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Since it’s Halloween I figured we ought to have something spooky on the site today and what better than the Tim Burton directed film Beetlejuice. It might not be particularly scary, but it is very funny.
Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis) are a young couple who live in a small American backwater town. One day, whilst driving home across one of those weird bridges with a sort of building on that they only seem to have in these small US towns, they swerve to avoid a dog and crash through the side of the bridge. In the next scene we see them arriving back at their house. They don’t initially realise they died in the car crash, but soon the penny drops when Barbara’s hand catches fire and it is not burnt, they no longer seem to have reflections and when Adam tries to retrace his steps to the bridge he finds himself in a strange desert land populated by giant sand worms. Final confirmation is provided when they find a book called The Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
Everyone must remember Adam and the Ants if only for the fact that lead singer Adam Ant (real name Stuart Leslie Goddard) always seemed to have a white line drawn directly across his face, under his eyes and over the bridge of his nose. They were a punk band around during the early 1980s who dressed in a very flamboyant manner, looking like pirates who had been caught in an explosion in a paint factory, but otherwise kick-starting the New Romantic movement.
For all computer geeks of a certain age (in which I include myself) one of the most fondly remembered films of the 1980’s is Tron, mainly because whilst it may well be a complete flight of fantasy from the real world of computers, it’s use of computer jargon and terminology was fairly accurate.
Cabbage Patch Kids burst on to the scene in 1983, and whilst not at the height of popularity they were then are still available today. They were the brainchild of American artist Xavier Roberts, who initially created hand stitched dolls that he sold at craft fairs. They were discovered by US toy firm Coleco and soon became a must have Christmas gift. In fact, Cabbage Patch Kids were probably one of the first toys to kick-start todays pester power tactics, where parents feel they have to buy their little cherubs whatever they desire for Christmas, no matter what.
Parma Violets are one of those foodstuffs that you either love or hate, a bit like Marmite which is probably the best example of this phenomenon. Not that Parma Violets taste like a sticky brown yeast extract of course! Personally, I’m on the “love them” side of the fence (I’m on the “hate it” side for Marmite though). The image here shows them in their giant variation, which are approximately the size of a UK one pound coin, but as a child I remember them better in their smaller form.
The BBC’s Great Egg Race was a precursor to todays Scrapheap Challenge, but on a slightly smaller scale. Three teams of university boffins would be challenged to solve a particular problem in as ingenious a way as possible. The kind of problems the team had to solve were usually of the “useless” variety. In early series the challenge was to get an egg from point A to point B without breaking, but in later series they deviated into a much wider variety such as creating a device capable of generating electricity by flapping your arms, or something equally stupid.
Lt. Tuck Pendleton (Dennis Quaid) is your typical sterotype American movie soldier, full of bravado and a little maverick, but at the end of the day a good guy. Tuck volunteers to test pilot a new scientific breakthrough – a pod named the Kraken II that can be shrunk to microscopic size and injected into living things to aid in medical procedures and the like. Unfortunately, on the day of the test, a group of terrorists attack the lab where the research is happening, and instead of being injected into a rabbit, Tuck finds himself accidentally placed inside unwitting civilian Jack Putter (Martin Short).
