80's Songs I Shouldn't Like (But Actually Do)

For the past 24 hours now I have inexplicably had Eddy Grant's classic (re: only) hit Electric Avenue trapped in my head for little to no reason at all. To make matters even more baffling I am not annoyed by this, in fact I secretly sort of enjoy that an early 80's reggae New Wave song has been stuck in a continous loop inside my brain for an entire day.

Which got me thinking about songs that I rationally shouldn't like, that in normal situations should annoy me or make me roll my eyes...but for some reason don't. I simply focused on the 80's as a decade because for me there were many popular cheesy songs that seem like they should be utterly cringe inducing, but for some reason or another melt my cynical side to the core!

Starship-We Built This City: I briefly mentioned before how We Built This City is a guilty pleasure song for me. Upon listening to it again there is little to no reason why I should even remotely find it enjoyable. It really is the epitome of 80's schlock complete with synthesizers and inane lyrics, however for some unknown reason that will probably never be explained it all comes together to make a catchy song. Also I am intrigued by this city made of rock n' roll...

Motley Crue-Home Sweet Home: If there is one thing I could never stand about the mid to late 80's (this also bled into the early 90's) was the over the top power ballad. It seemed like every metal album needed to have a soothing piano love ballad to balance out the inevitable song about how awesome it was to party. To make Home Sweet Home even more of an anomaly I was probably one of the only people that grew up in the 80's not liking Motley Crue at all! So why the hell do I like this song again? To tell you the truth it's like when you take two things that should taste awful together only to eat them and find out that seperately they may suck, but together they taste pretty excellent.

Europe-Final Countdown: Blame Arrested Developement for unlocking my unforgotten love for Final Countdown. From the beginning Casio noodling that mimics a lame attempt at an 80's court blowing horns to announce that the king has arrived to the shrieking of the chrous every fiber of my being should want to dislike Final Countdown, but instead a satisfied smile always creeps across my face.

Pete Townsend-Let My Love Open The Door: If there is one thing musically I can't stand it is completely obvious lyrics. It doesn't get much more eye rollingly obvious than Let My Love Open The Door (To Your Heart of course!). To make matters worse there is also the 80's staple of stopping the song in the middle while everyone claps and chants a part of the song. Despite all that this is one of those songs that as a kid when it came on the radio in the car I turned it up to sing along...which my Mom no doubt thought was adorable!

Lindsay Buckingham-Holiday Road: For me personally Holiday Road is embarrissingly catchy. Just add some electronic hand claps to Lindsay Buckingham hollering holiday road, layer a random guitar solo somewhere and there you have it.

-Astroboy

A Few Halloween Treats

In honor of Halloween here are some spooky Disney cartoons, including one of my favorites! Hope everyone is having more treats than tricks...

Lonesome Ghosts

Skeleton Dance

-Astroboy

Some Trick Or Treating Advice From The 70's

With Halloween right around the corner and that fact that I have been swamped this week work wise here's a PSA on Halloween safety circa 1977. I actually remember watching this particular PSA at school around this time...despite the fact that it was the middle 80's. So sit back relax and enjoy some Halloween safety tips (aka how to completely ruin Halloween for kids):

If you want to see the thrilling conclusion and see how the Little Witch's Mom can suck even more fun out of all Hallows Eve you can go here!

-Astroboy

#26 The Stuff

#26: The Stuff

One of my personal favorite sort of bad movies are the bad movies that take an absurd concept and present it in a realistic/straight fashion. For some reason the fact that the acting seems oblivious to the absurdity only heightens the hilarity for me. That's exactly what The Stuff is. While it seems to be filed under comedy horror or spoof, when I watched it this weekend it seemed less aware that it was a comedy horror/spoof but more of a absurdly silly plot that was being shot and acted seriously. Essentially The Stuff is about killer yogurt that turns people into zombies. The Stuff is obviously indebted to such movies like The Blob and Soylent Green, along with spoofing American consumer culture/over consumption similar to Dawn of the Dead or even They Live.

It begins with two miners who stumble across some white goo coming out of the ground and do what anybody would do when they find weird unknown stuff coming out of the ground...they eat it! Soon we see this goo is being packaged to consumers known as The Stuff and has become wildly popular due to it tasting just like ice cream without the calories. However an ex-FBI agent (with a horrible southern accent) is hired by some ice cream executives to find out what The Stuff really is. Meanwhile some kid doesn't like that his parents are becoming zombies because of eating The Stuff and attempts to destroy all of it in the grocery store. He then runs away from his family after they try to force them to eat some where he runs into said ex-FBI agent. Over the course of the rest of the movie the ex-FBI agent and the kid meet up with a former employee for the stuff, a junk food mogul known as *sigh* Chocolate Chip Charlie, and a militia looking to destroy the mine where The Stuff comes from.

Obviously a movie that revolves around a precocious boy (one of my friends actually thought the kid was kind of creepy looking) teaming up with an ex-FBI agent to take down mind controlling zombie marshmallow fluff is not aiming to be an award winner. While watching it however I felt like it was the kid being laughed at, not laughed along with. Yes the premise is utterly ridiculous, but the acting is either completely wooden or comically over the top only making the fact that people are being killed by alien marshmallow utterly funny in a stupid way. It even leaves a half assed sort of cliffhanger for a potential sequel that luckily never happened.

-Astroboy

Sad Moments In Comic Book History: Game Boy

Game Boy

I already waxed nostalgic about my yearning for an actual Game Boy here, however in 1990/91 Nintendo licensed some of it's characters to comic book publisher Valiant who was a third tier comic company who found wild success in the early 90's despite most of the art looking exactly the same. Most comics put out focused on some of the more popular characters from games (Mario Bros., Link from Zelda, Metroid), but for two issues there was a comic that was pretty much a blatant 24 page add for Game Boy complete with an incoherent storyline and of course plenty of product placement. It could have easily been called Buy Our Product.

The most obviously awful thing about the Game Boy comic is that it revolves wholly around an inanimate object. While it makes sense that previously established NES characters would have comics, there really is no reason for Game Boy to have it's own comic outside of letting the consumer know how awesome Game Boy is and trying to shoe horn the hottest/latest video game into the storyline in some way, shape or form.

Most of the first issue involves a grumpy old bad guy who steals a Game Boy (which is apparently magical or something) and allows all the bad guys from Super Mario Land to escape...somehow. You see it's not really actually explained how or why all these guys from the video game come flying out of the Game Boy it just sort of happens. Some typical 90's era teenage boys witness this and note most of the bad guys by name from Super Mario Land (in fact they mention pretty much everything about Super Mario Land except for the release date). They then decide to magically have Mario come out of the Game Boy to help them defeat said bad guys. And that is pretty much it.

Not surprisingly Game Boy the comic book was not really that popular, probably because most kids in the target audience were playing actual Game Boys and not reading comic books based on Game Boys

-Astroboy

Woof!

Ahhhh, Halloween vastly approaches and you know what that means right? Of course I'm talking about the one night of the year where women can consciously dress in slutty costumes and it's acceptable! Why one can be a slutty anything if you put your mind to it! In the mail about a week ago I received a magazine filled with various Halloween costumes for all various folks and I even came across a Sexy Ghostbuster and a Sexy Freddy Krueger!?

However what about you pet owners that want to dress up in a sexy fashion on all Hallows Eve...but want to include your pets? Well according to this article Right Here a company not only sells slutty costumes for you, but also matching slutty costumes for your dog. Because nothing says sexy (and sane!) like dressing up your dog in a ridiculous outfit to match your equally ridiculous outfit! And really hasn't that been the main problem with most dog outfits...that they just aren't sexy enough? You know I'm fairly certain that if that dog up top could actually form words it would be a string of embarrassed obscenities.

You know cats would never allow this sort of thing to happen...

-Astroboy

Maybe I'm Missing Something Here

As a kid every Sunday night my family would hunker down to watch America's Funniest Home Videos to see Bob Saget make horrible puns while showing an endless parade of people getting hit in the crotch, animals/babies doing silly/cute things, and individuals unexpectedly falling down ad nauseum.

However in this day and age we've seen plenty of folks get nailed in the groin to become meh about it all. Why we've seen celebrities get "punked" and hidden camera shows that put people in uncomfortable enough situations for our own humorous pleasure. What's the next logical step? Why violence of course! Hilarious violence...

Ummm...wow...that was from a Japanese show called Panic Face King and apparently they've upped the unexpected humor level from say "an unwitting customer being served by a rude waiter" to "random violence during an interview". Now I'm not a prude in the slightest, but isn't it safe to say that putting someone into a situation where they unknowingly witness others being shot, while they fend for their life (and no doubt shit their pants in the process) the opposite of funny?

*Sigh* We shouldn't be too surprised I guess, it is the same country that gave us this.