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Cannonball Run turns 30 years old

Posted in 80s, Cannonball Run, movies, nostalgia, pop culture with tags anniversary, Cannonball Run, movies, pop culture on June 19, 2011 by Paxton

Cannonball Run ad

The classic road race movie The Cannonball Run was released on Jun 19, 1981, 30 years ago today. It starred Burt Reynolds, Dom Deluise, Roger Moore, Jamie Farr and a host of other celebrities like Jackie Chan, Farrah Fawcett, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Terry Bradshaw and Adrienne Barbeau.

Watch the trailer:

Some interesting trivia about the film:

The film was originally going to be a straight up action flick starring Steve McQueen. After McQueen’s death, the lead was given to Burt Reynolds and the script was re-written as a comedy.

The race in the movie is based on an actual, real life race that took place over several years in the 70s. I discuss the origins of the real race; The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash here.

Many of the vehicles, including the ambulance driven by Reynolds and Deluise, were actually entered and run in the real life Cannonball races in the late 70s.

Roger Moore plays Seymore Goldfarb, Jr, a spoof of James Bond, who he was portraying at the time. In the race, he drives an Aston Martin which is famously linked to the British secret agent. However, Moore never drives an Aston Martin in the seven movies he appeared as James Bond. This movie is the only on-screen pairing of Moore and the famous car.

This movie features one of Jackie Chan’s first US appearances. His character is Japanese, even though Chan himself is Chinese. Chan was inspired by director Hal Needham’s use of bloopers during the end credits and from this point on would do the same in all of his own movies.

Burt Reynolds and Dom Deluise appeared together in Smokey and the Bandit Part II the previous year. This movie makes several references to that earlier movie including Reynolds mentioning the black Trans-Am and Deluise referencing his doctor character.

Watch the end credit outtakes

The Cannonball Run had two sequels. The first was The Cannonball Run II in 1984. Part II reunited the majority of the cast from the first movie. The second sequel was Speed Zone in 1989. The only returning character in the third movie was Jamie Farr’s The Sheik. The two leads were John Candy and Eugene Levy, friends who appeared together on SCTV and in the movie Armed and Dangerous. Their casting was an attempt to recreate the chemistry of original leads, and friends, Burt Reynolds and Dom Deluise.

This movie still holds up today. Reynolds and Deluise are hilarious and it seemed the entire cast had a blast filming the movie. Part II also holds up very well and fans may actually remember more scenes from Part II than the original.

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DC Comics going retro with summer one-shots

Posted in 80s, comic books, pop culture, Superman, The Flash with tags comic books, DC Comics, Superman, The Flash on April 8, 2011 by Paxton

I’m a big DC Comics fan. I love Superman and the Flash. I even wrote a post about their many races. So I was perusing the DC comic blog The Source the other day and they announced a fun little event called DC Retroactive. It takes place this summer and is a throwback to the DC of the last three decades (70s, 80s and 90s).

The event will consist of 18 one-shot comics. The 18 one-shots will be split up into three groups representing the aforementioned specific decade in DC’s history. Here are the Retroactive logos for each decade starting with the ’70s.

I love these logos. They look exactly like the logos/typeface DC used in the respective decade. Like I said, the 18 one-shots will be split up into the three groups of six. Each group will utilize different writers/artists that are known for their output in that decade. DC just announced the writers for each decade and what comics they’ll be writing. They haven’t released the artists for each issue, but you can click the images above to read the full list of writers. Expect DC luminaries like Cary Bates, Marv Wolfman, Louise Simonson, Alan Grant, and Dennis O’Neill.

My favorite hero, The Flash, will be written by Cary Bates (70s), William Messner-Loebs (80s) and Brian Augustyn (90s). I’m very excited by these writers. Bates is a very popular writer from DC. He did a lot of his work in the ’60s – ’70s. He wrote a bunch of Silver Age Flash comics throughout the ’70s and early ’80s. Bates will also write the ’70s JLA issue. William Messner-Loebs wrote a slew of issues of the awesome Wally West Flash series starting around issue #15 in 1988. I still have the majority of his issues in my collection. Brian Augstyn was the editor on the aforementioned Wally West Flash series. He was the one that brought in Mark Waid in the early ’90s to help him plan a revamping of the series (Waid would’ve been another good choice to write the 90s issue). So, from the writing standpoint, these are all solid choices for the Flash books, which are the ones I’m mostly concerned about. However I am looking forward to the Superman books, too.

As for the other heroes, DC got Marv Wolfman to do the 80s Superman book. Great choice as he helped John Byrne plan out the Superman reboot of 1986, but I would have preferred to see John Byrne also included. They haven’t announced the artists, so they could have got John Byrne to draw the issue, which would be awesome. I think Byrne has to be involved in this event because he was such a large presence at DC in the 80s when he wrote and drew both Superman and Action Comics for nearly two years.

Anyway, to see the full list of writers, head over to DC’s The Source. They should be announcing the artists and other creative teams for these books in the near future. I, for one, think this is shaping up to be an awesome and wonderfully nostalgic event. DC didn’t say, but I’m hoping the stories for each decade actually take place in that decade. I want Barry Allen in the ’70s issue and Wally West in the ’90s. I don’t want it to just be nostalgic, I want the events to be taking place in that time period.

Should be a lot of fun.

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Looking back at my elementary school sticker collection

Posted in 80s, collecting, Ghostbusters, Michael Jackson, movies, pop culture, stickers with tags collecting, Ghostbusters, Michael Jackson, movies, nostalgia, pop culture, stickers on March 29, 2011 by Paxton

Shawn over at Branded in the 80s has a great feature called Peel Here that showcases his amazing 80s sticker collection. I was cleaning up my garage a while ago and found my own sticker collection in one of the boxes. It was complete with even some extra pages full of stickers stuck inside, plus my collection of bumper stickers and tons of my old Garbage Pail Kids.

So, in the tradition of Shawn’s Peel Here I thought you’d like to take a look inside a mid-1980s elementary school sticker collection. It could be awesome, it could be totally embarrassing. Today I’ll look at the main sticker collection. Later I’ll take a look at my collection of bumper stickers and finally I’ll go through a bunch of the Garbage Pail Kids.

So, without further to do, let’s see the types of stickers I liked to collect in elementary school. You can click all these images to see them bigger in Flickr.

Here’s the cover of my sticker album. I honestly can’t remember where I got this sticker binder. It was probably a gift from my mom or my grandmother. I covered up it’s puffy, purple-ness with badass, macho Mr T stickers. The Mr T stickers are pretty awesome. They feature Mr T doing manly things like bending a steel pipe with his bare hands and lifting up a f**king semi over his head. But, for some reason, they are…puffy stickers. Puffy stickers were the girly cousin of regular stickers. Mr T puffy stickers are like painting a Corvette pink. WTF? If you ask me, the makers of those stickers are sending mixed messages to kids.

I don’t remember what the giant white ripped sticker on the cover was before I tore it off. I apparently changed my mind about liking that particular sticker. I was a fickle elementary school child. The faded white stickers with the green border under all that mess were for Mr B’s delicatessen. It was located in Independence, KS and owned by my aunt and uncle.

Let’s look inside this awesome tome of sticker archeology. First up is a separate page (front and back) of stickers I had shoved into the binder.

These are not a part of the actual sticker album. I think I acquired them separately in a trade. They mostly consist of “scratch and sniff” stickers. You can see candy apples in the right hand page and cinnamon rolls and bumble bees in the left hand page. Okay, these pages are slightly embarrassing. Not exactly the type of stickers I remember liking. “Scratch and sniff” stickers of cinnamon rolls and candy apples are about as manly as pink fluffy toilet seat covers. That is to say, not very.

The yellow “Cheap Thrills” sticker and the white Putt-Putt sticker in the right hand page are mine. Cheap Thrills was a “mom and pop” record store a friend of the family owned in Birmingham, AL. The sticker was a price sticker used on LPs. We had huge rolls of these stickers at home. I remember putting them on nearly every surface in the house. Lightswitch covers, walls, furniture, pets. They were EVERYWHERE.

The Putt-Putt in which I obtained the white sticker was located in Hoover just off Hwy-31. It turned into a Krispy Kreme a few years later, but I think even that is closed now. The sticker appears to be a 1 free game coupon. I must have got a hole-in-one. I wonder why I never used it.

Here’s the front and back of the first page in the sticker album. It’s actually not a page, but a clear plastic case that would hold the actual page. I don’t know what happened to the page. However, I needed the real estate so I started putting stickers all over it. My favorites of this group are probably all the McDonaldLand stickers. In the center and in the corners on the left as well as the corners on the right. You’ll see forgotten characters like The Professor, The Captain, The Fry Guys, and Officer Big Mac. As well as stalwarts The Hamburglar, Birdie the Early Bird and Grimace. If I’m not mistaken, the Reese’s Pieces sticker on the right page is from a group of ET stickers. I’m not too happy with the hearts behind them, though.

Okay, here are the actual first pages of the sticker album. We start off with some Michael Jackson puffy stickers. I loved MJ so you’ll see a bunch of those (and of course, these are puffy). There is also an Orko (puffy!) on the left and two Ghostbusters stickers under that. The red and white “Mi” sticker is from a company my dad worked for, Motion Industries. The black and gold Racing Team sticker is taken from a remote control Smokey and the Bandit Firebird. You can see the top and bottom stickers from the Rubik Missing Link puzzle. On the right you can see a bunch of generic 80s “exclamation” stickers. Good Show! Fantastic! Dynamite! Super! I have no idea where those came from. Or the giant ice cream cone (the hell?). The two rectangle stickers in the upper right came from the Cracked Monster Party magazine. The tennis ball stickers came from my parents. They were avid tennis players when I was growing up.

Continue reading →

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Awesomeness Elsewhere – Mar 18, 2011

Posted in 80s, blogging, movies, music, pop culture, rap with tags blogging, Freddy Krueger, music, nostalgia, pop culture, rap, The Fat Boys on March 18, 2011 by Paxton

Where you can find me this week on the Internets:

— New Forgotten Favorites this week. It involves one of my favorite rap groups. Come see me talk nostalgically about The Fat Boys and how they would rap about comic books and movies. They also had songs with The Beach Boys, Chubby Checker, Freddy Krueger and William “The Refrigerator” Perry.

— I run down the more interesting DVDs/Blu-Rays that went on sale this week. Come see WrestleMania, BMX Bandits and Sharktopus. Yes, I said SHARKTOPUS.

— Over on Held Over! I take a look at ads for The Shootist and BeastMaster 1 and 2.

Since I talked about The Fat Boys over on Strange Kid’s Club, let’s see a few videos featuring them.

It doesn’t get any more 80s than The Fat Boys on Miami Vice.

Another great 80s clip featuring The Fat Boys in the movie Knights of the City. Check out Markie Dee sporting that rad crop top. WTF, dude?

And here’s the video for the Fat Boys/Freddy Krueger collaboration Are You Ready for Freddy? It was used to promote the release of Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master.

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Awesomeness Elsewhere – Feb 11, 2011

Posted in 80s, Atari, cartoons, pop culture, TV shows, video games with tags Atari, cartoons, pop culture, TV shows, video games on February 11, 2011 by Paxton

Here’s what I’ve been up to around the Internets:

– On Strange Kids Club I wax nostalgic about CBS’ Saturday Supercade. It was a block of cartoons back in 1983 based on popular video game characters like Donkey Kong, Q-bert and Frogger.

– I also talk about all the new DVD releases this week which include a trio of terrible Brad Pitt movies and Barb Wire starring Pam Anderson’s breasts.

Hope everyone had a great week. Check back next week, we have a big 20th movie anniversary on Monday. It’s not a movie you would expect to have a birthday on Valentine’s Day.

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