Show Notes for HMOTD 050: Soul Suds

BIG REMINDER: Get those Listener Mail questions in to us ASAP for our penultimate episode! There's still time, despite what we said in our post-credits "blooper." Email thebigguy@holdmyorderterribledresser.com before next Wednesday the 7th!

1:00 Hugh Wilson, RIP: As we said, three hours' notice was not enough time to do justice to the man who brought us WKRP, but rest assured, HMOTD 052 will take a deep dive into the man and his career.

2:23 "I learned the news of Hugh Wilson's passing... from Les Nessman." That's @WKRPQuotes on Twitter, well worth a follow!

4:50 "White guys drive like this..." It's true, it's true! We're so lame!

5:45 Big Guy Office Props: If I were to rank my Top 3 Big Guy Office Prop bits, it'd probably go: 3) inflatable raft, 2) Soul Suds standees, and 1) Apollo 11 rocket. But they're all so damn good. The one where he flings a desk drawer out the window is funny, but always makes me nervous about the people on the ground outside the Flimm Building.

5:59 Standee: I was hoping there'd be a really good Secret History of the Standee but I couldn't find much online. Although the Wikipedia entry has this lovely image from the Roaring 20s of some cartoon-y standees for a clothes shop.

[Rob: Here's an 80s CanCon anecdote for you: at some point in the early 1980s, my sister acquired a standee of pouty Canadian dreamboat Corey Hart, sunglasses and all. Long after her infatuation with Corey faded, he lurked in one corner of our rec room, giving people heart attacks when they came down the stairs.] [p.s. Holy heartthrob: the Corey hotline was real??!?]

7:39 Media/communication failures on WKRP: I mean, I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that a series about radio has so many plotlines that hinge on communications and how funny it is when they break down, but there's the episodes we mentioned in the episode, plus "An Explosive Affair," "Mike Fright," and of course tons of Les jokes ("killer lizzard," for one). I have a feeling either Rob or I could get a good Media Studies-type paper out of this.

14:13 Tom Sullivan: Hey, Tom Sullivan is from Boston and a Harvard graduate, not to mention a musician, screenwriter, and author! His memoir, If You Could See What I Hear, was released in 1975 and was adapted into a movie in 1982 starring Marc Singer, the Beastmaster himself, and Shari Belafonte!

Also, I wanted to mention, apropos of the mention Rob gave of the nameplate on Mr. Sherman's receptionist's desk, that Mr. Sherman has that classic 1980s executive toy, the Newton's Cradle, on his desk.

[Rob: Is it able-ist to wonder what appeal a Newton's Cradle would have to a blind person?]

14:50 "Handicapped": I want to give a sincere apology for using the term "handicapped" and not "disabled" or "person with disabilities" in this episode. As someone who grew up in the time period that this show depicts, it's awfully easy to slide back into outdated terminology, especially when you're watching a show that is set during that time. But honestly, that's no excuse, and I apologize unreservedly and will most certainly do my best to avoid this in the future.

21:48 The Metric Marvels! You see that '70s cartoon style I'm talking about here? It's very Schoolhouse Rock. I actually remember this PSA much better. Man, the late '70s really were a golden age of PSAs, weren't they? (BLATANT PLUGS IN LAST-EVER SHOW NOTES, AHEM)

[Rob: Here's a Canadian PSA from the same era, explaining what is obviously the most critical use of metric system: the difference between 3 cm, 30 cm, and 100 cm of snow. Note the little flying bug (snowball? will-o-the-wisp?) wearing the Canadian metrication logo as a hat. I'll bet this guy is the reason I remembered that logo as "adorable."]

23:26 French Revolution: So yes, the French Revolution not only gave us the awesome idea of chopping the heads off the monstrously wealthy, but they also gave us uniform units of measurement. Alas, decimal time did not take off, and neither did the Revolutionary calendar, as beautiful as it might be.

24:01 The British get the Prime Meridian: Rob was absolutely right. The trade was that France would recognize Greenwich (instead of Paris) as the Prime Meridian if the British signed onto the metric system. While the British technically did as early as 1884 recognize the meter, as Brexit has shown, it has never dislodged the mile and the yard in British hearts.

24:40 A cubic decimeter of water: I was right! A cubic decimeter of water simultaneously takes up one liter of volume and weighs on kilogram. Not bad for having my metric dreams crushed at the age of 8.

26:10 "You like Canadian late-20th century graphic design?" Yes. Yes, Rob I do.

28:15 Meet The Meters: Used copies are going for $40 on Amazon. I'm not ashamed to say I teared up a little seeing that cover. My goodness, what nostalgia. Basically the only books I used to take out of the library at this age were about math.

30:31 Old Skull: When Rob included this clip in the episode, I was floored. I'd forgotten all about the most punk of all hardcore '80s bands, Old Skull! Yes, three 10-year-old kids in the late '80s singing songs about how much Ronald Reagan fucking sucked. Sadly, the two brothers at the center of the band both died in the early '10s. The story of Old Skull always reminded me a bit of The Shaggs, too.

31:29 Madam C.J. Walker: Really, just an amazing story; Madam C.J. Walker is literally one of the world's first truly global brands, as Black beauticians across the Americas used her products and trusted the name (and face) on the packaging.

34:23 Afro Sheen/Frederick Douglass: Both Rob and I didn't remember clearly if this ad was real or a Robert Townsend/Eddie Murphy-era satire, but no, it's absolutely real and actually kind of awesome. Frederick Douglass is being recognized more and more.

[Rob: I can't get enough of the line, "I've been watching the progress of our people, and I'm quite familiar with the natural."]

35:31 Huey Lewis: I've had "Do You Believe In Love" stuck in my head all week, thanks Huey. Good song, GREAT dorky early '80s video. I bet that woman is like, "Hey, The News, get the hell out of my bedroom." But WKRP music maven Michael Rodriguez reminds us in this comment from our Facebook that only Sean Hopper of Clover went on to join the News.

39:41 Johnny/Hirsch: It's a great scene and a great pairing. What more can be said? It feels like Hesseman is finding Ian Wolfe to be a comedic brother-in-arms in that scene.

42:47 "It makes everything make sense." It's true! Whether the arc was planned out or not, kudos to Hugh and the writers to be able to stick the landing like this and explain away 4 years' worth of zany schemes and Mama's conniving.

49:44 News radio on AM: The all-news format began in the early '60s but really didn't take off until stations like 1010 WINS in New York changed format in 1965 and heavily branded their content with slogans like "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world" and their famous use of the xylophone intro to Ib Glindemann's "Construction Site," memorably used in Goodfellas as news of the Lufthansa Heist comes over Henry Hill's radio.

51:12 "Another Merry Mixup": We talked about "Another Merry Mixup" back in HMOTD 045, and here's Jaime Weinman's article about it one more time. Hey, sincere thanks to Jaime Weinman for being one of our polestars throughout this podcast for WKRP lore, along with...

55:13 Michael Kassel: If you take your WKRP fandom seriously, you really should pick up a copy of Michael Kassel's America's Favorite Radio Station: WKRP In Cincinnati. Thank you so much, Michael Kassel, for all your hard work in interviewing the cast and crew.

1:06:32 "Leave it to Gordon." This quote about the show's cast and crew being a family shoots up to the top of my list of Gordon Jump's Being Adorably Kind list; I don't know how I'd rank Gordon Jump's Lasagna and Gordon Jump And His Wife Dancing Like Singin' In The Rain, but those are definitely my top 3.

1:07:59 Cheers: Boy that Cheers post-finale interview is just a horrible mess. I cringed like five times just listening to 45 seconds of it. I will tell you, though: people in Boston in 1993 were fucking INTO having the Cheers cast here in town. But the finale itself... I love that final couple of minutes, still, to this day.

1:12:45 "Life on Mars finale... just Google it": If you must know how the American version of Life on Mars ends, spoilers I guess.

1:14:00 Lincoln in the Bardo: I really need to read this book. I'm a George Saunders fan from way back and everything I've heard about this book has been exceedingly good.

[Rob: I liked it a lot: funny and sad and Saunders has a lot of fun with the language. I'm a sucker for faux 19th-century grandiloquence.]

1:20:14 Post-credits: As we said above, it's not too late to get your questions into us; we definitely would like a few more emails before next week! And hey, the Twitter tournament is heating up! We've got three regional rounds still going today and this weekend! We were too shaken up from having to end the podcast to look at a damn calendar. Oh well, it's a good blooper. :)

Show Notes for HMOTD 049: Venus Is A Girl's Name

2:35 Our hiatus and Lisa's blog: Lisa Faden's blog is at Breathing In, Breathing Out. It is a powerful read, and I'm grateful to Lisa for sharing her journey with all of us. And once again, thank you to all our listeners for your kind words and well wishes. It's meant a lot to Lisa and Rob and family, and to me.

4:23 "What the first line of The Invisibles?" Ah, I misremembered it, Rob was right, it's "And so we return and begin again." I suppose this loses me a spot in any eventual Invisibles read-along podcast.

8:40 Andy's side of "The Creation of Venus": This was the big revelation of the episode for me, showing Andy's nervous time during the Pilot behind the scenes, contradicting the laconic cowboy he seemed back in 1978. The writers have done so much with Andy, and Gary Sandy as we've noted time and time again is in a different class than he was back in Season 1. Most Improved Cast Member!

10:00 Carol Bruce: Yeah, probably not controversial at this point to say that Carol Bruce has also shown tons of versatility in her four years on the show, and totally justifies the decision to use her for the series.

13:00 Reshoot of the format change scene: This is probably the biggest bummer of the episode for me. They shouldn't have even tried to do this. I do appreciate the scenes between Pilot-era Johnny and Venus meeting each other for the first time, though. Two guys who'd become best buds during the series having their meet-cute which we never got to see the first time.

[Rob: I don't mind the alternate version! I think it's less about being "low energy" and more about showing us how Johnny is winging it / making the Fever character up on the spot. I also think it forces us to embrace a Rashomon-style approach to continuity, as we discuss. What we saw in the pilot might be what that moment seemed like to the WKRP audience, or maybe to Arthur; what we see here is what the moment might have felt like internally to Johnny and maybe Andy and Venus too.]

15:33 Simpsons memory clip: It's a very visual joke, but Lord knows it's probably one of my favorite single moments in Simpsons history.

15:52 "It's a love sign, ruled by Venus." Libra is a super interesting sign! It is indeed ruled by Venus, and the "love" part of the sign is said to involve Librans' appreciation of fine art and fine clothes. Hmm, seems perfect for our Venus now that I think about it. It's also the title of probably my favorite Don DeLillo novel (1988's Libra, about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald). In that book Clay Shaw, CIA asset and possible assassination conspirator, explains to Oswald that the Libran be either balanced or impulsive and brash. It kind of makes you think of Venus's double nature throughout his time on WKRP, doesn't it?

19:12 Other carnivorous plants: Carnivorous plants are creepy and weird; I've always had a kind of irrational fear of them, stemming I think from a 3-2-1 Contact segment I saw growing up with microphotography of bugs getting captured and eaten. Shudder. Or maybe it was this Vincent Price-narrated (!!!) educational film called Death Trap. Also there was Little Shop of Horrors which I liked not one bit as a kid. In conclusion, carnivorous plants, while badass, can also GTFO.

25:03 "In 2017, we're all nerds now." I really did shudder to think about the ramifications of this statement.

26:45 "Trials and Tribble-ations": Oh man. I think my love of this episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine came out sufficiently on the show, but the Memory Alpha entry does give all the background including the fact it was inspired by the success of Forrest Gump and that it was originally going to be set on the planet of "A Piece of the Action." But it would be about the planet 150 years later, now adhering to the Enterprise crew's behaviors as they had the 1920s gangsterse, "as a social commentary on the Trekkie phenomenon." I actually kind of want to see Rob Moore's script for this episode now.

[Rob: That's interesting: shades of Galaxy Quest, though the DS9 episode would have preceded the film by a few years.]

31:07 Broadcast intrusions/David Foster Wallace: My piece on the history of broadcast intrusions is here (it's also been syndicated at one of my favorite sites on the paranormal, the Daily Grail), and the classic David Foster Wallace piece on the meta-reflexiveness and irony-saturated landscape of television is here. The MTM/St. Elsewhere stuff starts on page 158.

32:23 The Tommy Westphall Universe: Wading into the history of the Tommy Westphall theory is about as labyrinthine as the theory itself! These guys claim they invented it on alt.tv.homicide (big ups to Usenet baby!) back in 1999, but I've also heard rumors that late comic legend Dwayne McDuffie arrived at it independently in 2002 as well. I'd forgotten that Tommy and his father put his snowglobe down on top of a TV set at the end of the episode as the St. Elsewhere theme plays in the background. Just hammer that metaphor home, Tom Fontana. I love it, though.

34:58 The Wold Newton Universe/Planetary: The Wold Newton universe theorizes one single event, a meteorite strike near the British town of Wold Newton, created all the pulp heroes of the first half of the 20th century (this concept was indeed ably recycled by Warren Ellis in his Planetary comic series, a longtime favorite of Rob's and mine, with Ellis's concept of "century babies" all born with superpowers on January 1, 1900).

[Rob: Here Mike mentions our longtime mutual friend, Jess Nevins, Two-Fisted Librarian and probably this timeline's number one expert on the pulp, comic, and dime novel fantasies of yesteryear. You might remember him from the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana or his hypercomplete annotations to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and other comics, which frightened even Alan Moore, and that's saying something.]

38:01 Bishop Berkeley: Bishop Berkeley's philosophy is a little more complicated than my potted version, but subjective idealism tells us that everything is real insofar as it is sensed by a mind.

40:50 Mad About You/Seinfeld: While the jokes about George being emasculated by having to watch Mad About You are pretty retrograde today (and now that I think about it, an incredible burn to the producers of that show by the Seinfeld crew!), hearing the theme music tinkling over George's agonized facial expressions in the closing credit of that episode still makes me chuckle.

45:37 "The Impossible Dream": I liked keeping this little "not-intended-for-air" bit about Rob pondering whether he should sing.

49:24 Walter Cronkite/Dan Rather: So we had the timeline a tiny bit off; Cronkite had been replaced by Dan Rather back in March 1981, so he'd been out of the seat for a year by this point. So this bit probably would've involved, as Rob theorizes later, Les getting some appropriately avuncular advice from Uncle Walter.

52:30 Aurra's "Make Up Your Mind"/Ernie Watts's "Chariots of Fire": Two pieces of excellent music on Venus's show in this pair of episodes. Aurra's aforementioned sick jam, which is just in that perfect post-disco, early-'80s funk place of artists like Cameo and Rick James. And in the last episode we had to cut a discussion of Peak Vangelis triggered by the appearance of this amazing jazz cover of the massive Vangelis hit, the "Chariots of Fire" theme song, by jazz saxophonist Ernie Watts at the beginning of "The Creation of Venus."

59:47 "New York's gonna eat him alive." The conversation between Andy and the Big Guy here is very meta, isn't it? The Big Guy represents the kind of old, idealized, fictional universe where a kid from the sticks can make it big in the city. Andy is the brutal realist. Kind of an amazing little clash of worldviews there.

1:02:38 "He doesn't do anything really bad to anyone." I was wrong, of course: only last episode Les was stealing Bailey's incomplete piece from her typewriter in "Dear Liar." Call it my hiatus hangover.

1:05:43 John Hodgman's Vacationland: Rob's right: every geeky 40-something dad I know has been raving about this book. I'm not a dad but I'm going to pick it up ASAP because Hodgman is awesome.

1:07:24 Dave's Theory of Narratives: Ably described by Dave Lyons back in HMOTD 045, at around the 43-minute mark.

1:09:11 Moms episode: If you missed the episode with our moms, it's HMOTD 030. And given all the talk about "bad moms" in this episode, I'd point you to the 46-minute mark there, for Rob's mom Betty Jo's incisive assessment of the "bad mother" character in pop culture.

1:09:32 Drag in comedy: Again, keep in mind Rob and I are a couple of cisgender guys working all this out. But it is undeniable how much of my formative media, especially sketch comedy, utilized drag. John Cleese of course lampshades it delightfully in the Piranha Brothers sketch with his "female impersonator" punchline, but this of course is also inspired by the fact that Ronnie of the notorious Kray Brothers (the model for the Piranhas) identified as queer.

1:11:26 Canadian TV bracket: Here's the beginning of the bracket that roiled Canadian Twitter for well over a fortnight.

[Rob: I called it wrong! In the end, Mr. Dress-up beat out Kids In The Hall, proof once again that democracy simply doesn't work.]

1:16:13 Steps: Whoo boy. What can you say about the Steps sketch in 2017/18? Two straight and one gay comedian play essentially gay community "types": Dave as airheaded twink Riley, Kevin as the always politically correct Smitty, and of course Scott as Butch, the, er, shallow butch cocksman. And then you have the additional weirdness of Bruce cross-dressing and playing a lesbian who hates "when fags do [drag]" but who's going to dress up as Rush Limbaugh at a warehouse party and my brain just exploded. It's a recursive set of political and comedic statements, it's problematic and hilarious, it's downright Brechtian and I love it despite its obvious flaws.

1:18:25 YMCA: How much did middle America understand about "Y.M.C.A." when it came out? I've tried to find some evidence that either that the whole country was in on the reference, or that nobody outside of the gay community knew the double meaning, but I'm guessing that in 1978 it was somewhere in the middle. Urban hipsters probably understood, but your average housewife in, say, Iowa probably thought it was a wholesome paean to the Y.

1:19:44 VHS or Beta: I found this lovely NEC ad when searching for "VHS vs. Beta" and it's actually super illustrative! The rootin'-tootin' rich Texan oil baron wants Beta for its superior picture, and the couple about to start to necking on the rec room couch probably want to watch a horror movie on VHS. It's perfect!

Show Notes for HMOTD 048: Harold, A Little Razorback Hog

1:50 "WKRP is on the fourteenth floor..." So why do buildings often not have a numbered thirteenth floor? Obviously, it's triskaidekaphobia in action, but there's actually a little more to it than that. Unsurprisingly, 99% Invisible, the great podcast/blog on architecture, infrastructure, and design has an article about it.

4:35 Get to the bank on Friday afternoon: I'm a little bit of a strange case here, as the first bank account I held as an adult had an ATM card attached (right around 1992, 1993). So my late-Gen X self doesn't personally remember the days of having to get to the bank before 5 on Friday. Here's a piece from NBC News in 1977 about the early days of off-hours withdrawals and electronic banking.

5:43 "Three bucks on a hun!" Money Mart! An Ontario staple in the early '90s, or so I'm told. This commercial is Poochie-riffic. Zero line-ups! It is interesting to see basically a payday loan company market to young urban go-getters like this. Their market has changed radically in the past quarter-century, for sure.

[Rob: "Poochie-riffic" is exactly right, Mike. This ad for Canadian jackals financial services firm Money Mart was beloved and endlessly quoted when I was in college. That particularly unconvincing phrase, "Three Bucks on a Hun," spawned many parodies, rebus puzzles, and at least one campus band.

Would you call the guys in the ad "young urban go-getters"? They're young, yes, but they're not yuppies--it's clear they're working construction, which makes them very much the target market for payday loans and similar predatory services. Even in university I did have the awareness to wonder if all the hilarity around "three bucks on a hun" was directed at the cheesiness of the ad or also contained some snobbishness about the world of people living paycheck to paycheck.

Money Mart has been sued multiple times for charging illegal interest rates--according to plaintiffs in one 2003 case, when you include all Money Mart's ancilliary fees, they were charging the equivalent of 120,000% annual interest (that's, like, $120,000 on a hun!). Money Mart has paid out millions in damages but admits no wrongdoing.]

[Mike: Well, the commercial actors were wearing flannel, and I forgot that 1992 was itself sort of a hinge year when it comes to what that signified.]

6:30 Grown-ups loving fire engines: It's not just Arthur Carlson and Ray Stantz who love fire engines and fire houses, how about the great Rube Waddell!

8:35 Johnny's derring-do: Here's that TV Guide article about Howard Hesseman, Man of Action!

9:10 Caribbean vacation: Andy's Caribbean getaway is, as we talked about last season, entirely in keeping with the early-'80s trend of Caribbean countries marketing themselves to budget-conscious American vacationers.

9:50 "This is where they got the idea for Die Hard": Actually, did you know that Die Hard was based on the same series of novels that gave us Frank Sinatra's relatively gritty 1968 film The Detective? Nothing Lasts Forever, The Detective's 1979 sequel, was the basis for Die Hard and also very much part and parcel of the novelistic branch of the '70s disaster movie (like Thomas Harris's Black Sunday) we've talked about a few times over the course of the podcast. See, that's a much less annoying factoid than reminding people that Die Hard is a Christmas movie.

14:00 "Officer Shanks. Explain fire." Damn, that's a great line. And yeah, fire is really really hard to explain! Les is absolutely right to demand this answer.

[Rob: I think I came pretty close with "rapid oxidization"!]

14:25 "This is starting to feel like a bottle episode." From the Community second-season episode "Cooperative Calligraphy."

21:12 Gilligan's Island Lagoon: I don't need to say that the Gilligan's Island lagoon has a secret history, do I? I mean, at this point, are any of us shocked?

23:26 et subseq. Battle of the Network Stars: Get yourself to the AV Club to read this fantastic detailed oral history of Battle of the Network Stars. Its heyday was 1976-1985, really smack dab in the middle of my TV childhood. A lot of the shows are on YouTube, but if you want to go right to the Reid vs. Baio obstacle course video, you can do so here. Poor Tim. He got destroyed.

I misspoke a little bit on the Alvin Garrett thing; it was his stature that ostensibly led Cosell to describe him in such a way. And as we hear on the obstacle course call (and in a previous broadcast from 1972), Cosell certainly called other white athletes "monkeys" too. [Rob: And "gazelles"!]

And on the topic of celebrities on game shows in the '70s and '80s getting money: my own memory is that celebrities in the 1970s definitely used to be awarded cash winnings (for instance, on Celebrity Bowling) but by the '80s celebrities on special celeb-only versions of game shows often would be playing for a charity. Not sure what this means, but it's interesting.

31:25 Cincinnati Chili: Yes, we pretty much had to cover Cincinnati chili before the end of the podcast; it's one of those specifically southern Ohio things that definitely needed a call-out and I'm so happy we didn't have to shoehorn it in (like that Battle of the Network Stars stuff above, heh). If you want some disturbingly high-resolution shots of "plates" of this "chili," here, knock yourself out. But the origins of this chili do seem to come from Greek tomato-based dishes like moussaka. On the whole, I'd rather have the real Greek thing.

34:13 Hawaiian pizza: And on the flipside, yes, Hawaiian pizza, London Ontario's own contribution to unaccountably popular fast-food flavor juxtapositions.

42:20 "Jennifer and Johnny's Charity": We talked a lot about the failure of the federal government to look after the sick and poor in the early years of Reagan's first term during HMOTD 046.

46:27 "Rutabaga is a funny word." I hate to link to a Dilbert in these dark times of Scott Adams having gone batshit crazy, but I always liked this strip about inherently funny words. Also, slight correction: the Scottish rutabaga is a neep, with a P.

48:02 "It felt very New WKRP": We talked about Les having been fully Flanderized in our April Fools episode on The New WKRP In Cincinnati.

50:50 Jaime Weinman on "Dear Liar": Here's our old stalwart WKRP fire-keeper Jaime Weinman on "Dear Liar" and how out of character everyone seemed.

52:22 Janet Cooke: This drama played out to its conclusion mere months before this WKRP episode aired. Here's a good summary piece from the Washington Post's then-ombudsman about "Jimmy's World" (the original piece), its initial rapturous reception and subsequent rejection. Another piece from 1996 about her life since the scandal is really heartbreaking.

58:10 Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass: The Blair and Glass cases resemble Cooke's only in their use of fabrication to preserve the respective fabulists' careers; as Rob noted, their crimes were far more persistent and egregious. Interesting how they, as men, were able to get away with much much more (and how their eventual "punishment" resulted in far fewer long-term career ramifications than Cooke's).

I'd be remiss if I didn't A Million Little Pieces, another famous early '00s case of fabulism, and yet another case of a man getting out of controversy relatively unscathed. There's also the JT LeRoy case, a little more complicated than James Frey's book.

And this section wouldn't be complete without the greatest journalistic fabulist of our age, Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan.

1:00:18 Dan Rather: I may be rather harsh on Dan Rather in this segment, but come on. The Killian documents were such an obvious modern-day fabrication, it's embarrassing that no one on the CBS News team was able to see this, pull the producers aside, and say you may want to reconsider running with this. Absolutely, I blame the ratfuckers/dirty tricksters who unleashed this hoax on the world, but Rather and his team deserve much of the blame for cutting corners and not doing journalism. It's a shame his stellar career had to end this way, but it's no excuse for abdicating your responsibilities.

1:05:48: "Who's Pulitzer?" Like many other Gilded Age magnates, Joseph Pulitzer did attempt to buy himself some peace of mind with his philanthropic endowment of Columbia University's school of journalism and the Pulitzer Prizes.

1:10:59 Spider Jerusalem: Subject of the oddly prescient comic series Transmetropolitan (1997-2002) by Warren Ellis, Spider is a futuristic Hunter S. Thompson muckraking gonzo journalist reporting in a futuristic City that embodies all the best and worst of America.

1:11:34 "Huhuh. Bummer." The official subtitle of our podcast ever since our entry into the Reagan/Trump years.

1:11:44 The Future of Journalism: This clip courtesy the aforementioned CBC and Rob's colleague at Western, James Compton.

1:15:00 Local news: Of course, as soon as Rob and I posit that local news is the way for us to reclaim a journalism not dependent on capitalism... evil conglomerate Sinclair Broadcasting decides the way forward in propagandizing Americans is by taking over local news broadcasts.

1:16:07 Barbara Cason: One slight correction, Barbara Cason did not play the head nurse on Trapper John, M.D.; she was just a returning guest star.

[Rob: That clip of Cason is from Cold Turkey, a Norman Lear comedy from 1971, about an entire town that tries to give up smoking. Friend of the podcast Leah Biel recognized it right away.]

Show Notes for HMOTD 047: Lorraine's A Farmer?

1:00 "Man, I was so blown away by both of these episodes." That was all the way back in Season 1, at the beginning of HMOTD 009: Someday You're Gonna Buy It, which featured the pairing of "A Commercial Break" (the Ferriman Funeral Home episode) and of course "Who Is Gordon Sims?"

5:30 Les's sexuality: I do find it interesting to look at Les's sexuality through a modern lens, and gray asexuality does seem to fit the bill very well with what we've learned over these four seasons of WKRP. What his actual orientation is or whom he might be attracted to, I still have no idea, but boy, was that Cincinnati sports player's assessment of "queer little fellow" sort of unintentionally perfect. I do think Les's repeated mentions of broad-shouldered Russian and Soviet bloc women are a bit of a tell.

14:56 "Computer Love": Kraftwerk's 1981 album Computer World extolled the coming computer revolution and especially its ability to connect people. As soon as I knew this episode was coming, I was excited to use this clip. "Computer Love"'s hook was memorably stolen (with permission, but come on) by Coldplay for their 2005 single "Talk."

16:34 et subseq. Computers and their social acceptance: Mario Savio's speech is still chillingly prescient, more than a half-century after its fiery, impassioned delivery. This piece on the history of the punch card from 1991 (!) contains some of the stuff about the Free Speech Movement's co-optation of the punch card and the computer as symbols of modern dehumanization. Both George Lucas's student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967, viewable here) and feature debut THX-1138 (1971) are a perfect example of this sort of feeling of alienation thanks to the faceless Computer. The Berkeley free speech movement's fear of computerization was indeed the primary mode of the youth counterculture's interaction with the computer up until the '70s and the arrival of computer "revolutionaries" like Stewart Brand.

Rob's right; Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture is sort of the signal text for this transition of the American postwar counterculture from computerphobes to computerphiles; definitely check it out if this history interests you. And my Adam Curtis impression is in aid of telling you to RUN, don't walk, to your nearest grey-market Vimeo machine and watch all three parts of his still-shocking 2011 documentary series, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace.

22:06 Computer Date Zero: In our Monday post, we linked to some of the pieces we used for research for our computer dating discussion. The clip we use here is from a fantastic Fivethirtyeight.com/ESPN mini-documentary on Harvard's Operation Match and other university computer dating efforts going on at the time. This piece on Joan Ball from Marie Hicks is an impressive piece of research and quite a time capsule of Swinging Sixties London.

30:20 Rob's in-laws: [Rob: Here's the story of my wife's parents and the first computer dates at Oberlin College--that is of course Oberlin, Ohio, not that far from Otterbein! As I say, my in-laws (who are wonderful) celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary this past year. I don't know if this is relevant but it has occurred to me, in the context of the computer match-up, that their marriage was interracial: Janice is Japanese-American, Mike's descended from Russian Jews. They say that nobody at (famously progressive) Oberlin ever batted an eye about their dating, but still: at the time they got married (the same year as Loving v. Virginia) I think their marriage was illegal in like 12 or 13 states. Probably (?) the Oberlin punch cards didn't have a field for race or ethnicity; is it possible the algorithm fixed them up where human matchmakers in 1965 might not?]

33:05 Mike's online dating history: Prodigy, IRC, Usenet, OKCupid, Livejournal, yeah, I've been everywhere, man. I mean, I was and am an awkward chubby dude and back in the day, that was the way to meet people who maybe couldn't see right off that you were awkward and chubby. My philosophy about dating and meeting people online has changed a little bit since my very awkward 20s, but it was a very strange time to be single and mingling. I really can't tell you how many times I've recited that line about "the Livejournal" from The Venture Brothers, though. I probably even had an LJ icon for it.

35:53 The hooker with a heart of gold: Of course there's a TV Tropes page on this. I really liked Rob's observations on this, how it's all tied up with, of course, patriarchy and capitalism. It is interesting that despite their professed desire to demonstrate the interior and indepedent lives of the sex workers in all these '70s and '80s "hooker with a heart of gold" stories, they all seem to end with the woman ending up with the male protagonist (or, in the case of Taxi Driver, with the rescue fantasy/delusion that Rob mentions).

[Rob: It also occurs to me that whatever sex-worker positivity Risky Business and Pretty Woman manage to muster comes through their celebration of capitalism. It's been ages since I've seen either but my memory is that both films make it pretty explicit that prostitution is a form of capitalism and therefore a good thing, or at least not a very bad one. Corvette Summer maybe not so much--Annie never even gets paid!]

39:11 Corvette Summer: I remember catching parts of this 1978 movie on cable as a kid and being sort of confused by it. Mark Hamill is in his first film role since Star Wars (and since his 1978 motorcycle accident). And yeah, it had its own overly-wordy, mannered, nearly three minute long cinematic trailer.

[Rob: That trailer is something. The voice-over guy is determined to work every possible variation on "if X knew as much about Y as they do about Z..."]

43:44 "Baby, Come To Me": I should not be remiss in pointing out three more fun facts about this song, a) Michael McDonald, the very voice of Yacht Rock, is on there providing the background vocals, making this song a true pinnacle of smooth music, b) it was produced by Quincy Jones and written by Rod Temperton, two of the geniuses behind Michael Jackson's Off The Wall and Thriller, and c) it got its boost in 1982 thanks largely to its use on General Hospital (just like "Rise" by Herb Alpert, which we talked about back in HMOTD 029).

53:45 "Homer's Enemy": Hate this episode. DESPISE it. It is the beginning not only of The Simpsons' overall decline, but of the metamorphosis of Homer from a basically sympathetic all-American lug to a willfully selfish, destructive monster. Which may be the point in a greater cultural sense, given his role as sort of an avatar of post-Cold War America, but I digress.

Putting aside any "tradition" of the trope of the sitcom interloper who pulls aside the veil of illusion on a television show's wacky universe, the episode doesn't bother to temper this idea with any kind of empathy or actual humor. It's just a heartless, angry, bitter, spiteful piece of work. You can't have black comedy without actual comedy. It's awful and anyone who likes it is immediately suspect in my eyes. Here's a piece from the AV Club on its divisive nature, where more of the AV Club writers come out in favor of it than I'd like.

58:06 Jaime Weinman's post: Here is Jaime Weinman's look at "Circumstantial Evidence," where he shares some of our bafflement about the episode and the notes on its shortened length, filming with no studio audience, and Tim Reid's role in casting.

1:04:50 Guest cast: Here's our big guest cast for "Circumstantial Evidence": Daphne Maxwell as Jessica, Michael Pataki as Detective Alcorn, John Witherspoon as Detective Davies, Max Wright as Frank Bartman, Robert Hooks as the nameless prosecutor, and Winnipegger (and Academy Award nominee!) Jack Kruschen as Judge Newcomb.

1:09:00 John Davidson and ALF on Hollywood Squares: I swear, I wasn't holding out on y'all when it comes to the "I played ALF in a school play" story; it is just not something I have thought about very much lo these thirty years. But I thought you'd appreciate this clip of ALF taking over Hollywood Squares from host (and HMOTD repeat reference) John Davidson. And it is from... 1987, the very same year I was in 7th grade.

By the way, ALF is voiced (and operated) by Paul Fusco.

1:10:48 Permanent Midnight: Ben Stiller's first real foray into drama, this 1998 biopic of Hollywood screenwriter Jerry Stahl examines how soul-draining a job in Hollywood can be. ALF was changed to "Mr. Chompers" for the purposes of the movie.

1:11:33 Cop Talk spend: Sorry for the deep gaming talk here kids, but ever since discovering Robin D. Laws's wonderful GUMSHOE RPG system I tend to think of the world in terms of Investigative Spends.

1:14:30 Cincinnati Triangle: Yes, our very last Cincinnati Triangle (most likely), but it's a beaut. I would've loved to have explored more the differences between bilocation, tulpas, and Hugh Everett's many-worlds theory, but I also loved our look at Mirror Universe WKRP. I'm supposing Herb could be a sniveling toady to the Big Evil Guy in this universe; no big difference, but I suppose we could give him a conscience which he fights against relentlessly, much as Herb-Prime fights his venal, creepy side. [Rob: Yeah! Like the way Lex Luthor is a doomed hero on Earth-2.] Evil Venus, like Evil Bailey, is an exercise I'd rather not contemplate.

Show Notes for HMOTD 046: Are You Earth, Wind, or Fire?

0:08 Monster Lizzard Ravages East Coast! Yes, this is a lovely little piece of Les comedy. The reference to the "worst lizzard since '78" immediately made me think of the Northeast Blizzard of '78 which lives on in local lore here in Massachusetts, but is more likely referring to the "White Hurricane" that hit the Midwest a couple of weeks previous. Here's a shot of the electronic warning signs I reference later in the podcast.

3:42 "There's a man exercising in the nude again." First off, I love hearing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Magnolia," a deep cut off the second Heartbreakers LP You're Gonna Get It! in the background here. I could see Johnny digging their country-fried sound. I'm trying to remember what other context we accused Friends of ripping off WKRP in the past; we did talk in HMOTD 032 about Friends being emblematic of '90s sitcoms having awesome apartments. The Friends Wiki will hook you up with a précis of the Ugly Naked Guy.

[Rob: I think it was the wistful staring out the window shot, a la Bailey in “For Love Or Money.”]

5:20 "We're getting close to the end of the podcast." I talked about this more in the Monday Post, but yeah, I'm really going to miss these times where we get to breathe and hang out with the cast. I have to honestly confess, I've never understood the impulse to fanfic, but after deeply analyzing the entire run of WKRP, I'm beginning to get it. When a piece of narrative fiction leaves you wanting more depth into the characters' lives, you might want to stay in that world a little longer.

8:58 "Record (sic) station": One of many flubs by me this episode. Apologies.

10:55 "Black stations wherever Johnny grew up": See, I wrote my own fanfic right here! Johnny growing up listening to Black DJs, who in the 1950s had a broad crossover appeal with white teenagers. And much as white artists co-opted Black musical styles, so too did white DJs cop the attitudes, slang, and on-air personas of Black DJs. Again, Wolfman Jack was working within a long history of racial ambiguity; the white hipster strikes again.

Black radio stations were some of the most powerful Black-owned businesses during the middle part of the 20th century, with a media reach and economic power that supported Black social, cultural, economic, and even political life during some very difficult times, in metropolises both North and South. Here's a thorough virtual exhibit that opened last year thanks to Indiana University's Archives of African American Music and Culture titled "The Golden Age of Black Radio" that seems to this museum professional to be fairly definitive.

I wonder where Johnny grew up?

13:33 Code-switching/double consciousness: As Rob says, this phenomenon is nothing new in the Black community. W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk from 1903 takes on the cultural collision of colonizer and colonized head-on. In the first chapter, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," DuBois describes the African-American a mere forty years from emancipation struggling to see through a "veil" that cloaks his vision, a veil placed there by the force of white supremacy in America. DuBois also interestingly evokes the veil as being like a caul and bestowing upon the Black American a "second-sight," the ability to see himself through this very double consciousness, living in two worlds at once. Powerful stuff, and still directly relevant to the Black experience in America.

16:20 "Searching for old Guy Lombardo LPs and smoking dope." I have never gotten high and listened to big-band music, but now I kind of want to. Thanks, Big Guy. Also, it'd be remiss of me not to link to the most notorious intersection of drug culture and old white square culture, the heartwarming performance of Brewer & Shipley's "One Toke Over The Line" on The Lawrence Welk Show.

[Rob: And it would be remiss of me not to observe that Guy Lombardo is, or at least once was, my home city’s most famous son. London, Ontario’s own Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians are believed to have sold between 100 and 300 million records during their long career; they also headlined CBS’ New Year’s Eve gala every year from, get this, 1928 (on the radio, naturally) to 1979, two years after Guy’s death. Sometimes when I’m jogging around London I’ll run across an abandoned Guy Lombardo museum or crypt or pavilion. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, indeed...]

16:52 "Are you Earth, Wind, or Fire?" Excuse my long exegesis of the fashion choices of EWF, but I do find it legitimately fascinating. Check their LP covers from '75 and previous and you see a ton of open shirts, or otherwise sleeveless vests and bellbottoms, very post-hippie. But when you get into the late '70s and early '80s, Afrofuturism takes over in a big way. (Check their legendary live performance at the Oakland Coliseum on New Year's Eve 1981 for evidence; leather is out, lamé is in, and the band basically fights Darth Vader live on stage. It's amazing.)

I wonder if P-Funk's more overt scifi wildness was partially the impelling force here. Anyway, I wrote about EWF's aesthetic for We Are The Mutants, as mediated through their groundbreaking sponsorship deal with Panasonic boomboxes. It's a good piece, if I do say so myself; check it out.

18:08 "Billy Jack/Indian appropriation": Speaking of leather jerkins and fringe jackets, the probably hashtag-problematic-by-modern-standards '70s franchise Billy Jack brought a bowlderized version of the very real rebellion of the early-'70s American Indian Movement to the white American drive-in.

18:20 Tim and Tom routine: Oof, yeah, this routine is a bit hard to listen to in this day and age; as we've talked about on WKRP, this kind of "clueless white guy" routine (mostly done by Les on the show) sometimes veers into out-and-out stereotyping. In Reid and Dreesen’s book, Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White, we can see that Tom's impression of "soul talk" was sometimes a tough initial sell to a Black audience. But reading the rest of the routine, you can really see how Tim and Tom used their knowledge of each other's cultures to get the crowd on their side. The story definitely goes in an... er, unexpected direction.

[Rob: You can see most of the “bus stop” routine here, but not the tense denouement described in the Tim and Tom book. Really, do check out the story of their Club Harlem debut in Mike’s Google Books links above.]

20:03 Ebony and Jet: Ebony and Jet have historically been the pair of African-American publications with the biggest profile and largest economic reach. Both were founded in the same era as Black-owned radio stations, the late '40s and early '50s. Black entrepreneur John H. Johnson brought out both magazines, sensing a void in the market for a literal Black Life magazine. As we mentioned, they featured advertising with Black models and celebrity sponsors, and featured both lifestyle pieces and hard-hitting reporting on racial issues. Jet published the disturbing and graphic post-mortem photos of Emmett Till in the aftermath of his murder at the hands of white terrorists in 1955.

21:15 Tim and Tom history: Check out HMOTD 008 for our first discussion of Tim and Tom, and seriously, buy the book! It's fascinating.

21:58 Tim Reid's background: Tim Reid bounced around a lot of locations in Virginia growing up but they weren't really rural; another error of mine.

27:15 Rick and the women at Black Life magazine: Again, that sentiment could never have worked in Tim Reid's mouth; it is often the prerogative of the outsider or the jester to point out the things we can't admit to ourselves, and when that jokester has the additional shield of white privilege like Rick/Tom does here, it's devastating.

29:25 90s Black sitcoms and Black WKRP: I guess Martin does technically count as a "Black WKRP" given Martin's role as a DJ at WZUP but the show only partially took place in the workplace.

29:45 Black Life before the Black Andy shows up: This was a genius idea of Rob's.

30:48 "I uh, do look rather good, don't I?" This is one of those moments where I feel like all our detailed analysis of Herb's conflicted masculinity from HMOTD 021: Huggable Herb pays off. Herb looks good and feels good and while he's always been a bit of a peacock, you can sense the confidence that comes with a really nice suit.

33:30 Gordon Gekko/Scaramucci/Eighties Guy From Futurama: The death of The Boneitis Guy is one of the more inspired animation sequences from Futurama.

And speaking of The Mooch... I also love to get together with my paisans and pose for imaginary Sopranos DVD box covers.

34:38 T-shirts of WKRP advertisers: There are already a few out there on various custom T-shirt sites, but they are of depressingly poor quality.

36:45 Police Academy: I am not gonna lie; the Police Academy series (maybe from 1 to about 4) were prime cable viewing in my late childhood/early adolescence. Hugh Wilson is right; they are uniformly tasteless and awful and dumb but they do have a certain low-budget charm (at least the first few). And yes, if you want to go diving for WKRP guest stars, you come up with a boatload. George Gaynes, Art Metrano, Howard Hesseman's fairly big role in 2, even Colleen Camp, who we discussed a few weeks ago!

41:20 PJ Torokvei: Again, we'll link to this piece on PJ Torokvei's journey which is alternately inspiring and incredibly sad.

43:52 Ulysses: [Rob: This is Irish actress Angeline Ball (you might remember her as Imelda Quirke in The Commitments) as Molly Bloom in the 2004 film, Bloom.]

[Mike:] I might have gone with Kate Bush's interpretation of the Molly Bloom soliloquy, the title track from 1989's The Sensual World, but that's just me.

49:32 "At least in 1982 the rich still felt a duty to help the poor..." I'm not trying to engage in class treachery here, pining for the days of "philanthropists" like Carnegie and Rockefeller, I'm just observing how that patrician sense of duty and generosity has completely evaporated after the combined assault of forty years of deregulation and neoliberalism and the rise of "do as thou wilt" postmodern libertinage. There was a certain superego that once held the ultrawealthy's predatory influences at least somewhat in check, call it noblesse oblige or clueless and needy attention-seeking, but now that's gone as New Gilded Age tycoons want to turn us all into either cog-like coders or blood batteries.

50:10 "There's something in the New York Times about rich people that makes me mad every week": Behold, this week's offense against the working class and just plain decency. Warning: this piece will make you Mad Online.

51:57 Hobo King: Rob and I and some of our gaming friends have always had a soft spot for the slightly-occult undertones of the hobo lifestyle. Mysterious chalk marks, sacred kingship ceremonies... it all adds up to an Emperor Norton-like innocent, a capital-F Fool who rides the rails for the sins of America.

53:07 Sheila Morgan: The realization that this guest star was the same Sheila "Bombs Away" Morgan that the Big Guy sang a tipsy paean to back in "I Am Woman" was a wonderful moment for me.

55:15 "What kitchen is this?" Our joy at being back in Jennifer's old apartment should be apparent; I really didn't think we'd see it again and I was so authentically pleased and surprised.

56:36 Microwaves: When I started going back through old TV Guides a few years ago, I found the early-'80s issues redolent with ads for microwave ovens that keep hammering you over the head with the versatility and user-friendliness of the appliance. Yes, a lot of these ads seem to prominently feature roasted turkeys. Rob and I share a fascination for this time in American history when a new piece of technology, desperate to shoulder its way into American kitchens, tries frantically to prove its familiarity and usefulness. The one thing I remember about getting our first microwave back in I think 1985 is that the instruction/recipe book featured very prominently two preparations that became standards in our house for their ease and familiarity: hot dogs (nuked, bun and all, wrapped in paper towel) and nachos (3 minutes on the low-medium setting so the cheese didn't dry up). The microwave I think became a leftovers machine for most Americans by the end of the '80s, but the way the appliance was marketed is much more versatile.

[Rob: Well, I know I always cook my lobster tails in the microwave. "Cooking without heat!" I’m afraid this link won’t work for anybody not on a university network, but there was a cool article in the history of technology journal Technology & Culture a few years ago about the microwave as “a terrifying … eruption of the uncanny in the domestic sphere” and how we eventually learned to stop worrying and love post-industrial food.]

[Mike: It's a great article and I am very sorry if you can't read it. You didn't tell me it referenced Scanners, Rob! (Sadly no mention of Back to the Future Part II's "pizza rehydrator"; speaking of which, y'all should check out Rob on the Netflakes podcast talking BTTF2; it's a great discussion.)

Speaking of exploding heads, this reminds me of one of the central events in my favorite novel, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, when tennis academy patriarch and creator of enslaving perfect Entertainment James O. Incandenza literally nukes and explodes his own head in his home's microwave. I get the feeling DFW was working out his own Gen-X microwave anxiety and/or impulse towards using urban legends in his work with this tableau.]

58:45 Carmen Filpi/Gurning/the Enigma: [Rob: It’s Carmen Filpi, not Filipi, my apologies. Not to be confused with Patrick Cranshaw from Best In Show and Old School (though Google Image Search does just that), Carmen Filpi got his start in minstrel shows (!), served in the Pacific during WW2, and had a film and TV career spanning fifty years. A brief list of his memorable roles includes: Homeless Guy, Elderly Guy, Bum #1, Bum #2, Bum, Old Guy, Old Man in Bar, Ancient Guy, Old Crusty Man, Wino, Stan the Bum, Old Man Withers, Old Geezer, Drunk, Jail Bum, Hobo Jack, The Bum, Panhandler, and Bus Station Bum. It sounds like I’m making fun of him, but that really is the list. Filpi’s credit for WKRP, as Percy Romanoff, seems downright dignified in comparison. He passed away in 2003 at the age of 80.]

[Mike: Wait, Percy Romanoff... is he supposed to be the heir to the Russian throne, Anastasia's son or something?? I may have been onto something calling him the Hobo King!

Also, regarding gurning, our timing on this episode was impeccable: the Egremont Crab Fair took place this very week and World Champion Gurner Ady Zivelonghi held his title as the best gurner in the world.

Body-mod-god The Enigma starred in the "first funny X-Files episode," "Humbug," about circus/carny folk, where he played circus geek "The Conundrum" opposite '90s Lollapalooza sideshow legend Jim Rose.]

1:02:50 Cheaplaffs Johnson: [Rob: I can’t say that “Six Gun Justice,” from the very uneven final season of SCTV, was ever one of my favorite bits. It’s a parody of an old Western movie serial, but my impression is that the SCTV gang were almost trying to play it straight--that is, they were more interested in accurately recreating the old serials, warts and all, than in trying to be funny. But I do love the framing sketch, “Happy Hour” with Happy Marsden, a kiddie show so bleak, low-key, and depressing as to gradually approach Scarfolk-style hauntology.]

[Mike: I can see a lot of the DNA of Three Amigos in those Six Gun Justice bits.]

1:03:50 Reaganonomics/homelessness/the mentally ill/drug abuse: I feel like we didn't even come close to doing this series of issues justice on the podcast; there's just so much to say about it, we could have easily done 70 or 80 minutes just on the social ills caused by Ronald Reagan's destruction of the social safety net. But here are the two pieces we mentioned on the podcast: the San Francisco Weekly piece on Reagonomics' impact on social programs and the homeless, and the Salon piece on Reagan and the mentally ill.

1:10:40 Intellivision/video games: Bless you, Rob, for including a clip of a George Plimpton Intellivision TV ad; like Henry on The Americans, all I ever wanted as a kid was an Intellivision. Have any of our listeners figured out what video game console that is supposed to be in this scene, by the way? The big controllers with the curly cords were used by both the Intellivision and ColecoVision consoles, as well as a bunch of lesser lights in the Second Generation of Video Game Consoles, but the size and color is wrong for all of them. [Edit: As I was pulling the screenshots, I noticed for the first time... they have little tiny hair-thin antennas! And they're connected to some kind of deck sitting on the couch! These are obviously some kind of jury-rigged prop. Weird!]

See what I mean about "gamer posture," by the way? [Rob: Is the Big Guy sitting on the floor with his back against the couch? That's perfect!] [Mike: Yep, he was being beaten by Andy - you were right - and sort of jumps/slumps down off the couch in the middle of play. The Big Guy is Sports Gamer Zero. I only wish I could've seen him throw his controller.]

1:15:45 Quarterflash/The Americans: Well, of course I tempted fate by saying Quarterflash was a one-hit wonder; back on Facebook, Mike Hernandez again schools me. But I will say that the moment I knew I'd be hooked on The Americans for its spot-on musical selection was not when they memorably used "Tusk" in the chase scene in the pilot but instead using Quarterflash in the very first scene to soundtrack Elizabeth's honeypot op in the fern bar.

1:18:30 Grace Jones: I am also super curious still about why Grace Jones got dragged like this on the show. My cursory research does show that Jones's overall aesthetic, both visually and musically, was tough for mainstream audiences to understand in the early '80s. This interview gives you a great look at an important and misunderstood artist and figure of our exact late-'70s/early-'80s WKRP period. Venus is not alone, though; Sondra Smuckles is also no fan of Ms. Jones. Raymond is careless... but not like that.

Show Notes for HMOTD 044: Nice Teeth And Good Hair

1:50 "He's playing Solid Gold, that's crazy." An interesting way to put Johnny's roots-of-rock-and-roll playlist, but in the increasingly regimented radio formats at the dawn of the '80s, this was an established station format. "Solid Gold" or "Oldies" stations got their start in the early '70s as late Silents and early Boomers started entering early middle age and DJs like Johnny would mix in classics from the '50s and first half of the '60s. It's the American Graffiti/Happy Days nostalgia phenomenon again. In Boston, we had WROR, which has a fascinating history involving both this Solid Gold format and an early form of playlist automation in 1966 with a DJ using a "robot" voice to hype the computer-programmed Top 40!

[Rob: We tend to think of Johnny as a "Sixties" character, but Norris is right that Johnny's musical taste is not rooted in the "High Sixties" (which we could delineate as, roughly, 1966-1974) but, really, in the "Long Fifties" (let's say, 1950-1965).]

2:38 Norris Breeze: The actor who plays Norris Breeze, David Clennon, has another one of those great "That Guy" careers. We had to cut a bit on Clennon from this episode for time, but we both celebrated his role as Palmer in John Carpenter's The Thing as well as went into a long digression about the show thirtysomething and how much it baffled both of us back in the late '80s (Clennon played the evil ad exec). Also, Clennon's IMDB biography says he's a committed political activist who turned down roles on shows like 24 because of their politics. You go, Dave.

[Rob: The Thing is one of my all-time, top-ten, desert island movies, and Clennon has at least two of the movie's great moments: first, reacting to the spectacle of Norris' head growing legs and eyestalks to escape MacReady's flamethrower, and second, the jump scare in the blood-test scene. I guess it's really a petri dish of his blood that gets the latter moment, but still.]

6:18 Wine: You can tell I edited this episode because I included gratutious clips from both Red Dwarf and classic Doctor Who, but Lister's rant about wine-drinkers just begged to be used here.

7:03 That hotel room: Yeah, I admit, this was also pretty self-indulgent on my part, but goddamn, that hotel room (and the art on the walls) was pure ＶＡＰＯＲ. Compare the angular modern grey hotel room with the cover of vaporwave albums like Initiation Tape: Isle of Avalon Edition or that abstract cloud-filled art on the wall with any PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises release.

10:20 "Andy gets everybody to act the opposite of what they are." I really should've used a clip from Seinfeld here.

12:13 Phyllis: That episode is "The First Date" from 1975. Blink in the first couple of minutes and you'll miss Loni; she looks near-unrecognizable!

14:20 Dunning-Kruger Effect: Boy, we have covered a lot of business history in this here podcast, haven't we? Conflict management, two episodes touching on labor unions, the Peter Principle, Rolodexes, and now the Dunning-Kruger Effect and sexual harassment in the same episode.

17:06 Stoned Bailey: What else can we say? Next to Sex Hair Bailey, Stoned Bailey might be my favorite development of Season 4. You get the feeling that Hugh Wilson et al. were gaining more confidence in Jan Smithers's ability to carry a scene comedically by this point in the series, maybe? The "When?" line-read is a killer.

19:00 The old Nestle's jingle: In my googling for the old '50s Nestle's Quik commercials (more on those in the next entry), I re-discovered a commercial from the '80s that repurposed the Nestle's jingle and combined it with some sweet aspirational '80s soft-focus Maxfield Parrish-iana. Naturally, I had to slow that shit down by 20% and slap an even softer-focus filter on it.

19:55 Farfel, Jimmy Nelson, and Danny O'Day: Okay, hang on to your hats, Gen-Xers and younger, because I'm about to enter the wild and woolly world of 1950s ventriloquism. As far as creepy puppets and puppeteers we've got: Senor Wences, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and finally Jimmy Nelson, Danny O'Day (his humanoid ventriloquial figure) and yes, Farfel the Dog. The story of how Farfel got his characteristic mouth-snap at the end of "chooooooc'laaaate" is kind of cute, but yeah, I'm with Rob. All these '50s ventriloquial figures are creepy as hell. But here's a couple of the old Nestle's commercials for you: the boxing one I sampled in this episode and one where Jimmy, Danny, and Farfel join the Space Race.

Zippy the Pinhead's creator Bill Griffith pretty much swam in this kind of Boomer-era kitsch, but the dog that Rob remembers is actually based on the giant dog head outside the Doggie Diner restaurant chain in the Bay Area. Griffith did explicitly mention Farfel at least once, though.

A few other links to help put ventriloquism to bed: this classic Mr. Show sketch (yeah, yeah, I know), and two bits from Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show that owes a lot of its DNA to Boomer-era ventriloquism: Tom Servo and Crow take a ventriloquism quiz at the beginning of 318 Fugitive Alien 2, and Tom Servo gets a new disturbing head at the beginning of 610 The Violent Years.

21:38 "I'm not saying that she and Johnny never burned one." Eh, not much to say about this comment, other than I do very much want to read Rob's Johnny-and-Bailey-get-high-and-order-pizza fanfic.

22:30 "I think you should know that Venus Flytrap is armed." Yeah, this kind of left a bad taste in my mouth when I got to it in the episode, because again, I literally did not see the racial angle until Norris Breeze spelled it out.

25:28 Office Space, the Bobs: When capitalism collapses and we all embrace our inevitable future of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, artifacts like Office Space will be carefully preserved as the prescient political warnings they should have been viewed as in the first place.

31:00 "Just how big is the TARDIS?" Finally, a real excuse to get a classic Doctor Who clip into the podcast. From the first episode of "The Masque of Mandragora" serial, a classic example of Robert Holmes/Tom Baker-era Doctor Who. The Doctor goes to late medieval Italy to stop an evil living energy helix bent on creating a cult to rule the Earth... yeah, you could say this is Extremely My Shit.

But yes, the secondary TARDIS control room! It's a beauty and it lasted through probably the best period of Doctor Who for my money: Season 14, from start to finish is probably the best Doctor Who ever was or would be.

33:25 Neo-Victorian fashion: I tried forever to find a good article online that explained the early-'80s tendency towards flounces, puffy shirts, and the like, but couldn't. Some fashionistas note the New Romantic movement that was breaking big into the mainstream in '81, '82, led by the club kids at Blitz and the post-punk era of Vivienne Westwood, but that's a bit too swashbuckle-y. Here's a piece on the rise of the prairie dress in the late '70s and early '80s, but again, that's a bit too homespun. I guess I have the whole "fern bars investing in Tiffany-style lamps" thing... I may need to write this early-'80s neo-Victoriana up for We Are The Mutants.

35:05 Dingy 1970s sitcoms: You can hear us talk the grungy sets of '70s sitcoms in the first 10 minutes of HMOTD 032, but you should really listen to the whole episode, it's definitely one of my favorites.

37:06 The Love Boat theme: Undeniably catchy, the subject of send-ups pretty much ever since The Love Boat debuted, and all anchored (ha, a pun) by the silky-smooth vocal chops of Jack Jones. It might be a perfect TV theme song.

40:52 Cincinnati Opera: I really shouldn't have harshed on the Cincinnati cultural scene; not only do I discover that Cincinnati has one of the oldest civic operas in the U.S., but the nearby Kentucky Symphony Orchestra is ending its summer season this Labor Day weekend with... yes, a concert featuring music from WKRP! I wish I could go.

42:18 "I mean, all you've got is Hirsch." I hope we faked out at least a few of you into thinking we weren't going to talk about Hirsch this episode. But yeah, this repartee is nothing new; I googled "butler and dowager" and found some similar schtick from the 1800s... there's also this dark take on the trope, Dinner For One, where a butler gets progressively more drunk as he impersonates all of the dowager's now-dead friends. This play has become an inexplicable New Year's tradition on German television, of all places, proving once again that you can never account for the Teutonic sense of humor.

44:53 Ian Wolfe: We discussed Ian Wolfe's tenure as Wizard Traquil on Rob's favorite limited-run, early-'80s, D&D-inspired, mid-season replacement Wizards and Warriors in HMOTD 036, and originally discussed it way back in our Season 2 premiere, so now Rob's managed to squeeze Wizards and Warriors in during each of the last three seasons of the podcast. Well done, Rob. :)

In all seriousness, Ian Wolfe worked right up until his 93rd year, playing the old forger in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy! And take a look at this career!

48:18 "The Story of Everest": My Mr. Show stanning has gotten kind of out of hand lately, but this might be one of the show's finest achievements in terms of pure hostility towards the audience. The people in the live studio audience had to sit there as they re-set the thimble wall each of the more than half-dozen times Jay Johnston took a tumble into it.

49:15 Sexual harassment: This capsule history on Wikipedia was quite illuminating. I note with interest, speaking of conflict resolution, that the author of the 1973 MIT report on sexual harassment, Mary Rowe, has been professor of Negotation and Conflict Management at MIT's Sloan School since 1985.

53:03 "Until you can name it... you can't get at it." Sometimes I think this is at the root of all so-called "political incorrectness." If our linguistic tools to combat injustice are taken away or mocked or belittled as an "overreaction," all of a sudden, as Rob so expertly puts it, we don't have the "technology" to fix the problem. It's theft, basically, a re-colonizing force meant to steal something of value from the oppressed. A fantastic observation from Rob here.

53:18 Microaggressions: The term "microaggressions" has actually been around since earlier than "sexual harassment"! It was introduced by Harvard's Chester Pierce, an African-American professor at Harvard Medical School (seriously, check that link; what a fascinating life and career) who tracked the physical and medical implications of suppressed anger. And Mary Rowe again helped bring this term into the parlance of business literature and conflict resolution.

55:33 Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings: The hearings were incredibly omnipresent in the fall of 1991. CNN had really come into its own as a 24-hour news channel given the recent Gulf War. I had just turned 16 years old and at the time, I felt profoundly angry and uncomfortable with the ramifications of Hill's testimony. You can imagine what the reaction of the student body of an all-boys Catholic high school was to these revelations. Between these hearings and the aforementioned Gulf War, 1991 was the beginning of a political awakening for me in a lot of ways. Pop culture at the time had its fun with the ordeal as well (at the expense of those white male Senators, thank goodness, though that is a tough needle to thread, even in '91).

[Rob: I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Anita Hill a few years ago when we brought her to Western to talk about her book, Reimagining Equality. Not much to say about that other than how smart, generous, and passionate about equality and the law she was--and that pretty much every woman in the audience over the age of 45 came up afterward to tell her what an impact the Thomas hearings had had on them and their lives.]

1:08:04 Colleen Camp/They All Laughed: Okay, hold onto your hats, because I delved deep into IMDB to try to find out the reason for this odd scene and cameo from Colleen Camp. In the IMDB entry for "Love, Exciting and New," the "Trivia" section states: "The incongruous cameo by Colleen Camp as herself may be explained by the fact that Camp and Richard Sanders both appeared in the movie Valley Girl (1983) around the same time." But around the same time isn't exactly the same time, and Valley Girl, given its subject matter, wouldn't have begun filming until at earliest the summer of '82, well after WKRP had finished taping. I don't think this theory holds water, ultimately, but I present it in the spirit of completeness. (Also, I can't find any proof one way or the other if there's any familial relation between Colleen Camp and two-time WKRP guest Hamilton Camp, as suggested on Facebook by Leah Biel, but it's doubtful considering Hamilton was born in the UK and Colleen comes from California.)

1:11:40 Dorothy Stratten: Wanted to pass along a couple of links to help expand on the Dorothy Stratten story: first, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice piece (RIP to the print edition of the Village Voice, by the way) that told Stratten's story first, and the recent You Must Remember This episode on Stratten. I highly recommend checking both out.

1:13:00 EPK: The electronic press kit as an artifact is an invention of the Entertainment Tonight era (which we're just entering here in 1981) but the term itself wasn't coined until the CD-ROM/early web era of the mid-'90s.

1:15:08 Fleetwood Mac: Was I too harsh on competent drummer, wacky face puller, and noted Star Trek: The Next Generation guest star Mick Fleetwood? I mean, The Visitor shows he was dipping his toe into so-called "world music" probably earlier than everyone except maybe Talking Heads. One thing I will not apologize for is my devotion to Mirage; read this Pitchfork review of the recent reissue to see why I love it so much.