Tag Archives: 1981

Soft Cell

It just dawned on me that I fucked up and left the writing off the CD I’m holding in the final panel. I’m literally holding a square. It could be a bathroom tile for all we know. FUCK!!!

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Filed under Animation Analysis, Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee, Thousand Listen Club, Unfairly Maligned

Joan Jett

Our biggest problem as a culture is simple; we allow attitude to win every time.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Girls of BIUL, Nostalgic Obsessions, Thousand Listen Club

The Doors

The origins of the line “It’s better to burn out than fade away” are somewhat muddy. It’s another version of “Play it again, Sam”; the words we’re most familiar with are actually a variation, and not a quote verbatim.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Magazine Rack, Nostalgic Obsessions, Thousand Listen Club

Van Halen

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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Magazine Rack, Nostalgic Obsessions, Thousand Listen Club, Worst Of All

Love At First Listen: Art Bears

If I may, I’d like to speak to the ladies a moment. The women, the females, the girls; there’s something I think you’ll find very interesting. I’m so sure of this, that I’m just gonna hit you with it cold; straight, no chaser. Afterwards, I’ll reveal why.

The following YouTube link should be cued up to the correct spot, but on the off chance it isn’t, you’re looking for the 9:04 mark: “The Slave”, from Art Bears’ 1979 album Winter Songs. The lyrics are under the link in case you’d like to read them. The words are so clearly sung, you probably won’t even need to.

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Filed under Faint Signals, Girls of BIUL, Late To The Party, Thousand Listen Club

How To Profit From The Coming Nuclear Holocaust

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with mushroom clouds. Something about their unbridled destructive power, and their strange, haunting beauty.

This and Miracle Mile are as close to “nuke porn” as I can get (my copy of Dr. Strangelove is worn out).

Also; the possibility that you could draw a really good one. It looked super-cool, and everyone at school knew what it was.

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Little Girls, Little Guns

“Little Girls” is the first track off of Only A Lad, the first LP from Los Angeles new-wave band Oingo Boingo. When was only a lad, it was sort of a personal anthem. You probably know it, it starts with:

I – I – I love little girls, they make me feel so good
I love
Little girls, they make me feel so
Bad
When they’re around they make me feel like I’m the only guy in town
I love
Little girls, they make me feel so
Good

Fairly innocuous, right? It’s cute, if you don’t read too much into it. Or, avoid watching the video.

An Elfmanic episode.

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Barnstorming

In the early 1980s, video games were simple in concept, much like the “game apps” on phones nowadays. At heart, they were demonstrations of your skills with a joystick, paddle, or “track-ball” controller, performing one or more challenges. Eating all the dots, or climbing a scaffold to defeat a giant ape, to cite a couple of well-known examples. Navigating a maze while being pursued by killer robots. Killing a centipede, segment by segment. Swinging on vines over bottomless pits.

Or, flying planes into buildings. For fun!

Signed by programmer Steve Cartwright!

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Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions

Dire Straits

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Unfairly Maligned: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

For your benefit, I will begin this article with a warning: 18 seconds of this movie consist of Shia LeBeouf swinging from vines with CGI monkeys. I know 18 seconds doesn’t seem like a long time, but apparently it’s an eternity for some people. It all depends on your perspective, or lack thereof.

The sequence is so brief, it was hard to screencap.

In 2008, Harrison Ford returned to the screen as globe-trotting archaeologist Henry “Indiana” Jones, Junior after a 19-year absence. I myself have been (to be kind) fanatical about Indy since Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, so before I saw Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I knew several things.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee, Unfairly Maligned