Vintage

Wines. A rant about vintage things can really only start at one place. Well, don’t be thinking 1925 Bordeaux now. I’m not that old. A notable vintage wine of my era would be Lonesome Charlie. Yes, a fine sparkling wine flavoured beverage best served very cold. Very, very cold. Tongue numbingly cold. It’s crisp acidity will cut through the greasiest of semi-rancid pizza meats and meat by-products.

Note that they’ve used the finest gold coloured aluminium screw cap. Stare in awe over the unique melted-strawberry-jello colour. Be taken aback by the shocking aroma. Ok, you can’t do that last one. Consider yourself lucky.

I went through cases of this stuff growing up. For nostalgia it scores high, but for vintage it scores low. Best left as a memory.

Movies. Now we’re talking. Hollywood is crap nowadays. Let’s looks back a little and see what we’ve got. Starting strong with Star Wars. They’ve turned it into crap now, but I was in the line-ups for the original! What else? Logan’s Run! Ok, losing momentum here. I loved the movie then, and I still do now, but only because I loved it so much then.

Recover from the stumble… “Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone”! Crap. I panicked. It did have Molly Ringwald. That must count for something. Ok, maybe not. I guess she’s “vintage” now, too. I have to pull this out of the fire… “Battle Beyond the Stars”. Fumble.

Ah! Alien, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the slightly fresher vintage of Terminator. Yes. Pulls it back from the brink.

Video Games. This one is clearly a win for my generation.

I know we started with Pong, but even that has to be given a nod for being the cornerstone of a great foundation. Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Asteroids, Zaxxon, Bubble Bobble, Joust, Moon Patrol, Astroblaster, Defender, Robotron 2049, the list is so long. Yes, there were a few duds, but the creativity has never been matched. Video games are nicer now, but not better. You have to have grown up in a real, thriving video arcade to know what I mean.

That’s a vintage memory that will never be equalled. You’ve got X-Box now because we showed the world how much money we were willing to pump into an Atari 2600. You’re welcome.

Magazines. Another point to vintage. Sorry, the past wins over the present in this category as well. We had Mad, Cracked, Crazy, CarToons, and National Lampoon. We also had Oui, Penthouse and Playboy back when that meant something. We had to work for our porn back then, and we appreciated it. One point goes to the present for improved grooming. Hadn’t anyone ever heard of a Lady Bic back then?

For the more cerebral, there were Time, and Life in their heyday. For the science fiction movie fans, there was Starlog and others like it.

I was going to say that magazines today are all derivative. I can’t do that after just lauding Mad, Cracked and Crazy. So we were derivative back then too, but our magazines were still way better.

Television. Where to start with this one. Television is crap now, but it was crap then. I still love all the old TV shows. I horde DVD TV series like gold doubloons. I’m not deluded into thinking they’re treasured relics of the past worthy of hallowed praise. Not at all. I love them all because they were all so awful. I think I even knew how crappy they were when I was a kid, but it didn’t matter. I loved them.

“Six Million Dollar Man” & “The Bionic Woman” (Lindsay Wagner is doing bed commercials now. What’s my sleep number? Back then it would have been 69 for you Jaime Sommers!) . “Knight Rider”. “B.J. and the Bear” (a truck driver with his pet monkey. Hey, those nights get cold and lonely). Emergency One (paramedics). CHiPs (staring Erik Estrada’s teeth). Space 1999 (really awful, but there has yet to be another space ship as cool as an Eagle). Battlestar Galactica (Starbuck was a guy, and the Cylons were not sex-bots).