'80s Television
1980s TV rokked. The shows were about cars! There were so many good shows back then! Cartoons looked better than they do today; none of this distorted, ugly bullshit! Regular Nintendo is just as fun as a Playstation 2 or XBox but with crummy graphics! Shows weren't full of themselves like they are today! Sick of exclamation points yet?! Good! Unfortunately, we have been losing these shows at alarming rate. Head on over to the Where'd our '80s TV Shows Go? page for an update.

When you're talking '80s TV, it doesn't get any better than The Dukes of Hazzard. I spent many Friday nights as a youngster watching CBS. At 8 p.m., it was the Dukes. At 9, Dallas came on.  By 10 o'clock, the programming had degenerated into Falcon Crest, forcing me to turn off the television at that point. But now, TNN has the Duke Boys on every day (no longer true; see above). Praise the Lord! I can sit around, drink beer, and yell at the TV: "Look out Bo and Luke! Roscoe has a speed trap on the other side of the Boar's Nest! He's got a hair dryer and is going to point it at you so that you think he's got a radar gun!" Now if it's a Coy and Vance episode, they don't get any help from me. I'm not going to save any shitty replacement Dukes! Jumped the Shark: I think you already know when.

Michael Knight could do anything. He could kick ass, outsmart organized crime, pick up foxy women, make small towns safe, and win impromptu drag races all in one episode. He also drove the Knight Industries Two Thousand, which was unstoppable. Not even Goliath could faze KITT -- and Goliath was a semi! Now, let me tell you how WGN dicked us all over. They replaced this show with The Cosby Show in their lineup. Granted, The Cosby Show is pretty funny, but you can watch it on every single channel on Earth. Does WGN actually think that they are stealing viewers from other networks by showing The Cosby Show? Why isn't there a Cosby Show Channel? WGN can lick my nutsack. They shouldn't show the Bozo Super Sunday Show so early in the morning, either. It should be on 10 p.m. on Sundays, so that we all can watch stupid kids screw up easy tasks and win nothing. Jumped the Shark: That did not happen with this show. This show is now on DVD, so I should stop bitching.

This was a fun little show. It was much better than the 1950s version, and I'm not just saying that due to my tremendous hatred of the '50s. The 1980s version was a real show with elements such as plot, climax, conflict, and resolution. These are all things that the '50s version lacked. Most '50s episodes consisted of this sequence:

1) The boys would be doing something mundane like cleaning house, and Alvin would get bored.

2)Alvin would put a mop on his head and talk like a girl.

3)Dave would walk in and yell  Alvin!

4)The credits would come on.

The 1980s version of the show dealt with real issues like Alvin's ego, Simon's dorkiness, and Theodore's overeating. Not only that, their band did rokken covers of Michael Jackson and Cindy Lauper tunes. Jumped the Shark: Hell, I don't remember

Yes, there actually is an ALF website. ALF was as source of torment during my young years, since his real name was Gordon Shumway. So other kids would walk up to me and say "Hi Gordon... SHUMWAY!" It sucked at first, but quickly I learned to say "Gee, I've never heard THAT one before!", which is the ultimate insult to an 8-year-old. Jumped the Shark: When the ALF cartoon premiered.

These four need no introduction. Absolutely nobody could beat them. Bad guys would lock them up in a junkyard or machine shop expecting that they were too stupid to escape. Not only were they able to escape, but they would build a war machine that they could use to conquer the enemy. My favorite piece of wizardry was when they welded a double set of wheels to the back of the GMC and slipped a belt over the extra wheel. The belt then ran to an auger that dug a new well, saving an Indian town. Jumped the Shark: After the big trial, when the show almost turned into a drama.  Score the A-Team on DVD.

The regular Nintendo was a blast. Even though it had some crappy games, you could have as much fun with it as you do with today's fancy games. We all talk of how many failures Sega has had, forgetting that Nintendo had R.O.B., U-Force, and the Power Pad. The graphical capability of the NES has been captured in this rare image. Jumped the Shark: After the Super Nintendo came out, programmers instantly started trying to make regular Nintendo games look like Super Nintendo games. Since that is impossible, the new games all looked like dogshit and played like whale shit. When they tried to port Street Fighter II over to it and there were only four characters, we knew that the NES had hit rock bottom.

How about peeping my Full House: Brilliant Satire or Dogshit? page? In the words of one webmaster I saw while researching the show: "Please don't e-mail me just to tell me that Full House stinks. Jumped the Shark: Full House never got on the fuckin' thing!

My God! The Transformers had the best cartoon, the best toys, the best clothing, and the best glow-in-the-dark sleeping bag of all time. This cartoon kicks every one of today's cartoons' asses halfway to Cyberton.  Not only that, The Transformers Movie is the best cartoon-to-movie film that Hollywood has given us. I was even able to download the "Oh, shit!" version off of Scour Exchange in only 5 hours back in '99. We didn't have the DVD in those days. I don't think that any network is currently showing this program. Assholes. Jumped the Shark: It's hard to say that the show even did, but I'm going to have to go with when all of the episodes were on Cybertron and none of them were real cars anymore.

In the '80s, they were Alive With Pleasure!