Saturday Night’s Main Event from 1989.
For wrestling fans in the ‘80s, it didn’t get any better than Saturday Night’s Main Event.
Run as late night specials on NBC with no set schedule, the WWF famously took over Saturday Night Live’s time slot, which both legitimized the product and gave kids the excuse to treat midnight like morning.
Though the shows were usually recorded a month prior and always post-produced to death, I didn’t understand that as a child. To me, it was always live television. I’ve remained a fairweather fan of pro-wrestling ever since, but even decades later, nothing’s come close to matching the excitement of these specials.
I recently found some of my old wrestling videos, which were all taped off television, with the shitty custom labels to match. On one of them was the January 1989 edition of Saturday Night’s Main Event, complete with all of the original commercials.
Yes, a goldmine.
This edition of SNME came out when my interest in wrestling was at its absolute peak. Macho Man Randy Savage was the champ, and he and Miss Elizabeth were on top of the world. As a kid who wasn’t a fan of Hulk Hogan but would’ve taken bullets for Macho and Liz, seeing Savage with the belt while Hogan had to make do with just pointing at it was sooo utterly satisfying.
As was customary, the show started with a series of goofy promos, leading into an opening package that still gives me chills to this day. (I know most people prefer the even older opening — the one scored by Animotion’s Obsession — but this is the version I always think of when someone brings up SNME.) Read More…
Comic Book Show at a NJ Holiday Inn.
On Sunday morning, me and Jay visited yet another comic book show, this time in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. Honestly, the big draw for me was that the show was staged from a Holiday Inn.
I am all about random hobbyist conventions taking place at minor hotels. Those are the types of shows I grew up with, where vendors cram into modest conference rooms, and where there aren’t even the smallest hints of corporate sponsorship.
These shows are plain but intimate. If you’ve ever been to a giant Comic-Con event, I imagine that you spent weeks if not months preparing, strategizing everything from your budget to your outfit. By contrast, a show like this involves no prep at all. You kinda just go, even if you’re hungover and wearing yesterday’s clothes. Read More…
Junk Food of the Gods, Part 4!
The Junk Food of the Gods series was last seen in July, before taking an extended break for the holidays. Now it’s back and it’s tanned and it can handle anything you want to throw at it.
Below: Five of the most interesting junk foods currently on the market. Most of them will only be around for a limited time, so if you know you’re gonna wanna binge on super-green Lucky Charms or pasta shaped like Darth Vader, delaying is dumb.
Hostess Dark Chocolate Raspberry Cupcakes!
Mixed feelings on these special Valentine’s Day cupcakes. They taste exactly as I assume they were intended to, uncannily reminiscent of those raspberry-filled chocolates you’d find dotted across a heart-shaped box.
Problem is, those are my absolute least favorite chocolates from those boxes. They’re like fucking landmines. I understand that millions of people love those particular chocolates, but to me they’re only to be eaten on double dares when there’s money involved.
That Hostess so perfectly mimicked a classic Valentine’s Day candy isn’t something I feel right in classifying as a “con.” Instead I’ll just say that these aren’t for me. If Hostess did anything objectively wrong, it was the false promise of cupcake creme that resembled psychomagnotheric slime. Read More…
Five Retro TV Commercials, Part 3!
The previous edition of Five Retro TV Commercials was an all ‘80s affair, and given the responses, I may have gone back a bit too far. Way to make me feel old, people. Like it’s my fault you were too lazy to get born before Good Humor retired Colossal Fossil ice pops.
Anyway, here’s my mutant mea culpa. Commercials that you were almost definitely around to see.
In one of my dusty bins, I found a video full of Pokemon episodes taped off of the WB Network in mid 2000. I believe I scored it from a yard sale, and that couldn’t have been later than 2003.
At the time, the commercials hiding within those Pikachu cartoons were too new to have any nostalgic appeal, so I never bothered to encode the tape during the X-E era. Now around fifteen years later, everything on this video feels totally ancient. And so do I.
Here are five of the more interesting ones, many of which are batshit:
Comet Pops! (2000)
These lollipops had special handles that worked like a cross between switchblades and lightsabers. It was one of those candies that doubled as a toy, and that’s how they were able to charge four bucks for 50 cents’ worth of lollipop.
While I’d concede that a space theme was right for this promotion, this ad went way too far. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but it’s so obviously a commercial that spent the better part of its run causing four-year-olds to never sleep.
The ad featured multiple aliens sucking lollipops, including one that looked like the perfect midpoint between Jim Carrey’s Grinch and the girl from Species. Complete nightmare fuel.
Paired with ominous music and a menacing voice-over, I just can’t see “I want a lollipop” being anyone’s takeaway, irrespective of their age, gender or predisposition to love TV commercials starring candy-sucking aliens. Read More…