Having just this year become a senior citizen officially at 65, I fully realize that very little I have to say could possibly be of interest to younger folks. My knowledge of specific music genres helps a bit, but only with weirdos, music geeks, theater nerds, etc. It’s mainly the references, highlighting how much things have completely changed since the 60s and 70s when we were kids.
You feel like an idiot, and kinda mean, droning on about how candy bars at the 5 and dime really were a nickel, you really could buy a gumball at anyplace (every place) with a gumball machine – the old fashioned ones you had to turn a little crank thing for it to come out and you could see the gumballs through a glass globe rather than plastic – for a penny. A Big Mac was 55 cents, same as a pack of smokes, which I was buying as young as 15 easily at the 7-11 up the hill. We had hills back then!
And TV and movies were way way different too, with just the big three networks and PBS for TV, and movies something seen strictly in a theater, before even VHS was available. It was all both much better and much worse than now in various ways. Things are orders of magnitude more convenient and easy now, with pretty much any media you might desire within a click or two of you enjoying it right there on your phone. It even sounds real good with real headphones, which have always been a thing with me. It took me a while but long long ago I found my headphone soulmate. Allow me to elucidate further…
I’ve been a Sony MDR-7506 guy forever – they’re in lots of movies, Pitch Perfect for instance, and they’re often seen in music documentaries too. The pros use ’em, and they do sound great with no excess bass like so many things have now, not just cheap headphones. I like the coiled cord too, an easy way to identify them on film. I guess I discovered them in the 80s. I’ve since tried others at various price points, one quite pricey, and none have everything these do. I just love ’em! Comfy too!
So to get back to the point, everything about experiencing media, of all kinds, is much much easier and more convenient now. No more waiting in lines for movies, no more being tempted by the popcorn and then being indisposed for hours, no more assholes bullying people or being loud in various ways before cell phones made that even easier. On the other hand I miss record stores and even the video stores, where the wife, now the ex, would always grab a porn or two along with the feature attraction. Sometimes it was the porn.
One of the saddest differences to me is no more communal movie or even TV (with the family!) experience. Being part of a crowd laughing at Blazing Saddles or Monty Python’s Holy Grail was a special thing we took for granted, and that goes for other movie genres too. A classic movie like 2001 can only be experienced fully in a theater. It was so long there was an intermission! Probably saw that 4-5 times before I was 12 alone, and lots of times since. It’s weird, and the books do help you make a bit more sense of it all. Sidetrack warning! Next paragraph only…
So if you’ve been confused by 2001 try reading the book, which is excellent, though not quite as good as Arthur C Clarke’s masterpiece in my opinion, Childhood’s End, in which the alien overlords look like devils so don’t reveal themselves until later, and that’s not even the weirdest part, which would be the ending, explained well in the book, not so well in various adaptations including a recent-ish miniseries that was otherwise very good
As a sci-fi nerd I naturally saw the first Star Wars movie the day it came out, but after having already read the cheesy novelization I’d gotten for free with my membership in the Science Fiction Book Club a month or so before. I was into it big time, probably due to a love of the original Star Trek, which somehow I saw in color. However, the book was very bad. Terrible even. Like anyone else though, the hype worked on me and I was pretty psyched by the time the previews were done and it finally started, after a Daffy Duck cartoon if memory serves.
I’d been swept up in the fever like everyone else but I didn’t really like the movie all that much after some time had passed. It had lots of fun stuff, and great characters, but as hard sci-fi, the kind based at least a little bit on reality, it was pretty underwhelming, just like the novelization had been without all the humor and fleshed out character stuff that the movie added.
To this day my favorite sci-fi movies are not the big franchises (I do like the Alien movies though) but things like Contact, Interstellar, Arrival and still 2001, probably at or near the top of my list. I’ve read all the books, seen the sequels, am a big fan of Clarke’s work, etc. I like Larry Niven, Clifford Simak, many many others, even some of Heinlein’s earlier books aimed at teen boys, often with very odd plots and plenty of Archie and Jughead on Jupiter type adventure. I got into sci-fi with those I guess, when dad used to take me to the Sundance Book Store on Main Street every Saturday where I’d pick out 4-5 paperbacks. I still have a few!
I’d been reading sci-fi since grade school now that I think back. I was taking out H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and whatever else I could find from the town library a block away from our house on Second street, parallel to Main. You could walk the whole main town area in minutes it was so cozy. I freakin’ loved Geneseo…
Anyway, my all time favorite sci-fi novel is Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, a masterpiece of absurdist comedy in a sci-fi story line that itself is so absurd as to cause laughter. It pokes fun at the rich and has a time traveling dog, so it’s right in my wheelhouse! One character is forced to breed, on Mars, amidst military activity, for those of you that need that.
To continue my original point somewhere up there, TV today is a whole different beast . Still recognizable as what it once was in some ways, but only superficially. It’s all on demand, streaming platforms, whatever buzzword is current. The olden days of the whole family gathering around the ol’ Trinitron for a Saturday night of high quality laughing together are hard to even describe now. It was magical to see mom laugh at a time when you knew she wasn’t feeling it, or show that you had good taste too by laughing in the right places.
It feels like ancient history now, all this classic television that we all revere, even the kids if they’re into comedy/entertainment. We’ve gone from Leave it to Beaver and Lucy reruns every day to a gazillion reality shows that even people you like and respect insist are great but you know suck real bad. I don’t think I’ve watched a single episode of a reality show in my entire life, unless Jackass, the old MTV show, counts. I ain’t kiddin’ folks! Not one episode of Survivor, Big Brother, Fear Factor, nothing. I demand writers and actors, not yokels and sadness for humanity, Hollywood style.
So it’s a completely different media landscape now, with immediacy and phone friendliness prime factors in every decision about everything, possibly aided by non-humans – the dreaded and still mostly dreadful AI that will soon bankrupt a good number of con men and stupid people before long. Just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they can’t be as dumb as you or I. People still buy crypto, at the supermarket Coinstar machine thing! I’ve seen it! Barnum was right…
You can escape the dummies and the evil ones easier than ever now! Just wallow in nostalgia, spend a whole afternoon watching Teri Garr Letterman clips or late night show bloopers. We never had that luxury in the olden days! We had to stay up and watch that shit on live TV until the mid 80s when VCRs became cheap enough for most people. You got to know the days of the week by what TV shows were on. The weekly arrival of the new TV Guide was an event! We’d all fight for first access, then make sure it didn’t get mixed up with this week’s.
As for late night, there were only a very few shows overall, which sounds crazy now! Almost the entirety of late night programming across all the networks consisted of one program, the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which had a fairly mainstream audience. Eventually that was followed by Letterman at 12:30am for us comedy nerds, then Tom Snyder doing interviews with anything that moved even slightly – I once watched a punk rock gal chainsaw a car in half as part of the act (the Plasmatics) on that show. Tom knew nobody was watching at 3:30am and acted like it. I liked him.
You can’t forget either that there were talk shows on during the day too, big ones with big time guests on shows that were more like the late night shows than what daytime talk is now mostly. The Mike Douglas Show for instance had John and Yoko on for a whole week as guest hosts, which was hilarious! Not always intentionally so. You’d see all kinds of acts on that show and the Merv Griffin show, both syndicated daytime shows, like what Ellen or Drew Barrymore do but more like Carson with different acts and guests and a band and all that.
It was a time when Philadelphia could be the home for a talk show that needed guests constantly. That was where they made the Douglas show, and how he happened to get Lennon on the show. John was buddies with Philadelphia newspaper man Larry Kane, who’d been covering the fellas during the height of the craziness early on. Kane was John’s Philadelphia connection, and undoubtedly helped get that deal done
Late night was all about Johnny. Nobody dared go up against him. I can’t even remember now who it was or when the first direct Carson competitor came along. Was it Arsenio? Can’t be… Be the very first commenter and tell me if you know. I’m all over the place here! Back to whatever thread there was…
I try to adapt to the good things and complain about the bad things technology has done for/to us. I keep my nostalgic Youtubing to a minimum but I’ve been known to click on things I’m not proud of watching. Recently it was a few clips that revealed celebs who were surprise maga morons. Adam Sandler shouldn’t have surprised me but it did somehow. I’ve never really liked his thing, but Funny People turned me a little and he’s not always that annoying character he usually was, himself. He’s got talent and from what I gather is one of the nicest human beings in Hollywood, but c’mon man… Chris Pratt I guess I knew, but still… The rest were the usual, Roseanne, Sly, Dean Cain, the guy from Kiss with the tongue, a who’s who of H-list celebrities.
Holy crap! All that drivel was supposed to be the updated intro to today’s real topic, the old Gong Show from the 70s. Got away from me there! I’ll shut up now so past me (August of 2015) can yammer incessantly too. Here you go:
I’m guessing that anyone in my age bracket recalls 1970’s era “game show” The Gong Show fondly. For the whippersnappers? Well, you don’t know what you missed! I don’t know if there’s ever been a television show that was as much fun to watch, and looked like it was as much fun to make.
Here’s the skinny on what it was, for those unfamiliar. It was the pinnacle of artistic achievement for pioneering 1960’s game show entrepreneur Chuck Barris, he of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game fame and fortune. He may or may not have been a CIA contracted hit man as well… The brilliant film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, based on Chuck’s autobiography and about which I wrote here, leaves this question open while graphically detailing what might have occurred as he was chaperoning contestants in eastern Europe.
Anyway, the original Gong Show ran from 1976 to 1978 as a daytime “game” show (longer in syndication and at night), between normal game shows and soap operas. Them housewives and derelicts must have been plenty shocked. This was unlike anything heretofore presented for daytime audiences, any audiences really. It was loosely a talent show, with acts selected not on the basis of talent so much as ridiculousness. The grand prize? $516.32. The minimum at the time as allowed by the Screen Actor’s Guild.
It was a tidy format. Host Barris would announce the acts and provide always entertaining and probably stoned between-act patter, then the acts would appear. A panel of three D-list “celebrities” (Jaye P. Morgan, Jamie Farr, Arte Johnson, etc… people that hadn’t held a real job in years mostly) would then gauge the studio audience reaction for clues as to whether they should grab the big mallet and (maybe collectively) gong the contestant. Often times ridiculousness was rewarded however. American Idol this was not…
You didn’t watch The Gong Show to discover the next Clay Aiken or Gilbert O’Sullivan. No, you watched because it was hilarious fun, infectious fun, highly inebriated, probably stoned out of their damn minds fun. You could sense that this was the biggest party in Hollywood, and everyone in town wanted in on it. Aside from in house featured acts like Gene Gene the Dancing Machine (stage hand Gene Patton) and The Unknown Comic (Murray Langston), there was a house band, Milton DeLugg (serious, big time Hollywood music guy) and the Band With a Thug. Some of the top LA studio musicians appeared in this band, including guitarist Tommy Tedesco, who loved to write about his Gong Show experiences in his column in Guitar Player magazine at the time. He even dressed up in a tutu and became an act at one point, if memory serves. Big ol’ Tommy in a tutu is an image not easily forgotten…
But the best part of it all was invariably just watching Chuck, or “Chuckie Baby” as he was often referred to on the show, attempt to get through a show without falling over or needing medical attention. His eyes often were stoned slivers, the perfect caricature of a very very stoned guy, though I think we all knew he really was. He’d often don one of a large assortment of wacky hats from his hat stand, maybe to hide his eyes, maybe just for fun. He was always losing his composure, but in a fun way, no meanness or making fun of the acts, no matter how terrible. He was on their side, always, chastising the panel of “celebrity” judges for their callousness, sometimes taking a few bucks out of his pocket for the poor schmucks. You couldn’t not love Chuck!
And the acts! I mean… It’s hard to remember more than a few after all these years, but the Popsicle twins were an immediate sensation, immediately unforgettable, and an obvious source of controversy. It got risque sometimes but mostly it was just sheer oddness. A teenage kid earnestly singing “Feelings”, so winningly yet with zero talent that he survives the gong gauntlet. A check of Wikipedia to jog my memory reveals that one time Baltimore Ravens coach and Super Bowl winner Brian Billick made an appearance, performing a routine known as the “spider monkey”, and that people like Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman) and the founder of the Crips gang got early exposure on the show. Yep. As many careers made as American Idol, and it was watchable too!
It was fun! Appointment viewing for me and my friends in the pre-VCR days when you’d make sacrifices to keep up with things. I watched the entire run of Mary Hartman Mary Hartman by staying up until 1am most weeknights, and after that there was Fernwood 2 Nite, so all through high school I was sleep deprived. It was worth it. The Gong Show during the day provided a boost just by getting you laughing, then I was ready to stay up late again. This pattern carried me right up through graduation.
I have fond memories of cutting school, or maybe my schedule worked out that way, and coming home, smoking a lil sump’m, and just laughing my ass off watching The Gong Show. Sometimes we’d make a party of it, getting 3-4 of us weirdos together at my house, before mom got home of course. I seem to recall it being on at like noon, that first year anyway. Later in the afternoon after that, which undoubtedly aided my maintaining a place on the honor roll. Between this show during the day, and Mary Hartman Mary Hartman late at night, my view of the world was becoming nicely bent. In large part these shows shaped my world view, for better or worse.
The 1970’s… such an odd decade. American culture had not yet been corrupted completely by advertising catching up to popular morés, by the lust for the almighty dollar becoming the be all and end all for almost everyone. Greed was not yet good, but it was getting there. We’d been through the Nixon years making us all distrustful of politics, the Vietnam war was still a fresh embarrassment, and excess in many ways, mostly drugs and fashion, was the prevailing vibe. America, or at least the young folks, just didn’t give a shit anymore, and was gonna have some fun, with none of the counterculture baggage of their older brethren. The Gong Show was emblematic of all of this. A couple Thai sticks, maybe some fine Colombian, and a half hour with Chuckie Baby? 1970’s bliss, right there. Fuck disco, fuck punk, this was the 70’s I remember.
Anyway, I recently discovered that there are entire episodes of The Gong Show on YouTube, a few from the very first year. In truth, the show got more dissolute and even more fun with time, but I’ll put the very first one here and let you pursue others on your own time. You can also search for the Popsicle twins successfully. Relatively speaking. Enjoy! And for you young folks, judge not lest ye be judged on the basis of your own generations’ travesties. America’s Got Talent for instance, which only disproves its premise with each airing. Just a guess there.
And here’s the Popsicle twins clip:
I thought I’d add a feature that was a daily thing on the old tumblr blog that was much more baseball oriented. I’d peruse various sites and come up with a daily list of baseball occurrences, called Today in Baseball History. It’s an easy thing to add, though it won’t be daily, just on days I post something, which is most days. It will have a large number of Orioles items. We’ll start with the following, the entry for 7/29, including a random Homer Simpson quote and a listing of a few national ___ day items, two other regular tumblr blog features way back when.
Today in Baseball History 7/29
1903 – Pittsburgh’s Ed Doheny (12-6) jumps the team to return home because he is convinced he is being followed by detectives. The Pittsburgh Post headlines Doheny going AWOL with: “His Mind is Thought To Be Deranged.” He will return on August 15th, but mental illness will indeed put a premature end to his career.
1903 – Cy Young goes all the way as Boston loses to the Highlanders, 15 – 14. The New Yorkers had been shut out in their two previous matches in the series. Patsy Dougherty leads the Boston offense by hitting for the cycle, but Cy gets little defense as Boston makes eight errors behind him. New York starter Jack Chesbro is lifted in the 6th for Harry Howell, while Willie Keeler has four hits to lead the Highlander offense. The game lasts 2 hours, 10 minutes.
1908 – John McFarlan of Helena (Arkansas State League) loses his perfect game when the 27th batter refuses to bat, resulting in a 9 – 0 forfeit.
1909 – National League president Harry Pulliam, despondent over his inability to handle the problems and controversies of the league, dies after shooting himself in his room at the New York Athletic Club yesterday. Pulliam had been suffering from a nervous breakdown.
1938 – On the WGN’s White Sox pregame radio show, Yankee outfielder Jake Powel, in response to a Bob Elson question concerning his off season employment as a Dayton, Ohio policeman, quips” I crack n*****s on the head”. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who down plays the incident describing the ballplayer’s comments as acting not “intentionally, but carelessly,” will suspend the reserve flychaser for ten days.
1948 – In Boston, Big Bill Voiselle pitches the first-place Braves to a 2 – 1 win over the Pirates, and collects his 5th hit of the year. Voiselle raises his average to .097, a point higher than his uniform number. Voiselle has the highest uniform number ever in the majors in honor of his South Carolina home town of Ninety Six.
1972 – Brooks Robinson hits a two-out home run in the 11th to give Baltimore a 4 – 3 win over the Indians. Frank Duffy hits his first major league home run for the Tribe and John Lowenstein hits a home run in the 9th to briefly give the Indians the lead.
1986 – Sparky Anderson, the first manager to win the World Series in each league, also becomes the first manager to win 600 games in both the National and American Leagues when his Tigers beat the Brewers, 9 – 5.
1988 – The Orioles trade pitcher Mike Boddicker to the Red Sox in return for Brady Anderson and Curt Schilling. Boddicker will have two successful years with Boston while Anderson will become a productive lead-off man for Baltimore and Schilling will became one of baseball’s most dominant pitchers of his era.
1991 – During a game at Yankee Stadium, Oakland OF Jose Canseco is bombarded with assorted objects by unruly fans. Included among the objects are an inflatable doll, a transistor radio, and a head of cabbage. Oakland escapes with a 10 – 8 victory, and Canseco strokes a double in four at bats.
1997 – The Orioles purchase veteran Harold Baines from the White Sox. Baines is hitting .305 for Chicago.
2000 – The White Sox trade catcher Brook Fordyce and three minor league pitchers to the Orioles for catcher Charles Johnson and DH Harold Baines.
2006 – Julio Franco became the oldest player ever to pinch run when he takes Carlos Delgado’s place on the base paths after the Mets’ infielder is hit by a pitch in the fourth inning. The 47 year-old pinch-runner, who will stay in the game to play first, steals second base and will advance to third on the catcher’s error in the Mets’ 11-4 win over Atlanta at Turner Field.
2007 – Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. are inducted into the Hall of Fame.
2009 – The Royals play an entire a game without registering a single defensive assist for the first time in franchise history in their 7-3 loss to Baltimore at Camden Yards. During Kansas City’s eight innings in the field, the team records 24 outs via nine strikeouts, 13 fly outs, and two groundouts, both handled unassisted by first baseman Billy Butler.
2010 – The Orioles announce that they have hired Buck Showalter as their new manager. He will take over for interim skipper Juan Samuel on August 3rd.
——————————–
All Today in Baseball History items are courtesy of either Baseball Reference or nationalpastime.com.
“It was a tumultuous time for our nation. The clear beverage craze gave us all a reason to live. The information super highway showed the average person what some nerd thinks about Star Trek. And the domestication of the dog continued unabated.”
Today is both National Lasagna and Chicken Wing Day! Have some ranitidine (Pepcid) nearby…
Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)! 
Leave a comment