Child Of The 1980's

Ghostbusters was released in 1984, and to this date remains one of my personal favourite films of all time. It’s sequel isn’t bad either, but no where near as good as the original. The film is about three New York scientists, Dr. Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) who after getting thrown out of their research positions at the university decide to go into business as Ghostbusters, or as it’s more technically put, Professional Paranormal Investigations and Eliminations.

Things don’t start off too well for the guys however, until a call comes in from the Sedgewick Hotel asking them to get rid of a ghost that has been up to mischief. The Ghostbusters turn up at the hotel, and track down the class 5 free roaming vapour, otherwise known as a Slimer! Venkman has a close encounter with said ghost (“he slimed me!“) before they finally manage to capture the ghost using some unlicensed particle accelerators (proton packs) and a custom designed ghost trap. They also end up destroying the hotel ballroom in the process. After this work picks up for the Ghostbusters, and they end up hiring a fourth member, Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), to help them out.

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With all the attention that the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana’s tragic death has generated recently, it reminded me of the happier times that were the lead up to Charles’ and Di’s wedding day. The day was declared a national holiday, and so the entire UK ground to a halt as crowds of over half a million people lined the streets of London, and everybody else tuned in on TV to watch the event itself. Estimates suggest that the wedding was watched by more than 750 million people world wide. That’s some viewing figure!

The Wedding took place on 29th July 1981, at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Charles wore the dress uniform of a Naval commander, whilst Diana wore the world famous Emmanuel designed dress, that had a train that stretched 25 feet! The only minor hitch in the service was when Diana fluffed her lines, getting Prince Charles name’s round the wrong way. Worst thing about this was it was his first name she got wrong, calling him Phillip Charles Arthur George!

After the wedding the Royal family all headed back to Buckingham Palace, with all the key members appearing on the balcony to wave at all the well wishers. What happened after that I don’t know, but I can’t get the thought of the Queen dancing to The Birdie Song and Black Lace out of my head…

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Black Lace are responsible for more heinous music than you can shake a big stick at, and whilst The Birdie Song may have the dubious honour of starting the make-an-idiot-of-yourself disco section at weddings, it’s the guys from Black Lace that drag it out to a full half hour or so. Every song they did had “actions” to go with it, which for some reason everybody knows – they must be tapping into some primal urge to look like a complete fool on the dance floor that resides in all of us somewhere. Not me, you say! Well, maybe not now, but if the evidence at weddings is anything to go by, wait until your a grandparent or old uncle or aunt…

Anyway, they are best known for their hit Agadoo. You know it, and the dance, even though you don’t want to. It’s a song with a touching holiday romance story attached to it, with some guy going to Waikiki and falling for one of the local beauties, who taught him to dance in the moonlight. All very romantic sounding, except the dance involves waving your arms back and forth, jumping up and down and going “to the knees”, whatever that means.

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In the UK, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was probably the most popular home computer of the early 1980′s. I’ve no sales figures to back that up, but the fact that it was both British made and less expensive than it’s rival the Commodore 64 would suggest it had the edge in this country. It was created by Sir Clive Sinclair, who had started his company making things like affordable pocket calculators, and went on to invent the C5 electric car. Oh well, nobody is perfect I suppose!

The ZX Spectrum contained a Z80 CPU, and initially came in either 16K or 48K configurations. Sound wise it couldn’t do much more than beep and buzz at different pitches, and graphically it could only display two colours in any 8×8 pixel region – which led to the infamous colour clash effect whenever a game tried to draw two things of different colours near to each other. It’s keyboard consisted of a bunch of dark grey rubber keys, each of which could produce letters, keywords and symbols depending on which combination of shift keys you pressed before hand. If you wanted to plug in a joystick, you had to invest in an expansion pack that allowed you to do so.

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As a kid I loved Scooby Doo, and to be fair I guess I still do now. Scooby and Shaggy are one of the greatest double acts in cartoon history, with their legendary cowardice only being challenged by their enormous appetites. Fred, Velma and Daphne may not have been as much fun, but they got the job done, solving the mysteries were flair (and flares in Fred’s case) and apart from Daphne always being the one who got captured by the ghost, and Fred always making the same mistake of sending Scooby and Shaggy off on their own (or possibly with Velma), I have nothing against any of them. They made a good team, and I still dig the Mystery Machines groovy paint job. See, I’m getting so into it I’m beginning to sound like Shaggy!

I distinctly remember going into school one day and a friend telling me there was a new series of Scooby Doo on that afternoon, with a new character – Scoob’s nephew Scrappy. I spent the rest of the day looking forward to watching the new series, thinking of the theme tune (Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you, we’ve got some work to do now), the haunted house with all the bats from the title sequence and wondering if, just once, there would be a real ghost rather than the irate uncle who missed out on the inheritance who would have got away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.

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