Things that make me laugh

Time for a few things that make me laugh....

I talked about Eddie and the Cruisers in another post and figured I'd tell a small story now.
Eddie and the Cruisers was a film released in the fall of 1983 to a not very enthusiastic response and likely nothing would have separated from tons of other films that failed to find a huge audience,except for one thing-HBO.
In 1984,HBO began showing the film and suddenly interest boomed in both the film and Springsteen soundalikes John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band among teenagers and young adults.
The soundtrack zoomed up the charts and it seemed like everyone I knew was singing On the Dark Side and Wild Summer Nights.
I always had fond memories of the movie as I spent a lot of time in my early driving time listening to that soundtrack and when I saw the movie on DVD about a year ago in WalMart for five bucks,I had to have it and was looking forward taking it to work and watching it.
Sadly,it didn't seem to age well and wasn't as good as I remembered it.
Too bad,sometimes memory is better than reality I suppose.


Cruisers has one other thing that made me laugh through the years.
I used to watch a lot of the Womens Pro Billiards Tour on ESPN and one of the hosts was Mitch Laurence,who's twin brother Matthew played guitarist Sal Amato in the film.
Well,Laurence married one of the tours bigger stars which explained why he was doing the broadcasts for the WPBA and I could never remember if he was "Sal Amato" or his brother was.
That was usually the running joke as I watched the matches.
It turns out it was the brother that was Sal and his current job?
Sideline reporter for the Duke radio network for basketball.....
So,playing a guitarist in a movie 25 years ago qualifies you to broadcast basketball?
And they said Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football was bad (it was)!

One thing that I loved when I was in the early stages of school was racing home to see re-runs of the 1968 Filmation cartoons on WDCA 20 that showcased stars of the DC universe.
Several of the lines from the show have survived here for going on 40 years.
The best parts were always listening to Ted Knight as the voice of various villains.
This was during the time that Knight was a big star with his work on the Mary Tyler Moore show,but the cartoon was before the MTM program started.
That always made it even funnier to me with "Ted Baxter" as the Riddler.
The Riddler voice in this clip kills me to this day!


Another great part about that time was that kids of my age group were really catching the end of local hosting of kids shows.
Captain Chesapeake ruled the roost in Baltimore,but our king was Dick Dyszel or Captain 20 out of Washington.
Dyszel also played Count Gore DeVol on the Saturday late night show Creature Feature as well as Bozo the Clown.
I don't remember much about Dyszel's Bozo days,but it gives me the excuse to use the Bozo Bop Bag picture again,so let's go with it.
Even then,I knew that Dyszel played both roles,but in a wrestling suspended disbelief way,I didn't focus on it.
There is a film of the "Captain" that was just released and you can see the trailer below.
And yes, I indeed did have the Captain 20 Kids Club card shown in the clip.
What great memories of watching the scratchy UHF signal come in on black and white televisions along with our trusty 70's color floor model and having to tune in order to pick up the signal....


Until Next time!

Photo Credit-Unknown