On the occasion of Eddie’s death, reviewing Van Halen stuff and

1) I had missed how revolutionary this was at the time. I’d noticed that I couldn’t really appreciate Hendrix because my sense of what rock *was* came from stuff after him, I’m realizing same for Eddie. By the time I was paying attention in the early 90s, “interrupt the song for a showoffy guitar solo” was a tired trope

2) I used to think the 80s big hair/spandex thing was a parodic dead end but honestly David Lee Roth brings more Jagger/Bowie genderweirdness to his manic masculinity than I remember

gluom:

pins from the 80’s

Tired: The Cosby Show made a black family widely relatable by making them yuppies, invested in bourgeois norms and practices

Wired: The Cosby Show made a yuppie family widely relatable by making them Black, concerned with passing on a respected moral tradition

“Sketchy arcade operator” as 80s-culture type

Blip (You Can’t Do That On Television)

Centauri (The Last Starfighter)

Noah Vanderhoff (Wayne’s World)

I mean it wasn’t a lark, it was a professionally shot and printed promotional item as part of a really high-profile campaign supporting 9 Lives cat food

Actually that’s an American cultural history point - this was in the context of the “ad wars” of the ‘80s. For a bunch of reasons, local and regional brands in consumer staple products had been consolidated into a few rival multiproduct comglomerates with no place to grow further but at each others’ expense; meanwhile the mass audience was still largely corralled into the big 3 TV networks.

So there were a lot of really intense ad campaigns for really trivial everyday products, often going negative on rival lines. The most famous example is Coke v. Pepsi, but there’s things still stuck in my head like the chunkiness of Prego spaghetti sauce vs. Ragu Old World Style, and the vidya “console wars” really came out of this background

c86:

Morris: A Cat For Our Times, 1986

bogleech:

This X-man character (Warlock) is drawn so fun and wacky it doesn’t even fit with the kind of comics he appears in

Oh I remember when this guy was part of a pair with another mutant that was collectively basically C-3PO: a machine intelligence that could speak any language and was subtextually really gay

Dim brain: the 1974 Death Wish was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time

Christmas lights brain: Marvel’s “Punisher” was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time

Alit brain: the Tim Burton Batman movie was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time

Radiant brain: Ghostbusters was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time

Galaxy brain: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time

kontextmaschine:

Watching Aliens, the part where they all wake up from cryo together and all the ritualized griping is absolutely masking this ‘Nam vet “we’re only good for war” cameraderie, the whole Soldier of Fortune vibe, I only just get that

Of the franchises that reacted to Reagan, Rambo: First Blood II was “what if we refought ‘Nam but seriously and won”, Aliens was “what if we refought 'Nam with all our new toys and still lost”

Honestly the Rick and Morty thing, “don’t you get that this tortured asshole master of the universe is supposed to be read as pathetic”

Like they didn’t “get” that about Gordon Gekko, or Tony Montana, or First Blood PTSD longhair John Rambo…