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The future was soo cool in the 80s and Knight Rider was no exception.  David Hasselhoff in his shining armoured car.  That’s got a better ring to it then ‘Ricky Ricardo Valenzuela and his flying guitar!”.  And KITT, don’t get me started, I always wanted a car that could talk to me, laugh at my jokes and stuff.  Now that I’m older and I can process this garbage show for what it is, I realize that KITT was probably a seriously depressed collection of AI routines.  You know what he had to deal with? KITT, tell me what to do.  KITT I got shot in the face and now I’m Michael Knight, I never really wanted to fight crime.  KITT, get me a coffee.  KITT, just watch while I do it and tell me if you get turned on, don’t worry no one can see us.  KITT probably really wanted to tell Michael to shove his keys right up his ass.  KITT probably never wanted to be a wussy Trans AM either.  He could have been a Lamborghini or a Ferrari or something; a car with some guts.

Yeah baby, I'm superfluous, but still awesome.

Remember this?

Yeah it was fun for awhile, until you got past level 10.  At which point you wanted Simon to just piss off and stop telling you to press buttons; but you couldn’t.  Many a broken Simon in my day.

If a female somebody wanted to be anybody in high school in the 80s, they wore leg warmers.  No exceptions.  Better if they were neon and striped too.  You just couldn’t be completely cool without this fashion faux-pas.  Invented by dancers, made popular by “Fame” and “Flashdance”, and made horrifically neon by capitalists, the leg warmer fad is something that I think most of us have probably erased from our brains.  Come on, you know you wore them, or at least you knew someone who did.  To find anyone willing to wear these neon nightmares in public nowadays would be a tough sell; you’d have a better chance of finding a metalhead wearing a sweater vest, it just doesn’t happen.

That's better, now I'm warm AND I look cool.

Ocean Hellman.  The stuff of which early adolescent wet dreams are made.  Nicole Roberts (played by Ocean Hellman) was every Canadian boy’s CBC fantasy when Danger Bay was at it’s peak in the mid-80s.  Jonah however (played by Chrisopher Crabb), was pretty much a class A douchebag, always getting himself into trouble that daddy (Donnelly Rhodes) had to get him out of by either battling rattle snakes (actually seen in the intro) or dealing with aquatic authorities.

Dangerous

Besides all that, Danger Bay showed us the importance of protecting marine life both in the wild and in captivity, the wholesomeness of a quality family life, and that if you’re a Danger Bay writer, you pretty much have the hardest job in the world creating new weekly story lines on a CBC budget with nowhere else to film except a hobo-filled Stanley Park.  And that’s why Danger Bay wins 1984.  Just check the teeeeeeight intro below.

Back in 1982, this bad boy was on every kids Christmas wish list.  Billed as the ‘good night friend’, the Glo worm promised to keep you safe in the dark with its warm, comforting glow.

Lets get real for a second.  Hasbro basically dressed up a flashlight to look like a giant, stoned worm. And kids loved it. They loved it because kids like anything that lights up. You could have put the flashlight inside of a giant piece of crap and kids would have loved it.  What’s more, the Glo Worm didn’t really fulfill its purpose. As a night time comfort toy you’d expect it to be soft and cuddly, but the reality is that when you squeezed it, it fucking hurt. I guess Hasbro tried to save a few pennies by forgoing some of the worm stuffing. What kind of sick company makes something so cute yet so unhuggable?

I swear I'm not high, I'm just really really tired.

On August 30, 1985 Starship unleashed unto the world an earful of pure kitsch in the 4 minutes and 56 seconds that comprises “We Built This City”.  Somehow, the song climbed steadily to the top of the charts in the US during that year.

Penned by the songsmith Bernie Taupin of Elton John fame and the remnants of Jefferson Starship/Airplane, “We Built This City” purports that a city, namely San Fransisco, was built on rock music. Now I’m not about to contest this aggrandizing claim but I am, however, going to ask Starship to pay me damages for suffering undue psychological hardship at the mercy of this song.  I know some of you out there are thinking, “Hey wait a second, I liked that song!”  No you didn’t.  You just think you did. Take another listen.

I just listen to it again and found myself doing the running man by 1:01. Fuck you Starship.

GI Tragedy

Released in 1987, GI Joe: The Movie was a direct-to-video disaster of epic proportions.  Straying too far from the comic book and subsequent animated series, the movie bore several shitty plot twists including the near death of the Duke (he falls into a coma only to awaken 45 minutes later, WTS?) and the hardly plausible transformation of Cobra Commander into a retarded looking snake.  To diehard fans this movie was nothing but a waste of hard earned paper-route-money.  Its only redeemable feature comes in the opening scene and involves all the Joes and Cobras in an epilepsy inducing battle on top of the Statue of Liberty, complete with an incredibly distracting soundtrack. For five minutes kids were in awesome heaven.

On a brighter note, the GI Joe animated series and ensuing PSAs are both major wins.   See PSA below.

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