Back to the '90s: Retro Week Cometh!

About half my memories of the 1990s are of watching TV shows. The X-Files, Space: Above and Beyond, Fortean TV, Friends, Frasier, American Gothic, Dark Skies, Babylon 5, Star Trek (TNG, DS9 - and had Voyager started by then?), The Adam & Joe Show, The Friday Night Armistice, Ellen, Caroline in the City - a veritable smorgasbord of good and bad telly. I found a single episode of Caroline in the City on an old VHS a while back, and I have no good explanation for having watched it. Inarguably, I watched way too much telly back then. When your Latin teacher is teasing you for watching too much telly, then there's something wrong. Luckily, when I went to uni I had no telly, so I broke myself of the habit. These days I don't watch it for myself. I watch quiz shows with the folks and a few sitcoms with my brother. Oh, and Castle - I rather like that: Nathan Fillion, dontcherknow!

Anyway, when you have a lot of time on your hands, you end up doing stuff to relieve the tedium. So over the last few months I have scrupulously catalogued every old video I could find, and all the DVDs in the house. We have a startling total of over a thousand films. Nostalgia has thus been brought to life. I've got several old episodes of Fortean TV on tape, and they are as entertaining now as they were fifteen years ago. I found I had most of Dark Skies, and then it got released on DVD, which allowed me to fill in the few gaps. Just the other day they released Space: Above and Beyond on DVD in the UK. For those of you who missed this classic hokum back in the day, here is the set-up. In the near sci-fi future A rag-tag group of recruits have all decided to join the USMC for a variety of reasons, including one bloke who got bumped from a colony ship at the last second - when suddenly it's war! Villainous aliens have attacked a human colony - worse, it's the colony that said bloke's girl is on. Then the aliens come after Earth.

The best of the Terran forces get severely beaten up, but the aliens are repelled at the last moment. Our new recruits then spend about twenty episodes flying around with some '90s CGI, feeling angsty (like nBSG) but retaining some semblance of military discipline (unlike nBSG), and fleshing out the universe. A couple of X-Files writers were behind the concept, which is stuffed to the brim with pure frothy patriotic nonsense. Remember President Bill Paxton's speech in Independence Day? Like that but with more soldiers. Add in a villainous human corporation that has some big, sinister secret, a bunch of AIs gone rogue, and a load of humans grown in vats for reasons that never really make sense, and there's your universe: cheesy, silly, overblown, awesome. Because the writers were from The X-Files, they reuse actors you know, so you get to think, "Hey, I know that face!" There's the small town sheriff from Home, the reincarnated love of Mulder's past lives from The Field Where I Died, &c, &c.

One of the nice bonuses about getting this series on DVD is that it's one of those spaceship-set shows with quite a bit of darkness in it, so it will be a nice bit of background for my continuing terrain-making for Space Hunt! I did get a bit bummed-out today, so I haven't done so much as I wanted to on the generator. I have done some work on that and on a few other things, including conceptualise what will be a very attractive wall-mounted fan. I was a bit narked because of the nexus of several things. I asked for a book at the library, which has arrived. "Er, that annoyed you, Pete? You're nuts!" Wait, you! The new Fortean Times came out today. "But you love that magazine!" Hush a moment! It was annoying because my car has been in the garage since Monday, and the weather here is making people suspect that ark-building would be a reasonable thing to do. So if I were to walk the two miles to town to get the book and magazine, not only would I be drenched by the time I got back, but I'd have an expensive wad of papier maché, too.

Our rabbit, Spot, has been doing his best to distract me. He has been demanding that I pick him up or play with him even more than he usually does. I've started to suspect that he's realised he has a dog's name. He likes to chase one's hand or foot in circles, and ends up chasing his own tail. When one leaves the room he runs after one, and when you enter it he runs up to one, wanting to play. If one picks him up he insists on licking one's face. He hasn't started barking or wagging his tail yet, but those things are both physically impossible for him. Still, I won't rule either out! Right, until our benign postman delivers unto me the beautiful things I am waiting for, I think it's time to get back to making terrain. I have watched everything suitable except for The Chronicles of Riddick and Total Recall, so I guess it's time to pull them out of the wall of films and start carving up those materials to make the plasma generator. Au revoir, folks!

Panic on the streets of Congleton! Also: General Store

A shocked feeling overcame me when I saw the Ebay fees for this month amounted to slightly over £50. More fool me for not being aware that they charge you about ten per cent, I suppose. On that note, do buy something, won't you? On a less mercenary note, I popped out today and picked up some more balsa wood and foamcard. See below for the General Store's current appearance. Of perhaps more interest was an excellent arrival in the post this morning: Dark Skies is here. Needless to say, I've been exposing myself to episodes I don't really remember from half a lifetime ago. The show ran in the US in '96-7, so I expect we got it a year later when I was in the Sixth Form at school. I've mentioned it to friends, who have either a vague recollection of something or who have no idea what I'm on about, like the three friends I spoke to about it on Saturday. I think they didn't remember Babylon 5, either, and one had mysteriously missed every episode of The X-Files. Call Mulder and Scully. Everyone else really was doing homework back in the day. No wonder my A-level results were so dreadful! :-D

Did I ever tell you kids the story of How I Met Your Mother? That show's made two or three references to the mother in six series? With that sort of pedigree I can tell you a rambling tale from my childhood with as much justification that it's "how I met your mother" - except I'm not dating anyone. Mm, but I'm not a fictional character, so I'm back to level-pegging. "Story, Pete!" Oh, yeah. I was lying in bed, and it was so nice and warm and comfy, when suddenly Dad knocked apologetically at my door, peering in to let me know that he had overslept, his alarm not having gone off, and that I now had about thirty minutes to get to school for one of my German A-level exams. It's a thirty-ish minute trip in good traffic. So I threw on my clothes, bundled my brother into the car, and roared off into the distance. I can't say with any honesty that my brother was pleased with my driving that morning. I think fear is an apt adjective, and anger is another good one. I was monomaniacal. Let me reassure any policemen reading this that I'm sure I kept to the speed limits. Probably. It's more than a decade ago, officer. I couldn't say for sure.

We certainly overtook a lot of people, and it's probably the only occasion when I have ever stood a chance of making a good time round the Top Gear test track. So we reached Newcastle, and hit a traffic jam. Oh. We managed to get past it after several agonising minutes, and got to school. For some reason one of the groundsmen took exception to my driving into the Quad. It's probably because it was full of schoolchildren, and you can't drive cars there. Some minor bureaucratic detail such as that. I stopped the car outside A-block, decamped, and flew indoors. I may have thrown the keys at my shell-shocked sibling or he may have fled the madman's car at the earliest opportunity. I burst through the doors of the Memorial (for the Great War, and later the Second World War) Hall just before the papers were to be given out, my tie clutched in my fist, and my socks tucked in my pocket, a sheen of sweat on my fat, red face. I got there in time.

I don't think it helped much, though. GCSEs had been so easy that I had been dissuaded from studying much for A-levels. The fact that I was going through your basic teenage depression (with a few bells and whistles) didn't help, either. My A-levels were awfully disappointing. That said, if I'd got the good results I had expected, I'd never have ended up in Lampeter. If I had to do it all over again, I'd rather go there than anywhere else. The people I met there were wonderful, and they have become if anything even more so. The university gave me a nice degree in Classics, then I hung about for another year getting a Masters in Ancient History. I haven't put either of those to much use as yet. Translating Latin bits and bobs for friends is as far as that's gone! But the striking difference between school and university was that I realised I had to work to get results. I did work and I did get results. I could have worked harder, but I couldn't have worked much harder while dating a girl with depression - and intermittently battling my own! One needs to unwind.

After that relationship, mind, I slid into thinking "Well, I put in all that effort, and that's what I get out of it?" That's not a healthy attitude when you've had one proper relationship. You might end up thinking such is always the case: generalising from the unique. I imagine that's rather sooner got over if you can talk to people. I couldn't do that for years. Every attempt was an exercise in terror and frustration. D'oh! Well, I've mislaid my health, I have no job, and whenever I have submitted recently to friends that we should say hello to those pretty girls at the end of the bar, they have nervously declined. In those circumstances, what can one do but ignore one's comrades temporarily? Roll on tomorrow night, when I shall try to remember not to woo women with defunct '90s sci-fi shows. Maybe current comedy shows will work better? I'll report back! Until then, enjoy some images of the General Store with its new roof.

Giving in to the Dark Skies (sorry, Obi-Wan!)

Image hence.

I revel in bad puns, so expect no apology. You may recall the other week that one of the episodes I long ago recorded onto VHS was unwatchable. I wept and gnashed my teeth. My dentist tells me I shouldn't do that. Last night I resolved with sangfroid to let it pass me by. I would be as a rock in a stream. "Not breathing?" No, unbothered! Stop deliberately misunderstanding, you blackguard! I put aside the useless tape, and picked up the next one. It's useless too! It was always a problem with videos. Sometimes they'd just be dodgy, and then you were stuck with no sound or lines through the whole thing or something else designed to give you a migraine. We didn't have any of that fancy high-falutin' digital recording teck-know-low-ghee back in the '90s. Two episodes on that tape, so that's three I can't watch, plus a few I didn't record.

Bugger that for a game of soldiers. Er, no offence intended to wargamers or fans of anal sex, obviously. So in a moment of weakness I sent for the DVD. Knowledge will be mine in a few (business) days. The funny thing is that I mean to have a nostalgic weekend with some friends, contemporaries of mine, two of whom haven't heard of half the shows I remember, and quite possibly the others are just too shy of offending me to have mentioned it. My classmates at school did always say I watched too much TV. They may have been right.

Heh, of course they were. Nary a friend from school lived within miles of my house, so I just hung around indoors, getting fat, reading and watching TV. It's not too different today, except that I watch stuff on the PC as a rule. That said, I decided last week to watch an episode of Castle, since it contains Nathan Fillion, and was quite taken with it. So I'll be watching tonight's in a little under a quarter of an hour. The précis of tonight's episode is that some rich woman was murdered and then shoved inside her wall-safe.

Like the previous six, this victim was found folded neatly in half...in place inside the glove compartment of a sanitation truck.

Am I about to watch an episode of a TV show based on a throw-away background gag from Hot Shots: Part Deux? Awesome! I'll let you know. Au revoir, mes amis!

Nostalgia Postponed

The above image is from this site.

Disappointment, joy, disaster! Back in the '90s there was a nifty little sci-fi show that aired on Channel 4 in the UK, Dark Skies: NBC's answer to The X-Files. Apparently, its American ratings were awful, and it sank at the end of the first series. Being a geeky kind of kid, it was of course on my list of things to watch rather than translate a chunk of Aristophanes. The premise was aliens were at Roswell, had demanded humanity's surrender, and the Yanks had refused, shot the beggars down, and were now (in the '60s) covertly trying to fight the aliens. A young couple (see above) got caught up in this, and kept trying to expose The Truth against the wishes of evil-minded aliens and secrecy-minded government types. The tag was "History as you know it is a lie" and they'd work in historical events, such as Kennedy's assassination. Watchers of Star Trek: Voyager will also notice the appearance of a certain Jeri Lynn Ryan in this show. More soberly dressed, mind, and with a face free from plastic and metal whatsits.

My farsighted younger self knew there would be a day when I didn't fancy watching anything on telly, and recorded them for me. Cross-temporal high-five, you spotty little guy! He didn't get 'em all, but I can stand a few missing episodes. "Then this 'disappointment, joy, disaster' stuff, Pete?" Yeah, I just tried to watch one episode, and the VHS is corrupted. Y'know, the old wavy lines of static interfere with picture quality, and you only hear one line in ten that the actors are saying. Vexing. But why that sequence of 'disappointment, joy, disaster'? Well, I was disappointed yesterday, 'cause I couldn't find an episode I thought I had. Then I felt joy about half an hour ago, when I realised it was on a tape that contains the antepenultimate and penultimate episodes. Huzzah! Then disaster: the tape's all screwy.


Is the rest of the tape screwy? Am I going to find out that I can't watch three episodes? I've two more episodes on another tape between the definitely messed-up one and these potentially messed-up others. I won't watch them without this, will I? Violate temporal law? That'd be like high-fiving my younger self. Am I really Ted Evelin Moseby? Rhetorical questions aside, I have a solution. There are about four days left on this Ebay selling I'm engaged in. I know I said something about buying Scotch the other day, but that wasn't really serious. I owe two friends a tenner each, and my brother a lot more. He'd not be happy if I spent it on something so tasty as Yamazaki. ;-) However, I know that Dark Skies, after years of delay, was finally released on DVD last autumn. £28 - I think we know where I'll be spending some of this Ebay money. I knew I'd be buying it in the end, since I don't have every episode . . . and because young me apparently failed to record the final cliffhanger episode. Tut-tut! So high quality showings of episodes will soon be in order, I fancy! At least one of the chaps I owe a tenner to will love this show, I know. You know who you are, Mr B!


It is rather groovy digging up all these bits and bobs. I turned up a couple of episodes of The Outer Limits the other night, one with the actress who plays Bruce Willis' wife in Die Hard, and another starring the actress who plays Roz in Frasier. Funnily enough, about a year ago, when I started going through these old tapes, I dug up an episode with David Hyde Pierce playing a misguided scientist brought low by his own hubris. I love that guy! Anyway, I guess I need to find something else to have on in the background while carving plastic and painting stuff. I've bored you enough, so I won't bore you with my deliberations on that. So long for now, o reader generous enough to keep going this far!