Jim Henson’s 80’s: When Childhood Was Whiplashingly Weird (Patreon)

It’s the 30th anniversary of the death of Jim Henson. Looking back, it was a moment I remember with vivid clarity, for it was one of the first celebrity deaths that really hit me. I adored Jim Henson. He made all my favorite things. There was no version of my reality where he wasn’t there. I know that for many, his name is synonymous with The Muppets and particularly Kermit The Frog. But for me, even then, he seemed to have this influence that went so much further than his own orbit. The madcap nature of Henson’s humor and heart bled right into the construction of movies, the DNA of storytelling, and the world itself. 

But please know the following is much less an explanation of Henson and how he managed to achieve this, but more a meditation on the culture then… and the culture now.

1. Tenor & Trolls

There is no tenor of essay more deplorable than one marked by the belief that one’s era of childhood was somehow more magical, more distinct, or more worthy than anyone else’s. For while we may cling to the delightful specific details of our own childhood media, the far more important thing is the feeling those bits of media created. And the nexus with which they are built into our emotional memory. It is undeniably a powerful force. And it’s no wonder that the economics of Hollywood have shifted to mostly operate on 24/7 nostalgia fuel. 

Now, if you’ve read me long enough, you know that I don’t have much affinity for this approach, but I won’t really get into it here (short version: George Lucas didn’t get to make Flash Gordon, so he made Star Wars. So I don’t want today’s artists always to be making Star Wars, I want those people making something new). But set within the bounds of looking back at the Henson era is a really important discussion of what kids movies are actually “for” and why they are often able to go to so many weird and interesting places.

I thought about this while I was recently watching Trolls: World Tour because it so greatly exemplifies what I’ll call “The Modern Kids Movie.” What started with Shrek and the Dreamworks-ification of kids entertainment has now become part of storytelling approach often seen in films like Angry Birds, Smallfoot, The Emoji Movie, Despicable Me, Boss Baby, etc. (please understand I’m not lumping in the relative quality of these films, just the approach). All these films seem to shoot lines fast and furiously, often featuring a mix of pop culture references, obvious parent jokes, low-hanging kid jokes, all set to popular needledrops or pulse-pounding EDM, and employing a huge amount of off-screen ADR, along with, well, just a metric ton of cutaways to people doing kooky things for, like, one second. There really is this overwhelming, kinetic pace to all of it. Like a hurried assault, we’re sent from moment to moment with a whiplashing frenzy. 

Understand, I am not abjectly criticizing this. They’re doing this because it works. At least in a short-term way. The singular, pulsing tone rarely lets an audience member sit in the moment. You’re purposefully pushed into a state of “present shock” and you really don’t have time to feel whether something works or doesn’t work. But the truth is there often isn’t much there to dwell on either. Most of these films understand you can bookend the story with a couple of emotional moments and it’ll do, Moreover, layering a film with a deep emotionality throughout is really hard to do. And often, just gets in the way of the joke onslaught. As a result, the relative success of these films honestly just depend on whether or not gags can consistently land. And for the most part, these modern films do okay because they are made by damn professionals. There’s just too much talent and work being put in over gradual time. Just about any high priced CGI movie will find the laughs. 

And as a result, modern CGI kids movies have managed to keep up this kind of barometer of “acceptable quality” that will keep them going in perpetuity at least for now. But it also leads me to an interesting realization about their approach. Yes, these films may be whiplashing from subject to subject in a hurried pace, but the tone isn’t really whiplashing at all. It’s often the same, light, jokey, irreverent monotone from start to finish; a singular emotional experience. And that’s when I remember…

… The movies of my childhood were not like this.

2. Toitels & Tone

I don’t know if you’ve heard this one before, but 80’s movies were kind of weird. 

Who’da thunk! I could likely throw out a list of beloved gonzo cult classics like Big Trouble in Little China, Repo Man, or Evil Dead 2. Or maybe the “how did this get made?” surreal absurdity of Garbage Pail Kids, Mac and Me, or Howard the Duck. When I think about any of these films, a whole bevy of insane imagery rushes to my head. Successful or not, they were just so goddamn weird. But the thing about the 80’s was it was almost like every film needed some kind of high concept absurdity to be green-lit into existence. There was literally an entire sub-genre of “man falls in love with mythical creature / inanimate object!” movies (Splash! Mannequin, Weird Science). Hell, even “normal” action films like Commando, Cobra, and Road House had this bizarre streak and ardent commitment to over the top comedic machismo… 

But that was the point of all of it.

Because the cinema of the 80’s had absolutely zero interest in realism. Movies were a place to get fucking weird! A place where you could be silly and surreal! Where the impossible could and would happen! And the more these high-concept films performed at the box office, the more it created this arms race of crazier and crazier conceits that no one would ever experience in real life (“oh no, I’ve gone back and time and my hot mom wants to have sex with me instead of my dad! I gotta fix it!” = 389 million dollars at the box office). But the thing that most strikes me is not the particular surface weirdness of these films, but the weirdness of their construction. Because these films were so utterly unafraid to jump from emotion to emotion, often changing the entire tone of the film at a moments notice. 

In one moment you could be enjoying the madcap antics of Gremlins and then you’re getting hit with the infamous morbidity of “the chimney speech.” Or perhaps you’re going along with the fairy tale adventure of The Never Ending Story and then wrecked by a shockingly grizzly sequence of watching a beloved horse drown in heartbreaking fashion (my god, the screaming). Or perhaps you remember the sudden suicidal streak of The Wolf Man in Monster Squad. Hell, I can just say the words “large marge” and a whole generation of kids are brought back to truly a horrifying jump scare (likely the first they ever experienced). But the thing is not that these moments exist as outliers, it’s how seemingly common these things were. So many of these films had darker elements that would have been nixed by a studio in the name of playing it safe. I mean, can you imagine the abortion subplot of Dirty Dancing coming out today? Or the electrotherapy scene in Return to Oz? Or the burning of the little shoe / everything about the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Unlikely, but that also leaves me with a pointed question… 

Why the hell were we doing it then?

I’m not sure it was because audiences were somehow “more comfortable” with disparate elements just rubbing up against each other. Many of the aforementioned moments still stand out precisely because they made people so uncomfortable back then. But perhaps that discomfort was the point. Folks like Spielberg, Zemeckis, Raimi, Burton, and Lucas could at times have this cackling, teenager-esque glee when it came to torturing the audience with a creepy moment. To use the crappy heteronormative example, they almost felt like the little boys who were chasing girls while holding worms. At it’s worst, there is something juvenile about it. But at it’s best, it’s that many of these filmmakers we were far more willing to make and embrace weird provoking art that just went right at kids’ fears, often in a way that was meant to get them to confront them. 

But that was an accepted part of the mission of the time. Even Walt Disney had long understood the importance of “teaching death to children” and brought the notion into the DNA of his company’s storytelling. But Disney has always had a deft hand and sense of grace in dramatizing that matter, while other filmmakers have been more, ohhhh, let’s say more cavalier and haphazard. But both were guided by a complete lack of fear. And often mixed such darkness and terror with wonder, hope, yearning, and even more irreverence. They would dive from tone to tone with reckless abandon.

And I was thinking about all this a lot recently because of rewatch of one particular movie. Did I finally sit down and rewatch Labryinth? Or Ridley Scott’s dreamlike Legend? Or did I watch The Secret of Nihm and the entire dour oeuvre of Don Bluth.

No.

It’s because I went back and watched the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). 

For a film that was one of my favorites when I was a rambunctious lad, I never revisited it for basic fear of seeing it through my adult eyes. Again, my mixed relationship with nostalgia often creates fear. But during the rewatch I was shocked by a couple things.The first is how willingly the film embraced the affections of its youngest audience. Theres’s entire sequences of turtles just jumping around yelling “radical!” with all the obliging grace of the Teletubbies. It was just intensely childlike. And at the same time, I was shocked how much of everything around it was, like, a real movie. I realize that sounds patronizing, but it’s genuinely not meant to be. For it’s sometimes rambling nature, the film finds an aching backbone in Raphael, a depressed teenager going through the traumatic push-pull of wanting people while feeling the pain of being inherently unwanted. I’m not trying to paint this as some ardent character piece, but the complexity is absolutely there. His emotions, and particularly his relationship with Leonardo, fuel the emotional engine of the entire film.

It also has a little rat mimicking karate moves. 

To experience the movie is to jump into nineteen different movies at once. At times, there are scenes of poetic and tranquil grace, like the sketchbooks in a broken down farm house. April muses “the turtles are four once again, and yet still not whole. A lingering doubt remains. An unknown that they can’t bear to face… their greatest fear… [implying a life without their master].” It then jumps to turtle wax jokes and then introduces magic out of nowhere. Just like it goes from overtly serious danger in the fights to Three Stooges brand cartoon fisticuffs. Just like it goes from malevolent introductions to badass villainy to ardent nut shots and golf puns. There were surely so many films that were “darker” or “more fucked up,” but coasting into the 90’s after the decade that preceded, the film speaks to all that I’m saying about fully committing to the tone of the given moment. Every moment feels like its pointed, full-sail in its intended direction. It’s willing to be anything, but it takes the heart of itself seriously. 

So enamored with this approach, I went to look at who made it and suddenly the weirdness of everything I’ve been talking about in the 80’s suddenly clicked.

Because I realized how much of it has to do with Jim Henson.

3. Henson and Heartstrings

Steve Barron has had one of the more interesting directing careers imaginable, as he was responsible for directing some of the most famous music videos of the 80’s and 90’s. We’re talking Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” Madonna “Burning Up,” David Bowie’s “Underground,” A-Ha’s “Take On Me” Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science,” and even Toto’s “Africa” (safe to say, there have been worse resumes). But his video work showcased a penchant for inventiveness, from hybrid animation, to intense stylization, to romantic verve. His only prior feature before the Turtles was Electric Dreams, which is yet another 80’s movie to feature some of the aforementioned WHAT THE FUCKERY (especially when a computer engaged in a human love triangle dramatically announces he is going to commit suicide). But the job that brought him Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? That came from his collaboration with Jim Henson while directing episodes of The Storyteller. 

Some of you may have never heard of the show, largely because the short-lived experimental project was not one of Henson’s more successful endeavors. It was an anthology show where the titular storyteller (John Hurt! Then Michael Gambon!) brought Henson-loving households into forgotten folklore and myth. Reflecting the scary nature of these myths, the show was often dark, lyrical, and mournful. But it, along with the similarly short-lived Jim Henson Hour, are part of the rosetta stone for understanding of the range of breadth of his interests. He obviously loved Kermit, but he didn’t necessarily want his work to be synonymous with Kermit. Instead, he wanted to create expansively. To evolve, change and push the tone of puppetry, showing it was not a mere friendly genre, but capable of anything. 

But really, it was the same fight he fought from the beginning. The Muppets were the thing that got adults to even entertain the notion of puppetry. So he just kept pushing, wanting kids and adults alike to embrace the fringes of the weirdest alleys of our imagination, never afraid to display absurdism. Go back and watch his original madcap and irreverent shorts, which feel more of a pair with the Marx Brothers and Tim and Eric than they do the rainbow connections. Even the popularity of the world “gonzo” stemmed from a Henson creation. The truth is that the success of his work came with time, for Henson had to learn how to actually pull back the weirdness a tad and open up with his unique brand of emotional storytelling.

And once he did, Henson understood heartstrings like few others. The work of The Muppets and Sesame Street resonates on to this day. Not just for it’s vaudevillian sense of humor and gonzo imagination, but because of the feeling of community in his work. He lifted his collaborators up and empowered them. And more than any of the other filmmakers of the 70’s and 80’s, there was this soft-spoken gentleness to him, along with an ethical drive to fix the world around us. When Kermit sings, “The Rainbow Connection,” Henson means it. We’re all in the car. We’re all in on the heist. We’re all on stage. Were’ all part of the same thing. And when we are all in lock step, the sky’s the limit.

It’s no wonder “The Henson Effect” was felt in just about everything.

Some of which was the tangible effect of “taking puppetry seriously.” It wasn’t just the cornerstone of Henson’s own dark fantasy films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. It was something evident in his collaborations with Frank Oz and George Lucas on Star Wars and the lasting emotional impact of Yoda. The popularity of his work helped bring puppetry into the mainstream. It could be felt in 80’s creature features and vice versa, often overlapping with the work from the legendary Rick Baker, as the two were constantly developing technologies that aided the entire practical industry. Henson felt right in step with the 80’s sword and sorcery boom, Dungeons and Dragons, and the cartoon space opera that populated Saturday mornings.

Speaking of which, there is perhaps no film that so nakedly reflects the range of these interests quite like Master of the Universe (1987). Yes, this is the live-action recreation of He-Man and also a staple of my childhood. But adapting it poses a hell of a question: how the fuck do you bring this to life? 

The (probably wrong) answer seemed to be loosely taking the show’s iconography while also embracing a grab bag of whatever else was popular. From the Superman knock-off opening credits, to Gwildor the inventor the wise old crone, to the verbal diarrhea of sci-fi technical terms, to the 80’s synthesizer Macguffin, to the fact it also stars Courtney Cox and a young male actor I swear is Andrew McCarthy but somehow not. It also embraced the popular trope of bringing the people of the mythical Eternia to Earth for good old fashioned budget reasons (along with the ability to make kids feel like you, YES YOU get to join your favorites! Which always feels unnecessary to me, because the movie *is* the vicarious experience. You’re just putting a hat on a hat). The film even embraced the problematic 80’s theme of NO, STAY IN THAT SMALL TOWN AND MARRY THE BOY THAT LIKES YOU AND DON’T LET YOUR PARENTS DIE. It even weirdly throws time travel into the mix at the last second. 

If all that sounds like a dysfunctional mess, it is. But with them you could easily argue the film is saved by two facts of genuine craft 1) the theme song rules and 2) Frank Langella is having an absolute ball playing Skeletor. It’s downright delicious, to the point you’re practically rooting for him over the still-green and wooden Dolph Lungdren. But these observations also imply the film needs saving. Because It is precisely this errant, whiplashing, grab-bag quality that makes the film so damn watchable today.

And also what makes it of a pair withTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. 

While Barron was surely able to create the more successful film, he was also faced with same daunting question: how the hell do you bring this to life? Anthropomorphic Turtles were an insane challenge for practical effects. So technically speaking, it all started with developing suits that Henson said “had the best animatronics he’d ever seen.” A watcher today may be confused by the statement, because it involves accepting that the mouths don’t quite work with the same fluid dexterity many puppets did, but to my young eyes and many others, it felt like a miracle. But both films had the difficulty of tackling fantastical identity with grand limitations. 

Because both films came from popular, deeply imaginative toy lines / properties. Both films were action heavy and had to mark an era of kids entertainment where bad guys would always stomp around like fussy prats and yell “destroy them!” versus more common articulations of straight murder. Both films reflect the way so many kids movies used to shoot at night because daylight tends to reveal low production value, while a few well-placed lights meant you can use shadows and darkness to your advantage. Both were also 90 minutes because they couldn’t afford to be longer. Looking at all of this, their relative success may feel apparent, but it wasn’t just their weirdness, there was rough and tumble nature both of them that reflected their time. Which leaves me with one question…

Why did this kind of film disappear?

4. Visuals and Values

Look, the short answer is CGI.

But don’t worry because the second most deplorable tenor of essay is one marked by the belief that practical effects are inherently better than CGI. Within which, so many people like to paint the work of one’s childhood as artisanal, crafted, and “real” and modern CGI as sterile and soulless, but it’s just not true. They’re both just tools. And perhaps no film highlights their mutual capacity for greatness quite like the original Jurassic Park (which makes sense because largely regarded as “the bridge film” between the two disciplines). It’s all about understanding how to make each tool work for a certain objective, often revealed in how to light it right and fit in with the rest of the environment on screen, while simultaneously emphasizing moments for scale, wonder, and awe. The problem is the success of Jurassic Park made people think CGI was a magic solution that could do anything.

It can’t.

Especially back then. It was / is something that takes painstaking attention to detail and massive forethought. But it didn’t stop people in the 90’s / early 2000’s from thinking they could bring anything to life with a snap of their fingers, which resulted in so many instances of people’s eyes being bigger than their stomach. Pick your favorite bad CGI moment from that era! From the entrance of The Rock’s Scorpion King animation in The Mummy Returns, to the CGI wave in Die Another Day, or even meeting the absurd devil in Spawn (though my personal favorite will always be Hayden Christensen surfing those… those whatever those things were in Attack of the Clones). I feel like the lack of discipline behind these shots is the reason so many people crap on CGI as being unrealistic to this day. But like most cinematic tools, they’re most successful when they’re invisible. And nowadays, having learned many lessons, studio films bake CGI discipline in at the core level.

Especially in family movies. Where studios used to throw 5-10 million dollar budgets at a host of ragtag, oddball attempts that have populated this essay, now everything has that 75-100 million dollar polish and 20 years of education behind it (But also to be clear, the VFX industry is woefully underpaid, overworked, and needs to be allowed to unionize). Which means that like the dark plot turns of the 80’s, we just wouldn’t let “bad CGI” happen now at that level. Everything would get an appropriate, placating sheen. 

Now, is this the core difference between the eras? With the turn of CGI is it just financially impossible to create things this weird anymore? Similarly, do kids of the 2000’s look back on the early attempts with the same kind loving reference that many 80’s kids do for practical effects? While it’s impossible for me to answer, I suspect it’s all just mutated a little. Because the errantly weird still exists! 

If you’ve never seen the nightmare fuel of 2012’s Foodfight! or the DIY madness Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe In Santa, congrats I just made your life slightly worse (for the record, I can barely make it through a few minutes of each). Maybe it’s just long-term aesthetic training, but I have so little visual patience for these kind of aesthetics. I can watch slow-as-hell, plodding B movies from the celluloid era, but the cold digital glitch horror seen above just repulses my brain on a base level. Is it undeniably weird? Of course! But I argue it inspires more morbid fascination than a head shaking chuckle and loving adoration.

The other core difference between the two is what I’d call the “Home Movie Corollary.” Meaning there’s something about low-budget practical filmmaking that irrevocably taps into the way kids try to make films at home. Whether it’s the way people make-do with household items as props or limitations of non-actors, there’s something familiar about it. And it’s clear we have affinity for it on the popular level, whether it’s the way some have enjoyed the in-house quarantine late night talk show productions or “SNL at home.” Or perhaps it’s best seen in what I enjoyed the most, which is the best work that came out of Vine. We see humanity in practical errors, silly attempts, and misplaced sincerity. And the contrary thing about the slick Dreamworks-ificaion of kids entertainment, is that we miss that “you can do it like this” aesthetic connection. 

Or maybe I’m completely wrong. Maybe there are people who see them and engage in effects and animation and video games with the same exact kind of glee and reverence. I’m more exploring the notion than feeling definitive about it. But for all my worry, there is only one potential reason for the “weird going away” that actually makes me sad. Because of my least favorite things to happen to movies throughout the 90s is when “the tone police” showed up. 

Now, I have a lot of trouble talking about tone online because most of the time really weren’t talking about tone at all. To the point that I feel like 70% of my conversations regarding tone have been with young men complaining about movies being too silly. What we are really talking about in that specific case is some beloved property (usually comic books) that they want to be taken seriously. To them that means no joking, darkness, and Hard R posturing because they are Serious Boys who want to be taken Seriously. But they aren’t actually wanting adulthood with all its complexities, it is merely their lack of comfort with things they see as “childish.” They push the “kid-like” elements of the things they love away and project gritty toughness, which is itself a crack in the armor that showcases their very juvenile adolescence. 

There is no real discussion of “tone” to be found here. Because what they want is to feel empowered by their media, often in a problematic and reductive way. But often even trying to have this conversation is met with animosity. So again, I have trouble with tone because this is a dog whistle for that problematic conversation. As for the other 30% conversations of tonal jumps, it’s actually not that far away from having the same core problem. Because it still reflects a rigid inflexibility in thinking how a movie “has to be” in order to be taken seriously. The same binary thinking that makes audiences assume that comedies always have to be light-hearted and dramas can never let up the veneer, which might seem strident, but it infects everything. I mean, there’s a reason comedic films are almost never nominated for Best Picture even though they’re often objectively harder to make.

More important, these notions miss the core lesson, the one at the heart of everything I’ve talked about so far. Because the truth is that you can bring a story anywhere if you understand the craft behind it. No, it doesn’t have to do with the audio and cues and lenses and filters that layer a style to keep it all “feeling the same” (though it can obviously help in some cases). It’s understanding that the driving force of any functional tone shift is whether or not it’s first spurring from the character’s emotional state, particularly from an earned, set-up moment that happens in the story itself. 

So many of the nuts moments in the films listed above don’t work because they feel like they come out of nowhere. They make the audience feel, whoa whoa whoa, we’re going here!?!? Meanwhile, a Pixar film can go through the same huge emotional ranges, but rarely feels like it whiplashes tone. That’s because the emotional changes are usually done with careful set-ups and ardent payoffs that are built right into the psychology and journeys of the characters on screen. But in those cases, we don’t feel a “tone shift,” we simply emote alongside the story. Again, the best craft is always invisible. 

And sometimes the best craft is inescapably jarring. The great thing about the chimney speech from Gremlins is that it’s actually made possible by its complete out-of-nowhere-ness. It’s anti-movie genius and ultimately just another arrow in the quiver for Dante’s delirious, joyful madness. You sort of have to be at extremes. And the films of the 80s, whether they were simply allowed to or part of the en vogue high-concept sensibility, routinely swung for the fences in this tonal regard. Sometimes they were successful in their graceful set-ups. Sometimes they had had this Henson-esque ability to go anywhere and still feel “right.” And sometimes they fell flat on their face. But they so captured the weird tonal capacity of humanity itself. Which brings us back to that question from the start of the section…

“Why did this kind of film disappear?” 

Well, here’s the thing.

They didn’t really disappear at all.

5. Why Weird?

In one way, all I’m really talking about in terms of change are the modern limitations of the film industry. As I mentioned, movies are so expensive and only worth it at certain tiers that no one is churning out enough attempts to really get weird. Sure, we get a few gifts like Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are or the pitch perfect Paddington pictures. But kid-centric weirdness is largely absent from the silver screen. But that doesn’t mean it disappeared from childhood, it just sort of changed where it came from. 

Because a lot of it moved right into TV animation. After all, it would take the least gracious among us to look at the emotional maturity of a show like Adventure Time, with all its “gorgeous existential funk” as Emily Nussbaum called it and not find that the heart of Jim Henson is alive in all of it. For it so vividly captures that divine mixture of the surreal, the irreverent, the odd, and the achingly sincere. Same goes for Steven Universe, which, though my experience is still limited (I’ll watch the rest, I swear), showcases a brilliant sensibility for undermining the problematic nature of mythic lore, often underscoring toxic masculinity and the like in pursuit of a more ideal understanding of the world. It’s a collective maturity that also bleeds into video games, for I think Undertale might be the most hilarious, weird, and thematically ambitious stories I’ve come across in the modern era. 

But it’s not just these accomplished works that manage to tell their stories oh so well. The truth is that the weirdness of culture has exploded, for he internet has given rise to a batshit comedic meme language that is so deep, so strange, and so omnipresent that it’s almost near impossible to explain it. I mean, if I had to try and explain “steamed hams” to my mother it would likely take an hour. The language of weird grows with such a rapid pace I can barely keep up. But this is good. For whether meme or narrative, we have to remember that “weird” itself has a point.

At it’s most meaningful, Andrei Tarkovsky argued that the aim of art wasn’t merely say something, but “to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” It’s a wording that is perhaps a little too extreme for this subject, but nonetheless compares because telling weird stories 100% prepares us for the weirdness of life. Because life is full of surprises, curveballs, horrors, and tonal juxtapositions that make no damn sense. The kind of moments where you unexpectedly find yourself in the surreal. The kind of moments where you can spend one minute laughing, the next hearing the saddest god damn thing. And a story going anywhere prepares us for the fact that life can go anywhere, too.

Hearing me say that can be strange given how much I talk about things like purposeful structure, therefore / buts of plotting, and diligent character arcs. But all those things are just part of the secret architecture of films that help you communicate the very things I’m talking about here. In short, randomness on screen needs to be meticulously planned in order to feel random and organic. Because the effect on the viewer is quite different. And even then, for all my preaching on the matter, they don’t necessarily have to be planned. Happy accidents exist in equal measure. Unhappy accidents can delight all the same. And there has always been more than enough room for the absurd. 

All my musings about the 80’s are narrow, an infinitesimal sliver of a broader idea. For my father’s childhood was filled with everything from forgotten B-movie sci fi to The 5000 fingers of Dr. T. Even his dad got the madcap antics of the Marx brothers in Duck Soup. And somewhere, right now, someone is getting those versions of something from a source I likely do not now and could not not fathom. It goes on as it has gone on. A light that never goes out. 

And with that understanding, I look to the specifics of my own childhood. Whether it be a turtle ninja-ing, a Gwildor playing synth keys to open portals, or a ghost giving Dan Akroyd a blowjob, and I still can’t help but smile. And when I answer the “why were the 80’s so whiplashingly weird?” I can offer all the thousands of words you’ve red above, but also just offer a shrug. For it just so happened that a lot of films of this era captured the spirit of slapdash experimentation, then threw in heart, hilarity and headaches in equal measure. For the “why” of it all was baked into the core DNA of what we seek in the very act of creation. Simply put, the movies of the 80’s were weird because we wanted them to be.

Also, cocaine.

<3HULK