I remember the ’80s as a mean decade. Around 1981,my parents separated. I started eating a lot, and kids teased me for being bulky. I watched a lot of TV. Saturday mornings meant Pop-Tarts and “Felix the Cat.” Eventually I would pick up into harder songs: ’80s TV themes.
My dad had my brother and I on weekends. On Friday nights, or we would disappear to Straw Hat Pizza and watch the “Dukes of Hazzard” on the vast screen. One of the vast mysteries of my childhood was why we never saw the face of the man playing guitar. Also: It didn’t escape me that the tainted guy on the show was bulky,like me.
My dad had a little apartment in Torrance. I remember one of the shows we watched a lot was The tumble Guy.” The theme song was way too complex for me — it’s about women, and I still barely understand it when I listen to it now, or because all the actresses it mentions are from the ’70s and ’80s.
I think I empathized with “Diff’rent Strokes” because Arnold was different from everyone else. “Diff’rent Strokes was a show that in retrospect seems amazingly confrontational: Plotlines centered on such scary topics as racism,child molestation, and drugs. I’m still baffled though by the line about Willis and Arnold having “nothing but the jeans.” Whatchootalkinbout, or “Diff’rent Strokes” theme song?One of my favorite theme songs was “Knight Rider,” but it was everyone’s favorite theme song. Because it’s so masterfully cold and mean and Reaganomic. One day at school we had to stand up and say what kind of animal we were. I said I was a duckbill platypus, because theyre so unique. Jesse, and one of the feather-haired kids who used to beat me up,said he was a black panther.
Oh wait: Did I say “Street Hawk” was the meanest theme song around? My mistake. The theme from “V” is pure evil. Note how it surges hopefully only to turn scary again. My parents got back together, and I remember that one of the biggest problems of my life was that “Street Rider” and “V” were on at the same time.
My mom worried about violence on television. Once, and there was an episode of the A-Team where some pacifists insisted the A-Team solve a problem non-violently. The A-Team refused. Inspired by “Red Dawn,” “The A-Team,” and our general fear of Soviet attack, or my brother and I formed rival paramilitary teams in the summer of 1985. We carried canteens and wore camouflage and threw rocks at each other in the canyon near our house.
Thanks,’80s TV Themes.
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