Back in the day...

So, in my last post, I may have seemed a bit, um, hmmmm, cheesed. I wasn't really; I was just kinda fed up with all the cold weather crankiness.

While I was in the mood to reminisce, I happened to be surfing around the usual haunts and for whatever reason, a memory popped in the old cranium.
So, I jumped into the WABAC (for those of you under 30, that's pronounced way-back) machine, also now known as You Tube and did a search.

When I was young, I had a huge affinity for cheesy Japanese TV.
Godzilla, Gamera, Jet Jaguar....I could watch them all day.

I remember going to my local dollar show when I was a kid to watch Godzilla vs. The Mechanical Monster back to back to back. It was awesome!

As you can imagine from this, I was a huge babe magnet. But on the rare Saturday Nights that the hotties weren't banging down my door to go out with me, I could even be found watching KUNG FU THEATER!

One of my favorites of the entire genre was Ultraman. (In a superjet he comes from a billion miles away....Loved it loved it loved it).
I would come home from school, and jump on Channel 20 to get my fix. First there would be Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot (another Japanese TV show), Ultraman, Get Smart, Batman and if dinner was late, The Green Hornet. But when I was outside with my buddies, the super hero I wanted to be was Ultraman.

So, back to my story, I hit You Tube up for some Ultraman and FOUND IT!!! I watched the very first episode, from 1966. It was exactly as I remembered. The episode was broken up into three parts, but it was awesome.

I think one of the things I like so much about those kinds of shows is how serious the actors tried to be, but how utterly silly they actually were. The dialog was terrible, the special effects were hideous, the monsters were ridiculous and the premise was silly. Perfection.

I don't like to live in the past. There's no future in it. But I do like to visit now and then, and for people that grew up like and when I did, You Tube is as cool as 8mm Super, Slide Shows, Photographs and the like to help remember.

I also don't really like to think of the hours that I wasted sitting in front of the TV. There were lots of them. I could have been solving world hunger, inventing the cure for cancer or at the very least doing my homework.

However, those hours paid off in the many hours I spent with my buddies pretending to be an outer space man, a caped crusader, a masked hero with a cool side kick (and no matter what you say, having Bruce Lee as a sidekick is as cool as it could get), and all those other really neat and really cheesy superheroes of my youth.

I don't really know what that buys me now-a-days, but for a half hour the other day, when I was watching the Science Patrol fly in the planes and shoot at the bad monster, well, it was cool and I had a grin on my face the whole time.

Now, I'm gonna have to find some time to check out Johnny Sokko….NOW ROBOT!