part0003

Throughout the years of interviewing people about movies, TV shows, rock bands, toy collections, and the like, numerous collectors and fans have told me that a particular entertainment helped them through a difficult time, such as a death in the family. I took them at their word, of course, but I couldn’t really relate.

However, that’s all changed now. During my dad’s months-long battle against pancreatic cancer near the latter part of 2013, when I wasn’t hanging out at the hospital or at my parents’ house, I watched all six seasons of The Wonder Years on Netflix. I suppose I was trying to reconnect with my past as the Arnold clan reminds me of my own family growing up.

My dad wasn’t as grumpy as the Arnold dad (in fact, he was rarely grumpy at all, just quiet), and my brother was much smarter than Wayne, but the parallels are many, from the dad and brothers roofing their own house to the cool older sister to the endless summers to the neighborhood football games.

The Wonder Years isn’t featured in this book (volume two, perhaps?), but I used this anecdote to illustrate a point: entertainment, when done right, is much more than a simple way to pass the time. It can be a healthy coping mechanism, a way to escape for a while when the real world is cold and cruel.

Not all TV shows, movies, etc. are as substantive as The Wonder Years , but even such lightweight fare as The Brady Bunch and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe can help take the edge off of a long, difficult day, or maybe even help a fan get through the death of a loved one.

Despite various allergies, insecurities, sibling squabbles, and other typical growing pains, I had a happy childhood. I grew up during the 1970s and ’80s in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, where I spent a lot of time outside, playing baseball, basketball, and football, riding my bike, digging in the dirt, and exploring the woods behind our house.

However, that didn’t keep me from watching too much television, reading too many comic books and magazines, listening to too much rock music, and playing too much pinball and too many video games. In retrospect, these “too many” things were therapeutic, though I didn’t consciously realize it at the time—I was just having fun.

Shows like Star Trek , the Land of the Lost , and Thundarr the Barbarian sent my imagination soaring, as did the exploits of such super-heroes as Batman, Green Lantern, and Spider-Man, the latter of whom I followed like a soap opera character—I couldn’t wait to see what Spidey and the gang were up to each month in the pages of Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man (I couldn’t afford all the issues, so on more than one occasion I was told by the convenience store proprietor, “Son, this ain’t no liberry.”)

Years before that, I would watch The Electric Company (a strange and more advanced alternative to Sesame Street ) for the sole purpose of catching the “Spidey Super Stories” segments starring my favorite wall-crawler.

I was also a big fan of The Incredible Hulk (1978-1982) and Wonder Woman (1975-1979) TV shows (as a bonus, Dad liked these programs as well, so we would watch them together), along with just about anything else that had a super-hero in it.

When Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park aired on NBC on Oct. 28, 1978, I was beside myself with excitement. The fact that the film had cheesy dialogue, cheap special effects, and poor acting didn’t faze me—I got to see my real-life super-heroes on TV. I loved every second of the movie and still watch it from time to time. I still listen to KISS on a regular basis. Love Gun , Destroyer , Rock and Roll Over , Alive , Alive II , and Dynasty are some of my favorite albums of all time. I even like the critically panned Music from “The Elder” .

Earlier in 1978, my best friend’s mom had taken us to see Jaws 2 , and it scared me witless. As I nervously ate the salt water taffy we had smuggled in, I would shield my eyes during the scarier, more graphic scenes. Not long after that, I got to see the original Jaws on television, and it was even scarier.

Nineteen-seventy-eight was also the year most of my friends began getting video game systems, primarily the Atari 2600, which had come out the year before. Since it was $250 plus tax, there was no way I was going to get one—it was simply out of our family’s price range.

So, I did what any video game-starved nuisance would do. In addition to going to the arcades, where I could play a video game for a mere quarter, I would ride my bike to the house of everyone I knew within a five-mile radius who had a gaming console. When I would get there, if they weren’t playing their Atari 2600, Fairchild Channel F, Odyssey2, or Intellivision, I would invariably be surprised—after all, I surmised, if you had easy access to a game system, why would you ever want to do anything else? Luckily, unless they were busy with chores, my friends would usually indulge me with a few games of Baseball , Combat , Air-Sea Battle , or other early favorite.

Years later, when I was in high school, I sat riveted during a midnight screening of Night of the Living Dead . I was too old and, I thought, too cool, to be scared by the movie, but I was certainly glad to be in the safety of that theater surrounded by film fans and friends, instead of in that ramshackle frame house surrounded by zombies.

This was also around the time when I saw Forbidden Planet (1956) for the first time (a life-changing experience that sent me on a quest to see all the ’50s sci-fi movies), got a ColecoVision of my very own (chronicled in my first book, Classic Home Video Games, 1972-1984 ), subscribed to The Flash (starring my favorite super-hero), started going to Larry Lankford’s Dallas Fantasy Fair conventions, and began attending rock concerts, such as my first KISS show in 1983.

In short, I had a misspent youth, “wasting” inordinate amounts of time doing things that I loved. My job as a freelance writer takes advantage of all those pop culture pursuits from the past as most every day I write articles about movies, music, books, video games, comics, collectibles, science fiction, and other fun topics.

Retro Pop Culture A to Z: From Atari 2600 to Zombie Films reprints 60 of those articles, each carefully selected, and each expanded and updated specifically for this book . Along with the A-Z articles, I’ve included a pair of “lucky eight” bonus chapters: a feature on 8mm films and a story about 8-track tapes.

As the saying goes, I hope you enjoy reading these articles as much as I had writing them. Writing is hard work, but I wouldn’t trade my job for any other. Unless, of course, I could somehow get paid to play video games, watch movies, listen to music, and read books. Wait a minute…