I could honestly go on and on about classic TV ads forever.  While most people were taking potty breaks during the commercial breaks, I was taking in the delightful entertainment and often-times unintentional genius of the paid advertisements that were carefully selected for my demographic.  I was thinking of some of my favorite campaigns from the late 80′s and early 90′s, and realized that a lot of them were for some sort of foodstuff you added to another comestible to make it better.  Since a lot of these brands weren’t well known at the time, they had to rely on quirky ad gimmicks to make a name for themselves, and they succeeded.  I’ve come up with four condiment ad campaigns from that time that were quite memorable, made me laugh, or both… and I’ve included them all in today’s Flashback Friday post….

Grey Poupon Mustard:

Don’t pretend you can’t remember this commercial (or one of its many spinoffs)…..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itHhhYxqSSE

Only the little people use French’s.

This scenario was so absurd that it inspired countless pop culture references and parodies for years to come.  Even the Grey Poupon ad execs realized their own idea was just begging to be roasted, that they even began mocking it in later commercials like this memorable ad!  It’s incredibly ironic that despite the snobbishness behind the entire image of Grey Poupon’s product, they managed to sell it to the unwashed masses by poking some unintentional fun at the very people who were most likely to indulge in this high class condiment…

Pace Picante Sauce:

I would hope you remember the classic set up of this campaign just from hearing the brand name… but if not, you’re in for a treat, as I found a You Tube video that contains not one, but TWO of the classic Pace commercials!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSxnieYctVM

This nut’s made in NEW YORK CITY!!!!

Pace Picante Sauce prided itself on being made in San Antonio, Texas, by real Texans who knew was picante sauce should taste like.  I’m not sure if there were ever any picante sauce factories in New York City, but it doesn’t matter…. that payoff line in each Pace ad cracked my ass up every time!  In 1995, not long after those ads aired, and perhaps due to its now rising popularity through the “This stuff’s made in New York City!” ads, Campbell’s Soup bought up the Pace brand.  I’ve been unable to determine if Pace is still made in San Antonio or not….

Polaner All Fruit:

Definitely the forgotten stepchild of great condiment commercials of my youth, but this may be the funniest of them all….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xBydH93eDY

Would you please pass the joint?

Another fancy schmancy brand name trying to mock its hoity toity clientele, just like Grey Poupon successfully did…. but in a perfectly brilliant way!  And I don’t think they could have found a better actor to utter the “Would you please pass the jelly?” line than the guy they found.  I can’t imagine this 30 second farce working with anyone else…

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!:

This butter substitute brand was well on its way to establishing itself thanks to some quirky romantic parody ads in the 80′s.  But in the mid 90′s, ICBINB really hit small screen gold when they began using romance novel coverboy Fabio in their ads.  I’ve chosen this one for demonstration purposes, because the way Fabio adds in “Spray” after I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter was so funny, it’s still the go-to line this day anytime me or my youngest sister hear of Fabio….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg52V_bOIuY

Nice try ES, but MBRS seems preoccupied with someone off camera…

Being a manly squirrel, I obviously am not attracted to Fabio for his supposed looks, but I do like the guy because he knows he’s a campy pop culture icon and isn’t afraid to mock himself for a few bucks.  At least there is a reason Fabio is famous, unlike these Kardashians and Lohans and all these reality show pseudo-celebrities who seem to exist solely because the paparazzi got tired of chasing around the real celebs and OJ Simpson hasn’t murdered anybody lately….

Parrrrrrkaaaaay!!!!

I think I just lost my appetite.  Would you please pass the Rolaids?

Girls in glasses and braces are such a turn on….

If you grew up in the 80′s like I did, there is very good chance you are already pretty familiar with the topic I’m going to devote this week’s Flashback Friday post to.   Yes, it’s the one and only trading card series intended for those younger minds who were still (and in some cases still are) fascinated with toilet humor… Garbage Pail Kids!

But it was CLASSY toilet humor!

Garbage Pail Kids were created by the Topps company, which is better known for making baseball cards back before the greedy big kids ruined that hobby for everyone two decades ago.  The concept was inspired by the wildly…. and I mean WILDLY popular Cabbage Patch Kid dolls that had mothers fighting in the middle of toy store aisles every holiday season long before Furbys or Elmos ever came along.  Topps had a similar sticker series aimed at kids at the time called Wacky Packages that parodied famous company brands and products, and according to the Wiki page for Garbage Pail Kids, the series began its life as an unreleased design for a Wacky Package sticker.

Br sure and tell ‘em Large Marge sent’ ya!

The cards were released in series from 1985 through the late 80′s, with around 40 or so new Garbage Pail Kid designs per set.  The cards contained a sticker on the front that was die cut to allow kids to peel off the main part of the image and stick them on their walls, books, Trapper Keepers, the dog, whatever they wanted.  The artwork featured a child similar looking to a Cabbage Patch Doll (This would eventually get Topps sued by CPK’s maker Coleco for trademark infringement) in some disgusting, deformed, weird, and often just plain gross situation.  There were two different cards issued for each design, with different names attached to each “twin”.  The names were usually alliterative, rhyming, or a bad pun… some of which likely wouldn’t even be recognizable to the prepubescent intended audience of Garbage Pail Kids…

Mommy! Can I have some of you and Daddy’s whiskey?

Garbage Pail Kids appealed to the gross sense of humor that all good children of the 80′s had, and the more kids loved spending their allowance on cards, the more parents grew to loathe them.  Some schools even banned the cards because they were a distraction (Like cell phones nowadays aren’t???).

Distracting??? Me!?!?!?

The series became so popular, that they even made a Garbage Pail Kids movie!  I seriously wish I was kidding about this… the movie really exists.  It was a huge flop, and I recall watching a bit of it once at my friend’s house, and it was dreadful even to my 12 year old self who loved the cards…

And kids thought Jason and Freddy Krueger were scary!?!?!?

After 15 series in the U.S., the lid was finally put on Garbage Pail Kids as the 90′s were dawning.  The original fans of the cards were now in high school and more obsessed with hickeys than boogers… and as with pretty much anything good, the franchise eventually jumped the shark in the later series as it became less cutting edge and original in its grossness.

It’s time to nuke this series!

Of course, when 80′s nostalgia returned within the last decade, so did Garbage Pail Kids.  Some new series were introduced along with classic “Flashbacks” that even contained funny Fakebook accounts on the back.  But the original craze these fucked up characters caused will never be duplicated.  All those quarters I threw away at the convenience store when I was 11 and 12 just for a pack of cards will always be considered well spent.  Thank you so much Garbage Pail Kids for showing us that it’s OK for kids to laugh and enjoy gross and sick humor, and that our days of innocence all need to have those guilty pleasures that are going to draw that concerned look from Mom and Dad’s face.  We here at The Nest salute your contribution to the green slime generation!

Tommy Gun died for our adolescent sins!

No one do the voodoo like MBRS do.

When did reality become TV?  Whatever happened to sitcoms?  Game shows? - Bowling For Soup, “1985″

When you turn on the TV during the late morning hours these days, you’re most likely going to see one of the expanded morning news shows as it rolls over into the talk show format of its program… assuming there isn’t breaking news going on at the time, like Lindsey Lohan appearing in court again or a nationwide search to find Paris Hilton’s dog.  Back in my day, I remember when this time of the morning was dominated by the game show.  All morning long, you had great fare like The Price is Right, Sale of the Century, and The Whatever Dollar Amount It Happens To Be Now Pyramid.  Even Wheel of Fortune had a daytime network produced version!  Of course, the one show that was the undisputed king of all morning game shows, and is about as representative of the decade as any show can be, was that legendary tribute to hyperactivity, the Whammy infested half hour spectacle known as Press Your Luck, the topic of this week’s Flashback Friday.

Wheeeeeee!!!!!!

Press Your Luck aired on CBS from September 1983 through September 1986.  Yes, it was only on the air for three years, but no game show has had quite the success PYL did in syndication reruns…. first on the USA Network during the late 80′s and early 90′s (Yep, I watched that afternoon game show block all the time!) and later on GSN… and because it has been omnipresent on TV for the last 30 years, it just seems like the show ran for a long time.  The show starred host Peter Tomarken, who was responsible for keeping the lid on the rambunctious bunch of contestants the show was constantly running out in front of the Big Board.  Since I’ve spent a third of my life hanging with a community full of game show fanatics, I have since learned that game shows carefully screen and test their contestants to ensure they meet the annoying levels of excitement and bubbliness that the 18-49 year old demographic require to be entertained… but at the time, I always wondered how in the hell this show seemed to find all the goofballs out there in the world….

Dick Clark would have never tolerated these fools!

Each show during Press Your Luck’s halcyon days began with a montage of past contestants playing the Big Board in dramatic moments.  Then Rod Roddy (aka, the most awesome game show announcer ever) would fire up the studio audience and the viewers at home by letting us know the contestants we were about to see were playing for BIG BUCKS… but they’ll have to avoid THE WHAMMY… as they play THE MOST EXCITING GAME IN THEIR LIVES!!!

has anyone ever seen Rod Roddy and Elton John in the same place at the same time?

The concept of the show was simple… players earned spins by answering trivia questions that were either simple enough for a kindergartner to answer, or based on some silly survey that nobody could possibly know the answer to.  After each of the two rounds, the contestants would take their spins and play the Big Board, which featured 18 screens alternating images between cash, prizes, free spins, and of course whammies.  Hit four whammies over the course of the game, and you were out.  End with the most cash and prizes after all the spins were exhausted in the second round, and you won all your loot and got to play again the next day, if you could stand another half hour of excessive perkitudiness…

I’m good to go all week!

Of course, besides the display of people off their ADHD medication, the show was best known for its little red gremlins, the whammies.  They not only had the nerve to take all of your winnings should you land on one, but they’d further rub it in with an entertaining little spectacle while they did so.  The famous whammy animations that would fire up each time a contestant’s luck ran out were an extremely innovative and novel concept for game shows that made PYL stand out even further from its brethren.  Here’s a YouTube video with a collection of some of these clever little gags that made us laugh and contestants cry…

Press Your Luck also had the distinction of being the target of one the most infamous and extremely clever game show “cheats” ever.  Michael Larson appeared on the show back in June 1984, and rung up $110,237 in cash and prizes on a marathon run of 45 spins.  How did he keep getting free spins and avoiding the Whammy?  He did his homework…

Using the quadratic equation, I can win a trip to Tahiti!

Larson taped earlier episodes of the show and studied the Big Board carefully, and he began to notice that the images and the seemingly randomly moving “marker” actually conformed to a pattern.  Armed with this knowledge, he managed to earn a spot on the show and completely fleece CBS in the process.  Larson’s show was initially shown as a two part episode because it ran for so long, and once it was found out how Larson pulled off his big win, the board’s patterns were made more complicated and his episodes were pulled from the syndication package.  I gotta admire someone who can pick up on patterns even better than I can…

I could go on and on about the beautifully intricate pattern of the 2007 National League schedule that only I seem to have noticed, but I’d probably lose my entire audience…

Like pretty much everything else that ever existed, Press Your Luck got a revival as well.  GSN did a reboot of the show called “Whammy!” back in 2002-2003 that featured more modern technology behind the board and the animations.  I never saw a minute of the new show, so I can’t comment on its quality… but I think I can safely say it did not come close to being the phenomenon the original Press Your Luck was… because it was such an original that it’s formula could never be duplicated to achieve the same results…

Seriously, Alex???

The good old days of game shows…. they have come and gone, my friends…..

Pick a hole, any hole!

If you were born sometime in the last two decades, there’s a good chance you’re looking at the picture leading of today’s Flashback Friday post and wondering what in the hell that weird looking monstrosity is.  It kinda looks like a phone…. but what’s with that cord?  And the handset big enough to bludgeon a possum with?  And the…… um….. wait a minute!  Where’s the dial!?!?!?  I can’t use this thing!!!  It must be broken!!!

Bad phone!!! Bad!!!

Calm down, grasshoppers!  Those of us older folks know exactly what that is and how to use one…. though we’d be a little rusty with it ourselves now since they’ve been obsolete  for over 20 years.  That is the good old rotary telephone, from back in the days when it took you longer to dial a number than it could now to receive and send a text.  Rotary dials have been around since the early days of the telephone, and although eventually the more familiar and convenient touchtone dial was introduced in the 1960′s, rotary phones were still commonplace in the 80′s.

I’ll bet this would stop everyone’s texting addiction real fast…

So how did this strange medieval apparatus work?  Simple… if you wanted to dial Jenny, rather than hit the buttons 8, 6, 7, 5, 3, 0, 9 and then wait to be called a prevert, you had to stick your finger into the corresponding holes for each number, rotate the dial clockwise until you reached the finger stop right before the zero, and then release your finger and let the dial work its way back to its set position…. and repeat the process for each number.  As the dial spun its way back once released, it gave off a sequence of pulses dependent upon the distance it had to travel backwards from the finger stop.  Dialing the 8 created eight pulses which triggered the routing system at the call center the same way the touchtone sound for the number 8 would on today’s phones.

Hey baby!!! Guess where my finger’s been!

If you dialed the infamous Jenny number on a rotary phone, you’d realize that back in the day it required much more patience to make a phone call.  Since most of the digits are towards the end of the dial, it required a lot of finger spinning and waiting for the dial to return from the finger stop.  Did you know this was a consideration when the first area codes were assigned back in the 1950′s?  The larger cities, such as New York City (212), Los Angeles (213) and Chicago (312) were allowed to have the codes that required the least amount of time to dial on a rotary phone since more calls would be made to customers in those area codes than in some of the podunks like South Dakota (605).  This consideration was not taken into effect when it was determined that 911 would be reserved for local emergency services.  Most other countries in the world that are much more civilized than we are use a number that takes a lot less time to dial on a rotary phone should you find yourself being pursued by an icepick murderer…

The 9 will still be pulsating when your aorta gets severed…

One of the most fascinating bits I found in the Wiki article on rotary phones involves a plan by a Washington DC anti-drug coalition to have the phone company replace its touchtone pay phones with rotary dials in the late 1990′s to discourage the practice of using pay phones to call the pagers of drug dealers, since pagers were not compatible with pulse dialing.  Alas, this was a case of applying obsolete technology to technology that itself was well on the way to becoming obsolete.  15 years later, pay phones are almost as hard to find as a rotary dial…

Dammit!!! Has anyone seen a phone booth around here!?!?

Growing up in a zoo house of five kids, we wore through a lot of things pretty fast, and one of them was telephones.  We seemed to alternate through many different rotary and touchtone phones through the 80′s and 90′s.  My favorite was a phone we had maybe 15-20 years ago that was a bizarre hybrid of the old and new dialing system.  It had push buttons just like a normal phone today would, but it still sent out pulses rather than tones.  Seriously, other than a little finger strain, what was the purpose of the push-button pulse phone anyway?  Only some demented evil genius would come up with something like that…

Behold!!! Plutonium dialing with the power of 1.21 gigawatts!!!

Sadly, rotary phones are not just obsolete in the popular notion, but they are actually obsolete from a technical standpoint as well.  Most telecommunications technology created over the past two decades no longer recognizes pulse dialing, which makes rotary phones about as useless as the pound key.  But those of us who lived with these marvels of popular science will always remember them with a warm, fuzzy sense of nostalgia.  A relic of a simpler day and time when the letters on a phone were for dialing Beechwood 4-5789, and our pointer fingers were always the most buff appendage on our bodies.  We here at The Nest would like to give the rotary phone a 21-pulse salute….

OMG!  The days when everyone had their telephone number printed on their phone!!!  Now that’s nostalgia….

Now showing on Channel 33…. scrambled porn!!!

Oh my… for the second straight week, I’ve started out my Flashback Friday post with some archaic looking device that anyone born since Ronnie Reagan left office has most likely never seen before, and is probably frightened of.  Relax, kiddies… back in my day, this was one of several old relics that we used to tune in cable TV.  Yes, we had cable TV back in the 80′s… and a number of those stations are still with us today and at some point in the recent past have likely celebrated 30th anniversaries.

Back when MTV’s acronym actually had some meaning!

I scoured and scoured the vast openness of Google to find an old cable channel lineup from the 1980′s, but came up empty… which is too bad, because it would have pointed to one of the first oddities a youngster might notice about that old cable box.  Why does it only seem to have 37 channels?  Heck, these days, most basic cable packages come with around 100 channels.  Well, even though cable TV was first getting a strong foothold on the country back in the early 80′s, there still weren’t very many channels of national prominence.  When you factor in that about 10 of the spots on that box were reserved for local network and local access (not to mention three set aside for FAA access, which my 9 year old mind couldn’t comprehend at the time), there were only about 20-25 actual cable channels back then.

The only possible explanation for how Mother Angelica became one of the biggest cable TV stars of the 80′s.

That simple, but clunky box sat atop many televisions three decades ago.  Here’s an even older version of a cable box that was the kind I saw the first time I laid eyes on this curiosity that gave us more than 7 channels…

Is that AM or FM?

Notice that neither of these boxes had an eyehole to make them compatible with a remote control.  So even if you did have the luxury of changing channels on your TV without leaving the couch, you still had to wriggle your ass out of the seat to switch from The Nashville Network to The Christian Broadcasting Network.  That was one of the small prices to pay to have access to music videos any time, any day instead of just on Friday nights, or to get the weather whenever you wanted it from trusted names like Dale Dockus and John Hope.

John Hope practically invented hurricanes!

Today, cable TV is a vast wasteland of hundreds of channels with a ridiculous amount of content.  What’s truly sad about the state of CATV is the way many classic niche channels have allowed their very identities to be stripped so that now there is very little actual variety on anymore, and the programs offered are essentially just heavily edited “reality shows” involving almost any theme you can imagine.  MTV is the most infamous example of this devolution, but so many other stations have followed suit.  Does anyone out there really believe that TLC stands for The Learning Channel in these days of pageants and Honey Boo Boo?  What could possibly be Artsy and Entertainmentlike about a bunch of hillbillies or bounty hunters?  Since when are modern dramas considered to be American Movie Classics?

Just try and hock this, Pawn Stars!

The early days of cable bring back so many memories for me… and I’ll be sure to share some more of those in detail in future Flashback Friday posts.  But until then, I need to get up and press a new button after the umpteenth night of some silly reality marathon.  I can only pray my shiny 21st century cable box can become a time machine, and allow me to stumble across some semblance of coaxial sanity.  This looks like a job for the greatest secret agent in the world…..

Oh, crumbs!

The 80′s Horror Preservation Society meets for fun and games. (Credit to Mayne, obviously, since I couldn’t do art this nice in a billion years)

The decade of excess found many ways to frighten its young and old denizens through its extremely popular horror franchises.  Freddy Krueger was the terror of Elm Street with the razor sharp glove and the bad fashion sense.  Jason Vorhees stalked Crystal Lake with his butcher’s knife and old school hockey mask.  There was Michael Myers, Leatherneck, Pinhead, Chucky… it was a great time to be a horrormeister!  And the public just couldn’t get enough of it, as these slasher franchises were milked for so many sequels, that they not only jumped multiple sharks, but continued to serve up sliced and diced fin well into the 1990′s.

This would be absolutely adorable on your mantel!

But popular as they were, these Hollywood generated scarefests were largely campy and goofy, particularly once the sequels started rolling around.  When your appointed slasher is reeling off corny jokes and bad puns while he’s severing your jugular vein, that’s not true horror…. certainly not the kind that makes you want to run out and buy a Rainbow Donkey nightlight, not that you wouldn’t want to anyway!

Yes, you know you want one…

The 80′s did, however, manage to produce a true masterpiece of terror.  A short, one minute weekly production that was guaranteed to conjure up goosebumps, especially if you were watching it late at night, and is seriously one of the most bone-chillingly terrifying works of genius ever created… and if you have the heart to click play, you can view it again as this week’s Flashback Friday honoree is the super-creepy introduction to the short-lived, but ever popular anthology series, “Tales From the Darkside”….

There’s no grotesque makeup or costumes, not a drop of blood to be found, no naive teenagers waiting to be preyed upon, none of the things we associate with Hollywood horror.  Just a stream of innocent, countryside images that we might see in a starving artist painting.  What makes this intro stir up fear on a primal level, however, is blending those ordinary everyday scenes with a spine-tingling musical score and the forboding narration.  The show’s theme, composed by Donald Rubinstein, is nothing short of eerie.  And just when it grabs you enough that you get this overwhelming feeling that you’re being stalked by something, in comes the voice of Paul Sparer, who puts even Vincent Price to shame in his ability to conjure up a sheer sense of terror through his slow, but powerful monologue.  The intro climaxes with the scenery flipping to reveal the “darkside”, in perfect timing with the narration, and the final pastoral scene is darkened using the very best of 80′s cheesy special effects at the time, and the title card for the series (there were two, the video I linked to shows the later “bloody looking” version) comes into view as the music hits a crescendo in terror.  And if that wasn’t enough for you, then a door opens up in the middle of the screen to reveal the start of the episode…

Not that the concept of doors in the middle of nowhere was all that foreign to us back then…

The intro to this show was so kickass in its ability to frighten the living shit out of you, that I can barely remember any of the actual episodes of the show, even though I know I saw plenty of them back in the day.  Tales From the Darkside only ran for four seasons in syndication, and it hasn’t quite taken on the cult status of some of its inspirations like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but it has certainly earned a spot in the Hall of Fame of Horror just on the strength of its opening sequence alone.  I dare anyone to say they can watch that intro even now, even in the middle of the day, and not get at feel at least a chill or two.  Only a sociopath could possibly not shudder in the face of such a brilliant work of frightfulness.

Sorry, it didn’t move me. Now excuse me while I go change my pants…

We all need a good scare every now and then, and we here at The Nest would like to salute the masterminds who created the Tales From the Darkside intro for giving us a weekly dose of uneasiness back in the mid 80′s.  After writing this post, we would also like to order up a whole case of those Rainbow Donkey nightlights….. MOMMY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Everything’s A-OK, punk!

We were all young once, even those of you out there who actually grew up.  Most people alive today grew up in the era of television, and undoubtedly have memories of the children’s shows that were all the rage at that time.  One of the kiddie shows that has stood the test of time and been there for many a generation of youngsters is Sesame Street.  Created in 1969, it is still on the air and as commercially $ucce$$ful popular as ever today.  Of course, I only really recall the show from the 80′s, where thanks to having a seemingly endless parade of younger sisters, I got to know the furry monsters of The Street throughout most of the decade.  If you can remember when Mr. Hooper was still alive, Mr. Snuffleuppagus was still a “figment” of Big Bird’s imagination, and there wasn’t any evil, red, annoying as fuck, snotnosed punk of an Elmo around to ruin everything… then you came from my generation of Sesame Street children!

We all know the main denizens of PBS’s most famous avenue…. Bert and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, Count von Count, and Elmo’s mentor Grover.  But for this week’s Flashback Friday, I’d like to reminisce a bit about some of my favorite not-so-famous Sesame Street characters from back in the day.  While I had a working list of B and C list muppets already lined out for this post, doing some research I came across a few more I had totally forgotten about… so hopefully you too will find a lot of pleasant memories in today’s post!

I have no idea what is wrong with that bear, but I think he needs emergency medical attention…

Telly Monster!  He was kind of a hot mess, but I found out where he got his name from.  His original purpose was to be obsessed with television.  I guess someone decided that wouldn’t make him a good influence on young children, so someone picked up the T encyclopedia and decided he would now be obsessed with triangles.  Hey, we know you didn’t choose that life for yourself, Telly, so we forgive you!

This child was never seen again…

Herry Monster!  Wait… “Herry”!?!?  really?  What kind of stupid spelling is that?  Were Herry’s parents merely ahead of their time in the fucked up baby name craze, or was there just a typo on his birth certificate?  Either way, we kids loved his badassedness, and if he were still a big star on the show today, our children would be much better off than they are now learning pussified lessons from a discarded red sock…

The wild girls of Sesame Street.

Prairie Dawn (left) and Betty Lou (right) were just the same muppet with a different wig.  Come on, girl, just because you were entertaining a group of 5 year olds, did you really think we were that stupid not to see through your charade?  I guess it’s a good thing your viewers were all well before the age of puberty, because we all know how hot noseless pink chicks can be.  You little tease…

Mr. Perkitude!

Guy Smiley was Sesame Street’s favorite game show host back when game shows were actually cool.  In googling up a picture of ol’ Guy, I see that he apparently got a resurgence in popularity last year because a lot of people thought Mitt Romney resembled him.  Ohhhhkay, maybe a little, but I’m pretty sure Guy didn’t carry around a binder full of muppettes…

I’ll never get my hair right!!! Never!!!

I remembered the character Don Music, but had no idea what his name was!  Given his appearance and tendency for overreaction, he has to be some kin to Guy Smiley, but unlike the bubbly Guy, Don had some of the shittiest self esteem on the show.  He never got the lyrics right to his songs and used to take it out on his piano with his forehead.  The Sex Pistols may get the credit for starting the punk rage, but Don Music was the one who had everyone banging their heads long before Quiet Riot ever hit the charts…

And I will wait, I will wait for you!

Long before the name Mumford became associated with terrible music, The Amazing Mumford was wowing us kids with his incredible ability to fuck up a simple magic trick.  But at least he had the greatest magic words in the business with “a la peanut butter sandwiches!”  He really should be doing commercials for State Farm and not David Copperfield…

A-HA!!! I have deduced that it was the evil Bert who put a hocker in your sandwich!

Sherlock Hemlock, a clueless detective whose dog solved all the crimes.  Sound familiar?  Yeah, Inspector Gadget wasn’t just copying off of Maxwell Smart…

What blog am I on again?

I was going to do a little paragraph on the dementia-plagued cowboy Forgetful Jones….. but, well, I forgot what I was going to say about him.

This is where purple people come from!

Long before In Living Color came along, Sesame Street had its own character that was as black as he wanted to be.  Roosevelt Franklin was a mainstay of the show in the 70′s and 80′s, but eventually became a victim of the PC police who thought he was a purveyor of negative racial stereotypes.  Perhaps had he made his album “My Name Is Roosevelt Franklin” a hip hop piece and not been all educational, he’d be viewed as a role model and not as the pariah he became.  Sorry Rosie, but The Man really was out to get you…

Walking, talking noise complaints.

The Honkers were essentially a one note act, but they amused our early childhood brains without making us want to choke the life out of them like the newer ADHD muppets.

And to finally wrap up this walk down the memory lane of Sesame Street, the absolute most awesomest creatures to ever land at the Children’s Television Workshop…..

Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip!!!!!!

The past decade and a half have seen the television airwaves so inundated with reality TV shows, that it’s hard to remember a time when they were the exception to the rule.  Even harder still is to recall a time when the proceedings of reality TV were actually real enough to be called Reality.  While we all know that Honey Boo Boo’s family is being amped up behind the scenes the same way Jerry Springer dysfunctional guests were, those Storage Wars guys aren’t blindly finding billion dollar valuables, and there are no real housewives on any show that says Real Housewives in the title… if there’s one reality format we should be able to boldly award the Real Seal to, it’s the judge shows.

You know what we’re talking about…. there’s about 42389933 of them currently on daytime TV.  If we had the number of judges in our actual courtrooms that we had on TV, court dockets wouldn’t be so backed up as they are now…

Isn’t there an important child custody case you could be presiding over right about now?

While Judge Judy is currently the gold standard of the TV courtroom format, and the one who inspired so many other TV judge wannabes in the 21st century, for my generation there was and still is only one TV magistrate that made sure the scales of justice were being fairly balanced in small claims court….

ALL RISE!!!

YOU, Ms. Merbear, are out of order!!!

Judge Joseph A. Wapner presided over The People’s Court during its entire 12 year original run from 1981-1993.  The People’s Court was one of the first and definitely most popular television courtroom shows to “try” actual cases involving actual litigants.  I put the word “try” in quotes because Judge Wapner’s domain was not actually a courtroom with any authority to rule on a motion for anything other than taking a lunch break.  It was actually a televised case of binding arbitration, where both parties agreed to waive their right to a real trial to appear on TV and have Judge Wapner decide their fates.  It was a win/win situation for both parties since they split a pool of appearance money from which any judgment was also taken from… something that does not happen when you get your ass sued off in real small claims court…

I’ve just been scarred for life! That’s going to cost Juan Valdez a pretty peso or two…

You can take all of the daytime judge shows on TV right now and put them all together and not approach the amount of 80′s awesomeness that was the original People’s Court.  Judge Wapner ran a tight ship that rarely led to outbursts, insults, or any of the other cheesy dramatics that pervade the current shows of the genre.  I’ll admit it, the show would probably be considered boring by today’s entertainment standards… but since when is a courtroom supposed to be entertaining?

Unless, of course, it involves two yutes…

One of the most kickass features about The People’s Court was the theme song.  It struck up as soon as the plaintiff walked through the doors.  We’d hear announcer Jack Harrell give the reason they were seeking justice while “Ba Boom-Boom Boom Boom” was playing in the background.  Then the vitals of the complaint would appear on the screen in teletype fashion.  Repeat for the defendant.  Then, while 108 year old Rusty the Bailiff swears the two parties in, we hear Harrell get very serious about how what we are witnessing is REAL.  The cases are REAL.  The litigants are NOT ACTORS.  They’ve agreed to settle their dispute in our forum…… THE PEOPLE’S COURT!  OK, maybe there was a little cheesy dramatization in the show.  But damned, if that didn’t get you fired up for Judge Wapner’s appearance!

10 seconds to Wapner!!!

And of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the show’s crack reporter Doug Llewelyn, who got the fun job of interviewing the two litigants as they exited the courtroom after Judge Wapner decided whether or not their appearance money was going to get raided or not.  He managed to handle the job very professionally without displacing a single hair on that horrific 80′s do he was sporting, and still had it in him to advise us before the credits rolled that if we had a dispute with someone we couldn’t work out, we should take it to court!

That hair…. good lord!

Let’s put it all together, and watch this real People’s Court case from 1986 in which a man who thought a stun gun would be a cool thing to have and nearly zapped his own balls off when he broke it decided to sue the store he bought it from when they wouldn’t offer him a refund for it:

I was so waiting for Rusty to turn to Judge Wapner and scream, “Don’t tase me, bro!!!”

How all drunk sports fans should be treated.

After a short hiatus, The People’s Court was rebooted back in the late 90′s and has aired in syndication ever since with such honorable judges as former New York mayor Ed Koch, Judge Judy’s less popular husband, and some chick named Marilyn Milian who has now presided over the show for the same length of time as Judge Wapner, 12 seasons.  While I have never seen a single episode of the new People’s Court, I have to ask the question any keeper of nostalgia would ask in such a situation… regardless of whether I’ve been exposed to the new show, can it really top the well-celebrated original?  We don’t need Judge Wapner to rule on that for us, now do we?

Let the record state that the defendants are fucked.

Judgment for the original People’s Court in the amount of one million awesome 80′s points.

As a parting gift for reading today’s post, you’ll all receive a copy of The People’s Court home game! This really existed and I unexpectedly got it for Christmas one year. I wish I was kidding about that…

Admit it, back in the day, you’d have paid good money to talk to a recording of Sting…

As hard as it is for kids under the age of 20 to believe, there was once a time in this world when the internet did not exist, or at least didn’t exist in any practical manner yet… and that prehistoric time wasn’t all that long ago.  That left all of the forward thinkers out there scratching their heads for a way to shamelessly self-promote themselves in a world where social media consisted of spinning a rotary dial around seven times.  Luckily for everyone who was relevant around 1990 (or still thought they were relevant), a new avenue opened up that allowed pseudo-celebrities and mega-billion dollar corporations alike to make a lot of money off of people who were too stupid to understand their phone bill.  The same time period that brought us MC Hammer and Saved by the Bell also ushered in the 1-900 number craze…. and boy, was it impossible to avoid at the time…

Hello! Is this the Dial-a-Skunkette hotline?

From around 1989 until the time when home internet started taking hold in the mid 90′s, it seemed like anyone and everyone had their own 900 number.  The only thing more insane than the fact that MC Hammer, Freddy Krueger, and even Santa Claus had their own 900 numbers is the fact that anyone would want to waste $2.00 the first minute and 95 cents each additional minute to listen to their pre-recorded tripe.  Hell, even Grandpa Munster had his own 900 number…. yes, Grandpa Fucking Munster was stealing nickels and dimes from kids’ parents back in the day!  Juliette, you may want to shield your eyes from this….

If you watched any of those YouTube links I provided (and you know you did, because if you didn’t love nostalgia so much, you’d be reading a better blog right now), you’ll notice how they all mentioned “Kids!  Be sure to get your parents’ permission before calling!”  You know why that is, don’t you?

Because only a kid with no responsibilities and common sense would be dumb enough to call one of these 900 numbers!!!

Hey! We can make adult decisions too (hic!)

Seriously, everyone went after Joe Camel, claiming he was a marketing tool to get kids to smoke, which was always pretty nitpicky to me.  But almost all of the cheesy celebrity 900 number commercials from the early 90′s were undoubtedly marketed at kids… and they had to know going in that kids were going to be their main source of income!  And how many of those kids got their parents’ permission before dialing?  Yeah, right…

Hey Mom! Is it OK if I call the Pamela Anderson hotline again?

My parents had to get 900 numbers blocked on our phone because one of my sisters kept calling the Kid N Play hotline (I really wish I could find that commercial, because the damn jingle is still stuck in my head all these years later).  I would imagine 900 number blocks became quite common since they were the only way to get out of paying the unexpected charges, and pretty soon the prospective customer base for these hotlines dried up and they were essentially gone by the time grunge came on the scene in 1993.

Kids, be sure to get your parents’ permission before trying cocaine.

But while the C-F list celebrities wound up on the outside looking in of the latter days of the 1-900 number fad, a couple of the more seedy industries who knew how to take advantage of the adults who should know better kept right on bringing in the loose change!  By the mid 90′s, if you saw a 1-900 number commercial on TV, you could rest assured it was either going to be for a psychic hotline…

I foresee me getting very rich off of you!

Or an adult “chat” line….

Come on baby! Give me my money’s worth!

Most of these sleazy operations enjoyed a brisk initial profit, only to eventually cave under as more and more charges became disputed and the sirens and seers were unable to collect revenues for many of the calls that were made to them.  The porn industry of course shifted focus to booming internet, while the psychics….. well….

You never saw that Chapter 11 coming, did you Dionne?

Today, the 1-900 number business is dead… literally.  Verizon (nee MCI) was the last carrier in the US that supported pay-per-call 900 numbers, and they put the axe to the service at the end of last year.  I was honestly surprised to see that the industry lasted even this long, especially since cell phones have become so dominant and they have never allowed calls to 900 numbers.  Besides being a tool for cheesy entertainers to make a quick buck, or sleazy profiteers to milk the wallets of the gullible, 900 numbers also had a more responsible role back in their heyday as source of quick information 24/7.  News, weather, sports, gossip… there was a hotline for it all 20 years ago.  Of course, the internet made the need to pay a nominal fee for information one would not have had access to back then totally obsolete by the turn of the millennium.  TV networks often used 900 numbers to allow viewers to interact with the shows in the form of polls, but that too was rendered moot by the web.  So if you miss the days of the 1-900 number, blame this guy…

Yeah, I invented the internet, baby!!! And global warming! And the all you can eat buffet!

We here at The Nest miss hearing the pathetic pleas for money and attention by those who were immersing themselves in their 15 minutes of fame in the early 90′s.  That would have never been possible without the 20th century miracle of telecommunications technology that was the 1-900 number.  A big thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, Watson, Ma Bell, Grandpa Munster, Al Gore, and everyone else who made this small, but totally unforgettable era in dialing history possible.  In fact, we’d like to extend our gratitude via recorded message on our new hotline we set up 1-900-THE-NEST.  Al, be sure to get your parents’ permission before calling….

You’re looking a little inconveniently ill there, Mr. Gore. How about we melt your icecap?

Internationally recognized acting superstar, or funeral director? You decide.

Do you recognize the man in the picture above?  He doesn’t exactly look like someone who belongs on my blog, let alone a Flashback Friday post.

Well, if you grew up in the 80′s like I did, you are almost certainly familiar with him.  What if I told you his name was Les Lye?  Does that ring any bells?

No?  Still stumped?  What could this rather stuffy looking guy possibly have to do with our childhood?

Here’s a little hint….

Duh’I got to get that recipe for Reese’s Pieces from the last comic.

If your parents had cable TV in the 1980′s, there is no way you weren’t raised on a heavy dose of Les Lye.  He was the actor who played all of the adult male roles on Nickelodeon’s flagship show of the decade, “You Can’t Do That On Television” (The female adult roles were all played by Abby Hagyard).  While the appeal of Nick’s legendary sketch comedy show was that it was for kids, by kids… there is no doubt that the show’s star was not one of its endless stream of child actors (Note from Buster the Mythbusting Possum: Alanis Morissette was barely a blip on YCDToTV’s radar, only appearing in a small handful of episodes).  She’s only remembered because of what she became), but the man who played all of the adult characters who constantly tormented them.

Lye created a whole slew of offbeat characters that were featured in most of the show’s sketches.  Above you see one of his most famous… restauranteur extraordinaire Barth.  Barth was slow and dimwitted, but an evil genius of culinary tastelessness nonetheless.  The Barthie Burger was legendary in its ability to make the kids sick, and you never quite knew what was going into it…

Whaddaya think’s in the burgers?

Digging further into Les Lye’s closet of quick change disguises, we find other such memorable characters as….

Don’t encourage your mother!

Senator Lance Prevert, the world’s worst and slobbiest father.

Here Lisa, stuff this in your mouth…

Ross Ewich, the show’s “producer” who could often be seen barging in on the set and trying to boss the kids around.

Only in the 80′s could you get away with a Hitler and naughty word reference on children’s television. Man, I miss the good old days!

The kids’ strict teacher Mr. Shidler, whose name was often pronounced with an emphasis on the T…

It’s the 80′s, I can still spank your ass, young man!

The school principal, who would run the detention and have the bad boys and girls of YCDToTV copy some obscene amount of pages from the huge, dusty dictionary on the desk.  I had a fourth grade teacher who loved assigning writing sentences (“I will not be an asshole in class” 200 times) as punishment, so these sketches always resonated with me…

Even Blip never dreamed of the day it would cost a dollar to play a damn arcade game…

Greedy owner of the arcade, Blip.  I don’t need to remind anyone in their 30′s and 40′s how popular the video game arcades were in the 80′s…

You’re not going to trick me into saying “fire” (BANG! BANG! BANG!)

The Capitan, who was in charge of executions.  These sketches would always start off with Lye using his sword as a baton as he said, “Ready….. Aim….” before the doomed kid would interrupt asking to stop the execution.  Most of these sketches wound up with The Capitan, who had the most dysfunctional firing squad (amigos!) in the history of executions, walking in front of the target area as he uttered the magic word “Fire!”, and he’d go down in a hail of gunfire.  “That is one sneaky kid!”

I can’t drive 95!

Snake Eyes, the renegade driver of the kids’ school bus, who was always violating every rule of the road and running the bus off the road and into peril for the sheer thrill of it.

Now assigned to Guantanamo Bay.

The dungeonmaster, whose job was to torment the chained up kids (why they were there in the first place was never explained).  The further I get into this post, the more I realize just how fucked-up awesome this show really was!

Evil Squirrel’s Nest has been a mangy rodent production.

The show’s announcer, who would only be seen at the end of the show, usually saying something he shouldn’t be saying and not realizing he’s still on the air.  At the beginning of each episode, you would hear him give the fake show that You Can’t Do That On Television was pre-empting (“Mr. Rogers Bullies the Neighborhood”, “Reading Rambo”, “Hulk Hogan vs. Punky Brewster”, etc.) as well as what kind of humorous production the show was after the credits rolled.

And Les had many other recurring characters on the show, including a Groucho Marx inspired doctor, a goofy looking high school coach, and a pain inflicting dentist.  What’s truly amazing other than the fact that this man literally carried the show with his endless parade of zany personalities is the fact that he was born in 1924, so he was in his 60′s during most of the show’s run!  When most people would be thinking about retiring, Les Lye was just beginning to make a name for himself… and working awful damn hard to do it!

Just another day at the office.

Sadly, Les Lye passed away back in 2009 at the ripe old age of 84.  He will forever be remembered for entertaining and entire generation of kids who grew up in an era when kids shows were more worried about being funny and interesting and not just about selling licensed merchandise.  We here at The Nest salute Mr. Lye’s contributions to the children of the 80′s, and recognize one of the most underrated talents to ever hit the small screen.  We would also like to assure everyone that Mr. Lye’s remains haven’t been put into the burgers….

Duh’I heard that!

We are the eggmen!

I get knocked down
But I get up again
You’re never gonna keep me down
Chumbawamba – “Tubthumping”

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, we had toys that were actually awesome.  Toys that appealed to both boys and girls.  Toys that were true originals.  Toys that left an impact on our childhood, and can still make us smile when we see them as adults today.  If you were a child 30 years ago and came to my blog today and saw that picture above, and didn’t immediately have the catchphrase “Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down!” going through your head, then I only hope you and your alien race actually came to this planet in peace….

Take me to your Weebles!

Yes, this week’s Flashback Friday post is a tribute to those roly poly little toys of three decades ago that always got back up and smiled now matter how much we little monsters abused them during playtime.  Hasbro introduced Weebles to the toy market back in 1971, and continued to produce the ovoid shaped little people until 1983, which was just long enough for them to make it into my childhood memories.  I still remember we had three different Weebles playsets when me and my sisters were still little rugrats….

The Tumblin’ Funhouse!

It’s all fun and games until someone rolls down the chimney.

The Treehouse

Complete with sunroof!

And the Haunted House!

Fear no Weeble.

Oddly enough, I always think we had four different Weebles domiciles, but that’s because me and my sisters were good at breaking every toy we ever had, and managed to have the Haunted House broke apart at the hinges in no time… so it was like getting two playsets in one!

Like many of the toys we played with back in the day, the science behind the toys would have blown our little heads right off our shoulders.  The Wikipedia article on Weebles has a paragraph devoted to the laws of physics that allow a Weeble to have its amazing resistance to gravity….

A Weeble is shaped like an egg—in order for the physics principles to work as intended, the shape must have a bottom which is a more or less smooth (unfaceted) hemisphere (to allow the Weeble to roll) and from the central vertical axis the shape must be nearly cylindrically symmetrical (that is, any plane cut through the vertical axis line must produce close to the same profile). Next, the shape must be filled with two basic types of unmixed solids, and the volume of the lighter solid must be greater than that of the heavier solid. Next, the overall shape must have constant positive curvature. Next, the relationship between the heavy solid and the light solid must be such that any orientation of the object off of the vertical axis line must cause the object’s centroid to raise and to become offset. Lastly, the object must have only one position in which it can achieve stable mechanical equilibrium.

Combining these characteristics produces a basic Weeble.

Sorry, marblebutt, but you’re just a Weeble in name only.

Weebles were too popular not to reintroduce to the world, and a few years ago, Hasbro duly modernized the Weeble for the youth of today…

New and unimproved!

Since toys buck the trend of most other industries in the notion that smaller is better, the Weebles of today exploded in size.  Since a scientific study conducted sometime in the 2000′s concluded that toys from the 20th century were so unsafe that nobody who ever touched one should still be alive, Weebles followed in the footsteps of other children’s playthings and became too big for some adventurous little tyke to shove in their mouth.  Either that, or Weebles have also succumbed to the obesity craze that is sweeping the nation…

Let’s hit the drive thru for Fourth Meal again!

We here at The Nest would like to salute the Weeble for bringing us countless hours of weeble wobbling joy, as well as providing a nice round projectile to throw at our little sisters.   While it would be cruel to give Weebles a round of applause or a high five, we instead offer them a congratulatory chest bump… and then watch as they bob back and forth trying to regain their equilibrium.  And if you’ve always wondered what could possibly be more fun than a box full of possums….

A bowl full of Weebles!

Now this chart here shows the delclinin’ popularity of Evil Squirrel’s Nest after yesterday’s comic.

I very rarely make political posts on my blog, and there are some good reasons for that besides the fact that talking politics is one of the best ways to piss people off.  First, I don’t really give a steaming heap about politics, and am pathetic with a capital A.  Second, I have great disdain for the whole concept of the two-party system, which does a good job of taking millions of people with vastly different and unique viewpoints and forces them to pigeonhole themselves into one of two camps if they even want to think they can have a voice in government.  It may also have something to do with the fact that my choice for President has lost every election in my lifetime…. who knows?

Funny, hanging around with undesirable women didn’t hurt Clinton’s chances.

I also get a perverse pleasure when something comes along that throws a big ol’ monkey wrench into the gears of the political machinery.  Two decades ago, a man did the unthinkable and without any support from either of the two major parties in America, or any other political party for that matter, he actually became a viable, electable candidate for President of the United States… and as an added bonus, provided us with a lot more entertainment than you’d get from a normal election year.  H. Ross Perot’s surreal run for President of the United States in 1992 is the subject of this week’s Flashback Friday.

America has spoken! But I can’t seem to hear ya’ at the moment!

Perot didn’t really have any of the traditional credentials one would look for in their ideal Presidential candidate.  He had never held a single public office before, and the only reason people even knew the name H. Ross Perot before is because he was a billionaire business tycoon who actually had charisma, and he had plenty of money to throw away on a run for the biggest elected office in the land.  Perot’s decision to run for President wasn’t any long thought out, carefully planned notion…. it essentially sprung from an interview he did on CNN’s popular Larry King Live show just 9 months before the election, where the king of suspenders asked the opinionated tycoon he often had as a guest on his show if there was any situation under which he’d make a run for President.

I’ll bet I could even get Merby to make a run for the White House!

In a year where there was a perfect storm of a lingering recession, frustration over George H.W. Bush’s policies, and a hot mess of candidates on the Democratic side that spit out the surprising choice of Bill Clinton, the country seemed ready to listen to some guy they most likely had never heard of before.  Perot’s volunteer army managed to secure his name on the ballot in all fifty states with one of the largest petition drives this country’s ever seen.  Perot drew interest from Democrats and Republicans alike, who wrote his name in during the later primary elections that year at a noticeable clip.  By May, some polls even had Perot as the leader, having more support than both Bush and Clinton… and talk of a potential situation where no candidate would get a majority of the electoral votes was starting to look like a real possibility.

Which, of course, would let these overpaid idiots decide who gets to be President.

Oh, but just as quickly as the hot air was inflating the Perot for President balloon, our man who could have stuck the middle finger to politics as usual was letting his inexperience in the political ring take a pin to it.  After a couple months of having his stands on the issues run through the wringer, and his character damaged by the campaign experts of Clinton and especially Bush, Perot was back in third in the polls by the end of July… and just as suddenly as he tossed his cowboy hat into the race, he bowed out and said he would not run.

No!!!! Get your butt back in the race!

Our boy Ross wasn’t done toying with the political process just yet, though.  After sitting out for two months, he would valiantly return to the ring on October 1st, just one month before Election Day.  Despite being damaged goods by this time, Perot still had a couple tricks up his sleeve… perhaps most famous were his infomercial-like spots he purchased on national TV where he pointed out the benefits of his economic plan featuring more charts and graphs than were in every math book you ever had in school combined.  These modern day Fireside Chats with a southern drawl got a lot of attention, and even drew higher ratings than some of the regular primetime fare on TV.  Perot’s newfound popularity forced a podium for him to be set up at the first Presidential debate on October 11… a debate which the polls showed he was the clear winner of.

But just when it seemed Perot might be a relevant candidate again, he sent in the clown…

Why am I on this blog?

Early on in his campaign, since it was necessary for his inclusion on the ballot in a number of states, Perot chose good friend Admiral James Stockdale as his interim running mate.  Stockdale was a Vietnam war hero with an absolutely fascinating and courageous story, but like Perot, he wasn’t much of a politician.  When Perot got back into the race in early October, he still hadn’t replaced Stockdale with a bonafide running mate… so the poor Admiral was sent off into the fire of the first Vice Presidential debate with little more than a week’s notice and preparation.  The debate was held in Atlanta on October 13, 1992, and the only thing that went right for Admiral Stockdale that night was that in his opening remarks, he delivered one of the greatest quotes in the history of the known universe.

The absolutely most fucking brilliant thing to ever come out of the mouth of any candidate at any debate ever.  “Who am I, why am I here?” was golden enough that you can almost forgive the old sailor for deteriorating into a rambling, incoherent mess after that opening statement, and further damaging the legitimacy of Perot’s campaign in the process.  Hopefully Stockdale also had his hearing aid off when the comics came out to roast his performance.

Oh well, we tried!

In the end, Perot put up a big goose egg on the electoral front… but he garnered a rather sound 19% of the popular vote.  Not bad for someone who most people hadn’t even heard of ten months prior and who quit the race mid campaign, later claiming he only did so because the Bush campaign threatened to sabotage his daughter’s wedding.  Perot’s showing even qualified him for federal campaign money in the 1996 election, which he chose to run in.   It was an even bigger disaster, likely because it lacked the drama of the 1992 campaign.

We here at The Nest would like to thank Ross Perot and the good Admiral for all the laughs and hijinks they provided us 20 years ago, that turned what could have been just another boring election into a fun filled circus that even us non-political types could enjoy.  In our everlasting gratitude for all of your graphs and gaffes, we promise to never allow any of our jobs here at this blog to be sucked down to Mexico…

¡Viva la ardilla!

Would you like fries with that?

There are many technological advances that I loathe and frequently whine complain about on this blog, but if there is one that has been a blessing for me, it has been the development of digital photography.  The number of photographs I have taken over the past four years using and reusing one single memory card would have taken hundreds of rolls of standard film at several bucks a pop.  I got a 35 mm camera for Christmas back in 1988, and I had a lot of fun taking pictures with it on the rare occasions I was allowed to have a roll of film.  The only bad thing was the knowledge that as that little number on the back of the camera that tracked how many shots I had taken began to creep up towards the limit for that roll (usually 24 or 36), the more I had to decide if something was really worth taking a picture of or not.  There were no do-overs in real film photography, no button you could press to erase a image… once it was burned onto the film, it was there until the photo developer you took your pictures to could laugh at your shitty photography.

A lot of my photos from that camera looked something like this.

In the early days of amateur photography, you had to take your film to specialized photo processing studios to turn your negatives into positives.  As time marched on into the 1970′s and 80′s, photo processing became much more convenient, as many retail and grocery stores allowed their customers to drop off their film while they were shopping for processing at some business they contracted out to… although it usually took several days before your photos came back.

48 hours is worth it for the lifetime of embarrassment opportunities!

At the same time, the one hour photo processing market was just beginning to heat up.  These were little shops that would process your film while you waited, and didn’t allow their employees time to marvel at those nude shots you took of yourself for more than a few minutes.  Working on a tight budget, the geniuses that brought us access to this almost instant photo gratification decided that the best place to set up shop would be on mall parking lots.  If you’re old enough to recall the days of flash cubes, you definitely remember these little parking lot warriors because they were almost everywhere!  While Fotomat, which I led off this post with, was the most popular… as a true child of the 80′s, the photo kiosk company that will always be nearest and dearest to my heart was the legendary Fox Photo.

Greyhound only wishes their logo were this cool.

The most famous photo kiosk in pop culture history was a Fox Photo booth.  It’s what the Libyans crashed into after Marty McFly vanished into 1955 in the movie Back To The Future.  Forward to around the 1:00 mark of this video….

Seriously, these kiosks were totally ubiquitous during my childhood days.  I think we had two of them in my cowtown alone, and it’s not like we had any really big malls.  Yet while the heyday of these tiny little photo labs was at its peak in the early 80′s, the business would be on life support by the time Ronald Reagan (the actor!?!?) left office.  Both Fotomat and Fox Photo began to shutter their tiny cubicle sized slices of picture making heaven in the latter part of the 80′s, and by the mid 90′s, the one hour photo kiosk had gone the way of the dinosaur.  It wasn’t digital photography that did in these oversized tollbooths, but the fact that by 1990, their one hour photo service had become feasible for set up in larger stores.  These in-store minilabs were much cheaper to operate, and thus, could offer prices the kiosks couldn’t match.  The Fotomats and Fox Photos that were hustling and bustling in the 80′s became the parking lot eyesores of the 90′s.

Someone just hit me with a VW van, please!

We here at The Nest would like to salute these small but powerful little centers of photo developing that came to represent a time when you were totally dependent upon someone else to turn your pictures of the kids taking a bath together into cherished family memories.  While we won’t miss the constant cost of buying and developing film, we will miss the cheesiness of your small fry in a big mall business model that was done in by the very stores whose parking lot you had invaded.  Thank you to Fotomat, Fox Photo, and all of the other wonderful one hour photo stores that operated out of an outhouse… this Kodak Colorwatch approved picture is just for you!

Smile everybody and say “DRIVE THRU!!!”

I’ll admit it right now… I’m not much of a reader.  In a blogosphere full of aspiring authors and bibliophiles, I stand out like a Hustler magazine in a library.  Even if you count collections of short stories (which is about all my attention span has time for), I can probably count on both hands the number of books I’ve read since I hung up my school career 16 years ago.  At least one of those books was about my favorite subject!  The internet is to blame for my lack of attention to the printed word, as I’ve spent the majority of my free and not so free time hanging around the vast timesuck of cyberspace since the turn of the millennium.

Why read when you can spend all day drawing cartoon rodents?

But we’re in Flashback Friday territory now, and with no internet to eat up the plethora of boring hours I had as a kid, I found I did occasionally pick up a book and read it.  Unfortunately, living with four younger sisters, a lot of the reading material around the house was Little Golden Books or My Little Pony style shit (NTTAWWT, of course).  But I was fortunate to be able to get my hands on a few books in one of the more unique, popular, and totally 80′s young adult literature series that was out there.

Behold the awesomeness!

The Choose Your Own Adventure series was debuted by Bantam Books in the late 70′s, and was one of the biggest kiddie lit hits of the 1980′s, with most of the stories being penned by authors Edward Packard (who created the series) and R.A. Montgomery.  While almost all literature since the beginning of time has been written in either the first or the third person, CYOA books were unique in that they were told from the perspective of the second person.  Yes, YOU!  You were the protagonist of these little pocket adventures, not some kid who is so much more awesome than you’ll ever be.  But what truly made these books unlike anything else out there was the fact that the story often came to a fork in the road…. and you got to make all of the critical decisions that affected the plot!

To blast ES’s head off, turn to Page 87.

To boil ES in water, turn to Page 53.

To zap ES with 1.21 gigawatts, turn to Page 152.

At times, the story would give you two or three paths to take, directing you to turn to certain pages to pick up the story.  Because of this, if you got cute and just read the book cover to cover, it was kind of like a time altering psychedelic trip since you’d be weaving in and out of various locations in the story’s timeline.  Because each CYOA story had numerous turning points buried within it that you got to control, there were multiple ways the story could end.  Some of the choices folded upon each other and created the same result or brought you back to an earlier part of the story.  Sometimes your choices ended the story within minutes, and other times your choices would drag on the adventure for an hour.  And there was one undeniable fact that was true of most of the CYOA books…. about half of the endings wound up with you meeting some untimely demise.

Now how do you like being the protagonist, huh?

Of course, we didn’t let those morbid endings phase us one bit back in the day.  We were part of the first video game generation, and knew that death was just a temporary inconvenience towards the goal of attaining the happy ending.  So we tracked back in the book to that fateful decision and chose the other option, which of course generally also led to you getting shot by a gangster, crushed in a collapsing cave, or impaled by a unicorn.  Hey, this was the same decade that gave us all of our favorite campy horror movies, so fictional death was nothing new to us.  The pussified generation, we were not.

Give us CYOA books, or give us death!

Choose Your Own Adventure books pretty much died by the time Two thousand zero zero was upon us, and in this age of Facebook and smartphones, do kids even read anything not online these days?  Yeah, I know, I have room to talk.  But back in the caveman days when we kids needed something to keep up occupied, the CYOA series was there to deliver with its re-re-re-re-re-readability and more gruesome ways to die than the entire Final Destination series.  We here at The Nest would like to thank the creative minds who brought us these twisted tales of self adventure that taught us the importance of making good decisions.

If you want to end today’s Flashback Friday post, click here.

If you can’t get enough of Flashback Friday, click here.

If you just want to see awesome masterpieces of sciurine artwork, click here.

Excellent choice!

We’re totally insaney!

There was once a commercial where a guy walking down the street with a chocolate bar happened to accidentally bump into a girl who was obviously having a bad pregnancy craving that led her to go for a walk and eat peanut butter out of the jar.  This awkward moment didn’t lead to any violence or lawsuits as we might expect, but the creation of Reese’s peanut butter cups.  Who knew two things so different could be so good together?

Like coffee and squirrel pee!

Now let’s take that same scenario, and imagine a Warner Bros. animator walking down the street, probably too busy looking up X-rated images of Petunia Pig on his cellphone to be paying any attention to where he’s going.  And let’s say he turns the corner and bumps into world famous movie director Steven Spielberg.  The typical result might be that the animator would never work in that town again, but that’s not what happened.  Instead, we got two of the finest, highest quality, and most original animated series of our time out of this bizarre combination.

Not counting “The Mysterious Cities of Gold” and “Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea”, of course…

In 1990, Spielberg collaborated with Warner Bros. animation to create the groundbreaking animated series “Tiny Toon Adventures”, which took the classic characters of WB animation and created younger, hipper versions of them with the premise that they were being taught the ways of becoming a cartoon star by those original legends at Acme Looniversity.  Airing on the booming Fox Kids after school cartoon block in the early 90′s, Tiny Toons not only provided plenty of fodder and slapstick to keep the kids entertained, but also culled from the classic WB cartoons the adult themes and pop culture references, which made it one of the first “kids” cartoons that adults also loved.

And especially us teens…

As great as Tiny Toons was, it was basically just the beta run that was used to create what would be the series that would be the crown jewel of the Spielberg/WB collaboration, and that was “Animaniacs”, which debuted on the Fox Kids block in September 1993.  Animaniacs would take the boundaries of what a kids cartoon could be that Tiny Toons established, and absolutely obliterate them… making this a show that could be enjoyed by the naive kids who were entertained by the cuteness and cartoon slapstick, and the teens and adults who could laugh at the more mature humor that was successfully woven into each episode.

Hellllllllllo, Nurse!

For today’s Flashback Friday, I’m going to look back at the wacky characters and skits that comprised this work of cartoon genius, which not only kept me entertained during my college years, but also provided me with a lot of the inspiration that went into creating my own characters you see on this blog…

Nobody ever cared that we were all only half dressed.

The Warner siblings Yakko, Wakko and Dot were the main characters of Animaniacs, and the glue (or perhaps snot)  that tied the show together.  The designs for the brothers (and sister, as Dot would often have to interject) were based on the simple black and white characters of the early days of animation.  Yakko was the eldest, a slick talking comedian who was inspired by the comedy of Groucho Marx.  Wakko was the little brother who had an obsession with the grosser things in life (He’d often be featured in skits belching out entire monologues or songs).  Dot was the cute little sister who was often underestimated by her enemies, and frequently seemed disgusted by the antics of her brothers.  The trio usually starred in the first short skit of each episode, and the most common formula for a Warners sketch featured the trio being wronged by some cold hearted caricature of a figure from pop culture… only to have the kids have a blast getting their just desserts on the offender during the remainder of the skit.  Here is my all time favorite… try to keep a straight face through this 7 and a half minute skit…

“What do you wanna do tonight Brain?” “The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Sing Karaoke.”

Pinky and the Brain are probably the Animaniacs most famous characters due to the fact that their schtik was so successful, it was spun off into its own cartoon series.  Pinky and the Brain were lab rats, with the Brain being the serious, intelligent one who would constantly cook up schemes to not only escape the lab, but take over the world.  Pinky was his dimwitted sidekick, who provided comic relief and usually wound up inadvertently sabotaging the Brain’s ideas.  There was a bit of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton to these two characters, and in no episode did that play out better than in “Win Big”, in which not only does The Honeymooners factor into the outcome of the plot, but the skit itself is actually a great takeoff of a classic Honeymooners episode where Ralph takes a fall on a game show for not knowing a tune that Ed was constantly whistling to his annoyance.

Go away, kid! Ya bother me!

I’ve always considered it a remarkable coincidence that long before squirrels meant a thing in the world to me, that Slappy Squirrel was by far my favorite character on the series.  Slappy was a crusty old squirrel who had been a big cartoon star back in the early days of animation.  Most of Slappy’s episodes featured her butting heads with an old cartoon nemesis, who would still rely on the cheesy old gags of cartoon lore in an attempt to get back at Slappy.  But this old broad knows all the tricks by now, and never falls for any of them.  She lives with her naive young nephew Skippy, who idolizes her aunt Slappy and tries to learn the ways of cartoon street smarts from her.  Slappy would typically end an episode with her trademark phrase which I borrowed as the title of this post.

The Godpigeon says he needs the toejam cleaned from between his talons.

As proof that the Animaniacs drew plenty of its inspiration from adult references, the Goodfeathers was a pigeonized version of the mob.  The characters Bobby, Pesto and Squit were based on the characters Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Ray Liotta played in the movie “Goodfellas”, with Squit narrating each episode.  The two main running gags in the Goodfeathers cartoons were Pesto getting upset at innocuous remarks made by Squit, which of course was inspired by the well known scene in Goodfellas where Pesci goes off after Liotta says he’s funny.  And then there is the Godpigeon, the don of the boys who often swoops in to save the day, and speak in unintelligible gibberish that Bobby always has to translate.

OK, I love you, bye bye!

The Mindy and Buttons skits literally drove me up the wall.  The overly perky, cute, and thoroughly annoying toddler Mindy tugs at pretty much every single thing I hate about young kids.  And to boot, she was constantly getting the family’s poor dog Buttons into trouble during her frequent escapes from the house (Back in an era where parents weren’t afraid to leave their kids to their own devices for a while), and it’s up to Buttons to keep her out of danger.  The poor mutt ends up taking the brunt of the ills that were intended for Mindy, and then gets busted upside the head with the newspaper upon returning home safely with the little brat when the parents misinterpret the reason Buttons looks like hell after they left them alone for a few minutes.  I always secretly hoped for the imp to get flattened by a steamroller, or shot into space by a stray rocket, but alas….

Can you sing me “Stray Cat Strut” again Rita? Yeah, definitely “Stray Cat Strut…. oh, look! Squirrel!

Even the best cartoon series ever created has its weak points, and the Rita and Runt sketches were my least favorite.  Rita was a singing cat, and Runt a big buffoon of a dog, and the two of them were companions on an adventure looking for a new home.  At some point in every cartoon, Rita would belt out a song, which was usually slow and sappy, and just ruined the whole feel of the show.  These two disappeared entirely after the first season, largely due to the fact that Spielberg hired Bernadette Peters to voice Rita and do her singing, and her salary demands were a strain on the show’s budget.

Were you looking to be wrapped up in a mink coat, dear?

Innuendo that went over the kiddies’ heads wasn’t quite edgy enough to satisfy the creative minds behind Animaniacs, so they created Minerva Mink.  In my infamous early post XXX Marks the Spot (which is still the most popular post EVER on my blog), I discussed the role of sexuality in cartoons, and how artists loved adding as much sex appeal as they could to their female characters to tug at the pent up libido of much of their target audience.  Minerva not only crossed that line, she had it for breakfast and used it to file her claws.  Her skits were so overtly provocative and sexual in nature, that many of them got left on the cutting room floor even before the censors could tell the show’s producers “no”, as they undoubtedly wiped sweat from their brows and refused to get up from behind the table.  Because she was too hot for kids TV, Minerva was barely a blip on the Animaniacs radar, yet she’s still considered to be one of the hottest cartoon vixens in history right up there with Cleo from Heathcliff, Cheetara from Thundercats, and of course Velma from Scooby Doo.  Minerva was also definitely an influence when I created my character MBRS.

So, like, Randy Beaman tried to feed his nuts to a squirrel, and….. um, k, bye!

In between the main shorts that would make up an episode, Animaniacs had a lot of other interesting short features to to bridge the gaps and fill in empty time.  Colin, who is better known as “The Randy Beaman kid”, would come outside and deliver a rambling monologue to the audience about the experiences of this kid he knows named Randy Beaman.  Here’s a link to a YouTube of one of Colin’s finest performances.  God, I loved this show….

Doggie want a bone!

But the best of the short features to appear on the show was the “Good Idea, Bad Idea” series, featuring the poor sap Mr. Skullhead.  Below is a complete collection of all of these skits from the entire five year run of Animaniacs.  My favorite one begins at about the 7:25 mark.  By the way, the narrator’s voice should sound familiar to you…. it’s Tom Bodette, who’s better knows as the spokesman for Motel 6, who leaves the light on for you.

And finally, as a special tribute to my favorite cartoon series of all time, here is a compilation I found on YouTube of some of Animaniacs best adult innuendo scenes they managed to sneak by the censors.  Remember, this was an after school cartoon that was technically aimed at entertaining kids!

And now’s the best time for Yakko’s signature line….. “Good night, everybody!”

The Nest loves political incorrectness.

No, don’t adjust your computer monitors!  My blog isn’t shutting down.  Sorry to make you think I was going to improve the quality of content on the internet by going away.  No, for today’s Flashback Friday, I want to talk about a phenomenon that truly is a dinosaur these days… and one my night owlish self was utterly fascinated with during my younger days.  Television has provided us so much during its seven decades of dominating our entertainment and information needs, broadcasting countless hours of news, movies, sports, sitcoms, dramas, and of course Honey Boo Boo.  But sometimes, television was at its most interesting after the broadcast day had ended…

Not to mention more colorful!

In the olden days of broadcasting, it made little sense for television stations to broadcast during the overnight when few people would be watching since the cost to stay on the air all night exceeded the amount of ad revenue the station could bring in.  So almost every station signed off the air for some period of time during the middle of the night.  The transmitter, however, kept right on humming along… so the station had to broadcast something when it wasn’t showing regular programming.  During television’s golden era in the 50′s and 60′s, that was often a simple test card, which was mounted on an easel in front of a camera in the TV studio and actually filmed for broadcast.  The best known of these test cards is the one I led off this post with… only with Chief Turnoffateevee’s mug in there instead of ES’s.

The tribe is not amused!

More familiar to the generation of readers I typically dedicate these flashback posts to is the pretty colored bars pattern.  This pattern was typically accompanied by an atonal sine wave, and if you woke up at 3:00 in the morning back in the 80′s, this is what you’d probably see and hear when you turned on your TV…

I’ll give you a moment for your eardrums to recuperate from that 60 seconds of pure aural pleasure.

That’ll clean your ears out better than a sanitary napkin.

Now you may be asking yourself what the purpose was behind these test cards and test patterns that would air late at night when literally nothing was on.  It’s hard to remember now that digital and LCD televisions have been commonplace for so long, but back in the days when the boob tube was actually a tube, it contained several different adjustment knobs to allow viewers to fine tune the picture.  While test cards and test patterns were primarily for the operators at the studio to calibrate their equipment, the overnight broadcast of these strange graphics was also a convenience for those at home to help adjust their sets.

Damned vertical hold!!!

Every 20th century television had about six knobs on it that controlled different aspects of the picture, like the contrast, brightness, and of course the vertical hold.  I’m sure there is a good technical reason for why it was necessary to have a knob to turn the vertical hold down low enough for the picture to start jumping every few seconds, but I’m too stupid to figure out why.

Geez, I’m going to have to wait for the station to go off the air to fix this damned thing!

Of course, the reason these crazy off the air shenanigans are being discussed in a Flashback Friday post is because a certain 1990′s innovation completely destroyed the whole concept of television stations going off the air.  Of course, that would be the infomercial.  The overnight hours became filled with these 30 minute advertisements two decades ago, and if sponsors wanted to pay good money for a half hour block of time when nobody but insomniacs and myself were watching, that sounded like a better deal than showing the most annoying rainbow in history.

Thank you Susan Powter for stopping the insanity of strange overnight graphics and dog whistles.

We here at The Nest always lived for the late night, and have to admit we miss these old, boring, one-note television downtime fillers, and would thus like to give a salute to the people out there who gave us a pretty palette of primary and secondary colors accompanied to a symphony of monotone.  In everlasting tribute to these bygone days, The Nest will be signing off for the next 24 hours, and we hope you enjoyed our broadcast day.  And now, one more tradition of the off the air process here in the good ol’ USA, and one which was referenced in one of the cheesiest but most awesome songs of the 1970′s…. ladies and gentlecritters, our National Anthem.  Good night, and we’ll resume broadcasting with tomorrow’s Saturday Squirrel….

You may recall back in June I devoted a Saturday Squirrel post to pictures of some majestically beautiful squirrels from the Eastern Hemisphere.  Since all of the featured squirrels were from countries in the old Communist Bloc, I made several Cold War references in the post.  I was surprised when two weeks ago, I received a comment on that post that turned out to not just be some Spam that slipped through WordPress’ filter.  I was taken to task by “Amber”, who read my playing off old Cold War themes as misinformed political garbage that was blatantly anti-Russian and factually incorrect.

I should be ashamed of myself!

Amber, bless her heart, was only looking for pictures of beautiful squirrels and ran into a sentiment that obviously came from a time before she was born, and one that she thus can not understand and therefore must think is invalid and incorrect.  To bring anyone born after the fall of the Berlin Wall up to speed, from around the end of World War II through the 1980′s, there was a clear cut “cold war” between the US and the USSR, democracy vs. communism, that (Korea and Vietnam notwithstanding) never actually escalated into a direct active war.  Thank God, or we likely wouldn’t be here today.

Because of THIS.

The “Us vs. Them” propaganda was big on both sides, but there was no doubt what the consequences of an attack by either side would have resulted in.  Many TV shows and movies played off the potential nuclear doomsday scenario that loomed over the earth like a thick black cloud for four decades.  Both sides took precautions to not only prepare itself for a potential counterattack, but to prepare its citizens for the impending horror an atomic bomb would wreak should one be dropped in a populated area.  The US did this by releasing one of the cheesiest children’s educational films in history…

While “Duck and Cover” has been skewered and parodied in about every way imaginable since it was released in 1951, trust me, I will devote a post to breaking it down in my own hilarious way sometime in the future!

Cover and Duck.

But our vigilant Civil Defense team did more than just entertain us with talking turtles and teaching us to put our head between our knees and kiss our asses goodbye, they also encouraged people to create a lot of these…

It’s a bowling ball…. no, a jack o’ lantern!

If you were alive in the 80′s, you’ve very likely seen one of these signs before in real life.  We had one at my elementary school, along the stairs leading into the basement.  I also remember one at our YMCA.  These were places you were supposed to be able to go to in the event of a nuclear attack and stay safe while everything else around you was melting.

NOOOOOOOO!!!! You forgot to duck and cover, Frosty!!!

While there were many fallout shelters built during the 50′s and 60′s that were actually constructed to provide safe haven from atomic fallout, in reality, most fallout shelters were just glorified basements that not only weren’t gonna stop those dangerous gamma rays that would turn your liver into charbroiled steak, but probably didn’t even have a stash of Spam and Tang for all of the survivors.  I’m pretty sure there was nothing in our school’s basement that was edible…

Especially since that’s where the cafeteria was…

But it probably didn’t take much to merit a building getting one of the infamous black and yellow signs.  After all, sometimes just the feeling of safety is good enough to satisfy the people… and when people noticed all of the fallout shelter signs as they went about town doing their business, it made them feel better knowing there was a place they could quickly run into and hunker down so they could get fried from the inside out in the company of total strangers.  It’s kind of like how people feel so much safer driving a car with an airbag even though it’s probably going to rip their head off of their shoulders when it inflates.

Winning!

Alas, my younger readers like Amber will never realize the blissful simplicity of knowing exactly WHO the enemy was, and WHAT they were going to wipe us out with like we had back in the Cold War days.  When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90′s and the threat of atomic warfare subsided, the Fallout Shelter became a relic and most went back to their old purpose of serving up school lunches and hiding dead bodies.  Sadly, the old reliable threat has now been replaced by the much more unpredictable attacks of modern terrorism, and there isn’t much diving into a Fallout Shelter or curling up like a turtle is going to do to save us from those unconventional kinds of assaults.

If only all attacks could be this predictable.

So The Nest gives a big Flashback Friday salute to the Fallout Shelter and its promise of safe haven from The Big One should it happen to be dropped on our hometown.  While we no longer have the old Soviet bear to kick around anymore and make us tremble a bit in our boots, at least there is one bold lunatic out there to keep us on our ducking and covering toes, scrambling for the nearest triple triangle placard of sanctuary.  And I hear he even likes Rainbow Donkeys….

You go with your bad self, Kim Jong!

Is this almost over? I’m hungry.

The 1980′s saw an explosion in celebrity activism, and most of these charitable efforts focused on one lingering issue in the world…. people were starving.  In the days before Calvin Klein ads and supermodel mania, lack of food was actually considered to be a problem worth tackling.  Most of the initial efforts focused on the mass starvation that was going in in Africa, particularly in the country of Ethiopia.  Admit it, if you’re over the age of 30, even to this day when someone mentions the word “starvation”, the first image that comes to your mind is some poor Ethiopian kid with sticks for arms and legs, and huge flies circling around his head.

So we had the Bob Geldof organized Band Aid…

Who’s up for some roasted Boomtown Rat?

Not to be outdone by their British counterparts, American musicians put together USA for Africa…

Michael Jackson looks really weird in this picture, and yes, I realize that’s really saying something…

And on my 10th birthday, the two sides joined forces for Live Aid…

Feed the world, one continent at a time…

These three events all took place within less than a year from the Fall of 1984 through the Summer of 1985, and they were a huge success.  People felt better about themselves, celebrities got some much needed exposure, and plenty of money was raised to ship food to Africa for the evil dictators there to hoard from the people who really needed it.  But there was just one problem, Africa didn’t have a monopoly on this whole starvation thing.

Feed me.

There were plenty of people starving right here in the good old U. S. of A., and they had to be pretty pissed off to see all of the efforts the rich and famous were making to feed those who were living on the other side of the world while they had to resort to digging through Lionel Ritchie’s garbage can.  Would anyone step up and raise money and awareness for those mouths that needed more nutrition than a half eaten Big Mac from a dumpster could provide?

I’ll sell my mane for a five dollar foot long!

Yes they would.  And they would do it with one of the most ridiculous nationwide charity events in the history of philanthropy….

No way…. seriously???

Since it’s a no-brainer that the best way to raise awareness for starving Americans was to get together enough people to form a human line of Red Rover from coast to coast, the idea for Hands Across America was born.  On Sunday May 25, 1986, event organizers were going to string together a human chain of hungerbusters from New York City to Los Angeles and have them sing kumbaya songs.  Could you imagine millions of people holding hands with total strangers these days with all of the germophobes we have out there?

Eeeeew, why are your hands so sticky, kid?

As ridiculous as the idea sounds of trying to gather up enough people to stretch from the Pacific to the Atlantic, the Hands organizers made things even harder for themselves by ignoring one of the basic rules of math.  Had they planned the route for the chain more like in their logo I posted above, it would have made more sense, but here’s the actual route that was used for Hands Across America….

Sorry, but an earthquake hit while we were drawing the line through the Midwest…

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to crisscross the Mississippi River three times.  Wouldn’t it have worked a little better to have the route be as close to a straight line as possible?  of course, even a straight line isn’t going to solve the problem of American geography that is the vast expanse of mountains and deserts that make up the western third of the country.  Try finding enough people to form a 500 mile chain through the sparsely populated Southwest desert.  Yeah, they didn’t, so in the many places where there were going to be huge breaks in the human chain, long ribbons were substituted to link up Hands holders.  This event wound up using more police tape than during the entire run of Law & Order.

Or by Lady Gaga’s fashion designer.

Then there was the problem of those who felt “Left Outt”…

Nobody wants to hold paws with me? (sniff!)

Politicians and public figures from New England, the South, the Northern Plains, the Northwest, and even Alaska and Hawaii were miffed at being excluded from the Hands Across America fun, and instead of embracing the spirit of the event decided to boycott it instead.  Yes, it has to be a huge ego blow to big cities like Boston, Miami and Seattle to have to sit on the sidelines while the likes of Little Rock, Amarillo, and Bumfuck Arizona got to enjoy all the hand holding fun.  It’s an important lesson that no matter how noble and inclusive your intentions are, somebody out there is going to still feel like you’re screwing them over.

We’ll just shake our hips while you mainlanders all hold hands..

If you really want to be entertained, check out the list of cities with some of the notable participants that appears on the Wikipedia page for Hands Across America.  Yes, Cincinnati managed to bring out Chewbacca from Star Wars, because who else would anyone ever associate with the Queen City but the world’s most famous Wookiee?

Little known fact: Chewy’s first job was working at WKRP in Cincinnati.

So in the end, was this ambitious yet ludicrous event actually a success?  Well, as far as how much money it raised, most estimates I have found state that Hands Across America really didn’t raise much more money than it spent organizing and promoting the event.  But Hands did bring to light the issue that we needn’t look any further than our own backyards when it came to helping out the hungry, and that has generated countless indirect donations of time and money in the effort to feed our own people in the years since the mass hand holding.  Yet while Live Aid and We Are The World have lived on in our collective memories over the past 25+ years, Hands Across America has largely slipped from the public consciousness… mostly remembered only for the absurdity of the whole gimmick behind it.

Do you mind? I can’t see the game!

But that’s fine and dandy enough to get a Flashback Friday salute from The Nest, and we cheerfully extend our paws to our fellow critters today in honor of one of this country’s forgotten spectacles.  While it may tug at our hearts more to see a poor, starving kid in Africa be exploited by an ironically overweight actress from the 70′s, let us never forget that charity always starts in the home….

Pictured above: NOT Menudo.

Ah, the late 80′s.  Everything was so colorful and rad.  Looking at the picture above, you’d swear it was inspired by a scene from “Full House” or “Saved By The Bell”.  But no, what you’re looking at is probably the most forgotten popular music group in the history of rock and roll…

I was blessed to have satellite radio in the car I drove to and from Texas on my trip this week, which is good since the drive was 12 hours one way, and rural Arkansas (yes, that’s redundant) is not known for its quality of radio stations.  So instead of listening to Preacher Jimmy Bob tell me about how I’m going to hell, I was able to listen to 12 hour blocks of 80′s music on Sirius XM’s Channel 8.  Believe me, I heard pretty much every song associated with the decade at some point on the way there or back, as well as a few surprises…

Alas, they did not play Mr. Lekakis’ classy hit single…

The 80′s on 8 has a feature at around quarter till the hour where they play a “Lost Hit of the 80′s”.  Oftentimes, the song really is one that you hardly hear anymore, though some of them are not songs I’d really consider to be lost hits (like Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop”, for instance).  Then there are lost hits that make me wonder how in the hell we can have such short memories of the songs of the era that were popular.  And it was maybe 50 miles into Arkansas on an early Tuesday morning that Sirius XM played this as their lost hit of the hour…

Before I start ranting about how much this pissed me off, here are the facts.  “Crush On You” was the first single by a group called The Jets to become a hit, and it wasn’t some minor success… it made it all the way to #3 on the charts.  That’s a position a lot of better known 80′s songs never touched…

And also a nice day for a song that peaked at #36…

The Jets didn’t just release that one song and fade away like an old Polaroid picture.  They had six Top 40 hits in all spanning just three years from 1986-1988, five of which landed in the Top 10!!!  They were staples of Nickelodeon’s video show “Nick Rocks” at the time, and were even popular enough to get to perform the National Anthem at Game 7 of the 1987 World Series!  That’s a gig even fellow Minnesotan Prince couldn’t pull off..

Prince was too busy singing at The World Series of Love.

Yet by the 1990′s, not even 5 years after these modern day Osmonds set the pop music scene on fire, they were quickly stashed into the repressed memory file in our brains so that we could get all angsty with Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder.  Along with the eye-stinging fashion and the fun loving wholesome attitudes the band projected in its videos, their music also did a major disappearing act.  To this day, The Jets and their five Top 10 hits have been reduced to spinning in the Lost Hit bargain bin.  How did this travesty happen!?!?

It’s a conspiracy against people who wear colored socks!!!

Well, first of all, The Jets were like an 80′s version of The Osmonds, only without the variety show every celebrity who lived through the 70′s used to have.  The eight original members of the band were literally not even half of the Wolfgramm family, which comprised of 15 biological children.  Not surprisingly, they were also Mormon.  Oh, and they were of Tongan descent.  Yep, the 80′s were a weird place and time.

Native Tongans doing the happy dance for my new character Wiki.

The Jets did themselves no favors on the fame endurance scale when they decided they’d rather do other stuff than just spit out Top 10 hit after Top 10 hit.  One by one, the older Wolfgramms left the band, and the remaining members replaced them with even younger siblings and made the huge mistake of converting over to a gospel group.  Elvis Presley got away with performing gospel songs because he was Elvis Fucking Presley, and he knew no matter what crap he barfed out and put on a record, he’d still be adorning velvet art on street corners long after he faked his death.  The Jets were not in Elvis territory.  America took Janet Jackson’s advice, and asked what had The Jets done for them lately, and quickly flushed them down the toilet with the rest of the late 80′s pop movement…

Mommy! Why is the toilet full of hair?

You see, as I alluded to in last week’s Flashback Friday when mentioning Debbie Gibson, it seems like most pop acts from the late 80′s got shipped off to Siberia, particularly the divas.  Tiffany, Jody Watley, Expose, Karyn White and Martika are all on sprawled out on the skid row of memory lane along with D-D-D-Debbie and The Jets, and they’d likely have been joined by Paula Abdul had she not had a resurgence in popularity a decade ago after her success as an American Idol judge.  Why?  Disco, which came a decade earlier, became so reviled by the music loving population that they literally blew the entire genre up.  Yet disco survives to this day on most retro and variety radio formats.  What was it about the 80′s pop sensations that left them out in the cold?  I don’t have a good answer for this…

Apparently, the future isn’t Electric Youth….

So despite the fact that they recorded Grammy nominated songs, released several Top 3 Billboard hits, and even recorded the song that was the slow dance at every late 80′s prom (and if that song doesn’t tug at your heartstrings, you need to turn in your card to the human race), do The Jets get any love for the joy they brought to us in the 80′s?  Heck no.  Arnold from Green Acres probably still has a bigger fan club than The Jets do.  But for being such a memorable part of my 80′s experience, and giving us music that still never fails to make me happy during the rare times I get to hear it, today The Nest would like to salute the Mighty Mormon Power Singers!  We did then, and we still do now have a crush on you, and thanks for keeping it real unlike this generation’s class of “pop” singers…

No, I wouldn’t want to wear a nudie suit and sneakers and shake my booty for you in front of millions of people… why would you even ask?

There was an undeniable “golden age” of television programs that spanned three decades from the 1960′s through the 1980′s that just seems so different from the early television fare that came before it, and the more modern small screen shows that have come since.  Remember when TV shows had real theme songs, and a real opening montage?  Who can forget laughing every time Dick Van Dyke tripped over the ottoman, smiling when Mary Tyler Moore tossed her beret into the air, or holding our ears in agony while Jean Stapleton tried to sing?

Edith! Will you stifle yourself?

Networks have blown up the traditional beginnings of today’s prime time shows because they want one show to segue straight into the other, giving the viewer less of a chance to flip over to something else before they become entrapped in the storyline of the next program.  But what’s really taken the hit is what comes at the end of the show.  Rolling the credits, as we once knew it, practically doesn’t exist anymore.  Now programming executives redo the original credits from a show, squash them into a corner of the screen, and roll them so fast that you can’t even find out who the damn guest star was, let alone who was manning the best boy grip.

A real, honest-to-God best boy grip, in case you ever wondered what one looked like…

One of the many great things about the older shows from the golden age wasn’t just the show’s unique credit roll, it was those little production company idents that would appear at the very end.  Sure, they’re still around nowadays, but they usually play before the faux-credits roll, which takes away a lot of their appeal.  And besides, they’re just not as good as the old production company logos.  Back in the day, every production company worth their salt got together with someone who was on the cutting edge of cheesy TV animation at the time to craft their 5 second business card they tacked on to the end of all of their shows.  And that wasn’t even good enough, because they were also scouting out terrible orchestras and out of work prog rockers to come up with some of the most annoying short jingles in history.

This has been a Filmways Presentation, Dahlink!

Take shitty animation, horrifically bad music, horrendous seventies fonts, and throw in the element of surprise these little masterpieces of “LOOK AT ME!” theater could often render if you didn’t know they were coming, and you get a very weird phenomenon.  Go on YouTube and start looking up videos of some of the classic production company identifiers out there, and you’ll see most of the uploaders and commenters have the same strange adjective they use to describe them…. scary!

BWAHAHAHA!!!! I’ve come to eat your chileh!!!

I’m not so sure scary is the right word to describe most of these short bits of nostalgia.  But creepy?  Fuck yeah.  Especially if it was at the end of a rerun you were watching late at night and you were already half asleep.  Just watch this compilation and see for yourself that these were creep overkill…

It’s not hard to see how a small child might be frightened by some of these, and even an adult can still get goosebumps watching that Viacom V of destruction headed our way like a giant tornado while the overly loud synthesized music plays to a crescendo.  What in the world were the creators of these old animated logos taking that made them think this was the best way to promote their studio?

Ehhh, nevermind.

But even if some of them did come off like they should be put at the end of a horror film, The Nest still gets a warm fuzzy feeling every time we get a chance to flashback to a day and age when we actually used to watch TV because it was worth watching.  Thanks for all of the chills, thrills, bad synth riffs, and strangely shaped letters moving all over the freaking place.  And to wrap up this piece, I’d like to show off some of the artwork I was inspired to draw while I was doing the research for this week’s Flashback Friday… where I added my own unique characters to some of these classic idents.  Enjoy!

I don’t think this is gonna be no Three Stooges flick…

Squirrels make early 80′s PBS seem so much less creepy…

Meow!

Sit, Skanki, Sit! Good dog!

And because you knew I couldn’t possibly leave him out…..

Benny Hill, Danger Mouse, and Rainbow Donkey! Cheerio!