Back in the summer of 1996, I was working full-time at the grocery store that I would go on to work at for a decade. I had just graduated high school and was fortunate to be in the position of having friends from school and friends from work to hang out and do stuff with.
When the ads for Independence Day started dropping, several of those friends and I were getting excited to see this latest summer blockbuster. The little two-screen theater in the town where I worked was a weekly stop for us as we took in at least one movie every week. When Independence Day weekend rolled around, there was no question as to what movie we were going to be watching.
Independence Day is the story of an alien race coming to Earth to take it over for its resources. After a first strike that wipes a lot of major world cities off the map, the US stages a counter attack that is ineffective. Fortunately, the world has an ace up it’s leave in genius Jeff Goldblum. He figures out a way to weaken the aliens, and a rag-tag group of former combat pilots led by the President show the way to bring down the hostile invaders, and the world lives to see another day. One of the hooks of the movie is that the events take place across July 2, 3, and 4 in the movie, leading to the United States declaring it’s freedom on the 4th of July once again.
Independence Day was the major summer blockbuster of 1996, and all of the hyp leading up to it had me very excited to see it. Watching it in the theater there was an electric mood as the packed house loved every minute of the spectacle.
It was also a breakout performance for Will Smith. Up until this point, he had starred in the movie Bad Boys and was still a sensation on the hit TV show Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but this was his coming out party as a major leading man in Hollywood.
With it’s massive scope, incredible effects, and all-star cast, Independence Day became one of the biggest movies of the ’90s, and one I still go back and watch every Independence Day weekend.
I was always a fan of the Marvel Comics series What If?, where they would take classic stories, give them a twist, and give us readers a look at what might have been. I’m doing the same thing here with a classic moment in wrestling history.
Let me set the stage for you. In 1993, Yokuzuna was the WWF champion and portrayed as an evil Japanese bad guy. He was dominating the competition, and at over 500 lbs. he was a massive wrestler. In celebration of Independence Day, the WWF brought Yokuzuna to the U.S.S. Intrepid that was harboured in New York City for a body slam challenge. They invited several celebrities to come and try slamming the big man, as well as several good guys from the WWF. No one was able to get Yokozuna off his feet and slam him.
Just when it looked as if no one could pull it off and the challenge was over, a helicopter came into sight and landed on the deck of the intrepid. Off stepped Lex Luger, who up until this very moment was a bad guy in the WWF, but had a history of being a very popular good guy. He came off the helicopter decked out in an American flag pattern shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. He climbed into the ring, gave Yokozuna a shot and then lifted him into the air and slammed him to become the WWF’s #1 good guy and all-American hero.
What followed that event was a summer tour on a bus to drum up support for his title match against Yokozuna at that year’s Summerslam event. The push didn’t go as anticipated, and Luger never really captured the imagination of fans across the country the way the WWF was hoping, and the whole thing fizzled out when he didn’t win the title at the end of the summer.
But let me give you an alternate version of events that I think might have went a little better for everyone involved…
By 1993, Sting was solidly the face of World Championship Wrestling, the WWF’s chief rival. While he had a contract with WCW, it was not impossible to get out of them at the time, and if the WWF had shelled out a buyout payment, they could have probably gotten Sting’s services for their company. Imagine if when the helicopter landed, instead of Luger getting off, it was Sting wearing his American flag ring coat and American flag face paint like he wore at Great American Bash ’90. It would have been patriotic as hell.
The shock of the crowd in attendance would have been off the chart as they would have just watched WWF alumni and celebrities alike try and fail to slam Yokozuna. Then there would come the most popular wrestler from another company, give one of the passionate promos that Sting was known for, and then be the one to give Yokozuna the slam for all of America.
Sting would have been on a wave of popularity, unlike anything he had seen up to this point. If he had gotten the bus tour, he likely would have gotten over much better with the people all around the country and probably would have been popular enough to get the title win over the evil sumo wrestler at the end of the summer.
Who knows what the future would hold from that point forward, but certainly a feud with former best friend and still bad guy Lex Luger would have been very likely. It may have even led to a showdown at Wrestlemania the following March.
We’ll never know, but I like to sit around and wonder, What If?
After a long hot week at work, my body has been craving fresh fruit. So I got up and went to the local grocery store this morning to pick up some various fruits to satisfy my cravings.
The first thing that greeted me in the produce section was a display of fresh-cut watermelon. All of it had a nice deep red color and looked like it would be full of flavor, so I picked up a quarter of one to enjoy this afternoon along with some other tasty choices.
But once I chunked it up and started to eat it, I quickly realized that looks had been deceiving. While it looked really ripe, it had a mostly bland taste and was devoid of the sweetness of the watermelons of years ago. This seems to be a trend over the last decade or two, and I guess it’s because most watermelons you can get these days are the hybrid ones, and the ones engineered to be seedless. With each of these iterations, the watermelon loses something.
I can remember as a kid getting a watermelon was a big deal. They were super sweet and everyone wanted a piece. I can remember numerous times, someone in my mom’s family would pick one up, and then call the rest of the family to meet at the grandparents and have some. There were many Sunday afternoons that my grandparent’s front porch would be full of my aunts and uncles, and their front yard was full of us grandkids all chowing down on juicy watermelon and spitting seeds everywhere.
And as you’ll read later this week in the latest issue of the This Nostalgic Life newsletter, the nightly watermelon races were a big part of wagon train every year. I can’t imagine anyone running as hard as they can to try and win one of today’s watermelons. That really speaks to the loss of sweetness through the years.
Or maybe all of this equates to me finally turning into an old fogey who just complains about how things aren’t as good as they used to be. Maybe I’m just one step away from yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
Days of Thunder hit theaters in 1990, and I was all in on it. All in except for actually going to see the movie itself in the theater. Back then, it was rare to convince my folks to go to a theater to catch a movie, so I usually had to live vicariously through whatever promotional tie-in merchandise was available when new movies came out. That task was made more difficult by the fact that a lot of my friends at school were getting to go to the movies on a regular basis to see whatever the hot new thing was, and I just had to stand around and listen to them talk about how awesome it was, and Days of Thunder sure sounded exciting.
Sure I had seen the trailers for it during television commercial breaks, and I have some faint memories of reading about it in a magazine. Maybe something like an issue of Cinescape, or maybe there was a special one-shot magazine released for it or something. I don’t know, but either way, I knew what the movie was even before my friends were describing all the details to me.
But anyway, Hardee’s rolled out these Thunder Racer cars, and I really wanted them. First, they were tied to a hot new movie that I wanted to see. Second, they were 1/64 scale die-cast cars and I was already a lover of both Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars and had quite the growing collection. And third, it was an additional toy I could snag on the weekend. I say additional because I would spend my weekly allowance on a toy while shopping on the weekend, but this gave me an opportunity to get a freebie.
You could get a Thunder Racer car for just $0.99 with any purchase…not just a kid’s meal. But it might as well have been offered with the kid’s meal as far as I was concerned because that was probably what I was ordering then, and there was no way I was leaving Hardee’s without a Thunder Racer car!
But you couldn’t just get them all on one visit, as a different one was available each week as you can see in the earlier photo. This meant that four separate trips had to be made to Hardee’s to get them all. A feat that I was unfortunately unable to pull off. I managed to get the first three…the City Chevrolet, the Superflow car, and the Hardee’s car but missed out on the Mello Yello one for some reason. Luckily for me, they were quickly released by Racing Champions as well and I was able to get the Mello Yello car that way. I never end up with Rowdy Burns’ Exxon car though.
I’m not sure what, if anything, was actually included in the Funmeal Pack meal promotion that was out at the time. I know the box featured Days of Thunder artwork, but I distinctly remember having to purchase the cars separately.
As I continued to get the various ones I had, they began to dominate play time in my room. At the time I had a few other Racing Champions cars as well, so NASCAR races were taking place on a regular basis that summer. Most of those races were won by the green and yellow City Chevrolet, but every now and then, that beautiful orange Hardee’s with Russ Wheeler at the wheel snuck out a win.
But now let’s talk just a bit about the Days of Thunder cups you could also get from Hardee’s. My brother was a big fan of special cups in general, but Hardee’s cups in particular. He has a full set of those Moose cups at one time, and numerous others as well. At this point in time, he had no trouble attaining whatever special merchandise like this he wanted as he had a job and was driving.
While I never personally cared for most cups like these, the Days of Thunder cups were ones I really wanted. I guess I just wanted to show my support for a movie that I hadn’t seen for some reason. Or I just thought they were really cool looking. Or both.
The artwork on the cups is great, and the colors really pop. I like how the Days of Thunder title logo appears on the cup in the same color as the car featured on each one. You can’t see it in the photo above, but on the backs of the cups were stats on the drivers of the cars. That could be perceived as a little lazy though since Cole Trickle drove three of the cars featured, and the stats could all be the same.
I can’t begin to calculate how much money my mom had to spend at Hardee’s on me that summer. But the food had to be bought to purchase the cars. They were $0.99 each. And you had to buy a 32oz drink to get a cup. Well, now that I think about it, I guess you could purchase a 32oz drink and get the cup, and make that the purchase that qualified you to buy a Thunder Racer car. Maybe she didn’t spend all that much after all.
Regardless of how much was spent, it was all worth it in my eyes because I can remember that summer better than most, and I always refer to it as the “summer of thunder”.
This Nostalgic Life issue #3 dropped today. Featured in this issue is Eric telling the story of the longest summer of his life when he was stuck in a town in the middle of nowhere in Texas. In the story, he relates how lonely the time was, and what he did to entertain himself that summer. Mixed in are fun tales of his experience with Live Aid and the theatrical release of The Goonies.
Also in this issue, I provided a Nostalgia Nugget as a backup to Eric’s main feature, and this week’s crop of Recommended Reading links. We also unveil a new feature in this issue, as an audio voice over version of Eric’s feature is available in the post so you can listen to it instead of reading it if you prefer.
I urge you to check it out, and if you like what you find, consider subscribing. We publish a new issue every Wednesday, it gets delivered straight to your email inbox automatically, and it’s free. You can also unsubscribe at any time, but I doubt you will want to. Just click the photo above to be taken to the current issue and see what you think.
The TRN Time Machine podcast is back! As a way to honor Jason’s podcasting legacy, we’re re-releasing classic episodes from the original Retro Network Podcast, as well as classic episodes from the early days of the Time Machine podcast. In addition, we’ll be releasing previously restricted episodes of Grocery Stories, Outtakes, and the critically acclaimed TRN After Hours podcast that until now have only been available to Patreon subscribers.
The Patreon-only library has almost 100 episodes that until now have only been heard by a few people. They are packed with so much Jason goodness that we can’t keep these episodes locked away any longer. While Jason may no longer be with us in person, he is still with us in spirit, and releasing these episodes will give everyone a chance to hear more stories and memories from Jason and help keep his memory alive.
If you’ve never done so, be sure to subscribe to the TRN Time Machine podcast in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode.
Here is the first release of this new round of Time Machine episodes, featuring a classing from the very early days where Jason and myself rehash old summer memories. Enjoy!
From the late ’80s through the early ’90s, one of my daily rituals in the summertime was to go inside during the hot part of the day and veg out in front of the television and cool off for an hour or two. Back then, I didn’t have many television channels, so there wasn’t much channel surfing to be done. I could watch soap operas on the networks, or watch whatever was on the local PBS station, and boy was I lucky with what my local PBS station, Blue Ridge Public Television, was showing every afternoon.
Blue Ridge Television offered up a block of cooking shows for two hours, followed by Bob Ross. While I didn’t care much for the Julia Child cooking show that started the block, it was followed by Justin Wilson whom I enjoyed, then Yan Can Cook which was also fun, but the last cooking show in that block was my favorite, and one I still watch episodes of today via YouTube, and that show was Cookin’ Cheap. No matter what else was going on in my world on those summer days, I was intent on being inside from 1:30 to 2:00 PM to catch the show.
Cookin’ Cheap was a popular comedy cooking show that was produced from 1980-2002. For most of its run, it was hosted by Laban Johnson and Larry Bly who prepared recipes and shared a lot of laughs. The show was recorded straight through with no stops and no rehearsals so if the guys dropped or burned it, we the viewers got to see it.
In 1980, Laban Johnson, who was already an established cook on local TV came up with an idea for his own television show. He was a funny guy, but fortunately, he realized that much of his humor came from playing off of someone else, so he decided to invite a friend, Larry Bly, on to the show as his sidekick. Larry’s quick wit was already well known in the area, thanks to his radio and TV on-air shenanigans, as he was a local radio DJ.
Laban Johnson (left) and Larry Bly (right) on the set of Cookin’ Cheap in the Blue Ridge Public Television studio in Roanoke VA.
After deciding that the show could work as a comedy cooking show using mostly viewer recipes, it was decided to pitch the show to a local TV station. Shortly after that, a “pilot” was shot, shown to some local potential sponsors, and the rest, as they say, is history.
What made the show great wasn’t the food. The recipes come from viewers, the ingredients from the freezer, cans, and cardboard boxes. In the poor studio light, the dishes, casseroles, meatballs, bean salads, and dips most times ended up looking like glop.
And it wasn’t the culinary skills either. The hosts were amateurs. They struggled to open zip-lock bags and fumble in their oven mitts the way you or I would. Their kitchen would get messy and sometimes dangerous, as they juggled hot trays and employed questionable knife skills while chopping. They puzzled over pronunciations, and spent a lot of time on boring prep work, because, as Larry would confess, if they didn’t, the show would be a lot shorter.
The way that they incorporated more comedy into the show than technique made it feel like they were your neighbors instead of professional cooking show hosts. What I loved most is that it wasn’t just more of that fake Southern thing, which is all around us these days, as Laban and Larry were the real deal. They were both from Roanoke VA where the show was filmed, and just 2 hours up the road from where I lived.
While the show was filmed in Roanoke VA to air on the local Blue Ridge Public Television station, it was so popular that it was picked up and syndicated by other PBS affiliates all around the country. It was the only original program of Blue Ridge Public Television that got syndicated, showing just how good this show was.
More than any other cooking show I’ve seen in my life, Cookin’ Cheap made you feel like you could truly replicate what they were doing in your own kitchen. My mom was a big fan of the show as well, and we would watch it together every afternoon. And we would end up trying a lot of the recipes we saw them cook on the show. And that might be the biggest reason I’m so fond of this show. We would attempt those recipes, and others, together. Both of us in the kitchen at the same time, each creating a dish that we would sit down and share for dinner. Without even acknowledging that we were copying the format we had learned from watching Cookin’ Cheap, we were performing our own version a couple of nights each week.
Laban Johnson passed away suddenly in 1999. Larry Bly tried to keep the show going, bringing in one of Laban’s friends to replace him, but the chemistry wasn’t there, and the experiment only lasted one season and then the show was canceled. It was the end of an era for a show that helped instill in me a love for cooking and helped to create so many great memories of cooking with my mom. If Retro Ramblings had a Hall of Fame, Laban Johnson and Larry Bly would be first-ballot entries for that fact alone.
I’m including this post as part of the Retro Ramblings Summer Vacation ’24 because it was a part of many of the summers of my youth. I wanted to feature one of their videos, and what better one to pick to go along with the summer vacation theme than this episode where they are preparing a couple of cook-out dishes. Check it out and see what you think.
When Backdraft originally debuted back in 1991, I desperately wanted to see it. As I’ve explained before though, my parents weren’t the movie theater type. And as I was only 13 at the time of its release, I wasn’t going to be going by myself. The closest I got to it was having to hear my brother talk about how great it was after he and his friends saw it. But a year later, it was on HBO and other channels like it all the time so I got to see it finally thanks to the cable descrambler we had. My brother and I probably watched in a dozen time that summer it debuted on PPV and HBO.
It’s about a group of Chicago firefighters on the trail of a serial arsonist who is targeting various victims who are contractors who are connected to each other and a high-ranking city official.
Stephen McCaffrey (Russell) is the Lueinent of Engine Company 17, and his younger brother Brian (Baldwin) is a probationary fireman assigned to the company after graduation from the academy. The two brothers are the sons of a legendary Chicago firefighter who lost his life battling a blaze while young Brian watched on. As the movie reveals, the two brothers have never been close, and are at odds with each other more than on the same page.
After several firehouses are shut down due to budget cuts, the arsonist starts taking out the decision-makers behind those cuts by setting deadly “backdraft’ fires to murder them. Company 17 finds itself as the company that ends up fighting those fires, while Inspector Donald Rimdale (DeNiro) is the one tasked with finding the arsonist behind the attacks. It all climaxes at a large fire at a chemical plant where the killer is revealed and the McCaffrey brothers must stop him once and for all. All while battling the huge blaze.
Growing up in the ’80s with a Dad who was the local fire department chief, I was always fascinated by firemen and firefighting in general. Now while I was never a fireman myself, I do know more about it than most others who were not. And what you see in Backdraft is pretty close to how things are. The camaraderie displayed between the firemen in the film feels real and on point. And the firefighting sequences are top-notch. The arson investigation is pretty straightforward, but you can’t really guess who is behind it until near the end of the film when everything comes together. The writers did a pretty good job though of trying to lead you to one conclusion of who the killer is before revealing the true villain.
Backdraft was a blockbuster in the truest sense of the word, and everything about the movie was well executed. The story arc of Kurt Russell’s Stephen McCaffrey may be the best thing about the film. From being the overprotective brother to being the ultimate badass fireman, right through to the final confrontation and climax, Stephen “Bull” McCaffrey was a story well told. Kurt Russell was more than the commander of Engine Company 17…he also carried a commanding presence in his performance.
Backdraft was a blockbuster in its time for a reason and is still a yearly summer re-watch for me even now. It was a “big” movie with a big cast who were hitting on all cylinders at the time, and it lived up to the hype with its special effects and storytelling. There’s not much more that you could ask from a movie like this.
Garfield in Paradise is a half-hour animated special that debuted in 1986. It was the fifth animated Garfield special and ran as a special presentation in primetime in the summers for a few years. I would scour the latest TV Guide every week in the summer looking for an air date until it would finally show up. It was appointment television for me every year. Why I never made a VHS recording of it I have no idea.
Now for me, no other Garfield special tops the Christmas one, but Garfield in Paradise was a close second for a very long time. It may still hold that spot. I’d have to sit and think on it for a bit to confirm that though. But since we are now in the heart of summer, I thought it would be a great time to watch it again. Here it is in all its glory for you to enjoy. But if you’d rather watch it on some large screen, I believe it’s available on Pluto TV.
Now that we have warm weather and sunny skies throughout most of the country on a regular basis, it’s time to declare it officially summer! And with that proclamation, I’m celebrating that fact here at Retro Ramblings by sharing a slew of summer-themed nostalgia from now through August 31.
Throughout the summer you’ll find plenty of retro summer-themed posts. Plenty of summer memories to be shared, so if you haven’t done so yet, be sure to bookmark or add Retro Rambling to your favorite RSS reader so you don’t miss any of the fun.
If you do happen to miss something, you can just click on the summer vacation image at the top of the sidebar to see all of the summer-themed posts.
Nabisco unleashed Suddenly S’Mores on the world in 1990, and I was in on them early on. I had seen the commercial numerous times and was on the lookout for them at the grocery store every time we went. Growing up in our rural area, we were always behind other parts of the country when it came to the timeliness of receiving new junk food on the shelves.
So after a while, we finally got them in our area, and I was elated. I remember when we first opened them. They were such a novelty at the time, that the whole family wanted to try them, so there we were, all four of us gathered around the microwave to watch the magic. That’s because the gimmick of Suddenly S’Mores was that it was an uncooked s’more basically. There were the two “graham crackers”…really just two graham-flavored cookies, chocolate on each one of them, and some kind of dehydrated marshmallow sandwiched in the middle. You had to microwave them and then you’d have fresh, warm, gooey s’mores.
Back then, microwave doors were a little harder to see through than they are now, and my mom was a big proponent of how a microwave would destroy your eyes if you looked into it while it was cooking, so she was trying her best to keep my dad, my brother, and me away from the door. All of this took place in like 15 seconds because that’s about all the time they needed to do their thing.
Clipping courtesy of the Sun Herald June 06, 1990
When the first one was ready, I got the honor of trying it. At the same time, my brother was putting one in to try. That first package we had didn’t make it through the first night. We liked them so much, we ate the whole thing!
Of course, Mom was much more willing to part with the money they cost on the next visit since Dad asked her to get more. Our enthusiasm waned a little and the second pack lasted two nights. Things went on like this a couple of more times before the novelty really wore off for everyone in the family but me. I loved those things and was enjoying them on a regular basis.
Then one afternoon I was too lazy to microwave them and just opened a pack and ate one. I found that they were just as delicious as the microwaved version but in a different way. It’s hard to explain, but I really liked them straight from the package. I started taking them to school in my lunch as my dessert and soon found another redeeming quality about them…they were incredible trade bait at lunchtime. Since they came two in a pack (I think), I was able to enjoy one and trade the other for things like a pack of Shark Bite fruit snacks, half of a fruit roll-up, or any number of other tasty treats.
It’s hard to dig up much information about how long these lasted on the market, but I don’t think they made it past 1990. It was a heartbreaker when I finally accepted the truth that they were gone and wouldn’t be coming back. It’s still one of the junk foods I miss the most all these years later.
Ever since I was a young retro rambler, board games have been one of my favorite types of toys. While not a “toy” in a traditional sense, board games still made up a large part of my playtime through the years. I’ve written before about several of my favorites, but I’ve yet to talk about Hog Tied, the game of chase and chance. Let’s remedy that travesty here today.
To start with, let me tell you a little bit about the game. It was produced by Selchow and Righter. You may recognize the name as the one behind classic games Parcheesi, Scrabble, and Trivial Pursuit. They would eventually be bought out by Coleco in 1986, who in turn went bankrupt and had their assets purchased by Hasbro. But in 1981, they released Hog Tied.
Hog Tied is a two-player game, where the object is to capture all of the opposing player’s pigs and/or hogs. Each player has five pigs and five hogs, but only the pigs are in the game at the beginning. The five pigs start the game on the starting row, and advance their way across the board, trying to reach the opposing player’s starting row. If they reach the starting row, a pig becomes a hog. Pigs can only be captured by hogs, so getting your pigs to the other side of the board is the first goal of the game. Once you have hogs, you can then start capturing your opponent’s pigs. Hogs can move in any direction, backward and forwards, while pigs can only advance in a forward direction.
