Getting up early to watch cartoons on Saturday morning. Rocky & Bulwinkle started at something like 6:30am. The Smurfs as a two-hour block. Thundarr the Barbarian.
Our first VCR was a Betamax with a long wired remote. I think our first tape was Star Wars and you couldn’t rent them at the time.
Going to arcades. For a couple summers I lived in a tiny town in Ohio and both my parents worked. My dad would leave me $5 and me and my friends would ride our bikes down to the town center and spend all day there at the arcade, the quick shop reading comics, etc. We were 11 or 12, and it was totally like Stand By Me (but later, 1984ish).
For that matter, being able to go outside, destination unknown to my parents, all day, when I was 11-14. I can’t imagine parents letting their kids do that today. They had no idea where I was, and often it was doing stupid, dumb, and dangerous stuff out in the woods or on train tracks.
MTV as a big new thing. Until then all we had was Friday Night Videos.
Having to wait while the cable company dug a trench through our yard to wire our house for cable for the first time.
Pull-tab cans. I actually cut up my knee real bad one time when I was a kid when I wiped out on my bike and slid on one of those tabs in the road.
Cars that rusted. My first car was a 1981ish Toyota Celica that had a rear hatch almost rusted through and the floors were super bad.
When America fell in love with ninjas. Remember that one year when there were like 10 ninja movies? I actually bought a bamboo ninja sword and one of my friends was allowed to buy throwing stars.
Toy catalogs. Oh god, the hours I would spend looking at those massively thick toy catalogs!
CD-ROM arcade games, like Space Ace, Dragon’s Lair, and my favorite one - Cliff Hanger, which was actually just a Japanese animated show cut up. I could play it blindfolded and get a perfect score.
It felt like forever until you could rent the trilogy though if I remember right it was late 80s so maybe five years? That’s a long time to a kid though.
I remember those tapes being my introduction to widescreen, I read all I could find about it and if I recall correctly it was Siskel and Ebert talking about about pan ‘n scan videos that got me. I had to have that theater experience, even on our 19 inch TV!
Speaking of arcades, one game changed my life. The place I used to go to when my mother visited a friend was the usual. Pinball games, mechanical shooting and racing games. Nothing digital.
Until that fateful day. I walked in and there was this, weirdly shaped, organic thing. It was the first video game that I ever saw in real life that wasn’t pong. It was a rocketship that handled like the one in Asteroids would later on. There were stars. And flying saucers to shoot. I was blown away. This is it:
I would draw pictures of it in school. I dreamed about it. My first total crush.
I had a similar experience the first time I saw a Pac Man arcade cabinet, it was like the Yellow Brick Road scene, my life before had been black and white. I had seen video games before but they were like Pong or Space Invaders, just black and white. And Pac Man had music, and such vibrant colors! I was entranced.
I think it’s hard to convey to younguns how huge the difference seemed between Atari 2600-level graphics and arcade-quality graphics circa 1980. There was also the whole raster-vs-vector thing. Unless you actually owned a Vectrex there was nowhere but the arcade to see stuff like Asteroid or Battlezone.
This was my first. It was in the front of a Safeway in Little Rock, Arkansas, not far from my house when I was a very little kid (6-8). My older sister would occasionally drive me up there on her moped, which is funny because she couldn’t have been older than 13. They also had a Galaga machine, but I was entranced by Elevator Action.
EDIT: Well, shit, I looked up Elevator Action and it turns out it wasn’t released until 1983, so I guess you do forget your first! This was earlier than that. Jesus, what was that game then. Was it the one where you climbed up a building and people threw plants at you? What was that one?
Edit2: Yes! It was Crazy Climber. Wow, funny what your brain does to your memories from so long ago.
My Mom uses to put “Dippity-Do” jell in our hair before church to take out our out of control curls. And by “put” I mean dunking an entire comb in the junk to straighten things out.
Oh my god yes! I went to school every day with a gelmet. I thought it was normal from kindergarten to fourth grade. Then I realized that hair shouldn’t snap off when touched.
I have a picture of me in going to kindergarten in a school blazer with that stuff plastering my hair to my head.
Who is this? Why does he squint so much? Why is his hair so shiny? These were the questions from my Taiwanese father in-law when he was looking at old pictures from my family.
Here’s a good one - it’s 1986 and my parents just had gotten a divorce. I’m 13. Everyone’s obviously on edge, but for some reason I feel like I want a new pair of shoes. Reeboks, which were super duper hot at the time. The problem: they were ridiculously priced, at $60. My mom went apoplectic and absolutely refused to buy a pair of shoes for such an insane price.
