I don’t know what all this business about family togetherness and keeping fingers of phones at the table is about. My family watched TV at dinner. From six o’clock to seven, pre-prime time, were all the syndicated sitcoms from the house that Generation X built. Murphy Brown, Designing Women, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Empty Nest, Growing Pains, Night Court. And The Wonder Years. I didn’t know it at the time, but The Wonder Years was for my parents what The Goldbergs is for me — a sitcom that capitalizes on nostalgia and trying to convince oneself that the pop culture was more meaningful than it was (in this case, that…
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Ace Duck
While doing a little backgrounding for Is There a Right Way to Do TMNT? I came across a forgotten memory/unanswered question of mine. What was up with Ace Duck? He was one of the first TMNT action figures I owned after I got the core set (the core being the primary bad guys and primary good guys). He was released in the second series in 1989 along with many of the secondary recurring characters like Casey Jones and Baxter Stockman (fly version). But he NEVER showed up in the show. Every one of these characters got at least one episode, like Metalhead or General Traag or Genghis Frog. But Ace…
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HBO’s Braingames
I was going over old ’80s shows for a future article when I came across something I’d totally forgotten about. A lost gem from my early years: Braingames. Braingames was only on HBO, a channel that was fortunately present in my youth. Thanks to it, I got to see Fraggle Rock and a host of movies my dad recorded. Uncensored, commercial-free, and unedited — the way movies were supposed to be. Apparently, it used to be a half-hour show, but when I saw it, it was broken into single-game vignettes that filled time gaps between blocks of children’s programming or movies. This was the SCARIEST FUCKING THING I had ever…
