MTV

I don't remember seeing it from the first day of its initial broadcast, but the TV was now all but permanently anchored onto this new channel called MTV, which showed music videos all day and all night, hosted by a revolving gang of cool people who introduced videos, or told the latest about who was putting out a new album or touring.

It was an interesting mix within the first year of the channel starting out. We saw videos by old favorite bands who were still plugging along (The Who, J. Geils Band, the Rolling Stones), new bands and singers coming out (Asia, John Cougar Mellencamp, Survivor, the Eurythmics, Bryan Adams), and a plethora of "new wave" bands, often one-hit wonders (Human League, Madness, Bananarama, A Flock Of Seagulls, Romeo Void, ABC, and the Buggles, who launched the whole thing off with "Video Killed The Radio Star").

Some of the stuff was good, as well as stuff that was rather questionable; one that was hated around the house was "I Know What Boys Like" by the Waitresses, but would soon be followed up by another new band called Huey Lewis & The News, which was much more tolerable. And then, almost as comic relief, there were videos by funny guys like Madness, and Men At Work, whose videos were not only hilarious, but the songs were equally as good and memorable.

As the years went on, the channel got a little more complex, with live concerts being broadcast via satellite, like the Asia In Asia concert in late 1983. Another feature we enjoyed was a half-hour show called Closet Classics, which showcased a lot of videos from the German music show Beat Club, and I got to see clips by bands like Cream, and Blue Cheer. And a few years after that, they broadcast the now-legendary Monkees marathon over an entire weekend, and I was hooked from there (more on them later).

Like anything else that starts out great, it went to rack and ruin over a quick period of years. They introduced "Yo! MTV Raps", game shows, movies, reality shows, and then by the time the channel was twenty years old, anything that made the channel what it once was didn't even seem to exist anymore: the music video. Not that there was anything left that I wanted to see or hear (I'd given up years ago), but what it was built on wasn't there anymore. VH-1 was another great music channel until they, too, caught the same plague. Another childhood memory left to dry out. Ah well, there's always YouTube if I want to see the old videos again.

In retrospect, and not unlike the K-Tel albums I'd been subjected to in my earlier days, there was more trash to rummage through in order to get to the good stuff, but I gave up after a point. Even then, a lot of the new stuff coming out had a superficiality that I couldn't get into, with new styles coming and going at alarming rates. Less and less to hook me in, or even hold my interest.

"The Shining"

I had just started kindergarten in September of 1981. I don't think I'd been more than a week into starting my schooling when something happened that not only polarized my future upbringing, but also blew out the inside of my mind completely.

I was playing outside in the backyard by myself one evening, and it was just starting to get a little dark; Angie was next door with friends, and Mitchell wasn't there. Dad came out of the shed that was tacked onto the rear of the house; he invited me to come in, and that there was something on that I had to come and check out.

What could it be? I came into the living room, and there was a movie on, showing something I hadn't seen before. It was about twenty minutes into it, so I had to sort of piece together what was going on as I was watching. It seemed to be about a family who was in this massive (and empty) hotel somewhere in the mountains, looking after it. What drew me in right away was a tight shot of a kid around my age on a bigwheel, riding all around through this huge hotel, almost in a huge circle. I had myself one of those, but--damn, that looked like fun!

What was being shown was Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining. I had never heard of it, nor had I ever heard of those two names before. I recognized Jack Nicholson vaguely from the movie version of Tommy, where he was the "specialist" who tries to cure Roger Daltrey by having electrodes taped all over his face, and melon-ball cutters over his eyes. This time, he was actually acting in a movie, and I was impressed by his performance. In one sitting, I was introduced to Stanley, Stephen and Jack...wow, talk about a crash course! This was going to be an interesting ride!

All I can say for my fist-ever viewing was that I was drawn in. Completely. I didn't move, didn't get up to get something to eat, or go to the bathroom. I couldn't take my eyes away from the screen for the remainder of the time that it was on. I was mesmerized by all what was going on, the settings, the atmosphere, the music...everything.

The music...now that was an interesting facet of the movie. I was astonished years later to find out that the music (apart from the Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind synthesizer compositions) was not composed for the movie; it was selected from Kubrick's own picks, and all of them went perfectly with what was going on. Hearing things like Bartok's "Music For Percussion, Strings and Celesta" and Penderecki's pieces during the latter half were opening up some new doors in my head. Even hearing something like "Midnight, The Stars and You" was a little on the haunting side, almost ghostly in a way.

I had some seen some stuff in the "horror" genre before, such as Damien: Omen II and The Amityville Horror, but this was something different entirely. For me, it was more "haunting" than scary. There were lots of scenes and/or images that stayed with me long after it was over. You could never forget the image of the Grady girls lying dead in the hallway, the encounter in Room 237, the conversation with Grady himself in the men's room, Hallorann's fate, and the final image of Jack frozen in the snow. So many others, and everyone has their favorite, but this was definitely unlike anything I had ever seen before, or virtually anything after that. I knew I had to be the only five-year-old watching this; actually, it was almost like seeing it from Danny's point of view, as I was exactly his age at that moment. We thought he was great, and wished he lived nearby, so we could hang out with him!

Well! I couldn't wait to see it again. It might have been a week later when we asked if Mitchell could stay the night at our place, and--as luck would have it--the movie was on again, and this time I got to watch it from the beginning. And there we sat, the three of us, right up front, for the next 144 minutes. Everything really fell into place for me this time. And it was great to share the experience with Angie and Mitchell. I know they liked it. The next morning, when we went outside, Mitchell wanted to play a game (of some sort) based on the movie. Of course, he wanted to be Danny, and so I got to chase after the others with an imaginary axe! Oh, if only someone had a camcorder on us at the time!

Another time, not long after that, we watched A Clockwork Orange (typical of the cable channels, they were showing Kubrick's other films as well). Definitely not something to be watched by a small gaggle of grade-schoolers, but we did, and were equally as mesmerized, even if we didn't understand everything that went on in it (let alone the "nadsat" slang throughout it). Although I didn't catch that Kubrick had directed this one as well, I noticed that the two films sort of went hand-in-hand for some reason!

Another seed of influence had been sown into me gulliver.

When it snowed a few months later, I was out in the backyard, and I suddenly remembered the part with Danny in the maze, making fake footprints in the snow. I went and did that myself, leading my tracks halfway toward the garage. Unfortunately, no-one noticed, and they got covered over by more snow rather quickly.

The Blues Brothers

It had been a hot summer in 1981. One late evening in the backyard found all four of us together in the small swimming pool that Angie and I had, just to beat the heat. Angie also came up with the idea of sleeping outside in the backyard in a makeshift tent (a rather large blanket held up by a clothesline across the backyard), and no-one objected to that. We all crammed into it and slept the night away. One of the last things that occurred during that summer was a camping trip to Alder Lake, way east, toward Mount Rainier. We went there with a family friend, Fred, and we were only there for a couple of days. Nothing exciting or notable happened, but it was a fun and interesting trip, if only to get away from the house for a little while.

When we came back home and unlocked the house, it was hot and stuffy inside. Even after throwing open all the windows, it wasn't that much better. Angie and I were playing around in the front yard when Dad rolled the TV stand out onto the front porch, with the TV on it. He'd never done that before. Something interesting was going to be on, at least for the TV being set up like this!

It was the Showtime premiere of The Blues Brothers, but I had absolutely no idea what this movie was about, who was in it, or what was going to happen. I didn't even know about Saturday Night Live, and the cast of players who had been on the show, and were now making the big leap to the movie screen, although we'd seen The Jerk recently, and loved it. But this was not like anything I'd ever seen before. It was about two guys cruising around in an old cop car, getting into misadventures and high-speed chases with the cops throughout it. And they seemed to be on a mission of some sort of getting the old band of their back together.

I was very impressed with the music and songs that came up, although I was not familiar with the likes of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, or James Brown, and we took an instant liking to Cab Calloway as we tried scat-singing along to "Minnie The Moocher". I especially liked the part where they somehow won over a rowdy bar full of loud, truck-driving rednecks who threw beer bottles at the stage the entire time.

I sat there and watched the entire movie on the front lawn of the house, completely forgetting the fact that we were still sitting outside, while the TV was on the front porch, and it was completely dark by the time the movie was over. I was impressed, and although we had never done anything like that before, we never did that again so that memory of seeing it the first time that way will always be attached to whenever I see it now. Geoffrey's seen it in parts, and his favorite parts are of Bob's Country Bunker, and "Minnie The Moocher".

The Screensaver

Boy...talk about a memory flogger! I remember this one very well from the days when not all of the channels on the cable box were filled up (out of 27 channels). This is one that beamed from the Teleprompter Cable company, soon to be Group W Cable. It was on channel 8, and not much was on there, except for The Rock Show on Friday nights, and maybe some scattered local information. Otherwise, this was on there the remainder of the time. Actually it was rather handy for the time and temperature, especially in the mornings, like before heading out to school.

The shot above shows what it was like in the earlier days. A little later on, they added plugs for local businesses along the bottom part of the screen. Bouquets made from mylar balloons became very popular at this time, so there were plugs for those from one of the local shops in town, and there were plugs from the local TV repair shop, known as Mr. TV. The audio feed for the channel came from KISW-FM, a Seattle rock station, so sometimes there was even more reason to just let it play on its own if nothing was on!

Short Takes

We began exploring the new neighborhood and finding some interesting things to do, not long after we moved there. One place we discovered that was only a stone's throw down the hill was the Tacoma Public Library. I don't know who thought of doing it, but either Dad or Red Fred got the idea of renting a 16mm film projector from there, with a few films to go with it.

Only just a few years later, VHS tapes would be commonplace to check out, superseded by DVD's by twenty years, but in the early summer of 1981, that's all there was for checking out films. I remember the group of us walking up the incline of 11th Street, some of them taking turns carrying this heavy projector up the hill. We finally got it to the house, and Dad began setting up in the living room. A poster was taken down off one of the walls, creating an "instant screen" right there on the wall. One of the films was taken from its canister and threaded into the projector. I didn't catch what they picked out, but I was excited as the light was turned out and the film started.

It was Hardware Wars, the now-legendary takeoff of the original Star Wars film, but done in the style of an upcoming film trailer. My knowledge of Star Wars was pretty threadbare, but I was able to enjoy and get a good laugh out of what was going on. I especially liked Chewchilla the Wookie Monster, as he looked and sounded like Cookie Monster, going after Princess Android's hair "buns". This was also the first time I had ever seen a parody of something, and the utter cheesiness of everything in this short movie was unreal. After it was over, they didn't rewind the film, but played it backwards, just for a laugh.

I seem to remember a Pink Panther cartoon as the other film that they rented, one where he was a rancher with a little sheep, battling a nearby rancher who sort of looked like Yosemite Sam. Angie was pleased with that one, as she really liked Pink Panther.

Oddly enough, this was the only time we ever rented a projector from there. I think we began seeing so much good stuff on cable that we sort of forgot about doing that again. One thing we noticed on Showtime was that they would show short films if there was a ten-minute gap to fill before the next film came on. I remember being impressed with one called Vicious Cycles, showing a bunch of bikers tearing down the highway on invisible motorcycles. They also showed the followup, Stop, Look & Listen.

One that was disturbing as it was fascinating was one called Recorded Live, about a guy going to an empty building for a job interview, only to be stalked and chased by two reels' worth of brown videotape. He wards them off with a big magnet he manages to find, but the tape outsmarts him in a locked room he's hiding in, covers him in the blink of an eye, and eats him on the floor. Not quite the kind of thing to show to an impressionable 5-year-old, but I managed to see it a few times, and although I'd forgotten the title for years, I never forgot seeing it.

A splendid time is guaranteed for...some, anyway!

Sometime in the middle of the summer of 1980, when Dad was home, this came on one of the cable channels. I had no idea what this was...

I recognized these guys from a couple of albums in the collection, but they were now a group together? And singing Beatles songs? What could this be???

It was the movie version of the Sgt. Pepper album, which had apparently laid a mighty egg in the theaters a couple of years beforehand, but that was not known to me at the moment. I was immediately taken by this, it being similar to Tommy, where there was virtually no talking in it, save for some narration bits by George Burns, whom I equated with being a Mr. Hooper sort of figure in this. No talking, just Beatle songs the whole way through?...I'm in!

Something about the movie just felt right on that bright, sunny afternoon. Just a perfect setting for what I was seeing. I imagined that the town's gazebo would fit just perfectly over at the McCarver schoolyard. As it went on, the more bizarre it got (Mr. Mustard's female robots, Lucy & The Diamonds, etc.), but was still enjoyable. There was that "wild and crazy guy" I recognized from The Muppet Movie, singing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", and then Alice Cooper serenading a room full of Hitler Youth Scouts with his rendition of "Because".

Of course, I didn't like the part where Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina) gets killed just after the guys beat up Aerosmith and save the day (and, apparently, the world!), and the ultra-depressing sequence with her funeral. (My God, I was depressed about that part for a couple of days afterwards, even though I knew it was "just a movie", but that was just too sad to see.)

But then, the magical weathervane comes alive and makes everything alright again. Yayyyy! All is well!

The soundtrack album to it turned up at the house, and was being played with regularity around the house (and we didn't even have a copy of Abbey Road !). It even followed us to the next house we lived in, with a few more viewings (including one last viewing for a while on KCPQ-13), and Red Fred won a copy of an exploito "soundalike version" of the soundtrack album (on the Springboard label) in a ring-toss game at the Seattle Fair.

After the last time I saw it in 1981, it pretty much vanished from cable TV, and I got to tape it from the USA Network in late summer of 1989, but it wasn't until 1996 that it started showing up on cable again, perhaps as a tribute to the late George Burns, who'd left us earlier that year. This time, it was being seen uncut and uninterrupted. It felt great watching it again, just like being back at the Red House, and seeing it again for the first time.

Much later on in 2004, I scored a DVD copy of it, and once lent it to a friend who hadn't seen it in some years, and when he told me what he thought of it after a period of years, he summed it up thusly: "The only thing missing were a couple of singing Muppets, or a talking dog!". Indeed, you could easily imagine Scooby-Doo joining the Heartland gang in Mr. Mustard's van!

As the years went on, it was both a guilty-pleasure, and a reminder of happy times back at the old house, as the sun began setting on that magical summer of 1980, and it would be one of the last things we all enjoyed together immensely as a family then. I showed it to Geoffrey in May of 2013; he was familiar with both Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, and he was intrigued by what he was seeing. He recognized most of the songs, loved Strawberry Fields, and slinks from the room when Alice Cooper comes on to sing "Because". It's now one of his most-requested movies, somewhere between Monsters, Inc. and the Toy Story trilogy.

Hey, Kids!!!

Something that is pretty much absent from TV these days are Saturday morning cartoon shows based on either movies or TV shows. I thought of this one day when I first saw the 2-DVD deluxe set of Boogie Nights, seeing the characters from the movies in cartoon form on the cover of the slipcase. It reminded me of something you'd see in a full-page ad in TV Guide, proclaiming Hey Kids!!! Coming this Fall on NBC!!! It might have been interesting, but take away the porno-biz sleaze and snowstorms of cocaine, and you're not left with much, unless you give the players a SuperFriends type of angle to work with.

I got to thinking of this again recently while watching an episode of Laverne & Shirley, and I sort of remembered that there was once a cartoon show where they were in the Army. Looking it up on YouTube, I saw that--yes--it was part of an hour-long show that also included Mork & Mindy and the Happy Days gang (well, some of them, including a dog that trailed Fonzie, by the name of Mr. Cool).

Yes, it was terrible, but that also got me thinking that that sort of Saturday-morning wackiness has all but disappeared. I was wondering what kind of shows could be turned into Saturday morning cartoon shows; Friends would have been a great one, as would Seinfeld (Namowal said she could envision a show called Seinfeld In Space, featuring a tag-along robot that talked in beeps and weird codes that only Kramer could understand and translate).

But those are older shows, so how about some current ones? Kind of hard to choose. Too many of today's TV shows are too full of fat, gay and sex jokes (sometimes all in one sentence!) that they wouldn't be compatible for kids unless removing them entirely, and (like the Boogie Nights gang) you're left with not much that once made it great, but would leave the storylines open for much better scenarios. Maybe The Office and Two And A Half Men (minus the whoring, booze and fart jokes). The Big Bang Theory is just crying out to be cartoonized, as long as the gang is not in space or anything; put them on unthinkable journeys, such as a skiing trip, or even going fishing!

That led me to another untapped idea: instead of having ex-stars of old favorite sitcoms get together for those dreaded reunion TV shows and movies, why not have a two-hour animated cartoon reunion special? Much better than having to see your favorites all fat, old and grey now (which is probably why they don't want to do those reunion specials in the first place !), you could see them as they always were, complete with tacky '70s style animation (think Filmation).

Network heads, this could be a goldmine!

Don't touch that dial!

What I really miss are the local TV channels that were independently run. A lot of them in and around town have long since been bought and sold by the movie studios that turned them into little networks of their own. Eventually, a lot of those ended up being resounding failures, and are no longer in existence, with just bare little skeletons of what once was left on the old channel number.

But for a long time, a typical day on one of the channels was pure heaven. In fact, KSTW-11 in Tacoma was a longtime favorite. In the mornings there would be your typical cartoon shows, some reruns after those, a few game shows; then, The One O'Clock Movie, another two hours of cartoons, three hours of sitcoms, the 8 O'Clock movie, the local news, and then it was off to bed!

They had some great shows on that channel in the afternoon. As a pre-schooler, in the afternoon, I would see Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? followed by The Munsters and All In The Family. Later on, I'd see What's Happening!!!, WKRP In Cincinnati, Sanford And Son, Taxi, and M*A*S*H before the movie came on. After the 10 O'Clock News was Barney Miller and Benny Hill, but those were on a little too late for me.

Forget TV Land, this channel had it all! Eventually, it was bought by Viacom to become the UPI Network. KTZZ (which used to have cool cartoons like Heathcliff and Inspector Gadget and local shows like The Spud Goodman Show) became the WB. The less said, the better. KCPQ-13 became the local FOX network, but they somehow always stayed true to what they once were, and always kept the local news at 10 P.M.

Another favorite channel back then was WTBS, shortly to drop the "W". That was another great channel that showed great cartoons and reruns, plus a lot of obscure and long-forgotten movies; the first place I would see some of my favorites, and for some, the only time I ever would. That's where I first saw Willard and its sequel, Ben, not to mention Frogs and Devil Dog: The Hound Of Hell. Over time, the movies and reruns they showed got a lot more tame and unimaginitive, and TBS eventually became just another pay-TV channel. Like a lot of them did, including the USA Network, which once showed Night Flight and USA Up All Night, with loads of cheesy, no-budget sex-comedy movies.

Small wonder why TV has long since lost its charm for me.

Night Flight

In late 1983 or so, we discovered another cool music-video show on the USA Network called Night Flight. It was a four-hour show that featured music videos, state-of-the-art/computer animation, clips from old and new movies, old and sometimes very obscure cartoons and film shorts, standup comedy routines, music-video countdowns, and classic and obscure music videos and concert films.

And, very often, this was typical of just one night's show. Sometimes, there'd be a sort of "theme" night; like, say, drugs. They would intertwine standup comedy routines about cocaine and smoking grass with an old silent-comedy film about the evils of doing cocaine (in the middle of one such film, they dubbed in the song "Footloose" when the main guys were shooting the stuff into their veins and dancing like madmen).

Another staple of the show was the 1936 classic "Reefer Madness", with always a short clip of it shown somewhere during the course of the show. That, and clips of W.C. Fields, The Three Stooges and very obscure Looney Tunes shorts were pasted in there as well (that's where I first saw the infamous clip of Porky Pig slamming his thumb with a hammer and stammering "Son of a b-b-bi-bi-bi!"). Another theme was the latest in clay animation, where they showed John Fogerty's "Vanz Kant Danz", Frank Zappa's "Inca Roads", a clip from Fantasia, and other arty new-wave videos with the latest in animation and claymation.

In a way, "Night Flight" was what MTV should have been. Music, plus comedy and cartoons and wacky films and God knows what else that would fit into the pot. A lot of people remember the show as a sort of "MTV for stoners", which wouldn't be far from the truth.

The music videos were always great. One night, they had a "Tribute To Pink Floyd", showing some new videos from The Final Cut, which I had never seen anywhere else, and then capped it off with a couple of segments from Live At Pompeii, which I had never even knew about. I remember being totally blown away by that. Just the four guys, playing in an ancient, empty Roman amphitheater. Whoaaa...!

Another night, they showed clips from a Black Sabbath concert from 1978, and another night, recent clips from a Ten Years After reunion concert at the Marquee in 1983, which was bitchin'. They would also show films such as The Doors Are Open and the Rolling Stones' Sympathy For The Devil.

Another thing on the show that made me a devout fan were the music videos from the German music show Beat Club , primarily from 1967 to about 1973; some in black-and-white, some in color, and some of them in lysergic mind-melting color. Knowing a lot about music from that era, even back then, it was amazing to see videos from bands I knew about, but never saw in action. A handful I remember seeing were by Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Canned Heat, Yes, the Who, the Small Faces (before I knew who they were), very young Bee Gees, and "This Wheel's On Fire" by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity. I've been a fan and collector of footage from that show ever since.

I think this was more than half the reason we got this thing called a Video Cassette Recorder in mid-1984, in order to record a bunch of stuff from Night Flight. After all, that's among some of the earliest stuff we recorded on it. We caught a cool Frank Zappa special that he had compiled especially for the show in 1987. Still have that on tape, as well as some other parts of shows we taped in the mid-'80s.

Like all great things, it continued over the years, but grew shorter and shorter and less interesting as time went on. I think they ran out of cool stuff to show, or out of ideas, and the show wasn't as interesting as it once was. The last time I remember seeing the show anywhere was New Year's Eve of 1995, on a local channel that was carrying the sad remains of it, but at least with two gems to behold: a short film called "Suspicious Circumstances", and the classic Lenny Bruce animated short "Thank You Mask Man".

Pop Clips (1980)

Back in 1980, when I was four, we were the only ones on the block with a new thing called Cable TV. A lot of the neighbors would want to come over to watch TV shows they couldn't get anywhere else, or movies, or just see things with better reception than at home. One of the cable channels was called Nickelodeon, which I frequently tuned into in the mornings, as they had a two-hour sort of poor man's Sesame Street type of show, called Pinwheel.

Later on in the week or maybe on the weekend, at around 9:30 PM, there was a music-video show called Pop Clips, and Dad used to let me stay up to watch it with him. My sister would either be in her room, or at a friend's house overnight, but my Dad and I would see videos from the newer bands of the day, or old favorites still going strong.

Among the videos I remember seeing were "Love Stinks" by the J. Geils Band, "Do You Remember Rock & Roll Radio?" by the Ramones, "Play The Game" by Queen, "Fish Heads" by Barnes & Barnes, plus cuts by newer bands like Cheap Trick, the Police, the Knack and the Shoes. One particular favorite was "One Step Beyond" by a nutty bunch of guys called Madness, with a bunch of funny-looking guys doing all kinds of hilarious dances throughout the song. We would just crack up watching this one! I would get to brag to my sister the next morning about all the cool videos I got to see.

I don't remember how long the show was on, but it was interesting and fun to watch, and--yes--it was the precursor to MTV. One other thing that amazed me about the show later was finding out that it was created by Mike Nesmith of The Monkees.

After the show was over, as was the channel's broadcasting day, there was a clip of a mime-type character would wave goodbye and then turn out a light, with the Nickelodeon logo across the bottom of the screen. I didn't know what a nickelodeon was at that time, so I assumed that it was the name of the guy onscreen, and maybe that he was the channel's mascot.