About five years ago I did a list of offbeat stuff I watched when I was a kid that I still remembered. I think it’s about time to list a few more.
When you’re a kid, things seem odd. Not necessarily scary, but just strange. You don’t have the experience necessary to process certain things correctly. So they stay in your head until you reach the age when you can look back and say, “Oh, that’s what that was!” Now it seems very often I talk about stuff I did not actually see, so here are five things I did in fact see.
1.”Return to OZ”
I admit, I was one of those people who went to see this movie thinking we were getting a nice little follow up to the classic Wizard of OZ. That isn’t quite what we got. In the slightest. No instead we got The Wheelers. Yeah they were kinda scary. Actually the whole movie is, being very dark and menacing. I think it’s safe to say that anyone who saw this movie remembers it, somewhere in the back of the minds. Dorothy returns to OZ to find that an evil king has decimated the land. She makes new friends, like that creepy as hell skeleton guy, and to be fair it’s not a bad movie. It’s just not quite what I expected. It’s a lot closer to the original source material than the classic MGM movie.
2.”Out of Control”
hey did you wonder where Dave Coulier got his start? No not on Full House. This show, one of the very first original shows Nickelodeon ever produced. So what was it? It was a mock talk show which Dave Coulier hosted and there would be regular kooky commentators who would report on various things. The episode I never forgot is one where the inventor on the show somehow created a device which aged the characters. So for one episode all the regulars are old, for no real reason. The show was real offbeat and silly.
3.”Harry and the Hendersons”
Here’s an 80’s movie that no one talks about anymore. Back in the 80’s the big gimmick was to have a strange creature in your house that had to be hidden. And hijinks! E.T. did it, Alf did it, Small Wonder did it. So who or what was Harry? Just Big Foot. I am serious! A family almost runs of the mythical creature and brings him home. I don’t remember much of this movie to be honest, except for the final scene. Why? John Lithgow plays the father and unlike other movies he really acts here. In he end he is trying to get Harry to run back into the woods, where he’ll be safe, and his strategy is to yell at him. And then even hitting him! Yeah 1987, different time. And yes this led to a wacky TV series which I could not bring myself to watch. Though it lasted awhile so someone obviously did. This is one of those silly family movies which makes no sense but it’s also harmless and fun.
4.”The Third Eye”
Show of hands, who’s heard of this? It aired on Nickelodeon and was one of those shows that I watched even though I never got the title. It actually isn’t a show I would ever watch but somehow I got sucked into one of the anthologies. And I am getting ahead of myself. This was a an anthology series featuring sci fi serials from the U.K. I ended up getting caught up in “Into The Labyrinth”. The premise of the season I watched involved two sorcerers. One good and one evil, both fighting over ultimate power. The good sorcerer sends three kids to various time periods to find an object of ultimate power. Every time they lose and have to try again. And as you can guess the series had the children encountering the sorcerer in different periods in an attempt to find the item and beat the evil sorcerer. I got sucked in and watched it until the end. My only gripe, besides the silly effects, was the final episode was way to obvious that the good guys would win. But still enjoyable. There were two more seasons but I didn’t watch those.
5.”Alice in Wonderland (1985)”
No not the Tim Burton movies, or the classic Disney film, I am talking about a TV movie. This was on in 1985 and was the definition of all star cast. It was on for two nights and I watched…though I’d be lying if I said I remembered a lot of it. With one major exception. Carol Channing plays The White Queen and due to a series of events ends up turning into a sheep. Wtf? This scene was so creepy it always stayed with me, and I just looked it up on YouTube. It was worst than I remembered! Seriously though this Alice was a major production with tons of celebrities. Sammy Davis Jr was the Caterpillar and was awesome. Red Buttons as The Rabbit, Ann Jillian as the Red Queen, and many more I could be here all day. It stayed about as true to the book as you can get and is totally worth a watch, even if it is slow, as long as you don’t mind some 80’s silliness.
By the way there was a 1999 version which I also watched, but I don’t remember much of it aside from Gene Wilder as the Caterpillar. It also had Whoopi Goldberg as the Cheshire Cat and Martin Short as The Mad Hatter. It aired in the 1999 at a time when NBC commercialized everything, and this movie got hyped huge. It was good but not great. They also took a few more risks like showing the characters Alice would meet later as regular people in the start, Wizard of Oz style. And of course better effects, fifteen years later. It was an interesting choice. Still better than that awful Tim Burton movie.
That’s all I got for now, is there a classic movie or TV show that you still remember? Comment and let me know.
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