House of Eratosthenes

I’m not altogether sure how this thing started. It seems, at one point, I told my son that back in the early 1980’s there was a law put in place that every well-known heroic figure on the large- or small-screen was obligated to, at some point, rescue a beautiful Russian gymnast. Which has a grain of truth to it, but later on he showed signs of having taken this too literally and that was a source of mild amusement. Nevertheless I had to get things back on track to reality and give up the facts supporting the kernel of truth in my tall tale.

That’s the way these things usually go…and this was a source of education for the whole household. Yes, it turns out, there was something of a “law.” A cultural edict.

I spun my tall tale out of the difficulty that is involved in explaining what was going on, to someone who was born well after it.

And what was going on, was that Nadia Comaneci‘s coaches had defected shortly after the 1980 Olympic games. Nadia herself did not. But her Soviet bosses were worried, and so they put up some goons to watch her 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. This all happened in plain sight of the rest of the world, which in turn could do nothing about it. So everyone was properly horrified.

In 1981, Comaneci participated in a gymnastics exhibition tour in the United States. During the tour, her coaches, Béla and Marta Károlyi, along with the Romanian team choreographer Geza Pozar, defected. Upon her return to Romania, Comaneci’s actions were strictly monitored. She was granted leave to attend the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles but was supervised for the entire trip. Aside from that journey, and a few select trips to Moscow and Cuba, Comaneci was forbidden to leave the country for any reason.” “Life…” she wrote in her autobiography, “took on a new bleakness.”

Well shortly after that, life took on a whole new bleakness for everyone else as well. Suddenly, beautiful Russian gymnasts were being rescued, kind of like bits of trash being swept up after a parade, from their evil Soviet overlords and creepy goons.

Bo and Luke Duke never rescued a Russian gymnast, but Coy and Vance certainly did. February 1983, 5th season, Episode 101.

Much to my surprise, it turns out Wonder Woman did. She rescued a bunch of athletes captured by a vicious criminal overlord to train for the Olympics — against their wills, naturally.

Buck Rogers got his in early, in February 1980. You know, even as a pre-teen, I was noticing the difficulty involved in envisioning this as a profitable side business for busy criminal masterminds…kidnapping athletes. Seems complicated.

James Bond sort of cavorted with a gymnast…which left the audience bemused, befuddled, and probably started Roger Moore’s real decline in this role. The great 007 passing up sex? And, you know, when we think about it for awhile, it seems ordering British nuclear submarines to sail off course by means of a stolen computer, doesn’t have an awful lot to do with gymnasts…

I’m still not sure about Charlie’s Angels, the Bionic Woman or the Incredible Hulk. I seem to recall finding a Knight Rider episode about this, but now the closest one I can find is Number 50, Season 3 which I’m quite sure isn’t it.

Tom Selleck’s comeback vehicle in 1989, was all about rescuing a beautiful Romanian gymnast from her spooky overlords.

And so for just shy of a decade, our western culture was locked into the mindset that the best & brightest we could find all the world over, would make wonderful sympathetic figures. Which in foresight, seems healthy — this would provide the inspiration for ordinary mortals, particularly young ones brought up in rustic conditions, to aspire toward godlike greatness, would it not? Alas, it didn’t work out that way. It migrated into a rather ugly television addiction…a television addiction in which gymnastic themes were thought to meld quite easily into other themes, dealing with superspies, supercars, good ol’ Georgia boys running moonshine for their uncle, an astronaut waking up after five centuries in suspended animation, and an Amazon princess who flies an invisible jet.

It can be explained to children, little green men, and other thinking beings who weren’t around to actually live through it. But only with great difficulty. And by “great” what I mean is…even if you are a highly skilled communicator dealing with a receptive frame-of-mind, you’re never going to quite get there. You kinda had to have been there.

We simply were not in a settled and collected frame of mind. We were nuts. Detached from reality. And we watched way too much television.

[…] I just love this bad guy. You know he’s extra, extra bad because not only does he show the proper attributes and accoutrements — he’s obviously over forty-five, and wearing a nice suit with the tie knotted all the way up to the collar — he almost certainly dresses the same way at night, which in the 1970’s nailed the whole thing shut. Good guys wore plaid shirts, and jeans that were skin-tight around the size-twenty-eight General Lee window-wriggling ass, legs that trumpeted out to the size of manhole covers around the ankles. They did their good-guy things like jump up in the air and perform flying scissor-kicks, talk about self-esteem, tell beautiful naive young women they mustn’t blame themselves for something, and they rescued a lot of Russian gymnasts. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/28/2009 @ 06:26

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On Rescuing Beautiful Russian GymnastsSaturday, January 12th, 2008

On Rescuing Beautiful Russian Gymnasts
Saturday, January 12th, 2008