Question of the Day 8.16.12

Name the TV show!

Answer to yesterday’s QOTD: License to Drive. Congrats to Taps and Carey for guessing correctly.

Murder, She Wrote

Whatever you do, never (EVER!) go to Cabot Cove, Maine.

Seriously, that place must have the highest per capita murder rate of anywhere in America (or at least it DID… between 1984 and 1996).

People dropped like flies in Cabot Cove, and it was never from natural causes. They were hung, shot, stabbed, trampled, squished, beaten, run over, and poisoned.

It’s a small consolation for the victims and their families, but… at least novelist Jessica Fletcher was there to figure out whodunit.

When Murder, She Wrote debuted on CBS in the fall of 1984, our parents (and grandparents) had a field day. Here was THE Angela Lansbury bringing her top-shelf acting abilities to the small screen. And the fact that she was playing (essentially) Miss Marple? Even better. Agatha Christie would have been proud.

Even with the murder storylines, the show actually played well to families, too. There was never a bathtub full of blood or dismembered body parts. Nope. Just good ol’ nice, clean murders. And you couldn’t find a nicer, more polite (and Sherlock-ian) crime-solver than J.B. Fletcher.

With the trusty Sheriff Amos (Tom Bosley) by her side (at least for the first four seasons), there wasn’t a crime in Cabot Cove that went unsolved. But it wasn’t just Maine, either–– when Fletcher had to gallivant across the country on her book tours, she’d always trip on murders in those towns, too.

Jeez, did she break a mirror once when she was young? Or open an umbrella indoors?

In all, Murder, She Wrote would last for 12 seasons (plus several TV movie one-offs after that), and Lansbury would be nominated for a total of 12 Emmy awards for her work on the show (that’s a nomination every year of the series), but she wouldn’t win a single one. And we’re STILL scratching our heads over THAT little tidbit.

Not for nothing, but we always thought that the season finale should have had Ms. Fletcher commit a murder herself. She certainly had the experience… and not a single person would ever suspect her. How awesome would it have been if the last shot was her sitting down to her typewriter one last time with a mischievous grin on her face, calmly wiping blood off her hands?

Oh well–– guess we’re just stuck with pleasant, warm memories of the kindly old lady who could solve crimes like no one’s business.

We ♥ Murder, She Wrote.

Question of the Day 8.15.12

Name the movie!

Answer to yesterday’s QOTD: Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”. No one guessed correctly.

Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86

“Young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl fantasy…”

When The Police got back together in June 1986 to play a trio of shows for Amnesty International, all of us (yes, ALL of us) had a secret hope that the band was finally reuniting for good.

Then we heard rumors that they were heading back in the studio to record new songs.

And then… well, then drummer Stewart Copeland broke his collarbone when he fell off a horse.

The plan all along, it turned out, was to re-record old Police songs, giving them a new twist. The first one? “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”, the 1980 hit from Zenyatta Mondatta, about an inappropriate teacher-student relationship.

With Stewart’s broken neck, though, the drums would have to be programmed with a drum machine; Sting had one idea, Stewart had another, and all the old animosity came roaring back. The guys did manage to finish recording it, but there was no way they were going to hang out in the studio for another bunch of weeks arguing with each other.

So the reunion ended as quickly as it began, and only “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” got their re-do versions.

“Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86” did okay on the charts (though not nearly as stellar as the original), peaking at #46 on the Billboard chart in the waning months of 1986.

The Police never recorded any other new music (even to this day… but we’re still hopeful!), and even though the reunited (again) for a 2009 tour, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86” serves as the final musical chapter in the history of one of the 80s’ best bands.

(Note: No, we don’t count the fact that “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” finally saw the light of day on the DTS-CD release of the Every Breath You Take: The Classics. We’ll warrant that only 158 people in the world ever heard it.)

Turns out, we’re okay with “Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86” being the last thing we ever heard from The Police. And we’ll actually go a step further and profess that the ’86 version is even better than the original. The slower tempo’s a little more appropriate (given the subject matter), and not for nothing, but Sting, Andy, and Stewart sounded pretty darn tight after three years off.

Man, who knows what could have been if they could only have gotten along.

We ♥ Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86.

Question of the Day 8.14.12

Name the music video!

Answer to yesterday’s QOTD: Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Congrats to Carey, Jay Fingers, and @MrsSweatheifer for guessing correctly.

Pocket Rockers

“Here come Pocket Rockers! Tiny tapes, tiny players!”

As much as we loved hitting the record stores and scooping up the latest albums (or CDs or cassettes) in the 80s, there was one thing we just couldn’t do with them.

That’s right… we couldn’t WEAR our music.

Until 1988, that is–– when Pocket Rockers arrived.

Suddenly we could broadcast to the world that we loved Debbie Gibson, Phil Collins, and David Lee Roth.

Pocket Rockers tapes popped right into our Pocket Rockers player (which we kept on the waistband of our acid-wash jeans), and when we weren’t listening to the tapes, well… we could always just clip them to our shoelaces, popped collar, or onto our spangly necklace.

Presto. We were insta-cool.

Each tape included two songs from ‘today’s top artists’, including Bananarama, Huey Lewis, Bangles, and much, much more. And the players themselves were adorned with that trademark 80s neon color scheme. Awesome.

Believe it or not, it was Fisher-Price who brought us this wonderful little precursor to the iPod, aiming it squarely at the ‘tween’ set… long before the term ‘tween’ ever existed.

When they first hit shelves Pocket Rockers sold like the proverbial hotcakes, but the lustre quickly faded: the tapes were pretty expensive ($5 a pop), and the players weren’t that much cheaper than a full-blown Walkman.

And, let’s be honest, the sound quality was marginal at best. (Put your iPhone at the bottom of a metal bucket, and you’ll get the idea.)

No, Pocket Rockers weren’t long for this world (they were discontinued in 1991), but for one, brief, shining moment, we could actually wear our music on our sleeve.

And we loved it.

We ♥ Pocket Rockers.

Question of the Day 8.13.12

Name the movie!

Answer to Friday’s QOTD: The Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like”. Congrats to Kailyn, @booner1972, and @MrsSweatheifer for guessing correctly.

Mississippi Burning

“Down here, things are different. Here they believe that some things are worth killing for…”

The way the 80s were, we can’t always be all Strawberry-Shortcake-and-jelly-shoes around here. Occasionally we have to talk about less frivolous stuff, too… with good reason.

And in the early days on 1989 things got REAL serious down at the movie theater with the premiere of Mississippi Burning; not since Oliver Stone’s 1986 masterpiece Platoon had such a brutal, gritty, haunting movie come down the pike.

Based on the true story of the FBI’s investigation into the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, Mississippi Burning opened a lot of young people’s eyes to the way life used to be in the deep South… and for those people who were alive in the 60s, it served as a very harsh reminder.

Directed by Alan Parker (Pink Floyd – The Wall), it starred Willem Defoe as Mr. Ward (the straight-laced, liberal-minded G-Man) and Gene Hackman as Mr. Anderson (the former Southern sheriff who had a more… shall we say–– in-your-face approach).

With a supporting cast that included Brad Dourif as the town’s weasely deputy sheriff, Frances McDormand as his wife, and Michael Rooker as one of the most callous and bigoted people ever put on film, Mississippi Burning was just about as compelling as they come.

From the opening scene of the three boys being chased down at night and then shot in their car, to what is (in our mind) the best scene ever filmed in a barbershop chair, the movie was an honest, gritty, and superbly-written requiem to an ugly time in American history.

And then there was that particularly terrifying scene when the town’s mayor (played by Full Metal Jacket‘s R. Lee Ermey) was kidnapped by a ‘special’ FBI agent and taken to a little shack in the middle of nowhere. If you don’t flinch repeatedly, you’re simply not human.

Mississippi Burning didn’t do great in the box office (hmmmm… perhaps the subject matter was a little too, um, difficult to watch?). It only earned $34 million and finished the year as the #33 movie.

More importantly, though, it snared 7 Oscar nominations, and won one (for Best Cinematography). It may have lost out to Rain Man for Best Picture, but even today we still consider it the best and more important movie of its day.

Whew… think it’s time for us to go watch a couple episodes of Kissyfur.

We ♥ Mississippi Burning.

Question of the Day 8.10.12

Name the music video!

Answer to yesterday’s QOTD: The Journey of Natty Gann. Congrats to Carey for guessing correctly.

The demise of the 8-track

So far (as near as we call recall) Best of the 80s has been all about singing the praises of things that arrived in our favorite decade… never pointing out how happy we were to see some things come to their unceremonious end.

Until now.

There were, of course, plenty of items that met their sweet demise during the 80s, but we can think of nothing that we greeted with more of a hearty “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” than 8-track tapes.

With the arrival of the CD in 1982, clearly something had to give. Cassettes were still doing okay for themselves… but suddenly 8-tracks seemed more outdated and silly than bell-bottoms.

Aside from just being cheap, breakable plastic pieces of junk (owners of 8-tracks were well-versed in terms like capstan, head, and pinch roller), there was also the issue of not being able to rewind, and fast forward consisted solely of skipping ahead to one of four ‘chunks’ of songs… assuming your 8-track player even had the four buttons in the first place.

Sure, they were infinitely more portable than record players… but that’s about the only nice thing we could say about 8-tracks.

The end of 8-tracks obviously started in earnest in 1982 with the dawn of CD, but somehow they were able to hold on for a few more years. In fact, depending on who you talk to, the last 8-track ever produced was Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits in 1988.

These days you can actually score vintage 8-tracks on eBay (Don’t believe us? Look!), but we’re not sure why; generally ‘nostalgia’ only applies to things that have some kind of inherent or sentimental value…

…but “good riddance” are the only words that come to mind when we think of 8-tracks.

We ♥ the demise of the 8-track.