Midnight Misadventures.
We were out of food. Not in the hyperbolic sense that’s most often meant; I’m saying all we had left in our cabinets were cans of Fancy Feast and a box of Pumpkin Spice Cheerios.
So it was off to 7-Eleven for two handfuls’ worth of garbage.
I love going to 7-Eleven late at night. Hell, I love going ANYWHERE late at night. Doesn’t matter if it’s a supermarket, a department store, a bar or one of those Cash 4 Gold places. If you’re open after midnight, let’s play.
And with that, tonight’s survey:
Say it’s after midnight and you desperately need to get out of the house.
Where do you go?
Spill stories about your weird all-night diners and one-of-a-kind Walmarts, in the comments!
And seriously, if you’ve never done the post-midnight going-out thing, try it. It’s fun.
(No video tonight. The survey must carry us.)
Cheesy Blockbuster Training Video!
Here’s an incredibly cheesy Blockbuster training video from the 1990s:
(Or an “amazingly bad” one, according to the uploader!)
It’s hokey as hell and so worth watching.
Gotta admit, I miss the hell out of Blockbuster. I know I’ve gone heavier on covering the mom & pop-style video stores on Dino Drac, but I have loads of nostalgia for Blockbuster, too.
(One neat thing about Blockbuster is that so many of the chain’s old locations still stand. While they now have new occupants, many retain subtle hints of what they once were. I love spotting them out in the wild.)
1980s Shark Documentary.
In honor of the just-dropped episode of The Purple Stuff Podcast, I’m gonna borrow the show’s theme for tonight’s video. Get ready for SHARKS!
There are a billion shark documentaries on YouTube, but this one is soooo ‘80s. It was apparently released on video, but it’s exactly like the shark docs I grew up devouring on television.
You’ll notice a marked contrast between this and today’s documentaries, which so often over-inflate the “drama” to make for more exciting programming. (Heck, even Shark Week gets criticized nowadays for trading science for sensationalism.)
I get why that shift had to happen, but it’s still nice to see an old school doc that’s pretty much all business. In 4×3, no less! Pass me the Pizzaria chips and my Gobots sleeping bag.
Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats!
Here’s a random episode of Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats, an animated series that ran from ’84 to ’88:
Weird thing: I used to watch this show all the time, but I remember next to nothing about it. The theme song is familiar and I do recall that the artists had a little too much fun drawing one of the lady cats, but that’s literally it.
Given that I’ve been writing about old nonsense for almost twenty years and only a handful of people have ever mentioned this show to me, there seems to be a pandemic regarding Heathcliff-related audience retention.
I guess we gotta start somewhere, so enjoy the show!
