Yes, it could very much have been a knock-off, or possibly a test run of that show in my local market, which brings up a complicating factor: I grew up in Columbia, SC, which at the time due to the relative isolation of its media market was a common testing ground for all kinds of new products and possibly, by extension, TV shows. I don’t currently have access to a database which includes the local paper, but I have found that I have access to one that’s geographically close enough that it lists Columbia TV channels in their listings, and I have been working my way through the time period looking for anything that might be it.
In unrelated news, I can’t believe Remington Steele developed the following it did in season 1 given that it was up against Falcon Crest.
True that, but Dallas was a worse yawner. Perfectly fine by me that others enjoyed though, as long I didn’t have to watch. At least the stores weren’t crowded during Dallas’s broadcasts.
Lotsa memories in this thread. I totally recalled a game that fits the OP’s description; it looked a lot like Moon Cresta, but not quite. The ships docked side by side. Ah well.
Here’s an odd one I bet nobody’ll get. In the late '70s there were (at least) three really bad movies that were shown in the afternoon on a UHF channel. Each movie had the same actors, plot, and most dialogue.
The premise of the movies was, as I recall, that we were being invaded by aliens and only the teen stars of the movie could save us. The gimmick was that in each movie, the kids had a vehicle shaped like, or had on top of their car, 1) a hot dog, b) a frisbee, and c) and ice cream cone. The aliens/alien crafts of the movies were correspondingly shaped like hot dogs, frisbees, or ice cream cones.
In a time when I’d watch any piece of crap aimed at my age group on TV without question, I distinctly remember being wildly bemused and compelled by these terrible shows.
Sometime in the ~80s. An eclectic NYC radio station’s (WBAI) reggae program featuring a Steel Pulse concert. A pre-show reggae(?) song with these opening lyrics, female lead, after a series of, human, wolf howls; Riding down the highway hell-hounds on my trail, Out of hell but can’t get the hell out of me
Repeated It’s all right choruses.
NOT Robert Johnson!
CMC
Sometime in the mid-1970s, I went to a bluegrass music festival, I think in West Virginia, possibly near Sulphur Springs, that featured Steve Goodman, Vassar Clements, and Roy Acuff, among others.
I’ve been trying to track it down, without luck so far. I know that it was NOT Stompin 76, because I went to that one, too, and my pictures show that Stompin had a completely different (and much larger) stage setup. The other one had a simple, relatively small, uncovered stage. A friend who was with me believes that Acuff had recently had a stroke, and either didn’t play, or wasn’t up to his usual standard. Other than these few facts, I have little to go on, and an hour or more of Googling hasn’t turned up any likely candidates.
I remember that stuff as well. It wasn’t an episode of Real People or That’s Amazing, it was a feature segment of one of the news programs that ran after local news but before Prime Time TV – 20/20 or Sixty Minutes or such. It was well before that consumer watchdog show Fight Back! was invented, as well…
It was a feature exposing the problems with 2-liter soda bottles and showing a few kids in hospitals with burst eyeballs that got hit by the cap. I very clearly remember 7-Up being shown as one of the culprits because I was miffed that my mother stopped letting me get 7-up at the grocery store (perhaps I shoulda just changed my preference to cans…).
Very quickly after that, there was less fizz in soda bottles and the cap-and-thread design changed slightly. Now there’s a break-away ring at the bottom of the cap; I think that helps keep it screwed down tighter (though it might also be a tamper-evidence piece).
I’ve never been able to find out the answer to a question my kids asked me: “So, dad, what bands did you see? Y’know, back in the day?”
Well, the problem is that most of my live music was at Summerfest.
(Music fest in Milwaukee, lots of stages going non-stop from noon to 1 am for over a week. How many… whoa, a lot: Rolling Stone called it one of the U.S.'s “must-see musical festivals.” With OVER 800 ACTS playing on 11 stages…)
And because I’m old, I’ve been going since 1970, almost every day. So that’s a lot of music, and it all blends together…
which my kids thought was hilarious and assumed we were all hippies stoned out of gourds (sorry to disappoint you, kiddos, couldn’t afford that).
So I kept trying to find a list of who’d played. When the internet came along, I’d check AltaVista, ask Jeeves, and finally Google it. No luck. Finally found out that Summerfest kept taking down any listings, because they were publishing a pricey coffee table book that would include band lists and photos going back to '69.
Well, I ain’t going to pay fiddy-tree-fiddy just to impress my kids, but I did glance through the book at a friend’s brother’s house. So a few mysteries got solved… I’d known we skipped the band before Sly & The Family Stone because they were too “pop”. But never realized it was The Jackson Five.
And someday I swear I’ll figure out the rest…
…
TL/DR: I may have seen some classic bands without realizing it.
There are a couple of fragmentary memories that have been nagging at me lately.
Sometime during the 60s or early 70s, I saw a movie set in the ancient (or semi-ancient) world. I recall that it looked like a lavish 1950s Hollywood production. In once scene, a high priest or similar leader steps off a tall tower to prove he can fly. Of course, this doesn’t work out well for him. I’ve been working my way through old historical epics trying to identify this film, but without success. TVTropes lists lots and lots of movies where people fall or jump from tall structures, but not this one.
During the 90s (or perhaps the 80s) there was a young actress in TV and films who had a scar on her chin, which pulled down one corner of her mouth and gave her a pensive, serious look. I think she had blonde hair, and I remember her playing roles like the long-suffering wife in domestic dramas. Googling “actresses with facial scars” mostly turns up pictures of Tina Fey, and it definitely isn’t her.
What’s frustrating is that I’ve gotten accustomed to solving these little mysteries with one Google search, and it’s weird when that doesn’t work.
Many years ago - mid 1980s, I think - International House of Pancakes had a radio campaign featuring a woman with an exaggerated upper-class Southern accent, talking about taking her husband Hamilton to the “Eye-Haaahp”. (The accent’s impossible to capture in print). In my memory, her name was Mrs. Ashford Dunwoody, but that might be wrong, as that’s a specific Atlanta reference.
I’ve never been able to find the ads again. All I can recall is her catchphrase, “So Ah tol’ HAAAM-ilton…” But the ads were funny and I’d like to find 'em.
There was also a parody song two deejays in Miami made in 1988, about the Jamaican bobsled team that was going to the Calgary Olympics. It was funny, but also racist (in the “All Jamaicans are dreadlocked stoners” stereotype), so probably better it stay hidden away.
I saw a Danny Kaye movie @ 2007 in which there is a musical number by a group of men in bee costumes. As the song begins, they’re making buzzing sounds. I’ve been told (and maybe including on this board) that the movie was ‘Wonder Man.’ I have recorded that movie at least a dozen times, and have never, ever seen that scene again. I do remember that Kaye played two roles in that movie (which he did in a number of movies, for some odd reason), that he was a nightclub manager in one role, and this was one of the musical numbers. Certainly fits the bill–only I’ve never found a version that had that scene.
Thanks, @The_Other_Waldo_Pepper, for finding that for me! Yes, those are the pictures I remember but I could never get an address. I looked up Coolavin Park on a current Lexington map. Looks like any other big park with sports field in any other mid-sized town. Given how awful the orphanage was and how much my father suffered during the nine long years when he lived there, it’s ironic that now it is a place for kids to play.
I remember a book I read in the early 90s. In it teen boy frames his parents for murder. It was VC Andrews-ish pulp mass market paperback. (I’m pretty sure VC Andrews didn’t write it. or John Saul either which others have suggested)
The parents send their son to an institution ostensible because he’s danger to others, but in court it comes out they went on vacation while he was there. He gets released and his roommate breaks out. The roommate goes to his friend’s home. When the parents come home(from being out to dinner?) they find their son with a gun and the roommate just sitting on the couch. The son shoots his roommate to death and then blames his parents when the cops come.
The son also picked up psychotic symptoms from his roommate.
