Question of the Day 5.2.12

Name the video game!

Answer to yesterday’s QOTD: Duran Duran’s “New Moon on Monday”. Congrats to Taps and @RICANDROLL for guessing correctly. And, @RobLamarr–– BLUE Moon…? Really? 😉

Saving All My Love For You

“A few stolen moments is all that we share. You’ve got your family, and they need you there…”

When Whitney Houston released her debut album in February 1985, it was obvious that she would be a force to be reckoned with. In a decade that had been dominated thus far by the likes of Madonna and Bonnie Tyler, all of a sudden here was this woman whose voice sounded as close to an angel as we could imagine.

Hyperbole? We think not… you all heard what we heard, right?

Her first single, “You Give Good Love” was, well, good enough to make it all the way to #3, but then came “Saving All My Love For You”, and just like that, young Whitney’s place in music history was cemented.

Written by Michael (“Tonight, I Celebrate My Love”) Masser and Gerry (“Natural Woman”) Goffin, the tune was a quiet, gentle ode to a married man from the woman he’s having an affair with. So yeah, no… it’s not a love song, people.

In Whitney’s capable hands, though, it sure felt like a love song, and before we could blink it had shot to the top of the Billboard charts.

On that weekend in October 1985, when “Saving All My Love For You” finally did hit #1, who among us could have guessed that it would start a string of seven consecutive chart-toppers for Miss Houston? (It’s a record that still, much to Katy Perry’s chagrin, stands today.)

We can all freely admit that Whitney is gone too soon, but whew… at least she left behind some pretty damn fine songs for us to remember her by. And it all started with this one.

We ♥ Saving All My Love For You.

Question of the Day 5.1.12

Name the music video!

Answer to yesterday’s QOTD: Octopussy. Congrats to @StarLady92 for guessing correctly.

Out Run

We’ve already sung the praises of Pole Position, but in 1986, the ol’ PP got knocked down a notch or two when Sega unveiled the oh-so-awesome Out Run.

Designed by the great Yu Suzuki, who went on to create video game staples like Enduro Racer and Virtua Fighter, Out Run was the driving game that took things to a whole new level… up to ’11’, so to speak.

Not only do you get to sit behind the wheel of a Ferrari, you have a hot blonde chick by your side, and (AND!) you get to choose your music! (For our money, “Magical Sound Shower” was the way to go.)

And then there were the graphics–– all of a sudden the 8-bit days were pushed to the curb, and 3D-like scenery rocketed to the forefront. Yes, those are snow-capped peaks in the background, and yes, I’d love to take a gander at the boats sailing out yonder in that ocean.

Plus, we haven’t even touched on the fact that you could not only enjoy the real-feel of holding a steering wheel in your hands, but you actually got to pick your route at the end of every stage. (Were you a right-left-left-righty, or a balls-to-the-wall ‘right all the way’ gamer?)

With a gear shift, a ‘you better use it’ brake pedal, and possibly the coolest sit-down console EVER, it’s no wonder Out Run dominated 1986 in the arcades. And, of course, it went home with both the Game of the Year award and the Golden Joystick award.

We’ll argue there’s never been anything like it, either before or since. Game over.

We ♥ Out Run.

Question of the Day 4.30.12

Name the movie!

Answer to Friday’s QOTD: The Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger”. Congrats to Robin, bababooey, Todd, and @buttercup081474 for guessing correctly.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

“Nick, I’ve got six hours to get home, get big, and get to the mall. Now get moving.”

When Teenie Weenies went into production in the late 80s, Disney probably thought they had a pretty solid movie on their hands–– the funny tale of “an absent-minded professor who invents a shrink ray that inadvertently miniaturizes his kids” certainly seemed to have all the trappings of a box office hit.

Good thing they changed the name.

Seriously… Teenie Weenies?

The movie that would go on to become Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was pretty darn clever, if we do say so ourselves (not that we had anything to do with it… but it’s our decade, so that counts for something.)

Rick Moranis, fresh off Ghostbusters II, is Wayne Szalinski, the man behind the electromagnetic shrink ray. After his neighbor’s kid Ron (Jared Rushton, Big‘s Billy Kopecki) hits a baseball through Wayne’s attic window, the machine flips on. When the kids (Wayne’s two, plus Ron and his brother) go to investigate, they get pee-wee’d, along with Wayne’s ‘thinking couch’.

It’s only when Wayne accidentally throws the kids out with the trash that things get really interesting. All of a sudden, legos are the size of houses, bees make elephants look puny, and the water spray from a sprinkler becomes a flood of biblical proportions.

All the kids need to do is walk back across their backyard, but when you’re 1/4-inch tall, the backyard’s suddenly as big as greater Manhattan. And if all that weren’t enough, we have the teenage kids’ blossoming love story, and a tragic subplot about the kids’ new friend Antie. (Poor guy.)

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids did just fine for itself in the box office, nabbing a healthy $130 million and finishing the year as the #5 movie in all the land.

Plus, it went on to spawn a couple sequels, a TV show, and Disney theme park attractions.

Of course everything works out in the end (it is a Disney movie, after all)… Not only to the kids get un-shrunk, Wayne figures out how to use the ray to make their Thanksgiving dinner one for the ages. And, yes, Nick finally understands the French class/CPR joke.

Ha!

We ♥ Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Question of the Day 4.27.12

Name the music video!

Answer to yesterday’s QOTD: One Crazy Summer. Congrats to Taps, Carey, and @BaconIsMyPig for guessing correctly.

The Discovery of the Titanic

“I’ll be goddamned! The sucker exists!”

We all knew it was down there somewhere. Seventy-three years earlier, Titanic had suck to the bottom of the North Atlantic. The trick was finding it. ‘Needle in a haystack’, anyone?

Three separate times in the early 80s, expeditions were launched to find the wreckage, but they all failed. Then in 1985 Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (jointly with Jean-Louis Michel of France’s IFREMER) set out to give it a shot themselves.

Using a remote controlled mini-sub called Argo, Ballard and his team scanned the ocean floor for any trace of Titanic, looking particularly for the debris field the wreck caused. After a week of searches that turned up diddly, finally at 12:48 a.m. on September 1, 1985, the wreckage was found.

Whether you view the subsequent salvage operations as grave-robbing or not, the fact is that we all now have a better understanding of what happened that fateful night and also what life was like on Titanic during its brief four-day voyage.

It’s the most important and amazing undersea discovery in history… so of course it happened during our favorite decade.

We ♥ the discovery of the Titanic.

Question of the Day 4.26.12

Name the movie!

Answer to yesterday’s QOTD: Kissyfur. Congrats to Taps for guessing correctly.

Cheers

“Makin’ your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got…”

Before Rebecca and Sam slept together, before Rebecca lit the place on fire, and even before the evil foosball table, there was Sam and Diane and Coach and Norm and Cliff and Carla in the 80s.

And they all worked in a place where everybody knows your name.

Cheers debuted on NBC in the fall of 1982, and just three years later became the third leg in what was (and still is) arguably the best two hours of television ever. “Must See Thursday”, indeed. Seriously, The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court. What could be better?

Sam Malone, a washed-up Red Sox pitcher, became the owner of a little bar in Boston, and the rest… well, the rest was comedy (and television) history.

From his flirting with the lovely (though uptight) Diane Chambers, to his camaraderie with space-case Cliff Clavin and lovable lump Norm, Cheers was one of the funniest and best-written shows of the 80s.

And then there was Coach, the warm, happy, and yes, scatterbrained bartender, who was a perfect foil for the loud-mouth, obnoxious (in a good way) Carla. Sure, his passing in 1985 paved the way for Woody to come on board… but man, did it suck when we had to say goodbye to him. It was a loss that hung with the show straight through the very last scene in the very last episode (in 1993), when Sam straightened that old Geronimo photo:

The 80s years of Cheers brought some of the show’s most memorable moments, including the departure of Diane (“Have a good life”), the arrival of Rebecca (“Um, I am a corporate attorney with the firm Emerson… Lake and Palmer”), and of course the daily Norm entrance (“It’s a dog-eat-dog world, Sammy, and I’m wearing Milk Bone underwear”).

Throughout its run, Cheers won awards out the ying-yang, including the Emmy for Best Comedy in ’83, ’84, and ’89 (and 1991). It also won acting Emmys for Ted Danson, Shelley Long, Kirstie Alley, Woody Harrelson, Bebe Neuwirth, and four for Rhea Perlman.

We could go on and on (and on and on), but suffice to say that taking a break from all our worries to watch Cheers every Thursday night sure did help a lot.

We ♥ Cheers.