It’s for kids, but I’m not sure kids enjoy it anymore. Francis Ford Coppola! George Lucas! Michael Jackson! Er. Hmm. The first was lost and coasting, the second had not yet been unmasked as something less than the Greatest Visual Genius of His Era, and Michael Jackson was still black and popular and charismatic, but you know how the story ends: with a snootful of rhino trank and a paralyzing fear of the outside world. From the beginning the Dismay you feel is enormous: it’s a two-headed chicken Muppet-thing running a spaceship with Comic Relief Alien Elephant and a cat with butterfly wings. Also a robot with a monocle. I repeat: a robot. With a monocle. They have to save a planet through dance; this is accomplished by shooting light beams at minions who turn into Fiercely Dressed professional prancers with 1985 hairstyles who make serious faces while executing certain steps. The evil queen, who is sort of a proto-Borg suspended by wires and tubes – the only thing in the piece that still holds up – is turned into Anjelica Huston, and then it’s over.
Oh, it’s 3-D and interactive; must have been quite novel back then, but at the end when the spaceship takes off into the vacuum and you feel wind on your face, well.
“That. Was. Bizarre,” said daughter.
“That was the 80s,” I said. I didn’t tell her that her mom once sported the ‘do the lead dancer had, a modified Sheena Easton, and it was hot.
Eighties hairstyles look very eighties now (think girlfriends in Back To The Future), but they didn’t seem so bad at the time.
Also, a bonus disquisition on how twelve is hard.
This was a good line too:
we had filet mignon the size of beetle testicles
Twelve is hard. Thirteen will make it seem like a cakewalk.
It’s all about perspective.
I don’t pay a lot of attention to sneering at Eighties style. I was a teenager during the Seventies. Nothing, at all, about the Seventies wore well, or even started out well. The Eighties was like regaining one’s faculties after being unconscious. One felt almost grateful; I think it was the sense that the country had started moving again.
I graduated high school in 1975. That was a decade of regretable clothes. A high percentage of what passed for popular music was beyond horrid. The 70s began bad and finished with a combination of disco and Jimmy Carter. Stagflation. Gas lines. Disco and crappy clothes that I wouldn’t have worn to my own cremation. Yep, the 70s sucked.
While I will not confirm nor deny the accuracy of certain parts of “That 70s Show” and the show was far from a documentary, it did capture the essence of the decade fairly well.
…and MANY of us see Red Forman as dad. He really catches the feel of those WWII or Korean War vets as the dad will mostly had. He didn’t believe in half measures and EVERY dads had his ‘buzz word’ for HIS son and said son’s friends. Red’s was ‘dumbass!’. My dad’s was ‘morons.’
It’s a running joke in my family that even though Pop is dead now, so long as Red Forman is on the tube, Pop will always be around.
I think Lileks has it doubly hard, his twelve year old is a female. He’s starting to see her pull away, he’s not a knight in shining arm anymore.
12 y/o boys are easier.
While he never said it in so many words, my Dad’s attitude was along the lines of “if I have to feed you, I might as well get some work out of you.” He died when I was 16 but Red Foreman brought back a lot of memories. To me, he was the real star of the show.
Plus, Kurtwood Smith, the actor that played Red, appeared in 2 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and one of DS9 and was the bad guy in “Robocop.”
“A high percentage of what passed for popular music was beyond horrid”
That’s true of any decade. Gangnam style! heeeeey macarena. oontss oontss oontss oontss
While true, it’s hard to beat “The Night Chicago Died”, “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast”, “Kung Fu Fighting”, “Seasons in the Sun”, virtually all of disco for sheer suckage. Those were just a tiny number of horrible songs that were hits in the 70s. I’ve tried to blot most of them from my mind with little success.
I read the first few lines of the excerpt before checking the link, and said to myself that it reads like something Lileks would write. Check the link and sho’nuff. Agree or disagree with him, he does have a certain style!
And Gawd help me, but I love the hairstyles from the 80s. Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, for example, and the afore-mentioned Sheena Easton.
Honestly, were you really looking at their hair? Sheena Easton had other features that caught my eye more than her hair.