The Six Million Dollar Man
The Six Million Dollar Man began
life as three 1973 TV movies based upon some
long-forgotten two dime novel, entitled Cyborg. Though
the movies were mercilessly Bond-esque, the ongoing
series – which hit screens in 1974 – played down the
secret agent and womanising aspects in favour of a more
straight action approach and, in later seasons,
ridiculous slapstick.
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THE
INCREDIBLE HULK
Get a load of this: Bruce Banner was standing at a set of
traffic lights next to this woman, and he suddenly got
really angry, and turned into The Incredible Hulk, and his
trousers burst open, and the woman freaked out and ran
across the road and got hit by a bus and was instantly
killed.
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SCOOBY
DOO
"Rooby
Rooby Roooooo!" Popular opinion has it that
Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby Doo went all crap upon the
introduction to the series of his pint-sized nephew
Scrappy.
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RUBIKS
CUBE
Wild-eyed
foreign loner (possibly) Professor Erno Rubik is,
undoubtably, a genius - albeit probably only in the same
manner that Albert Einstein is, y’know, a
"genius" for inadvertently inventing a weapon
which has, inevitably, doomed the human race to
extinction. Having said that, not even in our most
fevered moments would we ever contemplate Erno Rubik’s
invention as being possible of genocide.
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BOY
BANDS
Those who
decry the modern music industry as a manufactured
showcase for puppet bands manipulated by omnipresent
svengali, should cast their minds back to the origins of
modern pop, and Elvis Presley, who himself was little
more than a phenomenon manufactured by Colonel “Tom”
Saunders – the inventor of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
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BLUE PETER
It isn’t what it was,
Blue Peter. It’s gone all funky now, with the
off-their-face presenters larging it during a techno
interpretation of the main titles. It may be the
world’s longest-running childrens’ programme, but
the innocence of the show is gone.
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THE
A-TEAM
It just
wouldn’t happen today: a kid-orientated TV show,
scheduled for tea-time Saturday on ITV, in which the
main protagonists - and intended role-models - were a
mix of gun-wielding chain-smoker, social
misfit-cum-thug, womanising egotist, and a ‘comedy’
paranoid schizophrenic (or, if you’d rather,
"crazy damn fool").
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PLANET
OF THE APES
There
can be such a thing as milking a good idea too far, and 20th
Century Fox milked its Planet Of The Apes license until
its teats turned blue, then black, and then fell off
altogether.
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ALTERNATIVE
COMEDY
A
buzzword (or, more accurately, “buzzphrase”) from
1980s Britain which, along with “yuppies”,
“Thatcherism” and “le Bon”, has little relevance
in the informationsuperhighway-
overloadedhighbandweb- connectedBlair-
Britaingirlpowered-
NewLaboured 21st Century. This can, in part,
be attributed to the fact that many of the alternative
comics from the 1980s are now the comic mainstream in
this new Britain.
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ADVERTOONS
In
1969 the US television networks were shaken to their
core and beaten about the neck and lungs until they
coughed up flakes of matter; the Federal Communications
Commission deemed that ABC’s Hot Wheels show – based
upon Mattel’s toy vehicles of the same name – was "designed
primarily to promote the sale of a sponsor's product,
rather than to serve the public by either entertaining
or informing it”.
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THE WONDERFUL WORLD
OF DISNEY
Some time shortly after The Sword In The Stone, Disney
lost the plot - quite literally.
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BAND
AID
Nowadays,
pop stars getting together to save the world is a
considered passe.
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KNIGHT
RIDER
"Knight Rider, a shadowy flight into the
dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Michael
Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the
cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless in
a world of criminals who operate above the
law…"
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MORPH
Back in the Sixties, BBC art department staple Tony Hart, the notorious
homosexual-style heterosexual, created a comic strip for Blue Peter entitled "The
Adventures Of Paki - The Indian Elephant".
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CRISPS
Generally
speaking, being British (and, more specifically,
English) is rubbish. Fact is, everyone hates us.
Something that sets us apart from Johnny Foreigner.
It’s something that he’ll never understand, nor get
his hands on: the potato crisp.
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POPULAR MAGIC
There’s this photo
that’s been doing the rounds in media circles for years now. It’s a
photo of Debbie McGee, relatively attractive young wife of conjuring
abomination Paul Daniels. Specifially, it’s a photograph – a Polaroid
photograph – of McGee engaging in a certain explicit sex act.
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KURT COBAIN’S SUICIDE
On April 5th 1994, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain pointed a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Unlucky for him that it was loaded. Two days later a workman – a man visiting Cobain’s home to do some work – discovered the grunge pioneer’s mashed-up head, still mostly attached to his body, and alerted the authorities.
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NOVELTY
RECORDS
You’d
think that by now the novelty record was a thing of
the past, left to rot in an era where it was okay to
be wacky, and radio DJs weren’t concerned with
irony. But, let’s face it, would some of these
godawful rap record sell half as well if it they
aren’t based around deliberately kitsch samples
from Oliver or Knight Rider?
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SEA
MONKEYS
Sea Monkeys existed to spite any British reader of American comics
throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.
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DOUBLE
ACTS
Morecambe And Wise, The Two Ronnies, Cannon And Ball, Little And Large, Les Dennis And Dustin Gee –
these were true comedy double acts. And mostly, they were appalling.
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ROLF
HARRIS
Having just turned 70,
Rolf Harris’s showbusiness career has spanned more than four decades. He
had a number one single in his native Australia in 1960 with Tie Me Kangaroo
Down Sport...
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THE
BRITPOP IMPLOSION
It happened by accident,
but was inevitable nonetheless. An unconscious reaction to grunge, and the
US musical invasion of the early 90s, Britpop was born, and for the briefest
of eyeblinks it was cool to British again.
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PRACTICAL
JOKES
“Oh
no! Look, mum – the dog done a poo poo on the
carpet!”
“Why that little… I’ll have to clean it up.
What the…? This is a plastic doggie poo! Ha ha ha!
I feel like a proper Charlie!”
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ACTION MAN
Our
American readers may know him as GI Joe, but it’s
very likely that they, like every young British
owner of an Action Man, simulated copulation twixt
the eagle-eyed boy-doll and their sisters’ Barbies.
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