HMOTD 032: Can You Teach Me About Magnets?

Rob and Mike are joined by special guest and ecopsychological pedagogy expert Mandy Leetch for two episodes of WKRP about teaching your children well: "Frog Story" and "Venus and the Man."

(Full show notes appear at Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser two days after each episode is released. All audio clips are the properties of their owners/creators and appear in this work of comment and critique under fair use provisions of copyright law.)

Check out this episode!

I don't have it in me for a witty subject line, sorry.

In putting together this week's episode of Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser, which covers the touching tale of a spraypainted frog named Greenpeace in "Frog Story," and the story of Venus trying to help a black teenager stay in school in "Venus and the Man," I couldn't help but keep the results of last week's election close to hand.

How could I not? As I sat here editing discussions of environmentalism, raising your kids with compassion and care, and both the power of education and its flaws as it's currently constituted, all while simultaneously absorbing the results of the vote, I thought about my fellow citizens of the United States. And how we all have a stake in all these things: our planet's health, our children growing up safe and loved, able to learn and grow.

It's tough when you see the face of hate, of short-sightedness, of fear, staring right at you. When you see children all across America bullying other children because of where they came from, because of who they are. Those bullies had to learn it from someone, right? And you think of their parents, those parents who themselves have worries, distractions, concerns, all legitimate, that mutate under the economic duress that they're experiencing into blind bigotry, hatred, tribalism, anger... racism.

There was a somewhat mawkish sentiment expressed back during the Cold War, most notably by Sting, that "the Russians must love their children too." That we couldn't look at people as ideological enemies if we also saw them as human, as having humanity, as having families they loved and wanted the best for. I thought about that sentiment a lot while editing this episode.

Herb and Bunny are about as far apart from Cora and Arnold as possible, socio-economically. But the concerns they have are, essentially, identical.

Herb loves his daughter. But he accidentally spraypainted a frog belonging to a young girl who loves nature and the environment, and he has to deal with the consequences as best he can. He has to grow and realize he has to be honest with her about death. Because he loves her.

Cora has spent years working as the cleaning woman at a radio station with only one black employee in order to fund her son's college, and now he wants to quit school because he's making more money on the streets. But Cora can't abide it. She wants him to go to college. Because she loves him.

These stories are about the same thing. About our children, and the world we want them to inherit. And if we started from that frame of mind when talking to people very different from us? We might actually get somewhere.

I haven't felt too optimistic about the future of America the past few days. Doing this podcast had awakened me to a lot of the ways that we've lost something undefinable in this country; you've heard us talk about it a million times.

But today, everything feels lost. Every bedrock belief in American democracy and society, every myth of fair play and teamwork that I was told and then retold myself through my adult life, gone. But not in an instant. Not as a result of this election, but as a result of nearly four decades of very deliberate neglect. Our polity has now lost all of its safeguards for the powerless.

My only hope now is that someone, somewhere, will remind us that the people on the other side, whatever side that may be, also love their children, too. And that we heed that message before it's too late for America.

Show Notes for HMOTD 031: Pour Something Sticky All Over Me

0:00 Title of the episode: A little more behind-the-scenes here; as you may have read in other Show Notes, titling of the episodes largely falls to whomever edited them. We'll frequently bounce ideas off each other, but this week, when I got the file from Rob and saw the title, I guffawed out loud. This is your revenge for my not using "Disco Bondage Headgear" for the Riverfront episode, Rob, isn't it?

0:28 "Even smaller I'm afraid." Les's imitation of his mother's slow shrinking culminates in a great sight gag where he just barely peeks over his work desk at Herb (see above). It immediately reminded me of Killer BOB from Twin Peaks peeking from between the slats of Laura Palmer's bed, because I'm a big weirdo.

3:55 "...like so many of these Season 3 episodes seem to have." Let's do a quick Herb episode tally in Season 3: "Real Families," "Hotel Oceanview" and "A Mile In My Shoes" sorta add up to one total Herb episode, "The Painting," and later this season "Frog Story" and "Out To Lunch." That's 5 out of 22 episodes! If WKRP were a game of Primetime Adventures, I'd be calling GM favoritism. Herb's got a ton of 3's!

5:30 Provenance: Oooh, the fancy French pronunciation. But if you train in museums, you soon learn the paramount importance of knowing whose hands a piece of art, an object, or a cultural artifact has gone through. Given how much of museum collections were collected as part of plunder in wartime or as a benefit of colonization, repatriation is a very hot issue in museums in our ostensibly post-colonial period.

5:45 A summer breeze: As Bailey tells the guys in Andy's office about the painting's calming effects, "Breezin'" by George Benson, another huge smooth hit from the late '70s, is playing in the background.

6:45 Mansplaining: Here's a primer on the term, but ACTUALLY (ahem), I really want to get "Gen-Xplaining" trending. It's when you try to explain something to a millennial that they already understand quite well!

8:15 "Herb? So's your mother." Just about perfect. I kinda wish Bailey Quarters was on 2016 Twitter. If not in the White House.

9:13 "This thing is like a Mamet play." Talk about late 20th-century American capitalist masculinity in extremis; that's basically the entire canon of Mamet's dramatic output. Well, that and con artistry. Apropos of close to nothing, I'd like to see what a mature Frank Bonner could do with the role of Shelley "the Machine" Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross.

11:20/23:05 Constanza on Art/Analysis of The Kramer: Did your mid-'90s dorm room have a copy of The Kramer?

13:20 Tortured artists in Johnny's mind: My wife Jenny asks me to include Jean Genet in my listing of homosexual criminal artists. Which also allows me a Bowie reference as a bridge to link up to, yes, my wife's and my Velvet Goldmine podcast, The Whole Shebang, which is just chock full of artists who have been come to grips with their homosexuality if not gone to jail for it!

15:05 "...for selling Quaaludes." Back in the WKRP period, we are about to see the end of Quaalude sales in the U.S. in 1982, so get those Lemmons while you can, folks.

15:31 "...don't get me started on that, we'll be here all night!" A lot of Kids in the Hall content in this episode but really, can you ever have too much Kids in the Hall?

16:40 Bob Ross/Thomas Kinkade: Bob Ross passed away back in 1995, going to that great squirrel refuge in the sky. His paintings were often given away to local PBS stations for their pledge drives, but there is a Bob Ross Gallery in Florida where you can see some of his works.

Thomas Kinkade, the pre-eminent "Painter of Light" (that Turner guy was a hack), achieved fame with his "maudlin and sentimental" images that struck a chord in middle America. I'd forgotten that podcast favorite Joan Didion offered her own critique of Kinkade back in her 2003 Where I Was From. This article on Kinkade and the subprime mortgage crisis from The Baffler is also excellent, art (and social) criticism with real teeth.

18:50 Voice of Fire: Painted for Expo 67, it surprises me that anyone would think this isn't an important piece of cultural heritage for Canada. I could try to be cute here and say that while America was tearing itself apart in the '90s over stuff like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, Canada was busying itself with a controversy over three stripes, and how perfectly Canadian that is... but I won't.

19:06 Exit Through the Gift Shop: Highly recommended. We had to cut a fairly lengthy discursion in this episode on the young angry British artists of the 1990s and how they became rich beyond anyone's wildest imaginings thanks to the interest of the moneyed elite for what are, in my opinion, pretty pedestrian pieces of conceptual art.

20:35 "That is not a primary concern for [millennials]:" More Gen-Xplaining! See kids, you may not know this, but it's really important for you to be concerned about sincerity vs. irony, and about authenticity in your life. In other words... "WELL ACTUALLY, you should probably read some David Foster Wallace."

22:18 Herbert Ruggles Tarlek III IV V: Thomas Pynchon himself had illustrious forebears who loom over his work; references to oddball nonconformist colonial-era ancestors appear in Gravity's Rainbow, among other places. This "Ruggles" question is definitely one of the questions I want to ask any WKRP writers or performers who might one day deign to let us interview them.

23:40 Secret history of black velvet paintings: Here's that fantastic longform Collectors Weekly article. Not gonna lie, I would TOTALLY buy that painting of Heaven's Gate cult leader Marshall Applewhite about a third of the way down the page.

28:20 The Big Guy and D&D: First of all, I want to give many sincere apologies to Jon Peterson for flubbing the title of his definitive history of RPGs, Playing AT the World, in this episode. If you are interested in those very deep cultural roots of D&D in both midwestern wargaming and late-'60s hippie Tolkien love, definitely check it out. You might also be interested in Rob's series of "Dungeon Master Zero" posts from his blog: 1, 2, 3, 4.

32:36 "Big Guy, two questions. One: Why is Jerry Lewis so popular in France?" Okay, here we go: if you want to learn the definitive answer to Herb's question, check out Rae Beth Gordon's book Why the French Love Jerry Lewis which includes elements such as: mesmerists, hypnotists, and magnetists, contagious hysteria, the famous French "fartiste" Le Pétomane, the French New Wave and auteur theory, and the aforementioned deep dive into fin de siècle Paris cabaret comedians and singers who embodied a neurotic, twitchy style. Also, when we speak of French clowns, we should not neglect to mention two Canadian representatives, M. Piedlourde from Kids in the Hall and Sol from Parlez-Moi, played by immortal Québécois mime Marc Favreau.

Also, apparently no one in England knows who Jerry Lewis is.

Also also, I forgot the word "sang-froid" when talking about French unflappability.

39:56 That's Entertainment! Go back to our look at "Mama's Review" in HMOTD 005 for our discussion Rob's love of clip shows and the That's Entertainment! series of movies.

42:45 Narratives are like technologies: My favorite part of this episode. Well put, Rob.

43:27 The Song Remains the Same: I really do love this movie. Every time it's on VH1, it makes me wish I was a high school kid in the Dazed and Confused era, going to see this at the movie theater while chemically altered.

45:32 "Radio. What is it? Where did it come from? And where is it going?" God, I love the Big Guy's delivery of those lines. And hey, if you're in Boston in the next four weeks, come to Radio Contact: Tuning Into Politics, Technology, and Culture before it closes!

46:30 Herb's Daydream: Regarding Tintin: We had a discussion on Facebook about elements of our childhoods that people from other countries can't understand (it grew out of the "no one outside the U.S. and Canada knows who Jerry Lewis is" discussion) and I can say, I never once read Tintin or even knew what it was, probably before college. Anyway, here's write-ups of General Tapioca and General Alcazar. 

49:09 Jennifer's Daydream: A history of media technology story here in the Big Guy's intro! In my research for the aforementioned radio exhibit, I discovered that in the early 1930s, in an attempt to peel away motion picture fans, there were radio versions of big Hollywood movies, sometimes even acted by the same actors as the film versions! Of course, the film industry would have none of this with the Depression on, and issued a blanket ban in December 1932 of their stars doing radio. Of course, radio's reach and power meant that the ban didn't last long; it was rescinded in August 1933 and was never fully enforced. This excerpt from Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable by Michele Hilmes explains it really well.

53:45 Les's Daydream: "Walter" and "Eric" are referred to by Les in this segment; their identities are pretty obvious. The trouble with trying to find a good source for George Patton's quote about wanting to beat the Russkies is that you end up dealing with a WHOLE lot of scary paleoconservative articles. Wikiquote has your back. And the Tom Joad speech, for those who aren't familiar with. That scene really has that Barton Fink feeling.

57:18 Bailey's Daydream: Thanks to Jaime Weinman for the information on the Bailey sequence being cut. Here's a story on the 1995 Walmart ban of the Margaret-from-Dennis the Menace t-shirt. (Our Monday post took a look at what Hillary Clinton was up to while WKRP was on the air.) Here's a link to all the Diamond Joe Biden stories on The Onion. And the reference to the previous tenant stealing the silverware got me thinking of the now-debunked urban legend that the outgoing (Bill) Clinton administration staffers removed the W's from all the White House keyboards. And many kudos to Rob for including that clip from the first-season MST3K episode Project Moonbase.

1:03:33 Andy's Daydream: What am I, a clown to you, Rob? And yeah, I'm not the first to notice the "watching 1940s Looney Tunes as a kid in the 1980s and being completely clueless about the cultural references" thing.

1:07:23 Venus's Daydream: We are certainly not the first to float the idea of Venus secretly wanting to be an unhip corny comedian; it was also noted by Jaime Weinman in his post about "Daydreams." I was of the opinion it was supposed to be Gordon Sims's "five minutes on Carson" originally, but I think I've come around to Venus being at the Palace.

1:10:56 Johnny's Daydream: Johnny limping through the backstage area surrounded by yes-men and hangers-on made me think of the bit in Van Halen's "Panama" with David Lee Roth being "arrested" backstage at a concert in nothing but a towel. Also, plan yourself a double feature of Phantom of the Paradise and The Apple if you can. Your mind will melt.

1:14:45 Arthur's Daydream? I'm going back on my Arthurian thing; I think he'd instead be a '30s or '40s swashbuckling adventure matinee idol like Errol Flynn as Robin Hood.

HMOTD 031: Pour Something Sticky All Over Me

Mike & Rob haggle over "The Painting" and drift off into "Daydreams," which are also the titles of the two episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati we just watched.

(Full show notes appear at Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser two days after each episode is released. All audio clips are the properties of their owners/creators and appear in this work of comment and critique under fair use provisions of copyright law.)

Check out this episode!

She's got a lot of things on her mind.

[Spoiler warning: we usually don't give a spoiler warning for our Monday posts, but this piece pretty prominently features a neat little twist in this week's second WKRP episode, so if you were planning to watch "Daydreams" in advance of our podcast, you may want to skip this post.]

So we've got a good pair of Bailey Quarters episodes this week in "The Painting" and "Daydreams." "The Painting" heavily features Bailey, who eventually gets the better of Herb Tarlek in an increasingly complex and Mamet-esque series of business transactions surrounding a painting from a church sale. But it's the tiny scenelet in "Daydreams" that grabs our attention this week, eight days before an historic Cincinnati City Council 2016 Presidential election.

"Daydreams" sees our cast listening to the practice run of a Big Guy speech and drifting off into their own little fantasy worlds in the process. Part of the fun of recording this podcast was using each vignette to further analyze the cast's psyches. And Bailey's fantasy, where she's in bed with Johnny and we very slowly and gradually learn that Bailey is now the President of the United States, could not be more pertinent on the eve of America possibly electing its first chief executive with the title "Madame President."

We'll leave off analyzing the implications of Johnny being the First Gentleman for our Wednesday podcast, but for now, let's quickly look at the "far-future woman President" trope in television and films in this period. It's interesting that in the 1980s, it was at least taken as an inevitability that America would eventually elect a female Commander-in-Chief; there are several examples of this besides Bailey's admittedly lightweight fantasy sequence. The short-lived 1985 ABC mid-season replacement sitcom Hail to the Chief, starring Patty Duke (and created by Soap helmer and future The Golden Girls creator Susan Harris, last mentioned in HMOTD 029), put the first woman President in a Dr. Strangelove situation of all things in its pilot, all while she needs to balance the needs of her husband and children in a traditional zany sitcom setup. Just as with Soap, we can see Harris struggling with the limitations of what kinds of representation could be allowed on network TV at the time (Patty Duke's President Mansfield also quite interestingly has an openly gay Secret Service agent, who is a recurring character). Given that Hail to the Chief was canceled after seven episodes, even these modest steps forward weren't really smiled upon by the powers-that-be in television in the mid-'80s.

In the '00s and beyond we've been spoiled by depictions of Laura Roslin and Allison Taylor and Selina Meyer; three-dimensional chief executives with a full spectrum of character traits, including flaws. But in the 1980s, the woman President, while inevitable, was still primarily an object of fun, helping male writers in working out their anxieties of the possible "benign violation" of the office of President. But even just that sense of inevitability is still very interesting. It's hard to deny the progress of women in politics globally when the United Kingdom elects a Margaret Thatcher (herself an archconservative) or figures like Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi from earlier in the 1970s. What makes America different? Why have we lagged behind the rest of the world? To answer this, we need to take a closer look at Bailey Quarters, and a little bumpersticker on her desk.

Bailey has always been our "woman trying to make her way in a man's world" proxy, of course. By Season 3, she's boldly out-dealing and out-conning Herb Tarlek and fantasizing about the challenges of being America's first woman chief executive. She's always been politically and socially conscious too; remember the ERA bumpersticker on Bailey's desk? Prior to the wave election of 1980 and the 1981 entry of Ronald Reagan into the Oval Office and the concomitant rise of the influence of his Evangelical allies, the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment was considered a fait accompli across the political spectrum. But all that changed in the late 1970s with the rise of vigorous ERA opposition. Even given an extension for passage into 1982, the ERA would die on the vine, the country's conservative psyche wanting to return to traditional gender roles in the face of the societal turmoil of the 1970s.

Led by prominent antifeminists like the recently-deceased Phyllis Schlafly, who channeled grassroots reactionary opposition to the ERA (and got an explicit ERA opposition plank added to Reagan's 1980 Republican platform), the women's rights movement ended up being dealt a massive counterblow in the 1980s, in large part by men using, as their public allies and faces... other women. To quote the afterword of Margaret Atwood's definitive statement on the Reagan era's antifeminism, The Handmaid's Tale, "the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves." (Schlafly and the wives of the 1980s' various televangelists in fact inspired Atwood's depiction of the Commander's wife, Serena Joy.)

We've talked about the 1980 election as the beginning of a sea change, a shift that has formed so many of the features of 2016's political, social, and economic landscape... from media consolidation, to massive deregulation, to union-busting, to today's overall runaway neoliberal consensus. But here, on the feminism side of things, we see the establishment of an explicit antifeminist strain in American politics, one that has interestingly led directly to next Tuesday's election.

What was 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton up to in early 1981 when this episode of WKRP aired, aside from just having given birth to a daughter? Bill Clinton had just been defeated for Governor in the 1980 election; even in traditionally Democratic Arkansas, Clinton could not form a bulwark against the Reagan Revolution. In the two years (1981 and 1982) that Bill Clinton was out of the Governor's mansion, Hillary Rodham was battling for her Carter-era appointment to head a federal organization called the Legal Services Corporation. The Legal Services Corporation was established in 1974 (by the Nixon administration!) to provide legal assistance to underprivileged Americans in civil legal cases, as an equal access issue of civil rights. Under the watchful eyes of the strict constructionists of the Reagan era, though, the LSC was ideologically suspect. Similar Civil Rights Act-era programs designed to provide legal aid to the poor had been one of Reagan's greatest bugbears as Governor of California. Throughout Reagan's first term, the LSC was directly in Reagan's sights. When removing its funding didn't work thanks to Congressional opposition, Reagan sought to stack the LSC with appointees who would essentially destroy the LSC through neglect. Rodham lobbied Congress, worked against Reagan's recess LSC appointments, and otherwise helped save the LSC from oblivion. (The LSC survived the Reagan years, as George H.W. Bush largely decided to dispense with the ideological-purge mentality of his predecessor.)

When Hillary Rodham returned to the Governor's mansion with her husband in 1983, Ms. Rodham was now officially going by the name Hillary Rodham Clinton. I'm sure this was entirely unrelated to the antifeminist mood in the country at the time. As was, I'm sure, the consistent decision by early-'80s syndicators to cut and broadcast a version of "Daydreams" that was missing the one daydream segment that happened to feature Bailey Quarters (Caravella) as a competent, in-charge, take-no-nonsense, be-pigtailed President of the United States.

To paraphrase Jimmy Carter, there are wounds here, ones that have never been healed.

Show Notes for HMOTD 030: He Has Genghis Khan For A Mother

0:58 "Hi Michael! Hi Robbie!": Damn it, Rob, I think we're funny when we want to be.

When it came to deciding when we'd want to have our Moms on the podcast, we knew we wanted an episode that had good solid Mama Carlson content. We had some options available in Season 4, but when I saw we could get "Bah, Humbug" along with a Mama episode, my mind went immediately to doing a sequel to last season's HMOTD 019: The Year WKRP Saved Christmas, which of course resulted in our little "Moms coming to visit for Christmas in October" bit at the beginning of this episode.

(Also, there's so much lampshading in this episode, we could open a lighting store.)

4:06 Pay TV: My uncle Billy was indeed prescient in his college years! Talk of pay television was very much in its infancy in the early '60s, but the FCC already was dealing with the fallout of the very first embryonic cable TV systems in the 1950s, in towns where over-the-air TV reception was difficult-to-impossible. There was also closed-circuit TV in the '50s and '60s, used to narrowcast prizefights to remote venues in the years before cable pay-per-view. These memories of CCTV fights from the '60s and '70s are pretty awesome.

4:58 "I invented TV": One of the most controversial questions in the field of the history of technology and media is finally answered: Betty Jo did indeed invent television in Flin Flon, Manitoba in the mid-1940s, behind the screen door! Okay, that's not really true, of course, but TV is one of those inventions that doesn't have a single iconic inventor. Rob's long been interested in these questions: check out a blog post of his from 2002 (yes, kids, people did blog back then) amended and updated in 2009.

5:12 Flin Flon Saturday Morning Fun Club: I am very sad to report that my research-fu was not up to the task; I cannot find any record of the Fun Club on the internet in 2016. I am wondering which radio station in Flin Flon it was on, though; my primary suspect is CFAR?

Also, digging into Rob's blog archives yet again: would you like to know the quite eerie Secret History of the naming of Flin Flon? Your questions are answered, thanks again to Betty Jo.

6:30 Boomtown with Rex Trailer: Boomtown! There are so many photos of my Dad as a little kid dressed in cowboy costumes, coonskin caps, and so forth; that's just what kids loved back in the '50s, am I right? What endless superhero movies are to the 2010s, cowboy movies and TV were in the 1950s. So it makes sense that he'd want to appear on one of Boston's most beloved kids' shows. Rex Trailer, who hosted Boomtown for two decades from 1956 to 1974, was a Boston Baby Boomer institution. Rex went on to found a television production company in Boston in the years following Boomtown's cancelation. For extra local TV/helicopter mishap fun (in the vein of HMOTD 027), check out this story about Rex and Boston's Bozo the Clown, Frank Avruch, appearing from nowhere in Western Massachusetts to the delight of local children. At least they didn't crash.

8:48 Indian Head test patterns and Betty Jo's first TV: The 1949 World Series did indeed feature the Yankees and Dodgers. You all were early technology adopters, Betty Jo! And as far as the Indian head test pattern is concerned, its design also has a fascinating secret history. I know we've talked about the BBC test patterns in past Show Notes, like the Test Card Girl, but the Indian head was, of course, iconic during the black-and-white TV era in North America and afterwards.

10:23 Sesame Street: This got cut for time, but please check out the book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street if you care for more evidence and observations in the vein of Betty Jo's Madison, WI playground anthropology in the fall of 1969. Sesame Street was a sea change in how parents, programmers, and educators looked at TV. Again, there was that brief glimmer of hope in the 1970s for a revolution in educational TV programming before the deregulation of the 1980s and the inevitable Mattel Chocobot Power Hours of my own childhood... but that's jumping the gun a bit for HMOTD 032.

Also, if you can get through the book's prologue, set at Jim Henson's 1990 funeral, without bawling your eyes out, you are made of stronger stuff than I.

11:34 Mister Rogers: I received an email from my dad following this episode that said legal action was forthcoming for using this story without his express written consent. I still love Mr. Rogers, though.

Edit: Well, I've found that other people had the same experience as I did with my dad, so here's a poll.

A bit in this week's @HoldMyOrderWKRP ep got me wondering: if you have a Boomer-age Dad, did he openly mock Mr. Rogers when you were a kid?

— Michael Grasso (@MuseumMichael) October 20, 2016

12:45 "Hi boys, it's me, Mom!" More Sifl and Olly, one of Rob's and my favorites. I've been waiting to use one of these Calls from Olly's Mom since we decided to do this episode. That's voice-of-Olly Liam Lynch's actual mom doing the voice there, by the way.

14:27 Doctor Who, Fables of the Green Forest: As I've mentioned time and time again, 7:30 on Channel 2 in Boston in the early '80s was Doctor Who time. I'm more intrigued by what I'm guessing Rob meant as his show, Fables of the Green Forest? It did air on TVOntario. See, this might be one of the reasons I never got into anime; I just never watched any of the early Japanese dubbed imports like this or Speed Racer, or even the 1980s latecomers like Robotech or Voltron.

[Rob:] Yeah, Fables of the Green Forest, that's the show. (Here's the opening theme.)  I had no idea it was Japanese! It was based on the books of Thornton Burgess, which were kind of like Walden for kids. Not unlike Hammy the Hamster, to be honest.

16:58 "You had a 'Thriller' party!": We did indeed. That first half of 1983 belonged to Michael Jackson and the album Thriller, but by the autumn, the album was beginning to lose its luster. The "Thriller" video event was a way to re-inject interest in what was already one of the biggest albums of all time. The John Landis-directed 13-minute video debuted on December 2, 1983 and was the first "world premiere video event" on MTV.

17:52 "Colour came late to Canada": Other than Rob's joke about Canada being black and white until the late '70s, this section just fascinates me, especially when I did go to check out how late color TV came to other countries. Canada finalized their color switchover in 1974, just stupefying! Although if you lived near the border, you could obviously get American transmissions. Cuba's an interesting case; they were super early adopters in 1958 but the Revolution put paid to their plans to roll it out completely. Many countries did not get color until the 1980s, including Turkey and Romania (1990!).

18:38 Rob's memories of color TV: We really need to replace "The Mandela Effect" as a term with "The Nowhere Band Effect."

[Rob:] Aka "The Orange Oscar the Grouch Effect."

19:28 "I suppose we need to talk about WKRP!" It was very difficult to keep the balance of awesome family stories to WKRP coverage just right in this episode. We cut a lot of really fun stories, even some stories about our Moms Behaving Badly, which will surface later either as bonus content for the podcast or blackmail material.

21:30 "At what point in history did [Christmas Carol pastiches] become hokey?" Not sure if we have an answer for this, but TVTropes does have a "Yet Another Christmas Carol" trope page. You know, I'd forgotten the Family Ties episode. Now Alex P. Keaton, that's a character who needs a Scrooge-like attitude adjustment.

[Rob:] The A.V. Club has its own list of Christmas Carol episodes, which posits "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol" (1962) as the first animated Christmas special and "one of" the first TV Scrooge pastiches. And scroll down to #15 on the list: In 1989 Hugh Wilson recycled "Bah Humbug" in his "critically acclaimed, dismally rated" sitcom The Famous Teddy Z.

23:00 Canceling the Christmas Carol play: It was mean not to cut my mom's "Bob Marley" brain cramp, but it did allow us to preview the pot brownie story. And Rob also had a hilarious cut bit about his own Grade 13 A Christmas Carol play being interrupted by a fire alarm... possibly pulled by one of the teachers being lampooned?

23:57 The Clapper: The Clapper really seems more like a Grasso Family-type product, if you know what I mean (ahem), so I was honestly surprised Betty Jo knew what it was.

25:17 "1950s nostalgia is much better. Much more nostalgic." My favorite funny line of Betty Jo's in this episode.

27:50 "How funny that Herb was the survivor?" I had to evoke the Peter Principle, even though I found that it's come down to us in a slightly different form than its inventor intended, I think.

29:28 WKRP Future: I love the little electronic sounds that the dueling computer systems use to communicate with each other. It's almost as if all the actual communication is happening by modem and the human touches like the voices are just there to make the people feel better about it. Again, strikingly familiar.

33:24 "Do you notice how many of these childhood stories involve the word 'anxiety'?" Ahem. *leaves the party early* While you're waiting for me to return to the party, read this piece I wrote for We Are The Mutants, a new online magazine I'm contributing to, about one of those very same complicated board games I got for Christmas 1986, The World According to Ubi.

34:24 "This is an extremely Canadian story, folks." This story definitely had more snowshoes and cross-country skis in it than I'd ever imagined being part of anyone's Christmas.

37:02 "I pity you." Not gonna lie, using this clip from the Season 1 Simpsons episode "There's No Disgrace Like Home" for the competing Grasso and MacDougall family Christmases was the highlight of my edit. Between my dad calling Mr. Rogers a shithead, my mom getting accidentally dosed by pot brownies, and my spoiled Little Prince-ness, we would've lasted maybe 3 minutes at the MacDougall family cottage before fleeing into the cold Canadian night, hearing "After you! "Thank you so much!" and MacDougall family singalongs echoing in the distance.

[Rob:] Well, if you'd fled into the night, the wolves probably would've gotten you. But yeah, this isn't the first time people have perceived my family as freakishly loving, wholesome, or quaint. (It's a fair cop.) And the Simpsons clip is payback for the glee I took last episode in tagging your musical tastes with Jonathan Coulton's "Soft Rocked." Was that perfect family singing "B-I-N-G-O" a sort of proto-Flanders family, or had the Flanderses been introduced by that point?

[Mike:] Heh. They were indeed some kind of proto-Flanderses. Ned had been introduced as the Simpsons' neighbor in the very first full-length (and, incidentally, Christmas special!) episode, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire," but the entire Flanders clan did not appear until all the way in Season 2's "Dead Putting Society."

38:04 "You're going to make me tell that pot brownie story." You can't pahk the cah on the Tobin Bridge, Mom. That is Bat Country. Have this supercut of Mahk Wahlberg in The Depahted (VERY NSFW) to keep you company if you like my mom's accent... and my lack of one. "You, howevah, grew up on the Nohth Shohe, huh? Well, la-di-fuckin'-da... You have different accents? You did, didn't you? You little fuckin' snake. You were like different people."

46:47 "Why do we have that [bad mother] figure?" And this is my favorite serious discussion that Betty Jo gives us. It's a question we still can't answer in pop culture depictions of mothers.

49:30 "They had to make her a strong woman, and make him a weak man." I liked my mom's observation here. Not only are you dealing with the complicated situation with respect to women characters on TV in 1981, you're also dealing with depicting Lillian's ability, as a woman who was doing this kind of work in the 1950s and '60s, to go against the cultural grain and be required and able to "take over the business."

[Rob:] Yeah, and this from Karen is the other great serious contribution that we only partially explore.

55:30 Carol Bruce, Life Magazine, September 9, 1940: Here's cover girl Carol Bruce looking very tropical and tanned, and the saluting picture I found on my search.

57:30 "We'll see you how do without my rolodex." The rolodex is actually a much more recent invention than I'd assumed! It is a product of the postwar office supply boom, patented in 1956, sold starting in 1958, and thus popularized during the actual Mad Men era.

58:00 "I grew up in an office." [Rob:] We pass over this point fairly quickly, but take a minute to reflect all on the changes Karen lived and worked through (and all the shit she undoubtedly had to put up with) as she worked her way up from "office girl" in the 1960s to "running the place" in the 1980s. That's the Women's Movement right there, folks. Here's to you, Karen.

59:50 Les sitting down with Mama: I'm not above a little Whoopie Cushion-type humor, and neither is WKRP.

1:01:52 "The great Jimmy James." [Rob:] I misspoke here but it was intentional. Milton in Office Space is of course played by the great Stephen Root, but he'll always be Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler to me.

1:04:45 The clothing in this episode: Here's a link back to our discussion in the Show Notes of HMOTD 016: Muy Dinero, about women's business fashion and its masculinization in the 1980s.

1:05:23 "Gary Sandy's hair... blow-dried to perfection." This to me is the hidden gem of this episode. The idea of Gary Sandy's hair being aspirational for women of the early '80s is fantastic. Princess Di was just getting secretly engaged to Prince Charles in early 1981 when this episode aired, but within a few weeks she'd be world-famous. The "unfortunate perms" bit also got me thinking of Sarah Paulson's devastating portrayal of O.J. prosecutor Marcia Clark in the recent The People vs. O.J. Simpson.

1:06:15 Huey Lewis: The poster on the WKRP booth wall was for Huey Lewis's self-titled debut album with the News. Their first single, "Some of My Lies Are True (Sooner or Later)" is very New Wave indeed.

[Rob:] Mike, I was very impressed that you went with a 1981-appropriate clip from Huey's first cassette (OK, album) rather than something better known from Sports or Fore. Good man. As for the famous scene from American Psycho, I'm just happy that Huey got the last word.

1:08:51 Sir Tom Jones: Betty Jo's gagging sounds at the thought of seeing Tom Jones live were just priceless; my mom's response even more classic. Rob's gentle correction of Betty Jo is also right on; it was indeed Robert Goulet who angered Elvis Presley into shooting his TV.

1:10:35 Barry Manilow Live: Again, any lampshading about "artsy-fartsy" versus "trashy" in the context of this episode is purely coincidental. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to listen to Tom Jones and Barry Manilow with my mom. Have a bucket of chicken...

HMOTD 030: He Has Genghis Khan For A Mother

It's finally happened: Rob and Mike are joined this week for a look at "Bah, Humbug" and "Baby, It's Cold Inside" by... their moms, Betty Jo MacDougall and Karen Grasso!

(Full show notes appear at Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser two days after each episode is released. All audio clips are the properties of their owners/creators and appear in this work of comment and critique under fair use provisions of copyright law.)

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