nostalgia was once considered a mental illness

[davemerrill]

So I have been going back through old Let's Anime posts and reformatting them to read easier and correcting egregious errors and adding new screencaps and images (it's only been in the past few years that I've been able to get decent screencaps of videos) and the latest one I fixed was a post from 2008 about anime parody dubbing.

When I first met Matt and CB they showed up at the local anime club meeting with Star Dipwads - their parody dub of "Arrivederchi Yamato" - already complete in at least one iteration -two guys with a cassette recorder and VHS copies of Star Blazers episodes and a burning desire to take their teenage nonsense and imprint it upon Space Battleship Yamato.

We became friends and years later we're all married, which is something we would have SWORN would never have happened back then. Anyway, Matt and CB decided to get a camcorder and shoot a fake documentary purportedly about how Star Dipwads was a real movie and how the producers were egomaniacal fraudsters on the run from the law. It's a film that we finished, but never really distributed, because it's funny to us, but if you weren't there shooting it at the time, it makes no sense whatsoever.

I dug it out for screencaps and watched it last night and it's a real trip down memory lane. We filmed man-on-the-street interviews in front of the movie theater where I'd worked; we spent hours in that shopping plaza hollering, waving pellet guns around, and generally making nuisances of ourselves late at night, and nobody batted an eye. Later segments of the film that involved the producers hauling a corpse through malls resulted in us getting thrown out of both Cumberland Mall and Gwinnett Place Mall.



You can see my brilliant camera work here, where instead of having the light source (the sign) actually shine ON my subject, I just let CB stand silhouetted. It's not all this bad, but much of it is (my later CPF film where I did the camera work, "Danger Highway 8", is much more competent).

It was an era of Corn Pone Flicks movie making that involved a gang of people getting together and doing whatever came to mind for eight or ten hours every Saturday and Sunday, and that requires pretty much everybody involved to be students or otherwise somebody with few responsibilities.

Now we're all old and married and we have jobs and mortgages and our weekends are spent doing laundry and buying groceries, and anyway it would look silly if we were out there getting arrested for trespassing while shooting a dumb home-made movie. But I'm glad we did it when we did it and I'm glad we saved some of it for us to look back at.

Comments

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

The thing that still amazes me, how so many things you guys did, heck things you and I did, you could NEVER do today. Never ever. Model guns, airsoft, Nerf, water, running around any of those places now with such a thing would more likely than not get one shot.

And SO MANY people freak out now. Back then, if one saw a guy our age (then) holding a toy gun while others were standing around watching and filming, they would shrug their shoulders and just assume "Idiots". Now, people lose their mud over SAYING the word 'gun'.

Were people more stupid or indifferent back then? I think it was more common sense. It's kids, goofing around.

Of course kids today are different as well and shit does go down so caution is the best course but geeze.

Of course this is coming from a guy who had the LEOs come up with loaded Mossberg 800s when we were playing Lazer Tag in the woods...

BTW, that shot with the lit sign, nowadays directors do that sort of thing on purpose. Makes it all mysterious and crap. Yeesh, modern movies, so damn DARK you can hardly tell what's going on half the time.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

We got our share of law enforcement attention while playing around with toy guns, so I don't think that's changed. They're tougher about it in schools, certainly, but to be honest, they should be. Teenagers are real dipshits when it comes to stuff like that.

I know what's changed in Smyrna is that the retail real estate that was largely forgotten about back then has been re-engineered for maximum effect, so that, for instance, that parking lot where that screen cap was taken from, the retail behind CB (where the "atari expo" was), that all got knocked down, the movie theater closed, they built a Toys R Us across the lot & the post office moved next door to that, they opened four restaurants in the parking lot closer to the road (one a Hooters, so no more deserted parking lots late at night), they knocked down the theater & put a Golf Town there or some dang thing, that moved, the toys r us moved to where the golf town was, all sorts of musical chairs retail.

And every mall got like that, every bit of asphalt with street lights now has a 24-hour Fed Ex Kinkos or a Starbucks or a security guard in a golf cart tooling around at regular intervals. The days of giant vacant commercial real estate, in that area at least, are gone; we had this golden age of nobody giving a crap + big empty spaces that allowed us to shoot Making Of Dipwads, Men In Black, much of Ozone Commandos, etc., that kind of went away once the economy picked up in the 1990s.

I think it went through another dead period in the 2000s, but I wasn't living over there any more. A lot of the empty space that sat vacant in 2008 now has retail on it, like that new Publix in downtown Smyrna whose initial groundbreaking coincided almost exactly with the '08 economic collapse.


For that matter, I cannot BELIEVE the nonsense we perpetrated in shooting Ozone Commandos. We basically ran hog wild through five or six large conventions. I've seen the footage, it's the kind of thing that would drive me APE if anybody tried to do it at AWA.

I dunno, it just felt like a very... unsupervised time. And we weren't unsupervised, it's that we were 19 year old white guys, and in that time and space, 19 year old white guys pretty much got away with anything short of murder or grand theft auto.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Or Grand Theft Bicycle? :)

I have a growing fascination with Dead Malls and Dead Retail. It's probably rooted in nostalgia but it's also a kind of...wondering.

See, the current thing (and it may be Grand Rapids is just catching up with other places) is 'De-Malling', where you take a former enclosed mall, knock most of it down, rebuild it as an old style 'open air' mall and suddenly people flock to fill the spaces. Of course most of the stores that fill in are very very niche and the only reason for their existence is the mall owners lowball the rent for a time, which if they had done that when the enclosed mall existed they may have kept the occupancy up. But the VALUE is the short term profit generated by not having to pay for mall security or maintenance, not having to pay the interior electricity or heat or a/c.

I want to visit the places I can't go to. there's a Witmark's catalog showroom on the north end of town next to another dead mall (they just lost KMart) that's been gutted. The Witmark was a Gelco/Playworld in the '70s and became a Witmark in the early '80s. It's completely intact, even to the marquee over the front doors. It hasn't been touched for like 20 or more years. GOD I want to go in there! Who knows what strangeness awaits in there?

But I run that Nostalgia horse to death. There's where this arcade was, there's where that theater was, over there was a drive-in, I remember where the other Playworld was at Woodland Mall which died the death and became a UA Movies at Woodland where I saw Star Wars a bazillion times and made an amazing marketing contact for the opening of Star Trek the Motion Picture. Gone.

Crazy. I have three things I miss the most. Places that sold toys, places to eat and arcades. F**k. Hello depression. got your hooks in me again now, huh?

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

there's some retail in Cobb that was one thing, got razed and became another thing, got razed and became a third thing, is now on its fourth go-round. It's nuts. The archeologists call it "palimpsest" where one thing is impressed atop another and so on. I weep for the researchers of the future, building mid-century America out of old newspaper ads and outdated street maps.

Heck, we spent a good three hours over Xmas trying to remember the name of the grocery store that was in the plaza that got knocked down to build the new Publix. That was where the first iteration of the local wedding-cake bakery was, where the Rexall Drugs was, hardware store. Still can't remember the name of that stupid grocery store.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

I have a similar 'nagging toothache' involving a grocery store. When we lived on the west side of the city, kinda near one of the most significant furniture factories (American Seating, which I think is dead or bought up by another company that then died), there was a grocery store across the street from the grade school I attended, we went there all the time and for the life of my, I have zero memory of the name. It wasn't one of the local chains I don't think. I've tried and tried to recall it and nothing. The memories I have of it, they had a coke bottle machine near the exit (gotta have that Fanta Grape) and a spinner rack with various paperbacks, where I got most of my old Mad Magazine fix, plus B.C., The Wizard of Id, and Tumbleweeds paperback collections. Sometimes I got a Peanuts paperback but those were usually bought at the bookstore downtown near the Majestic Theater. (comic books came from the spinners at Walker St. Pharmacy)

See? I can recall all that precise detail but not the name of the store! ARGGH.

You know, I'm really thinking now that it was the Batman TV series that drew me into superhero comics. Most of my early reading were Harvey, Archie and Gold Key pubs. I like to think that between Magnus Robot Fighter and the Kurtzman Mad reprints I got some decent comic art appreciation education. :)

(I still have a crazy soft spot for Don Martin. His use of sound effects was really impressive and built the comedy)

[(Anonymous)]

Although Matt has effectively disavowed the existence of The Making of the Star Dipwads, having omitted it from the digital preservation effort and thus making it the CPF equivalent of the Star Wars Christmas Special--perhaps Corn Dog 7 is the CPF equivalent of A New Hope, as it's only "officially" available in the Special Edition sans "who the Hell are YOU?" edition--it is perhaps the CPF work I remember most alongside Bad American Dubbing. I'm pretty sure I saw the antics of Ego Hat and Leper Jim trying to dispose of a sheet-wrapped body in the mall before I actually saw a proper copy of Megazone 23 Part II, and to this day it's the first thing that comes to mind whenever I see Klondike bars.

Sadly, all my VHS tapes were left abandoned in a closet in a foreclosed home so I can only cling to the memories. Truly, "Ego Hat...you've ruined...my life!"

Daryl Surat