Sunday, August 24, 2008

Ray Winstone in new HBO Cop Drama set in 1972



Some people may have noticed my newly-founded obsession with the 70's began roughly a day after I watched the first season of Life On Mars about a year and a half ago. It's a weird feeling that's been growing on me ever since, that nostalgic longing for simpler times that I know people in their 30's in 1978 had for the late 50's. But I do now unabashedly enjoy traveling down Memory Lane when I chance, and hope you readers are happily following along.

So, it brings me a mixture of happiness and trepidation that the US version of Life On Mars wasn't canceled after very poor reviews of the pilot episode, but has been completely re-tooled, re-scripted, and moved from 1972 L.A. to 1972 New York, with Harvey Keitel now as Gene Hunt, and Gretchen Mol as Annie. It could be great, it could be okay, it could bomb completely. Either way, the original UK show cannot suffer, and as long I've still got those discs, I'm happy.

Whatever the outcome of October 9th's season premiere of Life On Mars, there's something currently filming in Brooklyn that has also peaked my interest: "Last Of The Ninth" is a new HBO series starring Ray Winstone as a cop in the same corrupt 1972 NYPD that Serpico tried to fight. I can completely imagine ABC screwing up a perfect show by watering it down, changing the reality of the characters, etc., but HBO, who probably should have made Life On Mars in the first place, I fully trust to get it right. Who knows, maybe I'll be proved wrong, and if I am, then I'll be a happy man.

CB Radios Still Being Sold and Used


Here's a fun article about CB Radio (again) from the Chicago Tribune, not so much reminiscing about them, as explaining why people are still, even these days of iPhones and the Internet, still buying and using CB radios.

About 800,000 CB radios are sold in the U.S. each year. That's a far cry from the 10 million iPods that Apple moves each quarter, but not a bad little number for a market most of us probably didn't think existed anymore.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Total 70s Freak Out

 
Found a wicked site that's been around way longer than this one, but for some reason doesn't appear when I do any searches on Blogger for 70s blogs. It's called plaidstallions.com, and it's taken a love of the 70s into the realm of complete mockery, which means not only is it funny, but extremely cool at the site. I'll let Brian, the site owner, explain it better:
 
"The name "Plaid Stallions" Came about when I was in high school, I have always been crazy about department store catalogs and when a close friend of mine told me his mother had a stash of 70's Eatons ( a now defunct Canadian Department store chain), I grabbed them with both hands!

While we were pouring through them, I ripped out a page of guys in plaid leisure suits (which I believe is the one above) and said "Check out the Plaid Stallions!", I want to add that no one but me found that funny.

For some odd reason, I still found it funny and in April of 2006, I created a daily blog of the same name so I could make stupid jokes about polyester clothing I probably would have worn if I were in my 20's at the time.

Eventually, I liked doing the blog so much that bought the domain name and expanded it into this site."

Check out his 70s Fashion Mockery galleries, TV and Movie Character Mall Appearance gallery, and tons of scans from fashion and toy catalogues from back in the day. This is a treasure trove of nostalgic goodness, veen though much of it was very American, and I have no idea what it is. He has a blog, too, as well as discussion forums which mostly deal with vintage toys, and how to get hold of them, but is a fun read anyway.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Merlin Electronic Game

Mentioned in the previous post below this one, here's Merlin. Lordy, how I loved that stupid little red plastic thing.

Simpler in the 70s: Handheld Video Games

Some of the more astute of you will have noticed that up there in the title banner, one of the ghostly images superimposed behind the title itself is that of a game called Blip.

As you can see from this 1977 commercial, it's basically a handheld version of Pong, but it's half-mechanical, half-electronic. You have a timer, and three buttons, and you have to hit the LED ball back across the screen using the buttons. The weird thing in the commercial, though, is that the LED ball doesn't seem to conform to any kind of laws of physics. It seems to bend and land wherever it feels like.

I had this game as a kid, and remember loving it, but, of course, had no one to play it with. So I basically played it in one-player mode until the batteries died, then it ended up as trash in the bottom of my MFI toy chest until we finally threw it out.

Anywho, roll on next Christmas, and I got a Merlin (commercial in the post above), the Electronic Wizard, which had 11 buttons and 6 different games. Unlike the far inferior Blip, Merlin taught me how to play Blackjack. Later additions to game also taught me how to smoke and drink neat scotch with a little water to bring out the flavor, and to make sure that I wear dark sunglasses while playing Tic Tac Toe so I don't give away any 'tells'.

Merlin was worth buying new batteries for. In fact, I remember playing that damned thing so much that I had worn the circles off the buttons, and you could actually see the switches underneath the plastic. I was a Blackjack fiend back then, as long as I wasn't playing with actual real people and cards and such.

About 4 years later, I got a second-hand Atari console, and could play proper Pong until the cows came home. But that was the 80s, and the 80s don't play here.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Awesome in the 70s: Matchbox Superfast 75 Cars

From about 1975 onwards I was a massive fan of the die-cast metal rolling wonders known as Matchbox cars. Everything I knew about motorized transport I learned from these three-inch cars. The best ones, of course, were the ones with extras like opening doors and trunks. Interestingly, though, they all had exactly the same wheels.
Here's comes the nostalgia part: My dad used to have a Saturday morning routine back then. I'd go with him on the number 74 bus from Primrose Hill into Camden Town, which was nothing like Camden is today. It was more like a barren wasteland populated only by Scottish alcoholics that lived in Arlington House and hung out either in The Mother Red Caps (now the smaller bar on the corner of the World's End - which at the time had doors to the toilets so low only Scottish alcoholics and 6 year-olds could walk through without having to bend down) or the Good Mixer on Inverness Street.
There were two primary missions to this journey into Camden: One to hand in the football pools for that week which never won, and the second to get some fresh bread from Biroth's bakery on Camden High Street. Sometimes we'd go into Syd's barbers to get our "short back and sides" hair cut, and a lollipop for being good. Sometimes we'd pop into the cafe on Inverness Street and get beans on toast. But all of this was a prelude to getting those pools in to the newsagents, because on the wall opposite was the cabinet that held all the Matchbox cars (there was another one underneath that held Smurfs, but I generally ignored those). They were 50p each. Sometimes I was even allowed to buy two.
All of the below are cars that I had in my collection until one day in the 80s, I got bored in my sister's bedroom and trashed them all with darts before giving the remains to my nephew to play with. Why do we do that?
I use to have some Corgi cars, and even a couple of Dinky's, too, but neither of those were cool. Let's face it, Matchbox even made stationwagons look cool.
Shame there's no fake wood paneling down the side. If I recall correctly, though, the bottom door on the trunk at the back could flip down. I know I did have one that did that, might not be this one.
There were quite a few that were obviously made up, like this Fire Chief's car. Can't even figure out what it's supposed to be.
Ah, a classic. With doors that opened, too.
Again, a rather stately vehicle with opening doors.
This is one of the first ones I picked up. Looking back on it, I have no idea what the hell attracted me to a pink Datsun. It's not even a funky 70s color. What was I thinking?
Yep, I had this too. It's a track that you linked up and raced the cars down, it was flexible plastic, with raised edges to keep the cars inside the track, so you could create little hills and jumps and so forth. Loved this stuff. No idea what the hell happened to it.
Okay... My Matchbox collection had a hierarchy; a kind of cross between a pantheon of gods and the Cosa Nostra. The leader of the pack in this rag-tag group of die-cast vehicles was the De Tomaso Pantera. I think I saw one once in real life and nearly wet my pants. De Tomaso was the coolest-looking, meanest, most animalistic car of them all. This one, along with the beefy Pontiac Firebird turbo at the bottom of this list, which was the Enforcer, ruled all my other cars. Yeah, I said it. My Matchbox cars had their personalities, which really makes wonder what kind of kid would put the windshields out with a dart, but I digress.
Another made up car, perhaps, or a dragster? Who knows. All I know is it looked like it had rocket launchers on the top, and that enough for me to buy it.
And of course, anything to do with space just had to be mine.
The Hellraiser, like quite a few of the dragster-style cars, is questionably based on a real car. It might be, it might not be. If we had the kind of Top Gear back then that we do today, I'd probably see it on TV, but back then... Not so much. These were great for racing on the Super Track, but with no canopy and such a big engine, I'd imagine anyone trying to really drive that beast would just sucked out the top on a straightaway.
This one was just goofy. The back wheels were connected to the little guy in the middle, so his head would pop up and down as you pushed it along.
Hey, this once had a number, and racing stripes! And doors that worked! Forget that it's a Renault, this is one car that obviously moved, and fast! Zoom-zoom, indeed!
This is probably the lamest one of the collection. It doesn't look fast, has a color scheme still stuck in the 60s, and the doors don't work, despite this one even having handles imprinted on those doors, which many of the cars didn't. Definitely one of the early purchases. I was young and impressionable back then. Like, yeah, 6, so sue me.
This was another crazy hot rod car I had back in the day. Anything where you could see bits of the engine were a turn-on for me when I was 6. Otherwise, a fairly non-descript car.
Hmm... Yeah. I don't know why they made it, I don't why I bought it, but... Yeah. Hovercraft. It had little wheels under it.
I was looking at the Hellraiser and thinking, didn't this come with, like, an engine cover that flipped up backwards? No, the Tanzara did. This held the rank of 3 in my pantheon of cars. I *hearted* my Tanzara. And, as an added bonus, it was part of the much-maligned Matchbox Streakers line.
I had to hunt a little further to find me a picture of my Enforcer, the beefiest Pontiac Firebird you ever saw. I may have mentioned before that I've always had a thing for that particular car in real life, and this is probabloy where it started. It just screams muscle, racing for pink slips, picking up chicks in Daisy Dukes on the main drag, doesn't it? Forget the fact that it's the kind of car you buy during your mid-life crisis, it's seriously cool, man.
There were many more in my collection, if I find any more pics I'll post them. Pics here are courtesy of 70er Matchbox, and Matchbox 1-75.