the birds and the bees

There has been a lot of talk about sex education in schools lately, what with the new revamped curriculum in Ontario and all. I have no intention of making this blog all political (although for the record, I am definitely in favour of the new curriculum and wish it would come to Nova Scotia, too) but it got me thinking about what passed for sex ed back in the late 80s / early 90s.

And oh boy! Have I got tales to tell.

Our first brush with Sex Ed in School came in the fourth grade – would have been 1988 for me. The public health nurse came in one afternoon and showed us a jittery film strip (remember those?) all about menstruation. Ten minutes of a cutaway view of the uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes, and when the red arrows headed briskly southward as the narrator dispassionately explained about “the monthly cycle” the kid who sat across the aisle from me actually fainted in horror.

Poor guy, he was woefully unprepared.

In grades five AND six, we were shown films that were supposed to give us reassurance? I guess? from both the male and female points of view. They were so terrible, I have never forgotten them, and I have often asked friends if they remember seeing them at their schools.

The answer was generally “no”. I guess in rural Nova Scotia we were pretty underfunded.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know what I’m going to say next.

I FOUND CLIPS ON YOUTUBE.

First up, Am I Normal? I distinctly remember watching this in grade six and thinking to myself no, you are not normal. Normal people do not give public speeches about their penis to the girl they like. 

If you think I am exaggerating, well, crank up the volume and be prepared to awkwardly cry-laugh.

That poor, penis-obsessed boy. My god. He just never stopped thinking about his penis. And talking about his penis. And asking people about his penis. He learns about erections (note: not a bone! it can’t snap or break off! thank you, helpful narrator); about how masturbation will not turn you into a blind wolfman (there is a great cartoon illustrating this principle); and he even asks a zookeeper about penises. A ZOOKEEPER.

There is a bestiality joke in there somewhere, I’m quite sure.

The other movie was called Dear Diary, and despite my very best efforts I was unable to find any clips anywhere. You can borrow the VHS tape from the Stanford University library, though.

I recall that Dear Diary was more fraught with tension, and there was less laughing in the classroom. Menstruation just isn’t funny, I guess. In my fruitless search for clips I found several sites that discuss Dear Diary, and overall it gets more favourable reviews than Am I Normal.

And that was it! That was the last sex ed I recall until grade nine, when we all had a boiled egg “baby” for a weekend, and also practiced rolling condoms onto wooden phalluses in class one day (the phalluses were made by the seventh grade woodshop class, and no, that’s not a bad joke). In high school we talked about HIV and pregnancy, and how to avoid both – there were condom machines in the washrooms and we were encouraged to use them. By then, it was really too late.

At no point in any of this did we learn about consent, what a healthy relationship looks like, homosexuality, other STDs (lots about HIV, but apparently the clap was just a given), or much beyond the mechanics of the human reproductive system.

Certainly we came away from Am I Normal? and Dear Diary with many kids still believing that douching with Coca-Cola immediately after sex would prevent pregnancy, and I knew girls who had babies or abortions before we finished high school, so clearly the ten-year-old educational film approach didn’t work.

How did your school handle sex ed?

Superior Wokmanship

I love cooking shows.

Competition shows, demonstration shows, even that show Food Factory – if it involves the preparation of food, I’ll watch it, as long as that horrid Axe-body-spray-smelling Guy Fieri is nowhere near it.

My love of cooking shows is lifelong. One of my very favourite programs as a young child was the fabulous Wok With Yan.

Produced out of CBC Vancouver, every episode started with a pre-recorded segment of Yan visiting different places in Asia; he would talk a little bit about the culture of the area, and discuss the food. I loved those little vignettes. I was only four years old when Yan went off the air the first time (I kept watching him in syndication though, because I had favourite episodes, yes of a cooking show WHAT OF IT) and those travelogues were my first exposure to the bigger world out there beyond my country upbringing.

The cooking part of Wok With Yan was actually recorded LIVE, in front of a studio audience. Imagine! The chef, Stephen Yan, loved to play to the crowd. He had a pleasant, easygoing manner and he loved a good joke. (He loved a bad joke even more.) I used to struggle sometimes to understand his thick Cantonese accent, but I loved the way he talked, and all the food looked really good. At the end of every episode, one lucky audience member got invited up on stage to sit with Yan and eat. Can you imagine if any of the big celebrity chefs did that now? Cooked in front of a live audience without food stylists? Invited an audience member who might say anything at all up on stage with you? They couldn’t handle it. I know that Rachael Ray had a live audience for her show, but I also know that the one episode I saw she called it “cooking” when she wrapped a slice of prosciutto around a raw asparagus spear, and when Martha Stewart had her live show her cooking failed on a semi-regular basis.

That never happened to Yan! He had such a clear and obvious love of cooking. He practically danced around the kitchen. Every single recipe including something he called “Chinese wonder-powder!” – as an adult I realize to my sorrow that it was probably MSG, but as a child it felt like he was tossing in some magical ingredient I would never fully understand. I remember reading labels at the grocery store, trying to find “Chinese wonder-powder” and failing. He had a hole in his countertop for all the food waste; when he shoved peelings and stuff into it he’d say here’s a little something for my brother, which delighted me even though it made no sense. Every episode would start with him tying on an apron, and the apron always had a different Yan-based pun. I freely admit I had to check Wikipedia for this list, and now I want several of these aprons for my very own:

• Wokking My Baby Back Home
• Danger, Yan at Wok
• Wok Around the Clock
• Wok the Heck
• You Are Wok You Eat
• Wok Goes up Must Come Down
• Wok’s New, Pussycat?
• Wokkey Night in Canada
• Stuck Between a Wok and a Hard Place
• Raiders of The Lost Wok
• Eat Your Wok Out
• Moon Wok
• Jailhouse Wok
• Superior Wokmanship
• Wok-A-Doodle-Doo

He never, ever took himself too seriously, and I think that was the appeal for me. He was so different to anyone I had ever encountered, and he was just a fun & funny guy, cooking what looked like delicious food and sharing it with his new friends.

While researching this post, I discovered that many of the original episodes are on YouTube in their entirety, so bye-bye productivity. In case you’ve never seen Wok With Yan, here’s a fun segment on cooking beef & broccoli. I distinctly remember seeing this, and ordering this dish at my hometown’s Chinese restaurant when we went for my birthday one year, excited that I could try something I’d watched him prepare.

So, Stephen Yan, wherever you are, I truly and without irony salute you. In some measure, you influenced my love of food and cooking. Watching this old segment again reminds me to stop stressing so much about food prep, to instead just have fun with it and stop taking things so seriously.

And maybe to get a punny apron of my very own.

it’s a commercial racket

If I were to say to you, “Emerson High, 1975. You were in my class” how many of you would immediately reply “I was your teacher”?

Bonus points if you remember that dork’s name!

(It was Bugsy Brown. BUGSY. Anyone who still had the nickname “Bugsy” in high school was getting exactly zero play with the ladies, even in 1975. I feel confident in making this statement.)

Let’s deconstruct this for a minute, shall we?

First of all, the movie Top Gun was three years in the past when this commercial first aired, but clearly it was still a part of the zeitgeist, because for some reason it seems to take place in an Air Force hangar. A gorgeous woman is walking through holding a clipboard. She is clearly a civilian, so that dates the whole thing, because in a post-9/11 world no unaccompanied civilians wander at will through Air Force hangars.

A uniformed flyboy approaches her and I think he’s Australian? Maybe? The accent is a bit muddy but this commercial is also three years after Crocodile Dundee and only one year after Crocodile Dundee 2, so clearly someone was trying to capitalize on what the The Simpsons called “a short-lived fascination with Australian culture”. He tries be all smooth, with his “hey, we were totally in high school together so we should get jiggy with it” and then BAM! Nope! The lady with the British (??) accent reveals that she was not his classmate! She was his teacher! So she’s at least 10 years older than he is! GETCHOO, SUCKA.

Let’s think about this for a minute, shall we?

The commercial aired in 1989. He says he was at Emerson High in 1975. Assuming that was his senior year, Ol’ Bugsy is now 32 years old. Again assuming that Miss Teacher is ten years older than he is, that makes her 42.

FORTY-TWO THAT MISERABLE OLD HAG HOW DARE SHE TRY TO TRICK INNOCENT TOP GUN TYPES WITH HER OIL OF OLAY SKIN.

Anyway.

What I find interesting about this – aside from how delightfully 80s it is – is that this commercial dates back to a pre-500 channel universe. People of a certain age ALL remember this commercial. It’s like the Tasters’ Choice coffee people ads (here one of my favourite authors / bloggers, Jenny Trout, gives us a complete recap on the series and it’s brilliant), or the old lady who wailed piteously “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!”, or in Canada, “it’s Patrick, he took out life insurance!” We were all watching the same three channels and the same shows, and so we all saw the same commercials over and over again.

That doesn’t really happen anymore. Occasionally an ad will go viral, some multi-million dollar production designed for the Superbowl that hits social media and is the flavour of the minute for all of a week, never to be seen again.

The most persistently memorable commercials of the 80s had shitty production values, no celebrities, nothing to make them bury themselves in our brains… and yet there they sit, reminding us every time we got to the grocery store that Oil of Olay, twice a day is the secret to looking younger.

Which commercials from the 80s do you remember?

6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon

I realized the other day that one of my favourite movies turns twenty-five this year.

TWENTY-FIVE SWEET BABY JESUS.

Awwww yeah.

These days whenever anyone asks me how old I am, I always pause for a minute before I answer. Not because I mind being nearly 37! I truly don’t. Ageing has never bothered me… but I think it’s probably because in my head, I’m still 25, just like this movie. So when I hear that a quarter-century has passed since I watched this with my dad as a VHS rental one Saturday night… well.

It’s a bit of a jolt, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, Tremors is just a hilarious, wonderful little piece of cinema that was totally unappreciated when it was released. According to IMDB, it only earned $3 million on opening weekend, and it cost $11 million to make. Ouch.

Tremors tells the story of Valentine “Val” McKee (played by a young & scruffy Kevin Bacon, sporting the worst hairstyle of his career) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward), handymen in a tiny settlement deep in the Nevada desert. There are only a dozen or so people living there, so it’s basically a haunted-house movie; we know all the characters, they are isolated and unable to get help, no one is going to stumble across them by accident, and half the fun comes from watching the interaction between the townsfolk.

Nice hat, Kevin.

There is also a love interest (because of course there is!) and she’s delightful; graduate student Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter) is in town conducting seismology tests. She’s smart, unafraid, takes no shit from anyone, and while clearly attracted to Val she never lets it get in the way of her work. She’s the brains of the outfit, and is an equal partner with our heroes when it comes to saving the settlement from certain death.

Spiral perm!

Because the settlement is under threat! FROM GIANT CARNIVOROUS WORMS (see image, above). The movie’s small budget means the worms are basically huge rubber puppets full of glop, so they aren’t inherently scary – all of the tension comes from the actors selling it with all of their hearts. Horror movies of this genre really only work if everyone involved agrees to be in on the joke, and no one phones it in here. Every character does their damndest to make us care what happens to them, and we do. It’s hard to remember in the post remaking-Japanese-horror-movies era, but it is actually possible to put a good scare into people without creepy lighting and weird ghost children.

And just when you think this movie can’t get any more awesome, along come Burt & Heather Gummer, survivialists who live just outside the main settlement in their freaking awesome ultra-modern apocalypse bunker. Played by Reba McEntire and Michael Gross – yes, really! – they have enough weaponry in their basement to power an army, or as Burt Gummer puts it when they have to run for it: “Food for five years, a thousand gallons of gas, air filtration, water filtration, Geiger counter. Bomb shelter! Underground… God damn monsters.”

That’s just good stuff.

This is one of those movies, like The Mummy with Brendan Fraser, that I will watch whenever it shows up on TV. I’ll even sit through terrible commercials and put up with the overdubbing of the cussing (not that there is much, actually.) I was twelve or thirteen when I saw it, and my dad and I were howling with laughter, even while the gross-out bits and jump-scares were sucking me in.

You should check it out, if you haven’t seen it before. It’s a fine entry in the filmography of Kevin Bacon, if nothing else, plus you get the fun of seeing the dad from Family Ties play the exact opposite of that character. It’s funny, and smart, and scary all at once. Well worth a look.

blurred lines

A couple of weeks ago I sat down with my kids to watch an underappreciated movie from 15 years ago called Titan A.E. They loved it and I enjoyed revisiting it. It was fun.

This post is not about Titan A.E.

Instead, it is about cel animation.

My kids – all born since 2005 – noticed right away that something about Titan A.E. was different. It didn’t look like all the “cartoons” they are used to. The lines were less sharp. The textures were suggested rather than clearly defined. The facial features on the humans were more stylized.

I realized that for my kids, animated movies have always been completely produced inside a computer, CGI extravaganzas with 3D-friendly action set pieces and slow-mo shots of girls tossing their carefully-textured hair.

Look at the difference between Pixar’s Brave and Titan A.E., from Don Bluth:

Now, don’t get me wrong – there have been lots of animated films in the past twenty years that have been just fantastic. And there were many, many duds from the 80s that are really best forgotten. But the tone of 80s cel-drawn movies was entirely different. Darker, more moody and atmospheric. There were no zingy one-liners or mildly-risque jokes aimed at the parents.

I had some favourites, of course.

The Secret of N.I.H.M. (Don Bluth again!) from 1982 is one I remember vividly as being both scary and fascinating. I loved it, and it still holds up today – it’s a dark, intense film that never once talks down to the audience. It deals with very heavy themes; the main character is Mrs. Brisby, a widowed mouse who lives in a cinderblock with three very young children. One of the children becomes dangerously ill at the same time that she is about to need to move to a new home. For help, she reaches out to a colony of super-intelligent rats – they knew her late husband, and as the movie progresses it becomes clear that they owe him a considerable debt. In this movie we get a stern and graphic message about the cruelty of animal testing; some honest-to-god unrequited sexual tension between Mrs. Brisby and the dashing Justin; a truly-scary villian in Jenner (and don’t even get me started on his sidekick Sullivan; that relationship is legitimately disturbing); the possibility that kids can die; murder; and betrayal.

Every Easter weekend my family sat down together with baskets of chocolate and watched Watership Down (because rabbits? I guess?) Talk about dark! This one was actually released in 1978, but I didn’t see it until the advent of home VHS, so it feels very 80s to me. Based on the book by Richard Adams, it tells the story of a small band of rabbits that flee their warren one step ahead of developers. The movie is very faithful to the book, so there is an extended sequence showing the effects of poison gas on the crowded rabbit warren; one of the main characters ends up in a snare; rabbits tear each other to pieces with claws and teeth. DON’T LET THE BUNNIES FOOL YOU, PEOPLE. This movie is not adorable in any way. Want to know how the original small band knows to leave? It’s because one of the rabbits is psychic – he has visions that always come true, but they have also left him a scrawny, trembling, anti-social mess. By the time the talking seagull shows up, we are all desperate for the comic relief. And if you can hold it together when Hazel is shot – Art Garfunkel’s sad ballad Bright Eyes playing as he gasps for breath – well. You have a heart made of stone, that’s all I can say.

In 1988 came Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a great movie that (in my opinion) laid the groundwork for the current crop of animated films. Combining cel animation and live action so seamlessly that it still looks convincing, Roger Rabbit was marketed at kids but was truly an adults’ movie, a film noir with ACME bombs and one very kinky game of patty-cake at the centre of an old-style murder mystery. Let’s not forget the terrifying villian – Christopher Lloyd chewing up the scenery as the ‘toon-killing Judge Doom. My parents took us to see this one in the theatre – I was 10, my sister was 7, and my baby brother was 2. To this day, he can’t watch the final scene where Judge Doom reveals himself as the squeaky-voiced murderer with the crazy eyes.

The 80s were all about trauma, folks.

What kids’ movie has stuck with you since you were a child?

you can leave your hat on

When I was a kid, we didn’t have cable. Cable was for rich kids, and my grandparents, who paid for cable but never watched it and liked to complain how there was never anything on even with all the extra channels.

Like most children who grew up in rural Canada, we had two channels – CBC and CTV. “Screen time limits” being a phrase never heard or uttered in the 1980s, my sister and I would binge from just after breakfast until lunchtime, when the programming flipped to soap operas on every channel. Usually we did the trifecta of comfort programming on CBC; The Friendly Giant, Mr. Dressup, and Sesame Street. Then we’d switch over to CTV and the completely weird Harriet’s Magic Hats.

The premise was simple. A little girl had a trunkful of hats in her attic. When she put on a hat, zap! she was instantly transported to the appropriate setting for the hat. Chef’s hat? Zap! to a restaurant kitchen to learn about being a professional chef. Hardhat? Zap! to a dangerous-looking construction site where you learn all about the construction trades.

I loved the show. I loved the “special effects” that even little-kid me knew were kind of cheesy. I loved the strange opening theme sung by what sounded like a British children’s choir. For years whenever I was playing the whole “do you remember” game with people, I would ask them about Harriet’s Magic Hats.

No one did.

I started to think I was crazy. It became a kind of quest for me; would I ever meet someone who remembered the show? Did it ever actually exist? Were my sister and I just sharing in a hallucination brought on by years of eating carob-chip cookies and Red River cereal because my mom was a clean-eating localganic sort of person before it was cool?

I resolved that my first post for “Throwing it Back” would be an ode to Harriet and her magic hats, because dammit, Allison and Nicole have a longer reach than me and I was hoping someone, somewhere, would validate me.

I decided to Google that shizz, just in case… AND OH MY GOD, THE INTERNET IS WONDERFUL.

I found it! I found it on Wikipedia (although it’s not a full article and needs more detail). I found full episodes! I found the opening credits and the years didn’t lie, it does sound like a British children’s choir is singing it!

It’s strange, though. Apparently I was so young when I watched it (it went off the air in 1986, when I was eight) that I was remembering it all wrong. The little girl is not named Harriet; her name is Susan. Harriet is her aunt. MIND = BLOWN. I’d also managed to block out the creepy puppet that lives in the attic; it’s a parrot that talks and reads the newspaper (??) and is also roughly the size of an ostrich. Like, it’s a huge bloody parrot. A scary parrot. And although the quality of the YouTube video isn’t great, it looks like it has Groucho Marx eyebrows.

The 1980s were a strange, magical time, children.

I maintain that it was a great show. There was no gender divide about the featured jobs. There was a good balance between white collar and blue collar careers. The information was given in simple language and since an episode was only 15 minutes kids couldn’t get bored.

Imagine a rebooted version for today’s kids? I would totally watch that, and make my kids watch it, too. Right now they think the only available jobs are the ones their dad & I do, plus astronaut, palentologist, nuclear physicist, and professional baseball player. A little dose of information and reality would be kind of awesome.

You can leave the parrot out of it, though.

Do you remember Harriet’s Magic Hats? Please tell me if you do!