Let Me Tell You About My Best Friend…

A little snippet that came to me.  While I was not in fact raised by television, I was named after it.  Kind of…

Who remembers this little slice of the 1970s?  The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, starring Bill Bixby and Brandon Cruz as Eddie.  With that’s catchy opening, “Best Friend”.

So my parents were looking for a unique first name before my arrival on the scene due to my very common last name.  My mom was watching an episode of the above mentioned show, when she saw the name “Brandon Cruz” in the credits.  Hmm…that wasn’t common, in the 1970s at least unlike now.  So I was named Brandon, and my parents maintain that it was inspired by Brandon Cruz and that I wasn’t named AFTER him.  Sure, sure.

You may also remember Brandon as Joey in the Bad News Bears, the opposing picture from the Yankees whose dad, Vic Morrow, beats him in public.  The 70s…good times….

He got out of the child acting business by the 1980s (and no it wasn’t Vic’s fault!).  He got into music and fronted the hardcore band Dr. Know.

He also fronted the reformed Dead Kennedys from 2001-2003 in place of Jello Biafra.  And here is my namesake all grown up.

Anything you’d like to add Brandon?

Well, there you have it….

The Technology of Yesterday

So, to set the stage of where I’m coming from.  I was born in the late 1970s.  Yes, Carter was president, there was a gas shortage, and all that nostalgia.

The first TV I remember us having was a large black and white console model.  It was the only one we had and it lived in our family room.  It had glorious faux wood, knobs and dials, and rabbit ears on top.  As I remember it there were a total of 4 VHF channels (PBS, ABC, NBC, and CBS) and 4 UHF channels (another PBS, and local channels 25, 38, and 56).  I don’t remember actually watching much TV outside of Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, cartoons, etc.

This is pretty much what it looked like

Then in 1983 or 1984, we entered the glorious world of color TV with this monster, which was the floor model from Lechmere if I remember.

No more knobs for us, this was push button RCA glory

I still remember that the “5” button always stuck.  But it wouldn’t matter, because with this glorious addition to the family, we also got cable and a VCR!

Good old Continental Cablevision.

Under that little Magnovox panel there were a million little dipsticks and things to adjust something…but we never figured out how to get the 12:00 to stop blinking

Oh yeah, we had hit the technology age big time!  One of the first things I remember with having a color TV was watching the annual airing of The Wizard of Oz on TV and actually seeing when the film changes from the black and white in Kansas to the Technicolor of Oz.  It was mind blowing.

Now as far as renting video tapes, there was a little kiosk in the grocery store, Stop & Shop, that had cards you would take to the courtesy booth up front and they rented you the video.  Kind of like when you need Sudafed at CVS, and have to bring it with your license to the pharmacy because of all the crystal meth manufacturers.

OK, kind of like that….but there was less crystal meth involved.  It was the 1980s, crack was king!  Oh wait, I’ve gotten off point.

So yeah, the world expanded and now there were more options than cartoons on Saturday morning, Creature Double Feature, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The A-Team, and the Dukes of Hazzard.  There were movies on cable and on video.

As a reference, this was our “gaming console” and first “computer” around the mid-80s time frame too.

Ah, the ColecoVision console, with the Atari expansion module I got at a garage sale with a bunch of Atari games.

The ColecoVision ADAM family computer system with tape drives.  We never got it to actually do anything!

Introduction

Welcome to my blog!  I’m hoping it’ll be fun for people besides myself…but if not, oh well.

So I’m going to start off with the background behind this blog.  I’d like you to say hi to my parents:

As you can see my dad is a little older than my mother….

…..

OK, my brother and I were not actually raised by TV.  I have a pair of wonderful parents who have been married over 40 years, who provided a pretty great childhood for my younger brother and I.  And also, we were very active kids.  We spent all summer swimming at the municipal pool or playing outside with friends.  We both played a variety of sports, with me continuing to play varsity sports all the way through high school and college.  So we didn’t spend every day just sitting in front of the TV.

However, we both did watch our fair share of bad/cheesy movies during the 1980s.  And I can text my brother with a line from one of our many shared movies or drop it in a conversation and he immediately knows what I’m talking about and can quote an equally cheesy line from it right back without missing a beat!

So this blog is actually for the purpose of sharing some of those movies that made an impression on our…well…impressionable youth on those rainy days or after dinner viewings.  Some of them will be pure cheese, some may be the usual 80s suspects, so may be just obscure, but the one common theme is we watched them over and over and know them like the back of my hand.