Oh, how I wish I still had all of my original MOTU figures. One of the great crimes I’ve committed in my life is letting all the toys from my childhood go by the wayside in various ways. But I’m slowly working to rectify that situation, and am tracking them all down again. This Jitsu figure is an example of this, as this is not my original figure, but one I got from eBay.
I had more than my fair share of MOTU figures back in the day, and I’d put Jitsu in my top ten at least. He may actually be high on the list, but I’d have to sit and think about what order they would actually go in. That may have to be a post sometime in the future. But anyway, what I liked about this figure was the big golden judo chop hand he had. That thing was just so cool, and in my world, that hand could destroy just about anything with two exceptions. It could hurt He-Man, but not put him out, and it couldn’t destroy the iron fist that Fisto had. As a matter of fact, when Jitsu’s hand met Fistos fist, it was like what happened in The Avengers when Thor’s hammer struck Captain America’s shield. Yeah, they waged some hellacious battles in my bedroom through the years.
In my playtime, Jitsu was right up there in the ranks of Skeletor’s favored minions alongside Beast Man, Trap-Jaw, and Tri-Klops. He was there to take out any weapons that the Masters had on the field. Just get him close enough, and that golden judo chop could take out anything. Probably every time Skeletor was able to breach Castle Grayskull in my world, it was because Jitsu chopped the door down with ease, and not even the magic of Grayskull was strong enough to stop him.
First finding out about this movie was kind of an adventure on it’s own.
I can’t tell you when The Goonies first debuted on HBO. It had to be sometime in 1986 or maybe even as late as 1987. But either way, it was before we had cable at home. My dad and I stopped by his sister’s house one evening, and they lived in a part of town where you could get cable. While Dad was talking with his sister, I wandered into the living room where my younger cousin was watching TV. What I saw when I walked into the room were several kids coming out of what looked like a set of water slides in a cavern, and a huge pirate ship. I was immediately intrigued. I asked my cousin what this was and he replied that it was The Goonies, and he was watching it on HBO. Up until this point in time, I had no knowledge of this movie, but knew it was one that I wanted to watch in full.
This was around the same time we had gotten our first VCR and our first video rental store had just opened in town. The next time we went into that store, I inquired about The Goonies. The lady behind the counter told me it was a popular movie with kids my age, and that it was currently rented out. The story remained the same on the next several visits, but finally one day, the movie was in and I was able to rent it and finally give it a watch. I really enjoyed that first watch, and every subsequent watch through the years after that. Since my last viewing, about 15 years have passed. I remedied that situation this past weekend and watched the 4K UHD version. It’s still great.
The Goonies is a wonderful tale of a group of kids whose parents are all about to lose their houses to developers so they can knock them down and build a golf course in their place. Through some ingenuitive storytelling, the kids come across an old pirate’s map leading to a treasure hidden somewhere along the Astoria Oregon coast where they live. The kids set out on a treasure-seeking adventure hoping to find the loot and save their homes. Along the way, they have to deal with numerous booby traps and the murderous Fratelli family in order to find the treasure.
The Goonies is an absolute thrill ride. The group of kids and teens has a diverse set of personalities that play well with, and off of each other. And while all of the young actors perform their parts very well, it’s the set design of the underground world that they are traversing that I love the most. As they go through the various caves and encounter the various booby traps, I still find myself marveling at the design of it all. The dialogue and interaction between all of the characters in the film is superbly done as well.
I can’t imagine that kids around my age at the time could watch this movie and not be chomping at the bit to go on a similar adventure of their own. My friends and I were designing our own traps and mazes around our properties and going “adventuring” during sleepovers for a long while after this film debuted. And this speaks to how well done this movie was as a whole…when you can make an entire generation of kids want to recreate what was on screen, you’ve done a lot of things right.
Most of you reading this have probably seen it, but it’s definitely worth dusting off a copy and watching it again…especially if you now have kids of your own to share it with. I’m sure they’ll have the same sense of wonder that we did when we first saw it.
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.
I took my family on vacation this past week, and on the drive out of town the first morning, my mind started wandering while I was driving. The sun was up in the blue sky on a warm summer day, and I was headed down the highway. So my mind wandered back to many of the trips I took as a kid with my dad.
I’ve probably explained before but my dad traveled a lot when I was young, and in the summer, I would go on trips with him if he was only going to be gone for a couple of days. There was nothing quite like climbing into the front seat of his truck and pulling out on a sunny summer morning and hitting the road for the day.
It was the trips where we headed north that I really enjoyed, and that’s because we’d always stop at McDonald’s for breakfast. Now back in the mid to late 80s, the closest McDonald’s was 40 miles up the highway. While we had a McDonald’s just 12 miles south of us, we never stopped at it when we’d go south. But when going north we’d always stop. Can you imagine in today’s world not having a McDonald’s closer than 40 miles away?
The ad above represents the breakfast I remember from those days. Back then, they didn’t have biscuits on the menu yet, only the English muffins. I remember getting the Big Breakfast and enjoying the toasted English muffin with grape jelly. And I remember sitting there with my dad talking about the things we’d see along the route of the trip and feeling a lot bigger than I was. After breakfast was over I’d grab an extra coffee stirrer to play with in the truck, and we’d climb back in, push the Willie Nelson tape into the 8-track player, and hit the road again, with smiles on our faces.
Breakfast at McDonald’s always feels special to me. Even if I’m just hitting the drive-thru on my way to work in the mornings, there’s still a little magic in it thanks to those special stops years ago. And those are the memories that came back to me as we were rolling down the highway on vacation last week.
I’ll give you one guess as to where we stopped for breakfast.
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.
Last month MeTV announced they were launching MeTV Toons, a new 24/7 cartoon network full of classic cartoons. MeTV Toons has now announced its full schedule for when it launches on June 25, 2024, as the only TV network destination dedicated exclusively to classic animation.
The best part is unlike many classic TV channels that run long blocks of the same show over and over, MeTV Toons will launch with a diverse lineup of programs.
During weekday primetime it will offer classics like “The Flintstones,” “Bugs Bunny & Friends,” and “Cartoon All-Stars” with “Mr. Magoo” and “Tom and Jerry.” And during the day you will find programs like “The Flintstones,” “The Jetsons,” and “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” You can view the full schedule below.
Hey ramblers, I wanted to take a minute to let you all know about an exciting new project I’m working on. It’s a new newsletter/magazine called This Nostalgic Life that I’ve started alongside my good friend Eric Vardeman. A lot of you longtime visitors will remember Eric from his time posting content here at Retro Ramblings.
This Nostalgic Life is a weekly multi-media publication where we’re going back in time to tell the stories of our lives. Through personal stories and memories, we hope to entertain you and stir fond memories of your own.
Each issue of This Nostalgic Life will be overflowing with retro and nostalgic goodness and will contain special features such as Eric and/or I sharing tales from our youth. There will also be rotating sections such as Nostalgia Nuggets…short stories that aren’t quite feature length, Do You Remember articles looking back at the best of all things pop culture, short series, and more. And if you enjoy my Weekend Reading posts where I share a list of curated links every week, you’ll certainly want to check it out as that will now be the exclusive home of those Recommended Reading links every week. There are also plans to release a new podcast series, as well as audio versions of the features we present every week so you can listen to them on the go instead of reading them!
If you’re a subscriber here (and a lot of you are) or just a regular visitor and you like the things I post, then this newsletter is for you. There will be less “articles” about things, as the focus is more on the storytelling of events of our lives. There will still be plenty of things discussed like toys, junk food, comic books, video games, music, and movies…but with a lot more personal memories attached.
Eric and I both have a lot of stories to tell, and we feel that this is the medium best suited for doing so. The best part of all is that it is completely free for you the reader. And the second best part is that you can have it delivered directly to your inbox every time a new issue drops! All you have to do is click on the subscribe button below to be taken to the sign-up page.
Even if you somehow miss an issue in your inbox, you can go to the site and read them at your leisure. As a matter of fact, you should go check out the first two issues. For a sampling of what we’re doing, check out what’s appeared in the first two issues:
How I Almost Died at a Holiday Inn Holidome – by Mickey
Do You Remember? Stuckey’s
An acknowledgement of The Retro Network’s 5th Anniversary
Recommended Reading with a lot of summer nostalgia links
So if all of this sounds good to you…personal stories, special features, recommended reading, podcasts, audio posts, being free, and being delivered straight to your inbox, then please consider subscribing. We promise to try and make it worth your ten minutes to consume every week.
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.
Every weekend, I like to share a curated list of retro, geek, & nostalgia-themed articles, stories, and posts that I’ve come across in the last week. It gives you a chance to escape the daily grind, and just sit back and pass the time reading about what I call the good old days. So with that in mind, here are some things I wanted to share with you.
