SUMMER NIGHT FLIGHTS

Depending on your definition of Summer, we've got about a month of it left. For some reason this season always makes me even more prone to reminisce, and that should mean a lot coming from a retro-til-you-puke fellow like me. Recently I've noticed myself playing a disproportionate amount of 80s tunes, and I've been systematically satisfying my cravings for old summer film standbys: Karate Kid, Die Hard, Summer School, Raiders of the Lost Ark and First Blood to name some. And as you can tell from some of my recent posts, I'm currently on a "remembering TV" kick.

Now, my grandpa would scold me for such a notion. He'd tell me that summer recollections shouldn't have anything to do with forms of popular media. But don't get me wrong, this Arkansan scamp allotted ample time for fort building, bike explorations, and bathing in the local bodies of snake-infested water; and I had the sunburn and ticks to prove it. But few situations in my life have more effectively demonstrated the concept of 'peaceful' like my long, still, jobless, teenage summer nights. No people, no obligations, no worries (no girlfriend). Just me and my little companion with the flickering screen. So naturally I romanticize the TV shows that I associate with this precious time period. For instance, to this day Star Trek reruns put me so at ease that they rival sedatives.



In the summer of '87 there was some special deal on the Disney Channel that my family just couldn't pass up. At the time, Disney was a subscription channel like HBO and Showtime which were the only other "premium TV" choices. (Deal aside, I remember Disney was 8 bucks a month, two dollars cheaper than the movie channels.) So we got our Mickey Mouse, but more importantly we got a cable box. My family still hadn't ventured into the questionable realm of video recording devices (unlike all my friends' households) so this was the first time we'd ever picked up more than thirteen channels. One of which was channel 20, the USA Network. By day it was seemingly non-stop Dance Party USA, but by night it was the cooler-than-thou Night Flight...




That endless loop of dreamlike animation perfectly sums up the mood of those nights.

Well, the Disney channel stunk. Everything but the Wonderful World reruns was just painful. I mean, they didn't even have anything on the level of Hannah Montana or those creepy twins who live in the hotel (no, not The Shining). Occasionally they taunted us by airing commercial free movies like The Boy Who Could Fly which eventually enticed us to switch to ten dollar HBO. This meant that by 1988 I was watching the 2 AM showings of Killer Klowns from Outer Space. The spacey old HBO "Feature Presentation" intro they put in front of each movie still has a Pavlovian effect on me...


I'll go one better than just showing it. Here's a fascinating ten minute short on the painstaking, outmoded creative process behind of this very cool, very expensive piece of footage...




These days I'd like to think I get more out of my summers than love affairs with video clips. This year, at a time when I normally get my first tinges of Halloween excitement, I'm making a conscious effort to soak in the remaining summertime, and to appreciate the summer fundamentals that I so longed for six months ago... insect songs, air conditioned matinées, hosing down my son in the back yard, iced tea in metal tumblers beaded with condensation, the sense of leisure around the office, bike rides, sitting under the stars with the missus, well deserved bowls of ice cream after lengthy lawn mowings, hosting out-of-town friends, fireflies, night drives with the top down, this year's many rain storms (you can almost smell the photosynthesis when sun hits the grass afterward), and of course there's blogging at one in the morning. Anyway, let's savoring all this while we're able.