House of Eratosthenes

I got ’em all. If it was on the idjit box, somewhere around the time John Lennon was gunned down, and it was something you pleaded with your parents to watch, because on a Friday night there wasn’t anything else for you to do — I’ve got it. And…here’s the funny thing…I don’t really understand why. This was not the “golden age” of inspiring, thoughtful, deep or enjoyable television shows. But I got ’em. Several pounds of ’em. It’s like quicksand. You step into it, and some force that wasn’t there before, just kinda pulls you in.

I blame some of it on the kid. For someone born in 1997, he asks profound, insightful questions about this stuff. And he notices things I didn’t notice. Things, like Arsenio Hall used to say, that make you go “Hmmmm.” Like, for example — whenever The Incredible Hulk takes on a bad guy, the only thing he ever does to them is throw ’em. No hitting, no kicking, no gouging, no biting. And he never throws ’em into a brick wall, either. Or a plastic shredder or a vat of molten steel or a bottomless pit. Nope. It’s always a pile of squishy stuff. Raaaarrr!!! Aaaaiiigghh!! (Zoop!) Plop, into the pile of squishy stuff. The stagnant swamp water, the pile of foam rubber, the empty cardboard boxes in the warehouse.

Whenever Bill Bixby gets angry, there’s gonna be ugly middle aged white guys in leisure suits with muttonchop sideburns flying through the air like hackey sacks, yodeling, sailing headlong into piles of squishy stuff. And a big green guy.

Much of what is unexpectedly addictive, has to do with what is eerily consistent. The women are always docile but have lots of fashion sense. They’re gorgeous but don’t think about sex very much. They really, really do dream of settling down with a truly nice guy. I blame these television shows for the genesis of my miserable misadventures with girls and women, as I suspect most men my age do; it cost me serious money to figure out the hard way that women aren’t really like that. As for the guys — the footwear is always pointy. That’s a rule. The pants are flared at the ankles, up to the size of a basketball hoop. The butts are tight, tight, tight. Size 26. Size 24. Smaller still…which, by today’s standards, look a little silly when paired up with a flowy cowboy button-down shirt open down to the navel, with a shirt collar bigger than your dining room table. Back then, men didn’t shave their chests; quite to the contrary, they wore chest-toupees. If they really looked like that in real life, they’d have had to scrub their chests every other day to keep from getting dandruff. They could smuggle sandwiches in there. And another thing — they were amateur psychologists. They used unnecessarily extravagant magic-words like “self-esteem,” even if the most complex or exotic thing they’d ever done with their young lives was to smuggle moonshine past Roscoe P. Coltrane for their kindly uncle…and they recited canned pysch-babble phrases like “you can’t bottle up all your emotions inside,” and “you need to confront him with all this rage you’re feeling,” and “you mustn’t blame yourself.”

Princess Ardala Everyone had to rescue a Russian gymnast. Everyone. This was a rule nobody even thought of bending. It was like taking your turn on KP duty in the army, everyone had to do it at some time or another. Coy and Vance Duke had to do it. Buck Rogers had to do it. Yup, Buck Rogers rescued a Russian gymnast in the 25th century. Even James Bond had to do it. Twice. I do believe The Bionic Woman had to do it too, I just haven’t nailed down exactly the right episode yet. Goddamn, it was just raining doe-eyed whiny Russian gymnasts. There were more Russian gymnasts in need of rescuing than there were flattened rodents on the highway.

It was a time of transition. Toward the beginning of the era, the bad guys who you could tell were bad, because they were male, white, over 45 years old and they wore nice three-piece suits even at night — worked for government agencies. That was the Watergate influence. After Reagan was sworn into office, the bad guys were still male, still white, still over 45 years old, but now they worked for “corporations.” Nobody put a lot of trouble into figuring out why the corporations wanted to kill the good guy and the charmingly waifish but plucky single-mom he was constantly rescuing. The consensus that eventually emerged was that the corporations wanted to dump some toxic waste into the river. Yup. A complicated, fiendish plot to dump goop in a river. That must be quite the lengthy corporate income statement. Hit men, paid by the hour, to rub out anyone who gets in the way of us dumping our toxic waste into the river. And the hit mens’ suits, and moustache wax.

You might not have all this wonderful cultural decadence on your own DVD shelf, because you’ve been spending all your money and energy building up some silly iPod music collection, or some such. But don’t agonize over it. You mustn’t blame yourself.

The consensus that eventually emerged was that the corporations wanted to dump some toxic waste into the river. Yup. A complicated, fiendish plot to dump goop in a river.

Strangely, GE announced that the Hudson River will now be dredged with computerized machines, to displace the”extra” PCBs used as transformer insulation, to some “better” place in Texas.

I wonder if that means that pregnant women can eat more than one fish a week from the Hudson?
Are they swimming in Love Canal yet?
What color are the river banks down stream from the Tarrytown NY GM plant THIS week?

Apparently, the Nestle deal, forcing bottled Poland Spring bottled water (US$3.40/ 20oz. bottle at the NH movie theater-where they use the same aquifer source to fill their toilets, wash the sidewalks, mop the floors, and mix with soft drink syrup- after filtering) out of the hands of the folks that live where it ACTUALLY comes from (Fryeburg Me. ground well) and stuff, has whistled through the courts apace.
- CaptDMO | 05/21/2009 @ 00:27
Don’t forget Magnum P.I.–best show ever.
- sanskara | 05/21/2009 @ 11:42
I left out something…

Man with Pointy Shoes and Chest Toupee: Someone’s got to shut that plant down. I’ll be right back!

Doe-Eyed Plucky but Waifey Woman: I’m coming with you!

Man: No you’re not!

Woman: Yes I am!

I probably should have left it out because it was already goin’ strong by the zenith of the spy-movie era, in the mid-1960’s. It’s only starting to die out now, and still shows signs of life here & there. (Bond: “What do I need to defuse a nuclear bomb?” Christmas Jones: “Me.”) Rather remarkable that this trope survived, unscathed, during the late 1970’s when everything else was changing. Then again, the long life it had before this epoch, and continued to possess afterward, is a powerful argument for leaving it off the list.

There is another trope designed to pull in the feminist adoration that enjoyed more focused appeal during this time frame: One or two men get their asses kicked by one or two antagonists who remain somehow faceless during the ass-kicking. They lose a race, or they engage in fisticuffs with persons endowed with opaque headgear. The Big Reveal comes in right afterward, and — GAAAHH!! — they’re woemyn!! What a huge surprise!

Not quite so surprising when it’s done over and over again.
- mkfreeberg | 05/24/2009 @ 11:16

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