Showtime, Synergy!

As you may know (or, maybe you don’t) I am sucker for all cartoons, namely those made in the ’80s, or, and this is important to note, ones thats have remnants of ’80s opulence in them, which really doesn’t take much. Give me a thrilling tempo, some thunder, a couple of shining swords, the damsel in distress, throw in a unicorn sent from a distant planet, and I’m sold. I believe my affection for this specific imagery is an obvious reflection of the imaginative world I gave myself through the shows I watched when was I still eating Teddy Grahams cereal on a Saturday morning.

Now, I could spend all day and night talking about Rainbow Brite, and how obsessed I am with the characters on that show. Twink. Skydancer. On-X, the black robot horse. I could talk about Strawberry Shortcake and question the sanity of whoever created the idea for a bunch kids living in houses made of desserts and a sun in the sky that spoke and acted as their god. Imagine if the two shows had made a cross-over episode. The description might have read: an opium infused walk through Willy Wonka’s brain.

And then there was Jem. This was a truly inventive cartoon for its time. It was created by Hasbro, Marvel Comics and Sunbow Productions. It was different from the other girly cartoons because it wasn’t teaching us to be subservient or rely on a handful of minions to mine for color. Main character, Jerrica, had a rock star alter-ego, “Jem.” She was in a band called The Holograms, and they had a rival girl band, The Misfits. Now, bear with me, Jerrica is able to tap into this alter-ego through the help of a synthesizing, holographic computer that talks and has a name – Synergy. And she’s awesome. Jem’s bandmates are Kimber, Aja, and Shana – she plays the drums, the synth drums.

This show had an exuberant number of stories going on at the same time. For one, Jem, or Jerrica – whatever she wanted to be that day, was in charge of a foster home for girls called…get ready…the Starlight House. So, their concerts funded the home – and this was The Holograms’ ultimate goal. Relatively positive. Then there was that whole superhero-esc, hidden identity, love thing with Jerrica/Jem and this guy Rio. As previously mentioned, their rival band, The Misfits, were made up of Pizzazz, Roxy, Stormer (a keytar player with a softer side) and eventually the addition of Jetta. Whenever The Holograms and The Misfits’ had a battle of the bands, it was like Barbie had found the dark side. In the 3rd season, another band, The Stingers, came onto the scene, shook things up, and inevitably created peace between all three bands.

This show had simple sentiments. You can do whatever you put your mind to. You can be savvy, hip, and responsible with money. And if you want an alter-ego, an inverse identity, and an entourage of people who are named after cars, weather and attitude, then you should strive for that.

Put your pogs away

Earlier today I was thinking about the games we played in school when we were younger. I can picture a group of kids sitting by the small yellow lockers where the 4th and 5th graders kept their books – playing pogs. It’s really no wonder the game was eventually banned from schools. Packs of kids swarming around a circle, sitting on hard carpet while they rile each other up. What was the harm? A bunch of 3rd grade gamblers? C’mon.

What I remember about the short-lived craze was just how accessible it was to find pogs in mass amounts. If you walked into a Walgreens, the bins that hold DVDs and movie theater style candy today, were once filled to the brim with small circular pieces of cardboard – and no cutesy animal, symbol, popular public figure, or cartoon was spared. You could find the most random pog there was – a green cartoon bunny holding a magical carrot and feeding it to Spice Girl would not be too far-fetched.

And then there were “slammers.” Slammers were crucial if you were collecting pogs for sport. If you played the game “for keeps” and traded pogs with your friends however intensely you handled it, the type of slammer you had was key. I, unfortunately, had the crappiest slammers in the world. I’m not even sure if they were made out of real metal or just painted silver to make me think they were. But they did NOT slam well. A joke. I knew kids who had slammers that sent pogs flying into oblivion. Perhaps this explains why I ended up with so few pogs at the end of my run. I knew this one kid who lived in my neighborhood and kept all of his pogs in neon green and blue pog containers. He had hundreds. It wasn’t fair.

It’s kind of humorous to think about all of the pitiful side games that followed after pogs were banned. “Pencils.” Who had that bright idea? I guess they figured the school couldn’t ban pencils, now could they? Boys would break off their fingers to play that game in the aisles of their seats, and I never, ever understood the point to it. I suppose if pogs were to for whatever awful reason make a comeback, I think I speak for a generation when I say there’s one very necessary accessory that would have to come back with it….

Slap bracelets. I can see Michael Ian Black having a few words about that.

We interrupt your regular programming

I wanted to take a moment to write about something I found relative to the all encompassing idea I’m always trying to make sense of. I’m reading one of Chuck Klosterman’s books right now, IV, and an article he wrote in 2006, “Here’s Johnny” has struck me as the perfect explanation for the most absolute way I feel about pop culture. In the article he sort of narrows it all down to one man – Johnny Carson, but it isn’t about who Carson was as a person, or even how entertaining he was as a television personality. And it goes beyond the principle of even liking him. You didn’t have to. But, everyone simply knew of him.

With that said, what people remember is “Johnny Carson.” Klosterman put the man in quotes because what he became and what he stood for in itself was this subconscious “concept” that in itself defines something huge. He represents a moment that everyone was a part of.

Now, where this all comes together is in the way Klosterman describes the current way of life as we live today. You have a zillion options everywhere you go, so many things to choose from. He even kind of compares this to relationships. Apparently Steven Tyler of Aerosmith once said that the thought of being with one woman a thousand times is more interesting than thousands of one time flings with different women. While his epiphany is endearing and sweet, most men will likely disagree because most people believe it’s much better to have choices, plenty of options. What people don’t realize is that choice alienates us, and the more choices we have, the lonelier, and the more isolated we become. How many times have you stood before a shelf in a drug store, wondering what toothpaste or deodorant to buy? We’ve all trained ourselves to believe we like to have a choice. But the more I think about it, the more I’m sure that indecision, doubt, and all of the other insecurities that plague us are connected to the fact that we just give ourselves way too much to choose from.

With that said (because, I’m sure you’re asking yourself how all of this relates back to Johnny Carson), it’s hard for everyone to have “that moment” together nowadays, since there are so many choices. Everyone was watching Johnny Carson back when he was on TV, and if you were watching something else, well, it was more so that you just weren’t watching Johnny Carson. Now, there’s a handful of household late night names – and another handful that somehow squeezed in their 15 minutes of fame (like that Carson Daly clown.) And outside of that, the range of shows you could be watching at 11:30 pm are kind of infinite. But, those live moments, the one single moment that we all share, without having the option to Tivo it or watch it later on Youtube is gone. We’re all kind of alone in our moments now, and we reach them at different times. There was a time when there was one ad for soap, one ad for cereal – there was only one brand, one name to trust, one concept to understand, and nothing more.

Before she met Tom Cruise

In the early parts of, maybe, ‘96, I remember picking up my Seventeen Magazine and reading about a show that was in the works for a new network. They weren’t sure what they were going to call the show, but they knew it would take place in Cape Cod and involve teens. It wouldn’t be for another two years until the show they had been toying around with finally made its debut on a network called The WB, a station that would come to represent the adolescence of the mid-’90s kids and generate hype with one series in particular, a show that whether I want to admit to it or not, gave me a form of insight on the art of confrontation. Basically, I learned how to fend for myself via the Joey Potter way.

Dawson’s Creek. The theme song was originally supposed to be “Hand in my Pocket” by Alanis Morissette. Somehow, I’m glad that never happened. Don’t get me wrong, Jagged Little Pill might as well be framed on my wall for being such a definitive album of my pre-teen years, but we needed a new kind of alternative sound by this point. The show had two strengths: location and plot. Anyone could relate to the small, quiet town. It wasn’t pretentious. And, nothing was too over the top. I know what you’re thinking. Pacey. Tamara Jacobs. Endless cliffhangers. But, even the most scandalous of sub-plots were played out in the most understated and realistic ways. The show had one weakness, however: the characters’ use of vocabulary.

Now, it’s nice these characters had something bold to say to each other at all times, and it’s nice that in the most awkward of moments, they felt the need to be as open with each other as they possibly could. But, we all started walking around thinking this was how 13 year olds should act and talk, too. I guess I think of it as the anti-My So-Called Life, only because these Creek characters said what they meant. (Open for interpretation.) When the gang went off to college, the show was history. If you were still tuning in post-’00, you were just pining away after Van Der Beek’s new hair cut.

What I liked about this show went beyond the innocent, American Eagle ’90s culture it embodied (which isn’t that great, looking back at it) but for the way Kevin Williamson delivered it. That show was Kevin Williamson. That genre, those actors, that whole time period was Williamson. A favorite episode of mine called “The Scare” paid homage to the horror classics and sort of poked fun at the work Williamson was doing at the time with movies like Scream. There were dimensions to this show that go unnoticed. We can’t say it was ahead of its time. It was exactly what someone should think about when they think about 1998 pop culture.

I don’t know if I’ll ever look at a second floor window the same, lit from inside, Joey vulnerably standing before Dawson in her Gap jean jacket, a variety of Spielberg posters lining the teenage boy’s bedroom walls as we all hold our breath to see what happens next.