a scientist was creating an army of zombies for the Nazis.)
Watching those old films made me think of later zombie/walking dead films, notably George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” from 1968 and “Dawn of the Dead” in 1978. Both genuinely great films.
But what I got to thinking was when zombies got fast. Make no mistake, zombies are still slow, shambling creatures in some films and TV series, notably “The Walking Dead.”
The big change from walkers to runners came in 2002, of course, with director Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later.” In the film, the zombies could run – run fast! – and were probably considered a bigger threat than the paunchy, stumbling and mostly old white guys from earlier films.
If you haven’t seen “Dawn of the Dead” and “28 Days Later,” I urge you to do so.
As for the earlier films … well, you don’t have to rush to see them. The zombies are in no hurry. In fact, they won’ be going anywhere.
As one of THOSE obsessive moviegoers who stayed to watch all the end credits, sometimes I relished the little surprise a cool logo could make at the beginning of a movie.
There are many vanity production company logos in use now, some with animation of archers firing arrows or lighthouses shedding beams on rocky outcroppings. None will ever beat MGM’s lion, of course, or the 20th Century Fox logo whose fanfare was extended for “Star Wars.” Not to mention the classic Universal pictures logo that transformed every few years for most of the 20th century.
The logo for Avco Embassy was simple by comparison and not as stories as those, but still effective. Just sliding tones of blue and green that formed the AE logo.
But like the American International Pictures logo that came earlier, the Avco Embassy logo was – for me, at least – a sign that an interesting picture would follow.
(And I should note that the AE logo I cite above was not always the logo for the studio, which also operated under the name Embassy Pictures and other monikers.
I was a little surprised to find that the company dated to 1942. I really always noticed it during great films of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s.
What movies were decorated by the logo: “The Fog.” “The Howling.” “Escape from New York.” “This is Spinal Tap.” “Scanners.” Many more before Avco Embassy tapped out around 1986 or so.
Pour one out for Avco Embassy and a logo that always left me eagerly anticipating what followed.
It’s hard to go online without seeing opinions about “3 Body Problem,” the relatively new, eight-episode Netflix series that adapts the first of Liu Cixin’s three science fiction epic novels from 2008.
It’s especially interesting that, besides the books, we have two versions of the story to watch: The Netflix series and “Three-Body,” an epic 30-part Chinese television version.
I’m a few episodes into “Three-Body” but I’ve watched and I really enjoyed “3 Body Problem,” the Netflix series.
The story is basically the same in each series: Scientists around the world start experiencing strange phenomena: Many are seeing daunting visions and some are seeing a countdown that’s superimposed in their field of vision. As the countdown clicks away, some kill themselves.
Benedict Wong (“Dr. Strange,” “The Martian”) plays a British investigator who pursues the truth behind the suicides and the threat to the planet that’s implicit in the scientists’ discovery.
Slight spoiler: The warnings are coming from a civilization four light years away. Through a vivid virtual reality game, scientists learn that an invasion of Earth is 400 years away.
The news – and phenomena in the sky – is greeted with mixed reaction on Earth. It’s 400 years from now, right? Let future generations figure out what to do.
Luckily, a handful of scientists – part of a group of friends dubbed “The Oxford Five” – begin to prepare for the future, all under the supervision of Wade, a British intelligence official.
That description barely scratches the surface of this story, which is not only a cerebral sci-fi thriller but also a drama about friendship and soul-searching: what if your scientific advancement was used to fend of an invasion – and in the process killed a thousand humans?
I’m a compulsive credits watcher, for both movies and TV shows. (Just like I read the acknowledgements and dedications in books.) As part of an obsessive TV generation, the compulsive credits watchers among us were able to see, over and over, the credits for shows and we’d notice anytime something had been changed.
I don’t hold it against many modern-day and recent TV shows that their credits are brief. Maybe it’s a common belief that viewers don’t want to sit through credits. Every streaming service gives us the option to skip the credits. Let me just say, if you hit the remote to skip the credits, I don’t want to know you.
In the history of TV and in some relatively recent TV, there have been a tremendous number of great credits sequences, including those that are mesmerizing for their visuals, like “Counterpart,” “Silo” and “True Detective.”
As a compulsive credits watcher, I love when credits changed to reflect a change in the cast or setting.
“Star Trek.” My love of little tweaks to TV credits goes way back to the original “Star Trek” series. In the first season, only William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were listed in the opening credits. This changed with, I’m pretty sure, the second season, when DeForest Kelley, who contributed so much to the series as grumpy Dr. Leonard McCoy, was added to the opening credits. Today, the entire recurring cast would be listed up front, and rightfully so.
The “Superstar” episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In the fourth season of “Buffy,” from 2000, the episode “Superstar” took place in an alternate reality in which Jonathan, a geek played by Danny Strong, was the most-admired pop star, author and action hero in the world.
“Buffy” had multiple other credits changes over the years, as characters like Angel left the show. Probably the sneakiest and possibly the cruelest change to the credits came when Amber Benson, who played Tara, was prominently featured in the series but not added to the opening credits until the sixth season episode “Seeing Red” – and then for only episode, as the character was killed.
It’s possible there’s no TV series that has so many credits variations as “Fringe,” a sci-fi series that ran for five seasons beginning in 2008. I’m in the middle of a “Fringe” rewatch right now and it was fascinating to be reminded how the credits changed to reflect the alternate universes in which episodes took place.
The worst credits change? When Mike Farrell joined the cast of “MASH” at the beginning of the fourth season, in 1975. What was so bad about how the credits handled the change? Remember how the opening credits had Hawkeye and Trapper John rush out to a helicopter landing pad and there were shots of the actors and characters? Well, when Farrell joined as BJ, they shot a closeup of him, naturally, to sub in for an action shot of Wayne Rogers. But they didn’t shoot a new shot, from overhead, of the Jeeps and medical transports heading to triage at the mobile army surgical hospital. Instead, the overhead shot is cropped so that when the camera pans back to include the Jeep – in which Rogers is clearly visible – the former star isn’t on screen.
Yes, we all had a lot of time on our hands back in our TV-watching days.
There are many Black actors and actresses who moved through the background of classic films like they moved through Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s – quietly working and trying to preserve their dignity.
One of my favorites has always been Mantan Moreland, a gifted comedian and comic actor who was usually reduced to playing manservants in films of the 1930s and 1940s. In horror films, he often played the comic relief, and his performances – no doubt the result of the film’s direction and the culture of the time – seem pretty over the top, stereotyped and problematic now. He made dozens of films from the early 1930s and into the 1970s.
I watched two Moreland films in recent days, “King of the Zombies” from 1941 and “Revenge of the Zombies” from 1943. “Revenge” is a low-budget remake of “King” and is a little more polished but the plot is basically the same: A mad scientist on a remote island works to create an army of zombies, the walking dead, for Hitler. A small group comes to the island and foils the plan. Moreland is funny in both and John Carradine enlivens “Revenge” as the mad doctor.
But I watched the two films for another cast member who I was surprised I’d never heard of in all my decades of watching horror films, an actress known as Madame Sul-Te-Wan.
The actress, born Nellie Crawford in 1873, was the first African-American actress to sign a film contract. She had been born in Louisville, Kentucky, and her parents had been slaves. She had small roles in the Klan-glorifying “Birth of a Nation” in 1915 and was paid $3 a day for filming and had a contract worth $25 a week for work in films by director D.W. Griffith.
She appeared in Tarzan films and in “mammy” roles and she was in the 1933 classic “King Kong.” Despite the limitations Hollywood put on Black performers (and filmmakers) she worked steadily over the decades. She worked so often in part because she was a fine actress but also because she could believably play roles of many ethnicities. An April 1928 article noted that she was “from the Orient.” Others cited that she was born in Hawaii, contradicting that she was born in Louisville. Ah, Hollywood publicity!
In the twin “Zombie” movies, she plays largely the same role, an old woman in the mad doctor’s household who not only knows about the existence of zombies but in the first film performs the voodoo ritual that creates them.
In later films, her roles were memorable even when she wasn’t credited as prominently as she was in the two zombie films. Notably, she played Dorothy Dandridge’s grandmother in “Carmen Jones” in 1954.
In March 1944, the California Eagle newspaper reported on the party thrown for her 71st birthday. More than 500 people attended, the newspaper reported. The Eagle largely reported on prominent Black figures and, as early as 1928, had praised “this plucky little woman.”
In February 1959, the Eagle reported that Sul-Te-Wan had died following a stroke at the Motion Picture Country Hospital, a nursing facility in which many prominent show business figures of the era lived in their declining years.
In its obituary for Sul-Te-Wan, the Los Angeles Times noted she had “played in several hundred motion pictures since 1915.”
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