One of the things I miss most about the past is just how much info used to come packed in an issue of TV Guide. In the ’90s, that thing became quite a thick publication that was filled with the nightly TV grids so you’d know what was on TV when, and cool ads for various shows and movies each night.
But as good as normal issues of TV Guide were, their best issue of the year was always their fall preview issues where they’d run down all of the new series debuting on network television that fall. Every year was sure to bring hits and misses, and going back through those old issues now is a real trip back in time.
With that in mind, I present this Time Capsule and all of the fall preview pages for the fall of 1984. There were some epic shows that debuted in 1984, plus a few not so epic ones too. Give the pages a look and remember what it was like flipping through a TV Guide fall preview back then.
Every weekend, I like to share a curated list of retro & nostalgia-themed articles, stories, and posts that I’ve come across in the last week. It gives you a chance to grab a hot cup of coffee, tea, or cocoa, sit back and pass the time reading about the good old days. So with that in mind, here are some things I wanted to share with you this week.
The other day, I was reading through the great book, Wrestling at the Chase: The Inside Story of Sam Muchnick and the Legends of Professional Wrestling, and I realized something. I realized I miss the gold old days of pro wrestling. I miss when guys like Dusty Rhodes were at the top of the sport. The bygone era when guys who didn’t look like your typical star could still get a chance to shine. Guys like Terry Gordy, Big Bubba Rogers, “Playboy” Buddy Rose, and numerous others were on top because they were the best at what they did. Days when having a great muscled-up physique didn’t automatically make you a star. In short, I miss fat pro wrestlers.
Back in the days when wrestlers earned their checks by how many tickets they sold, the emphasis wasn’t so much on looks. It was a combination of their actual skill in the ring, along with their charisma out of it. If they could use their words to rile the fans up to the point that they would buy a ticket to see him get his butt kicked, that was enough. If he was good enough in the ring to make the fans believe what they were seeing, that was enough. Looks were just a bonus. Some of my favorite wrestlers would never be offered a cover spot on a men’s magazine, but they sure could make you believe they would whip the ass of whoever DID appear on the cover.
I use the term “fat wrestlers” loosely here. I’m not just talking about fat guys, I’m talking about guys who just don’t fit the “fitness” profile that you see with most guys in the ring today. Guys like Arn Anderson may not have gotten a chance in today’s wrestling world because he was not muscled up, and didn’t have six-pack abs, but he could talk, he could express emotion, and he knew how to tie guys up in a pretzel to get his point across.
You turn on WWE programming today, and you’re sure to find plenty of guys that are ripped and look like they’ve stepped straight off the pages of Muscle and Fitness. What you won’t find, however, are guys wrestling who looks like your dad, or the tough guy down the street who works on cars.
The loss of the average looking, but the tough son of a gun, in favor of hiring muscle-bound freaks who sometimes have trouble with the basic concepts of wrestling, has hurt the suspension of disbelief of wrestling to a degree. I want to see a guy who looks like my uncle fighting a guy who looks like your uncle.
A lot of the best wrestlers to ever come along were great examples of what I’m talking about. Mick Foley never looked too imposing physically, but because he knew how to connect with the fans through his interview style, and his brutal style in the ring, you always knew he was a threat. He didn’t have to rely on being muscled up with baby oil dripping off of him to become a star.
Take Phil Hickerson as an example. Phil spent a lot of his career wrestling in the Memphis area. While he certainly didn’t look like a star by today’s standards, he was one tough son of a gun and you had no problem believing what he did was real. Above is a video to help get my point across, and if you’ve never seen many of these guys I’ve mentioned, I urge you to search out footage of them and see just how some of these less than stellar looking athletes were some of the better workers in the business. And as a special bonus in that video, the two muscled-up chumps Phil was beating on here grew up to be Sting and The Ultimate Warrior.
The great space saga known as Alpha Mission…..or kind of a Galaga knockoff. This was a cool game where you had a space fighter and the ability to upgrade its weapons and defense systems in the course of the gameplay. Once you earned more weapons, you could switch back and forth between them. At the end of each level was a boss, and that boss was only beatable by one of those special weapons….and you had to figure out which one and select it before you got to him. It was hard in the beginning, but soon it became one of those games that I would sit down for an hour and a half and run through the whole thing for fun.
I got Alpha Mission on the same night I got my Nintendo. When we went to pick it up, all my local Hills department store had were the Nintendo systems without any games. So my dad let me pick a game, and I picked Pro Wrestling. While there in the store, he decided he wanted to pick a game and he chose Alpha Mission. I was astounded that my old man was picking out a game to play. He was genuinely excited about getting a Nintendo, but I had my doubts about just how much he would actually sit down and play. Turned out I was right, as he only played Alpha Mission once. I’m glad he picked it up though because as noted earlier, it became one of my favorite games to kill time with.
This may be my favorite ad out of all of the many ones that were printed for the line. If it’s not at the top of my list, it’s certainly in the top five. The image of the kid having a ball playing with the MOTU figures with his Mom over his shoulder fills me with nostalgia because my own Mom would sometimes watch me play with various toys.
I have no idea where this ad originally appeared, but I can tell it was a two-page spread. Can you imagine how awesome it would be to be thumbing through some magazine and all of a sudden you turn a page and BAM!, this ad smacks you right in the face!
Looking at the figures that are prominent in the ad, it can be guessed that this ad is from 1984. Everything pictured was on the market by 1984, and I don’t see anything that was released in 1985 or later.
There are 18 different action figures from the line pictured, and I had 17 of them with the lone exception being Webstor. But I did get a chance to play with Webstor on occasion because my cousin Tim had him. I really dug the Webstor figure because of his cool backpack grappling hook feature that allowed him to scale objects with the pull of the string coming out of the bottom of the backpack.
Of the figures pictured here, it’s hard for me to narrow down my favorite. The Battle Armor He-Man and Skeletor figures were cool with their rotating check plates that showed increasing damage during battle. But Cobra Khan had the cool “spitting” feature where you could fill him up with water and pump his head like a spray bottle and it would squirt out of his mouth. Then there are Fisto and Jitsu with their action arm features, and Whiplash with his elongated rubber tail. Dang, those figures were just so much fun back then.
Besides the figures, you’ve also got both Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain present, showing off the cool playsets that were available as part of the line. I had both of those too. I got Castle Grayskull for Christmas one year, but can’t recall when and where I got Snake Mountain.
In closing, this ad just brings a ton of memories flooding back to me, and I wish I could go back in time…not just in body, but in mind and youthfulness and live through the boom period of the Masters of the Universe again.
