Category: Nostalgia

A Geekster’s Paradise Part 3

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Underneath the Tiger’s Claw in the Box was this:

photo

Early 16-bit Windows gaming was a leap forward in what you had to do to get it to run, but also a big step backward in terms of graphical quality. Windows 3.1 abstracted a lot of what hardware could do through virtual device drivers.  This had a benefit in multiple programs could use the hardware at the same time, as opposed to MS-DOS based programs which had to run one at a time due to their exclusive hardware access.

So because MS-DOS got direct access to things like the Video card, you could have high performance, great looking games.  But Windows was often relegated to whatever your Video driver color depth ran at (usually 16, sometimes 256 colors) and a much lower performance capability. An analogy to all of this technobabble is that a minivan is optimized to get a group of people somewhere, while a Ducati is optimized to getting one person there, awesomely.

This meant the vast majority of 16-bit Windows games were turn based strategy games, and one of my favorites was Robosport. 

When I brought up my treasure trove of game manuals to E and Major Nelson and got to Robotsport, E actually squeed when I mentioned it.

“I remember that!” He said, “you had to pick the right robots and program them to beat each level. “

This is what made the game endless hours of fun.  Graphically it was very simple, but the play mechanics had tons of combinations.  You basically had 5 types of robots, and you program them to take actions within the isometric view of the “arena” to take out the enemy robots. At the beginning of each turn you survey the overall layout of the arena.  Things we take for granted in turn based play or real time strategy games today were available in Robosport by programming your robots.  You would program their path, stance, guard, shoot, attack, rescue, etc. 

It was also the first game I’m aware of for Windows that had cross platform Multiplay.  You could play over a modem with friends running Robosport on MacOS or Amiga.

I spent many hours playing Robosport, naming my robot teams (I always used names and themes from Silent Running, and delighted in using the quote “Poor Louie god bless him; he’s not with us anymore” when the bot named Louie got killed.)

One last note about this particular manual.  Go back and look at the picture of it.  Notice the first line of the Installation section: “Please make backup copies of your Robosport disks.  Really.  You want to do this.”  Ahhh those were the days.

A Geekster’s Paradise: Part 1

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You never know when the wormhole is going to hit.  One minute you’re just clearing some space in a closet, the next you’re 18 and waiting patiently for an Emerson 16mhz 80286 with 3 megs of ram to finish booting MSDOS 5.0 so you can patiently fiddle with its onboard expanded memory card TSR to open up just the right amount of memory to load Wing Commander with the expanded memory graphics that gave you…a 16×16 pixel 4 frame animation of your pilot’s hand on the fighter’s joystick. 

I turned down chicks for that shit man.  I turned down keggers for that shit man.

Slowly, Rochelle and I have been getting around to getting rid of crap from our last move, nearly eight years ago.  For us, this is progress.  Impatient to go get my Eddie on in Guitar Hero: Van Halen, I tore open an old box and heard the ever familiar sound of the DS9 wormhole and fell through.

IMG_0165

You see, back when physical games were shipped they came in insanely oversized boxes. You could *always* judge a game’s quality by the weight of its box.  That meant it had a thick manual, lots of disks (note to the children reading, not “discs”, “disks”) and probably some goodies inside too like maybe a cloth map if it was a dungeon crawler or ship blueprints if you were playing a space shooter. There’s no other way to say it people, when you opened a AAA title PC game in 1990, the first smell you smelled was paper.  Not plastic.

Wing Commander came with blueprints AND a special magazine called “Claw Marks”, after the enemy you fought in the game, the Kilrathi.

Man, the Kilrathi.  Blatantly ripped off of Niven’s Kzinti, the denizens of Kilrah were a worthy, epic enemy in the silver age of PC gaming. A warlike Feline race, their ships had a wicked claw motif and the game had a great differentiation of the fighter classes such that you knew you were ok fighting Dralthi class fighters in certain Confederation ships, but if you got caught without a ton of Spiculum IR missles or at least some Dart Dumbfire missiles in a messy Jalthi furball then—By the way there are two types of people reading this right now, the first is nodding and in their own wormhole.  The second type are wondering what the fuck I am talking about.  This next pic is for the first type. 

I opened the Claw Marks and here’s what was inside:

IMG_0166

That’s right.  The Secret Missions 2 install sheet.  You remember, the missions where you got to fly a captured Dralthi. When you got that mission, which is an epic stealth/space furball firefight, you marked your life into two epochs: Before virtual pixilated slightly choppily rendered 16 color incredible epic 1 year old mythos mission, and after virtual pixilated slightly choppily rendered 16 color incredible epic 1 year old mythos mission.

I still remember my first night actually playing Wing Commander.  I had bought the game without owning a computer to play it on.  Now you see why the manual and blueprints were so important to me.  I poured over those blueprints.  I studied every single word and hint in the Claw Marks magazine.  I was like Luke on the vaporator farm, I had the yearn and the fire.  I just needed Uncle Owen to get the hardware to work to LET ME JOIN UP. I knew my Mass Driver cannons from my lasers.  I knew my Pilum Friend or Foe missiles from my Javelin heat seekers.

Luckily my friend Rick had his 286 based PC.  Unfortunately I was home for the summer from my first year at college, and Rick was doing summer RA duty along with my friend Jason.  So after a month of owning this epic title I squared away enough time from the restaurants I was working at to drive down to San Marcos (a three hour trip) for a weekend.  Rick unfortunately had to work almost the entire time but he gave Jason and I the key to his room.

There we huddled over a 13 inch .55mm dot pitch CRT monitor.  Chain smoking cigarettes and downing Captain Morgan’s or Canadian Hunter cut with Dr. Pepper while we played.

Wing Commander was one of the first games to feature something called a branching plot line.  This was a brilliant innovation because it kept you playing even though you might be failing in the game.  Wing Commander was basically a space fight simulator that tried to recreate the Star Wars in-cockpit space fight experiences in an entirely new plotline.  So it had two paths.  A winning path and a losing path.  Each one had a unique plotline.  If you won enough and lost enough you could see maybe two thirds of both, but to really see everything you had to win everything and lose everything.

This took Jason and I mere minutes to figure out.

A secondary characteristic of the game was that as the game progressed, win or lose you got to fly newer, more advanced models of space fighters.

Thus was born the opportunity for drunken hilarity.

Jason and I decided immediately we would get to experience the entire losing plot by ejecting at the opening of every mission, thereby automatically losing the mission and triggering another losing plotline cut scene.  After doing this 15 times and getting awarded a newer, nicer fighter every 5 missions or so we began to drunkenly get excited about how each new fighter was not more advanced in its handling or weapons load out, but in the speed and luxury of its eject mechanism.

As we gleefully pissed the future of the Terran Confederation into the wind we noted how clearly the Rapier’s eject mechanism was ruddy and primitive but far more robust than the Hornet’s.  While the top of the line fighters the Raptor and Scimitar offered an unparalleled experience with their high-end comfort and overall view of space once ejected.

We eventually watched the bloody beheadings of our pilots in the Chengdu system. The terrible aftermath of the loss at Hell’s kitchen, and the final losing cinematic that left us a bit unsettled that as proud officers in the Confederation we’d just spent the evening getting progressively more shitfaced while bailing out of humanity’s last opportunity to stop the horrible Kilrathi threat and the genocide and enslavement of mankind.

Sobering up, we poured over the blueprints again, knowing the path of the missions, and spent the entire night playing through the winning path, starting over when we lost, because we’d already seen those missions more or less. Those of you in the know will agree the less said about Brimstone, the better.

I found many other game manuals tonight as well.  So this is first of a series. But don’t worry, we’ll make it through it all if it hairlip’s Admiral Tolwyn.

A Geekster’s Paradise: Part 1

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You never know when the wormhole is going to hit.  One minute you’re just clearing some space in a closet, the next you’re 18 and waiting patiently for an Emerson 16mhz 80286 with 3 megs of ram to finish booting MSDOS 5.0 so you can patiently fiddle with its onboard expanded memory card TSR to open up just the right amount of memory to load Wing Commander with the expanded memory graphics that gave you…a 16×16 pixel 4 frame animation of your pilot’s hand on the fighter’s joystick. 

I turned down chicks for that shit man.  I turned down keggers for that shit man.

Slowly, Rochelle and I have been getting around to getting rid of crap from our last move, nearly eight years ago.  For us, this is progress.  Impatient to go get my Eddie on in Guitar Hero: Van Halen, I tore open an old box and heard the ever familiar sound of the DS9 wormhole and fell through.

IMG_0165

You see, back when physical games were shipped they came in insanely oversized boxes. You could *always* judge a game’s quality by the weight of its box.  That meant it had a thick manual, lots of disks (note to the children reading, not “discs”, “disks”) and probably some goodies inside too like maybe a cloth map if it was a dungeon crawler or ship blueprints if you were playing a space shooter. There’s no other way to say it people, when you opened a AAA title PC game in 1990, the first smell you smelled was paper.  Not plastic.

Wing Commander came with blueprints AND a special magazine called “Claw Marks”, after the enemy you fought in the game, the Kilrathi.

Man, the Kilrathi.  Blatantly ripped off of Niven’s Kzinti, the denizens of Kilrah were a worthy, epic enemy in the silver age of PC gaming. A warlike Feline race, their ships had a wicked claw motif and the game had a great differentiation of the fighter classes such that you knew you were ok fighting Dralthi class fighters in certain Confederation ships, but if you got caught without a ton of Spiculum IR missles or at least some Dart Dumbfire missiles in a messy Jalthi furball then—By the way there are two types of people reading this right now, the first is nodding and in their own wormhole.  The second type are wondering what the fuck I am talking about.  This next pic is for the first type. 

I opened the Claw Marks and here’s what was inside:

IMG_0166

That’s right.  The Secret Missions 2 install sheet.  You remember, the missions where you got to fly a captured Dralthi. When you got that mission, which is an epic stealth/space furball firefight, you marked your life into two epochs: Before virtual pixilated slightly choppily rendered 16 color incredible epic 1 year old mythos mission, and after virtual pixilated slightly choppily rendered 16 color incredible epic 1 year old mythos mission.

I still remember my first night actually playing Wing Commander.  I had bought the game without owning a computer to play it on.  Now you see why the manual and blueprints were so important to me.  I poured over those blueprints.  I studied every single word and hint in the Claw Marks magazine.  I was like Luke on the vaporator farm, I had the yearn and the fire.  I just needed Uncle Owen to get the hardware to work to LET ME JOIN UP. I knew my Mass Driver cannons from my lasers.  I knew my Pilum Friend or Foe missiles from my Javelin heat seekers.

Luckily my friend Rick had his 286 based PC.  Unfortunately I was home for the summer from my first year at college, and Rick was doing summer RA duty along with my friend Jason.  So after a month of owning this epic title I squared away enough time from the restaurants I was working at to drive down to San Marcos (a three hour trip) for a weekend.  Rick unfortunately had to work almost the entire time but he gave Jason and I the key to his room.

There we huddled over a 13 inch .55mm dot pitch CRT monitor.  Chain smoking cigarettes and downing Captain Morgan’s or Canadian Hunter cut with Dr. Pepper while we played.

Wing Commander was one of the first games to feature something called a branching plot line.  This was a brilliant innovation because it kept you playing even though you might be failing in the game.  Wing Commander was basically a space fight simulator that tried to recreate the Star Wars in-cockpit space fight experiences in an entirely new plotline.  So it had two paths.  A winning path and a losing path.  Each one had a unique plotline.  If you won enough and lost enough you could see maybe two thirds of both, but to really see everything you had to win everything and lose everything.

This took Jason and I mere minutes to figure out.

A secondary characteristic of the game was that as the game progressed, win or lose you got to fly newer, more advanced models of space fighters.

Thus was born the opportunity for drunken hilarity.

Jason and I decided immediately we would get to experience the entire losing plot by ejecting at the opening of every mission, thereby automatically losing the mission and triggering another losing plotline cut scene.  After doing this 15 times and getting awarded a newer, nicer fighter every 5 missions or so we began to drunkenly get excited about how each new fighter was not more advanced in its handling or weapons load out, but in the speed and luxury of its eject mechanism.

As we gleefully pissed the future of the Terran Confederation into the wind we noted how clearly the Rapier’s eject mechanism was ruddy and primitive but far more robust than the Hornet’s.  While the top of the line fighters the Raptor and Scimitar offered an unparalleled experience with their high-end comfort and overall view of space once ejected.

We eventually watched the bloody beheadings of our pilots in the Chengdu system. The terrible aftermath of the loss at Hell’s kitchen, and the final losing cinematic that left us a bit unsettled that as proud officers in the Confederation we’d just spent the evening getting progressively more shitfaced while bailing out of humanity’s last opportunity to stop the horrible Kilrathi threat and the genocide and enslavement of mankind.

Sobering up, we poured over the blueprints again, knowing the path of the missions, and spent the entire night playing through the winning path, starting over when we lost, because we’d already seen those missions more or less. Those of you in the know will agree the less said about Brimstone, the better.

I found many other game manuals tonight as well.  So this is first of a series. But don’t worry, we’ll make it through it all if it hairlip’s Admiral Tolwyn.

In Memoriam: Saturday Morning TV

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I stumbled upon a Youtube video of the original Pac-man Saturday morning cartoon the other day and fell right through the god damn worm hole again.

It’s way too bright in this store. It smells of the strange alien smell of expensive new things. Christmas morning, your mom opens a box and a ring’s inside or dad opens a box with a new shirt and all you can think is that it doesn’t smell anything like a Kenner Star Wars playset. It smells adult. Things beyond the ken of a child.

This place is thick with it. It also smells of too many important adults bustling about. I’m eight. My mother has taken me to Stirling’s Jewelry near Northwest Highway and Central Expressway in Dallas. I have 15 dollars. I am going to put a television on lay-away. Until I would later buy my first car, this stands out as the single most important financial moment in my life. I’m too uncomfortably dressed for such an outing on a weekend, one of MY days.

Stirling’s was, technically, a jewelry store. But at this moment in the fall of 1980 it’s morphed a bit to compete with the local malls. Suddenly, almost overnight, the store carried a variety of different items. Smartly, they branched out from fine jewelry to cheap home electronics. Including one Emerson eight inch portable black and white TV, with a silver and black case and handle. The price was $79.99.

Stirling’s was one of those hold-overs from times gone past where you made a request of the salesmen (no women here unless it was the ring section) and they gave you a ticket. You paid the cashier according to the ticket and only then did you join a line that resulted, eventually, in your exchanging your receipt for the item you purchased, having just been run up by one of the warehouse guys. The only items out were display models. Everything was boxed up in the back room. I envisioned a warehouse populated by top men. Crates upon crates of treasure and mystery somewhere in the back.

A lot of moms jerk their kid’s arms when the kid is gobsmacked by something, and the mom is on a schedule. I stood there under the insanely bright overhead lights at the mixture of jewels, gold, silver; things I cared not for but were so overwhelming. I really just didn’t care about any of it, but it was all so beautiful. My feet were planted as if there were roots in my amazement. My mother waited for a moment and said, "we have to go to the other part of the store."

What? OH GOD! YES! TV! Dear christ on a crutch nailed to a cross of popsicle sticks, I had nearly forgotten why I was there! The magic of lay-away. Suddenly I was so proud to be there in my black Toughskins jeans and Osh Kosh shirt my mom had put me in for this serious financial arrangement.

You see, everything had been explained to me. This was serious business. My father had carefully laid out fifteen one dollar bills then sternly called my name to make sure I was looking straight into his eyes. He hunched, almost, to ensure I was at eye level and told me of the importance of what I was about to embark upon. It was a mission of capitalism you see. His warning, as he said, was ensuring I get a receipt.

It all began weeks before, with what I firmly believe was the impatience of my parents. And, in order to understand that, we have to understand Saturday morning TV.

To be clear, Saturday morning TV didn’t totally involve cartoons. If one was bright, and of a certain acumen, you could arise early and catch the Three Stooges, Flash Gordan, Green hornet. Such rich and mature adventures. The young mind boggled at what was once serious entertainment, but was now offered for any age prior to 8am. It’s almost like they knew that no adult would be up, so best to take this time to serve up the richest and deepest of 30’s and 40’s film serials. I sat in a time worn deep-orange-carpet living room, with the gigantic 20 inch color TV rendering to me the black and white grainy serials of four or five decades ago, as fresh and new and as engaging to me as Captain Caveman.

The volume low, hunched close to the device as to not awaken my parents or my still very young brothers, I sat there in rapture. An oversized bowl in my lap held what Sugar Pops I had not clumsily spilled all around the kitchen counter. I can remember how large the box was, how deep the bowl was, and how a child’s tsunami of whole milk poured across my treasure was the source of all that was important. And yeah, it was whole milk people. None of that white, thin-as-water fat-free "Milk" they give kids today.

I’ll leave for another time my obsessive mining of cereal boxes for prizes. Deep treasures hidden within food that the rest of the world must to this day regard as a sick joke; the very prospect of hiding something made of cheap plastic (that small children would covet but ultimately discard) within food that would feed a village for a week.

Oblivious, I proceeded to enjoy the full morning’s energy rush before anyone knew I was awake. Today adults stumble out of bed and apportion caffeine and sugar in far greater measures. I, was ahead of my time. It was around the morning hour past the New Adventures of Batman, past Tarzan and The Lone Ranger, somewhere about the Bugs and Tweetie show or perhaps the Scooby Doo Dynamutt hour, that my sugar fueled energy could hold no further restraint and my cackles would cause my parents to inevitably emerge from their slumber. I envision being regarded with disdain and some small amount of restrained violence, except I was nothing but eyeballs adhered to the screen.

I remember these moments. My solitude dimly interrupted by my mother’s patient exhortations regarding the mess I had made in the kitchen and my father’s unblinking disregard of the pap I was consuming on TV without fail every week. That was ok, because the later pre-noon shows almost always were Krofft Superstars or Shazam or Ark II. You know, the deep stuff.

And I haven’t even gotten to the commercials! In the late 70’s/early 80’s Kenner practically owned Saturday morning commercials. Star Wars toys, to which I have already written an ode to my unhealthy obsession, were always showcased on Saturday morning TV. But not just Star Wars toys, you could also catch awesome commercials for the occasional Shogun Warrior, or Justice League figures. It was like getting even more entertainment in between the cartoons. These weren’t commercials, they were me getting to watch kids play with toys I would soon at some point be playing with.

My parents never really understood how awesome Saturday morning was. Or perhaps they did. Their solution to gain perhaps just a bit more sleep was to allow me to buy my own TV. Over the course of that summer I made weekly trips to Stirling’s, dutifully supplying an additional three dollars for chore work each week until I had at long last reached the end of the $79.99 price and the box on the shelf with the red "Lay Away" sticker was mine. An Emerson 8inch black and white TV. My mom sprung for a nice little table for it to sit on.

Such was my love of Saturday morning TV that for an entire summer I went without Star Wars figures. Without my allotment of candy allowed to be purchased during store trips. Not until later when my DM made me take a wizard out of play for weeks to develop a particular summon dragon spell would I feel such a sense of sacrifice to attain a goal.

I loved that TV, and used it dutifully until that day in 1984 when got an Atari 800 which could do color. And each Saturday morning I woke up. I’d hit the power on the TV and went to the bathroom while the set warmed up. Instead of being hunched in front of the color radiation king in the living room next to my parents room I was much farther down the hall. My sugar intake somewhat delayed by the convenience of not having to really leave my room. Still later it would allow me my own unshared cartoon pipeline as my brothers got old enough to discover cartoons too.

Saturday morning TV is long since gone, a victim of over marketing and severely declining quality. Kids today are saving for Nintendo DS’s. This isn’t a bad thing, and in a way I’m kind of proud that people of my generation have such a universal and singular experience that ties us together.

But I do miss a huge sloppy bowl of sugar pops (Or Count Chocula, or Booberry, etc) and an entire morning of TV programming dedicated to exactly what I was interested in, all on a little black and white screen I worked an entire summer for.

10 movies you can quote thanks only to 80’s cable repeats

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Gather ’round children and I will tell you a tale. A tale of days gone by and of movies that at any other time in history would have been forgotten. This tale is of a device that magically reanimated mediocre, even bad films, such that everyone in my age group knows of these films and can even quote them.

What is this dark force, this twisted Istari that brings the trivial instead of wisdom?

Mid-80’s cable television. (cue bolt of lightning/crash of thunder)

You see, back before the world wide super tubeway net 2.0 service pack 4, before digital satellite and digital cable, before anyone making less than 200k a year had a cell phone, there were 57 channels. Usually divided between "A" cable and "B" cable. "A" cable contained all the stuff you wanted, like local channels, news channels, and movie channels. "B" cable contained public access, and C-SPAN. And for your 57 channels you were charged more or less what you are today for 500+ channels. And because of that you tended to watch whatever was on because paying for TV was still very new, so people felt compelled to watch it, even the crap because hey…already paid for it right?

The problem was HBO and Showtime and the various movie channels didn’t really have a huge library of movies to show. So they tended to take what they did have and play it in heavy rotation, such that a particular movie might get shown 80 or 90 times a month. Combine this with the idle time of School breaks for children in that era and you end up with this, the top ten bad/mediocre movies that I’ve seen more times than Citizen Kane.

#1: Mannequin

As if this film’s support of the neutering of Jefferson Starship into the insufferable "Starship" wasn’t bad enough, it starred sexy hot young Kim Cattrall, which meant in my teenage years I was basically going to watch the entire movie for that alone. For some reason, I assume for stay-at-home housewives, this romantic "comedy" almost always played in the morning hours before 1pm. Which ensured I would idly end up watching it while eating some form of breakfast type meal.

A story about an egyptian goddess of some sort forever condemned to be a department store mannequin until she finds true love, this film is so gut wrenchingly bad I live in constant fear of developing intestinal cancer at some point due to my youthful repeated exposure to it.

#2: Police Academy 2

This movie featured a man eating cereal his cat had just pooped in. Later, he eats a half eaten thrown away chocolate bar that has ants on it. After that do I really need to go into how crass and juvenile the rest of the plot was? Why did I watch it? 50% because it was on, and 50% for Colleen Camp as officer Kirkland. This is another film I fear future cancer from youthful exposure. This time it’s brain cancer.

#3: Turk 182!

Ahhh back to another Kim Cattrall classic. This was a perfectly mediocre film, the story of a rebellious young graffitti artist who uses a "Kilroy was here" type persona to fight back against a city hall who unfairly denied benefits to his firefighter brother who was injured on the job. He finds clever and ever more expensive-to-clean ways to put "Turk 182" on various city landmarks. The movie makes no sense in the end as the city, desperate to find who the heck this Turk 182 person is, misses the fact he’s spraypainting his brother’s Firefighting helmet number, 182. This isn’t a movie I’m ashamed to have seen a million times, but it’s one of those films that would have faded forever into obscurity without endless replays on cable.

#4: Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold

Hold on folks, I’m going to fold space in order to explain this to you. Most people think this is a cheap rip off of Indiana Jones, and they are right except that it’s a remake of movies and stories featuring Allan Quartermain going back to 1919. And all the film versions have as their source H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 story "King Solomon’s Mines." Lucas himself has cited the stories of Allan Quartermain as influences on Indiana Jones. So you have a cheap rip off that’s actually a remake of the very thing that inspired the thing being ripped off. This particular film is worth the price of admission for both a young Sharon Stone as well as a barbarian axe-wielding James Earl Jones as unintentional comic relief.

#5: Red Dawn

Now save your flame mail. I’m not here to say Red Dawn was a boatload of cheap 80’s bratpack starring Reagan-esque propaganda. I’m here to tell you that the greatest scene in any movie EVER is Powers Booth’s glum defeatist shot down pilot character, Col. Andy Tanner. Just chew, *chew*, on this exchange:

Col. Andy Tanner: …The Russians need to take us in one piece, and that’s why they’re here. That’s why they won’t use nukes anymore; and we won’t either, not on our own soil. The whole damn thing’s pretty conventional now. Who knows? Maybe next week will be swords.

Darryl Bates: What started it?

Col. Andy Tanner: I don’t know. Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, they’re gonna fight.

Jed Eckert: That simple, is it?

Col. Andy Tanner: Or maybe somebody just forget what it was like.

Jed Eckert: …Well, who *is* on our side?

Col. Andy Tanner: Six hundred million screaming Chinamen.

Darryl Bates: Last I heard, there were a billion screaming Chinamen.

Col. Andy Tanner: There *were*.

[he throws whiskey on the fire; it ignites violently, suggesting a nuclear explosion]

If you grew up in a world without early 80’s Reagan sword rattling, or The Day After, Amerika, or Red Dawn, you missed out on some classic us vs. them fear mongering. You think the current government is good at fear mongering? Kids in the early to mid eighties worried about nuclear war before they went to bed.

#6: Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo

This is the masterpiece that inspired a generation to immediately refer to any sequel with the ":Electric Boogaloo" moniker. It’s a story of how breakin’ through stereo types and breakin’ in general helps save a community center from the evil company that wants to turn it into a strip mall. This movie also taught anyone with a modicum of muscle control how to do "The Robot," a tactic that I intend to use during the coming zombie apocolypse to fool them into thinking my brains are circuit boards and thus escape.

#7: Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

The first Nightmare on Elm Street holds up ok as a horror film. It’s got crazy over the top blood effects, a decent hook, and the requisite amounts of female nudity/skimpy clothing. The second one, which Wes Craven actually refused to work on, is ultimate campy stupid crap. Although it does contain my favorite Freddy line, "We’ve got work to do you and me, you’ve got the body…and I’ve got the brains" where then Freddy peels back his skull to expose his brain. Most of the worst of the Freddy quotes that people like to quote actually come from this movie. Even though most people agree it’s really not very good. Personally it gave me nightmares and the entire Freddy aspect in this movie seemed to me to be the most evil, while still managing to be really campy and silly.

#8: Hellraiser

I confess right now I’ve never been all that impressed with Clive Barker’s horror. Hell, the tagline for Hellraiser was "Sadomasochists from beyond the grave!" That doesn’t sound like it’s destined for the front part of the rental store. But any movie that can inspire almost an entire generation to quote "Jesus Wept" in the same tortured/sensual tone as the movie has got to be ok in my book. It also forever conditioned me to be creeped out by chattering teeth.

#9: Brewsters Millions

This simple morality tale is one of the few examples where a relatively mediocre movie actually benefitted from the exposure and one of the few on the list I can watch today and enjoy and get a good feeling from. The story of Monty Brewster as played by Richard Pryor and his attempt to spend 30 million dollars without attaining a single asset in order to inherit 300 million dollars is both serious and silly. From his minor league team’s exhibition game against the New York Yankees to his running as "None of the Above" for mayor, this is a showcase example of how truly gifted Richard Pryor was and how deft he was with picking a safe script (The Toy, Superman 3) for every concert movie he did that made the white folk laugh nervously (All of them). I watch this movie and just really really miss his comedy.

#10: Night of the Comet

Comet passes by Earth, anyone outside turns to dust. Anyone partially outside becomes a cannibal zombie. Anyone in a cave or metal container survives. Ironically, this is the same comet that, when it passed by 65 million years ago, did the same thing to the dinosaurs. I used to watch this movie and think, has anyone ever made a dinosaur zombie movie? because *that* would be fucking awesome. Instead, we get treated to a bizarre sequence in the middle of the movie where the two lead girls in the film get bored and go on a shopping spree to a Cyndee Lauper tune. It’s bad folks. It’s real bad.

There’s so many more movies I could have put in the list. The Manhattan Project. Howard the Duck. Explorers. Buckaroo Bonzai. D.A.R.Y.L. But I’d be here all night. I think that was a unique time period because very little else competed for our time in those days. Today you have a hundred fold increase in the exposure something can get, but with that comes the darwinian process of not bothering with anything that is even marginally entertaining because there is so much better stuff out there. So I think mid 80’s cable stands out as a place where the audience felt more compelled to watch crap, and the crap became more pervasive.

And I wouldn’t change that for the world.