Obsessions and Nostalgia (in a bottle)

After the Fear Factor post I went on a trail in my mind, trying to focus on what other fun “top 10” lists I could do that would breakdown my character even more.

When boredom strikes, there are usually random magazines in my room that I sort through and find articles I read months (or maybe years) ago and yet feel like I had not read them. One of the issues of Res magazine had a piece about 8-bit graphic games, and making the iconic characters from the original Nintendo video games into magnets or something, I can’t quite remember. I just started thinking about my Nintendo and when I was seven years old. That’s when it struck! I’ll do something regarding nostalgia.

More elaboration was done and I decided to pick things that I’ve picked up from various parts of my past, whether it was early childhood, high school, or even college. The key part is that these subjects were fun when they were first introduced to me and are still fun when I revisit them. A few things wouldn’t make it like my Gecko t-shirts or my collection of Boxcar Children books (although I tend to find myself hanging out with a bunch of orphans and trying to figure out local mysteries, like that damn sandbox!).

WARNING: The following will reveal how much of a real dork I am.

10. Ghostbusters: There were many mediums that covered Ghostbusters; there was the infamous movie directed by Ivan Reitman, and the sequel; the animated series that went on for a few years that landed spots on Saturday mornings, and weekday afternoons; there were many action figures that were released as well. Watching the movie, as a kid, is great because it’s pure entertainment: four guys with cool guns taking on ghosts and a giant marshmallow figure (for those who read about foam could imagine my fear and disgust when Stay Puffed blew up); what’s cooler about the movie is when you get older you start realizing that the movie is actually funny, and stays funny even ten years later.

The cartoon and toys played more as a childhood thing. To this day, I still argue for them whenever a conversation strikes up about what was cool when we were kids. Most guys will go on about how it either was Transformers or G.I.-Joe. I watched neither and stick with my guns and fire them with Ghostbusters and how the show and action figures were way cooler!

9. "Night on Bald Mountain": The Walt Disney classic Fantasia was an essential piece of cinema growing up. There was just so much going on in this film. However, there was one segment that pulled all my attention to it, and that was Night on Bald Mountain. Once you see this piece, you realize that Fantasia is full of a lot of fluff and glam. I mean, dancing hippos and broomsticks carrying water are cool only to a certain extent. Bald Mountain was such a breath of fresh air. The sequence is so not Disney! It’s incredibly horrific, and I liked it! The whole story focuses on this large demonic being awakening itself at nightfall and unleashes all the ghosts and demons from their original territory. They all stream through the presented town and are having a ball. Come the arrival of dawn and the bells of the local church, the demons and ghosts know their curfew has come. They all go away. If I could find a way to make that whole sequence as my screensaver, I would be a truly happy man.

8. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: This little American fable was introduced to me at a very young age due to two reasons: the Disney classic “The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad” and Shelly Duvall’s television series “Tall Tales and Legends.” My mom had recorded the Disney one and the Duvall episode where they did the Sleepy Hollow story with Ed Begley, Jr. playing Ichabod Crane. I obsessed over these things. The Disney production is a classic too, with Bing Crosby doing the narration and songs for the piece. The songs were amazing:

“With a hip-hip and a clippity-clop
He's out lookin' for a top to chop
So don't stop to figure out a plan
You can't reason with a headless man”

The concept of the headless horseman was absolutely intriguing (and a bit frightful). In our front yard, my brothers and I would play with the other neighborhood kids and I would always want to be the headless horseman (no matter what game it was we played). At that time I was in full frame with my speech impediment. My family still teases about the way I pronounced things back then, and when I would be the headless horseman, I would declare, “Yuk! I am da hed-men hord-men!” Cute, isn’t it?

The great thing about Sleepy Hollow was back in 1999 or 2000, Tim Burton busted out with the supernatural piece Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp. It was so cool; he made the great fable into a slasher flick with all the Tim Burton trademarks. Superb!

7. The Iron Giant: I didn’t become aware of this one until my days working at the video store after college. I feel this is a very underrated family film. It’s directed by Brad Bird who was the mastermind behind The Incredibles. When working at the video store, we could only play either the Hollywood Video promo tape that lasted four hours or a family movie, so I usually tried finding family movies that were tolerable, and with this flick I found a keeper.

Later on I was at Target using a gift card I received for Christmas and they had Iron Giant on DVD for $7.99 and I thought, “what the hell, I’ll buy it.” The film came to great use a while back when I was living in my apartment on River Street. It was a Saturday night and Kyle was doing date night with his main squeeze, so I started going through the phone list to see who was around, everyone I called was either not home or had plans already. I started drinking by myself and got depressed; I did one of those “I’m going to die alone” moments as I held my Bacardi rum bottle in my hand, taking swigs, and since I couldn’t find a good chaser, I decided to eat wheat thins to wash down my rum in-take. There I was on the couch, rum and wheat thins, moping like a little emo-kid, and that’s when it dawned on me: I should watch the Iron Giant! I popped that sucker in and it brought all kinds of layers of joy to me. That companionship the boy has his with his giant robot; I want a best friend giant robot. Well, doesn’t everyone?

6. Legend of Zelda: It was the Christmas of ’86 when our grandpa got my brothers and I a Nintendo Entertainment System. When you bought the system, it already came with the combo game of Mario and Duck Hunt, but it was up to you to go out and get the other games. The next Christmas, my grandparents bought the Legend of Zelda for me. This game was rad. The packaging alone was remarkable; it was the only (at the time) Nintendo game that came in a gold plated cartridge rather than the gray ones that all the others arrived in. The game was more complex than the typical shoot ‘em up type or jump on things and they’re dead games, there was strategy, thinking, a lot of trial and error. I don’t think at age seven I was supposed to be using my brain so much. This was the first role-playing game (RPG), which there are hundreds out today.

I really remember Zelda during my third grade year because that was my form of escapism as my parents were fighting and arguing in their bedroom (something that didn’t really happen), which led to their divorce. So Zelda was there as I was tuning out my current reality.

5. The Trojan War: I realize this may seem to be a weird one. I was in high school, and I decided to learn everything there was about the Trojan War. My mother owned a copy of the Iliad of Homer and a bunch of plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, so I plowed through those. I wound up at the Sac State library reading literary theories and criticisms about the Trojan War literature. I just didn’t know where I was going with it. I made a binder full of maps, key players (like Achilles, Briseis, Agamemnon, Hector), summaries of what happened to the characters before and after the war. I remember my girlfriend at the time just didn’t grasp what I was doing.

“Why are you obsessing over some stupid fairy tale?”

“Blasphemy! That’s not true, Nancy Drew!” I would reply back.

I kept up with the Trojan War to the end of high school. When I moved to Santa Cruz, I had misplaced that binder, and I still don’t know what I did with it but I have all my Greek classics on my bookshelf. A couple of years ago, Wolfgang Peterson made the action film Troy, which said in the beginning that it was based on the Iliad. Well, all I can say is that is far from the truth.

4. Super Mario Bros.: For people within my age bracket, this may be on all of their lists. This was a staple for many households, and even though this game is probably one of the most simple and basic video games out there, it still holds a lot of amusement. You go to any house where someone still owns a Nintendo and there, in plain sight, is Super Mario Bros. I guarantee you, anybody will be, “Oh my god! You have Mario, oh, let’s play!” That person will go on and describe their childhood experience and describe how exciting it was the first time they beat it, and what tricks they learned over the years and how that game became even more easy for them to beat. We’ve all heard the story, and you know you were one of those types who did that. I know I was one. When I was living in Capitola with my friend Christy, she owned a Nintendo with Mario. Since I wasn’t making much money at that time, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do, so I found myself in the living room playing Mario.

Besides, everyone knows the theme song and all the supplemental songs like the underground song and the water song. Good stuff.

3. Batman: I have no idea where to begin with Batman. I could start back in the childhood days, the same time when the Nintendo came present. The Family channel (before it was bought out by Fox and ABC) had the old 1960s Batman show with Adam West syndicated on the network, and I think it was on everyday. It was summer time and that’s all I ended up watching when I wasn’t playing with friends or swimming. At that time, I had no concept on how cheesy the show was with all the bad gimmicks and bad acting but it was great for a seven year old.

The summer of 1989 Tim Burton releases Batman the movie with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Our parents took us to the drive-in and we watched this epic piece of cinema. I remember for my birthday and Christmas, all I got was Batman memorabilia: action figures, jigsaw puzzles, t-shirts, trading cards, it never ended. My first comic book I was ever exposed to was Detective Comics #602, my aunt bought me that right after the movie was released; she had seen my obsession develop (and I still own that issue).

After the first film was released, Batman Returns arrived a few years later, then the animated series, which was how I spent my weekday afternoons, and then down the road were Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. Everyone knows those two films are god-awful. However, two summers ago Christopher Nolan directed Batman Begins and made my childhood happiness come about again.

2. David Lynch: I knew people in middle school that would go on how Kurt Cobain was god. I thought that was stupid, and swore I would never go down that route. However, right after high school when I was in college, I was exposed to the works of David Lynch, and I remember at that specific time, I was near declaration of a new god. I don’t think I could’ve gone through a conversation without mentioning Mr. Lynch’s name. I’m surprised I didn’t lose any of my friends.

I had only known of the names of his movies, nothing else. I had seen the Elephant Man years ago but didn’t realize it was a Lynch film. The summer after my freshmen year, I rented Blue Velvet and bought the pilot to Twin Peaks. Entering my second year of college, Mulholland Drive was making the rounds in theaters; I knew I had to see it. I did… by myself, but I don’t care.

I eventually saw all of his films. The end of my junior year, I tried applying for the student-directed-seminar, which is an exit requirement option. I could teach a class and make that the ticket for graduation. My class was a focus on Lost Highway and the concept of interpretation. I made a reader that had about two dozen articles and critical essays on the film alone, the styles of David Lynch, and descriptions on the idea of interpretation. I created essay prompts and an overall layout of what the syllabus would look like. It got denied, though. Somebody had a taught a class three quarters before me about the study of adaptation and used his version of Dune as the focus.

1. James Bond: Talk about true legend! I started my Bond fix when I was in sixth grade; I was at my grandparents’ house and on the television was the Living Daylights (the first Timothy Dalton one). I became intrigued and started paying attention more to the world of James Bond. I remember vaguely when I was really young there was the cartoon of James Bond Jr. but I didn’t give it the time or day.

By the time middle school came, I had already seen all the Bond flicks up to that point. There were sixteen made and I had them all memorized by when they were released. I knew that six starred Sean Connery, one with George Lazenby, seven with Roger Moore, and two with Timothy Dalton.

After I had the movies mastered, an uncle on my dad’s side told me that there were books too. It was like learning that the world wasn’t flat and there was so much more out there to discover. James Bond was originally created by Ian Fleming who wrote twelve novels, two short story collections, and an anthology of fiction and non-fiction, which had one Bond short story in it. By my freshmen year of high school, I owned all of them. In middle school, MGM released the newest Bond film (an almost five year absence sine the last one), it was Goldeneye. It had a new Bond, this time portrayed by Pierce Brosnan. From that point, I made sure I saw every Bond film in the theater.

In high school, I kept up with the Brosnan films, and then read the other Bond books that came after Fleming’s death: one by author Kingsley Amis, fourteen by John Gardner, and six by Raymond Benson. As of now, I can tell you all the pros and cons of each author’s styles, what the top three are for each author (aside from Amis, who only has one). With the films, I can tell you the pros and cons of each actor and what the best films are under each actors’ collection.

To make things even more great was the release of Casino Royale, which came out last November. MGM decided to reinvent the franchise, and it was marvelous. I still appreciate the other films, but I am curious how the new setup will go. The books are on hiatus as the publishers are looking for a new writer.

You can throw Bond at me anytime and I guarantee I will catch it.