Forgot one: The X-Files. A friend has, I guess, every episode recorded in one format or another. It is something of an obsession with him. Last weekend, I sat down with him to drink a couple beers and watch some X-Files. Crimoney. I wanted to kick David Duchovny in the nuts virtually every moment he was on screen.
I know Dragnet has camp value now, but I used to take it seriously.
Same thing for Emergency! and Adam 12
Oh, and I was a BIG McCloud fan back in the day. I bought a DVD of it recently and I remembered being thrilled. Until I actually watched it. Ummmmm, yeah…
I have the opposite reaction to The Twilight Zone. I know al the endings a zillion times over, but when I’ve rewatched it I was taken by the writing, and the subtext. Serling really could write a teleplay (as could the other writers – Serling didn’t do them all, by a long shot), and something like “Eye of the Beholder” isn’t really about the twist ending (twist middle, really) of the plastic surgery patient being the pretty one and everyone else being ugly – it’s about conformity, and not merely physical conformity.
People tend to think that Serling came up with the stories, but most of them were adapted from the pulp SF and Fantasy magazines of the 1950s. A lot of good stuff got on the air from there. “To Serve Man”, for instance, the one about “It’s a Cookbook!” is a Damon Knight short story adapted.
The Billy Jack films. 'Nuff said.
I still enjoy it when it comes up on winamp, relaxing, cheerful, unassuming pop/dance music is harder to find then you’d think it would be.
The first album that I had ever owned, and listened to RAVENOUSLY for nearly a month before, and I’m not joking here, discarding it in a hole in my basement wall for fear of discovery by my 12 year old contemporaries: Vanilla Ice’s To the Extreme. The Lyric “Man, you probably eat spaghetti with a spoon” still haunts my dreams. That was after a brief period where I considered Bingo the greatest film ever made, EVER!
Some skeletons will eternally bang upon my closet door…
MsWhatzit:
I think it’s Anthony that changed, not the fans. The first 6 Xanth books, the first 3 or 4 Incarnations books, the original Apprentice Adept trilogy still hold up pretty well, I think. It’s after that point, when he descended into kiddie-porn-land that it turned awful, and probably dragged down our memories of the early stuff with it.
Styx
They are still much better than Journey.
I noticed the other day that I am now able to watch any Pink Panther cartoon without even smiling. In college this was the funniest show. I wasn’t even high. I think I just liked the music, which was the same for every episode.
Well anthology shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, which were clearly mining the rich veins of sci fi goodness from the 50s pulps, tended to be uneven. I loved them all as a kid. As an adult I see that many were mediocre, at best, and often way less then mediocre. But there are still some gems. “Demon With A Glass Hand” still absolutely rocks, a masterpiece considering the tiny budget. Harlan Ellison write it. When you want the good stuff, go straight to the source.
I went through an Ayn Rand phase in my high school years. To show you how little I understood of politics at the time, I was also a huge supporter of Bill Clinton. Somehow, the inherent incompatibility of these two ideas did not occur to me.
I still like Bill Clinton. I think Rand was a cold, heartless human being who loved only herself.