At centre of this August, 2013 photograph is the post-1977 McCorry house in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, on Fredericton North's Linden Crescent.
I celebrated my eleventh birthday in January of 1977. And in August of that year, I transitioned from Era 2 of my life to Era 3. The circumstance that demarcated the change of life era was quite distinct. The relocation of my parents and I from one place to another, in August, 1977. August 19, 1977, to be precise. We moved to a place called Fredericton.
Fredericton is the capital city of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Up to 100 miles south of New Brunswick's Miramichi region. 100 miles south of Douglastown, the village of the first and by far best five years of my schooling, the village where many of my most definitive and positive childhood experiences with friends and with imaginative entertainments occurred in combination. From village to city my parents and I moved, with me in all naivete believing that I would be as accepted and as fulfilled in the latter situation as I was in the former.
Acceptance was slow to come, and it was not to be found among any people of my age. It was entirely with younger people that I received something of a belated welcome, and I had to pass through several friends over the course of a number of years before I found one in particular who was similar enough to friends in Douglastown to meet my best-friendship needs. But because my friends were all younger and same-age peer groups tended to receive their highest priority, I had to endure recurrent separation or diminished attention from the people of my choice, which strained my morale and complicated the relationships beyond my capacity to comfortably, confidently, constructively, and effectively express my feelings or concerns. Add to that some critical errors of decision or judgement on my part, and my fate was sealed. I eventually lost the companionship of my friends, and after ten years found myself looking back to Douglastown and to my earlier childhood for present-day consolation. I survived the wrenching feelings of rejection and occasional onsets of intense sadness for gone earlier times. I survived precisely because of the tender memories of the many better times past, memories kept alive and vivid with my continued love of and fascination with the works of human imagination that first inspired me during the second era of my life. The grey bunny and his anthropomorphised compatriots of the animated cartoon, the interstellar wanderers inhabiting and crewing Moonbase Alpha, the crime-fighting, web-swinging marvel, the band of brothers marching together in year 3000 against tyranny, et cetera, were mainstays in the changeover from one life era to another. These were personages on which I could depend during some of the loneliest, bleakest times.
My life in Fredericton started entirely barren, gradually became socially fulfilling, and, on my tenth year in the city, came full circle as a condition of chronic, doleful loneliness. It was not until many years had passed that I comprehended how, in terms of friendship, I had gone from rags to riches to rags. Missed opportunities, occasional and critical missteps by me, and an environment that was often less than favourable or supportive of my friendship choices, all combined to yield a frustrating and indeed agonising last quarter of the 1980s in my Fredericton surroundings.
But I had happier days in the early 1980s. And I would not trade those days for anything, not even a reversing of my 1977 move from quite superb Douglastown to initially-and-for-some-time-dismal Fredericton. In the final quarter of the 1980s, it is true that I was regretting having moved to Fredericton, but that was an irrational, emotional response to the collapse of my social existence there. I have since then realised that the collapse was more my fault than it was anyone else's.
Where the move to Fredericton from Douglastown was concerned, it came at the best possible time, I have come to believe. I doubt that I would have had even another school year left to me in the Miramichi area before my life there would have started to deteriorate. I was, after all, about to be transferred to a new school, Croft Elementary, in Newcastle for Grade 6, as too were my Douglastown Elementary School classmates. Most of my friends at that point in time were younger than me, and I would not see my younger friends at school anymore, as they would all still be at the Douglastown school which went to the end of Grade 5. Moreover, I was not at all enthusiastic about the prospects of friendship at Croft Elementary. The Newcastle children of my age who had been schooled there since first grade were, for the most part, not likely to be very pleased to see an influx of people from Douglastown, particularly the less than fully outgoing person that I was. And it is quite uncertain whether my Douglastown Elementary classmates and I would have kept rather close together in Grade 6 at Croft. We, the alumni of Douglastown Elementary, would have been dispersed into different Croft sixth grade classes, and, from what I have been told, social interaction between children at that school, in class and during lunch hour, was kept to a strict minimum. Little opportunity for socialising. That being the case, I do tend to doubt that I would have been often selected as a conversation and fun and games partner in those times when interaction was allowed. I and my Douglastown Elementary classmates of old would be riding the school bus together to and from Croft Elementary in morning and afternoon, but I can visualise them being stimulated by the new experience of going to a different school and sharing among themselves their impressions of that experience, with me languishing on the outside of their conversation, some bus seats away. One of my friends of my age, David F., moved to Chilliwack, British Columbia, a month or so after I departed Douglastown for my new home in Fredericton; so, if I had remained a Douglastown resident, I would have lost his companionship within the first month of Grade 6 at Croft Elementary in Newcastle.
Michael, my closest, best friend, would that school year, 1977-8, have been in Grade 3 at Douglastown Elementary School and would, I suppose, have been waiting most days at my driveway for me to arrive at home on my afternoon school bus from Newcastle. But I doubt that I would arrive at home any earlier than 4 P.M.. Michael and I would not have had much time together before supper. And other younger friends, no longer seeing me at school in Douglastown and not living in close proximity to my home, probably would have drifted away from me in interests and tastes and interpersonal awareness.
Then, for Grade 7, Harkins Junior High School in Newcastle was enormous, and my Douglastown Elementary School classmates of olden times would have, at Harkins Junior High, been even more removed from me. It is so very improbable that at so large a school we would have been in the same Grade 7 class. Evie, Kevin MacD., and the others would have easily adjusted to the large school and found new friends, while I would have felt as though they, now seemingly always in the company of their new buddies, had less time or regard for me. I would have pouted, floundered, fallen through the cracks in the school, and been miserable, watching from the sidelines as my old friends integrated seamlessly into the milieu of Harkins Junior High, walking the hallowed Harkins halls with their new pals.
No denigration intended on my friends. Absolutely not! They are very special people. They had accepted me, reached out to me, and accommodated themselves to me for several years, and I do not believe that they would wilfully abandon me. However, when one is out of sight and out of mind, as would I have been while in a different Grade 6 or Grade 7 class from them, one becomes less noticeable. To be less noticeable may also mean being, or at least feeling, less significant and thereby somewhat subordinate to people who are in sight and in mind- the people with my friends for hours every day in their classes. Newcastle may not have been as amicable overall as Douglastown, but hands of friendship still would have been extended by some portion of the Croft Elementary and Harkins Junior High students to the more outgoing alumni (my friends) of Douglastown Elementary. Probably not immediately. After some time would have passed. A few weeks. A month. Maybe a bit more. And my brooding, withdrawn behaviour- my usual and probable response then to being given less time and attention by my friends than others with whom they shared hours of in-class experiences- would probably have been interpreted by my friends as aloofness and disaffection, and they would have backed away from me because of my perplexing conduct. I know that behaviour on my part such as this had exactly such effect in Fredericton in the late 1980s. It can be so very easy for good friends, even the best of friends, to become estranged, for excessive time apart to lead to misunderstood actions and reactions (and, as would be the case in later years of my life, misunderstood statements) and for what used to be easy and open communication to deteriorate. I have experienced this distressing process more than have most people. And I have much difficulty in believing that any friendship is immune to it. By leaving Douglastown when I did, when nearly every friendship was in a healthy condition and when I was at a zenith of social status, my memories- in the main- of friends there would forever be of warm and pleasurable rapport that did not seriously decay for as long as I lived there. I would derive much solace from that while in Fredericton.
Were I to have remained in Douglastown, however, I would have been experiencing a quite deeply troubling decline in my friendships at school in Grade 6 at Croft Elementary and in the first semester of Grade 7 at Harkins Junior High. And then, Michael would have announced that he would be moving to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, early in 1979. My staying in Douglastown would not have prevented that, because it was a migration caused by fracture of his family unit. His parents separated and soon divorced, and his mother brought him and his sister, Debbie, the younger children in their family, with her to Toronto. Losing my best buddy compounded with my diminished (or perceived as diminished) situation with friends at school, would have been too much. My social development, already much slowed, would have come to a halt and started to regress. And add to that the CBC's cancellation in September, 1978 of its Saturday broadcasts of Space: 1999. I would have been effectively inconsolable as I lamented daily about the loss of the happy life that I once had. As regards Johnny and Rob, I was not on the very best of terms with Johnny in the final summer (1977) that I was in Douglastown. Though I do refrain from its mention in my written memories of Era 2, there was some friction between Johnny and I that summer. Not enough to diminish the general excellence of that summer or my last impressions of my Douglastown experience, but still it was there in the 1977 summer weeks. The friction was personality-driven, temperment-driven, not born of any disagreement over any entertainment or other subject that one fancied. And although Rob and I were growing more and more close, he and Johnny were in Douglastown only two months per year, and I would not have been certain of how many more years that such would continue. If the situation between Johnny and I were to continue in the direction in which it was going in 1977, Johnny may have opted not to come to Douglastown each summer, and Rob (though still very much good buddies with me) may not have had any choice but to adhere to his older brother and also not come to Douglastown for the summer. I could not be certain how such would unfold, and ten months was a long time to wait and see. Particularly when facing bleak social prospects at school for nine to ten long months.
Further, by early 1979, the Newcastle-Douglastown-Chatham area would have been receiving cable television at last, but without a CBS affiliate in the offering (only ABC and NBC affiliates from Bangor, Maine). And CBS being the television network that was running The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show and other of my more desired Saturday morning television shows, it was the television network to which I most craved access. I would have been profoundly disappointed by Miramichi Cablevision's omission of a CBS affiliate and envious of people in Fredericton, who had partial CBS access at least (and access to the television shows I wanted most to watch) by way of WAGM-TV of Presque Isle, Maine.
Had I not moved from Douglastown to Fredericton in 1977, I would in all probability have agitated to do so in 1979 or 1980, departing Douglastown on a rather less than cheerful note and finding Fredericton, like I did when I moved to it in 1977, to be anything but congenial for quite awhile. It was good that I did leave Douglastown at a time when for the most part my social life was plentiful and pleasurable, because memory of that earlier social condition helped me to endure the seemingly endless weeks as a complete loner in Fredericton. And it was better to start my school years in Fredericton with Grade 6 at a 3-class-per-grade school than it would have been to move into a different community and at the same time be newly enrolled in some 9-class-per-grade leviathan of a learning establishment. Moving to Fredericton when I did, when my five years at Douglastown Elementary School were finished with a positive feeling of accomplishment in matters both academic and social, and entering the Fredericton education system with an as gradual as possible adjustment to ever increasing school size, was for the best, really. Still, that does not mean that my recounting of my first experiences in Fredericton is going to be filled with upbeat narrative.
Era 3, this era, was something of a transitional time period between my Douglastown tenure and the best Fredericton years that would comprise Era 4.
On Friday, August 19, 1977, two days after Elvis Presley's death, a moving van arrived at the Douglastown house that had been McCorry property for more than five years, and a team of burly men started loading all of our furniture and other belongings into the van. My mother, father, and I travelled by our car on that day's sunny afternoon to Fredericton, with Frosty and her two kittens, and stayed with my grandparents at their Skyline Acres, Fredericton South residence for the subsequent weekend of August 20 and 21 while the furniture was being deposited into the new McCorry house.
We moved into our new home in a developing subdivision, Fulton Heights, on Fredericton's north side, on a crescent named Linden inside of a maze of streets, most of them named with reference to trees (Woodmount, Longwood, Lilac, Moss, Oak, Fir, Willow, Cedar, Cherry). I did not care for my new environment. It had no history. It was characterless. It was cramped. Roads were not paved, there were no street curbs, and most houses, including ours, had no lawn. Our new house was an unremarkable, split-entry domicile rather smaller than our prior abode, with side yards so small that the houses on either side were casting nearly full shadows on ours in the morning or evening sun. The biggest window of our house, the living room window, had a splattered egg on it. We did not have a lawn until the following summer, when sod was laid. The street was not curbed and paved until autumn of 1978. And to my extreme dismay, we were not to have cable television in our home for more than a year (i.e. thirteen months)- even though the homes across the street from us did have cable television installed many months before we moved into our new place.
Further, although my mother's employment future was secure (it was her acceptance of transfer to the provincial V.O.N. office in Fredericton that brought about the Douglastown-to-Fredericton McCorry relocation), my father's hoped-for job at the Canadian Forces Base in Gagetown, twenty miles south of Fredericton, did not materialise. For a few weeks, he had to commute the 100 miles from Fredericton to Chatham until his duties at C.F.B. Chatham were concluded. He then found labour at a Fredericton business called Battery and Electric. And there he worked until October, 1978, when he was hired at Fredericton Transit as a bus cleaner and mechanic.
During my final few weeks of summer vacation in 1977, I had no contact with anyone in my new community. I was content to search the Fredericton stores for Space: 1999 books to read- and drew pictures based on my impressions from the books. Or I would stack the books on the living room floor and admire them while on the screen of our living room colour television was the New Avengers episode, "The Tale of the Big Why", or an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter or promotion on CHSJ-TV New Brunswick for such autumn television offerings as Logan's Run and CHiPs. I wrote letters to a couple of friends (Michael and David F.) in Douglastown and went to my grandparents' house every Saturday morning to watch cable television stations from Maine (i.e. WVII-TV, channel 7, Bangor's ABC affiliate; WLBZ-TV, channel 2, NBC's outlet in Bangor; and Presque Isle's WAGM-TV, channel 8, which was primarily CBS). Nobody on Linden Crescent showed any interest in meeting "the new kid on the block". This was not Douglastown. People were less friendly and rarely unconditionally accepting.
"The Tale of the Big Why" was the New Avengers episode that aired on Tuesday, August 23. The second evening on which my parents and I were in our new home, our television flashing its images in the living room. I also distinctly remember seeing the New Avengers episodes, "Cat Amongst the Pigeons" and "Three-Handed Game", in the living room of our new Fredericton residence. Those episodes probably followed "The Tale of the Big Why" in broadcast sequence before The New Avengers vanished on eastern Canadian broadcaster ATV until the following summer (in which The New Avengers' second season was telecast). All of the other New Avengers episodes that I saw in 1977, had been watched in Douglastown. Also memorable in those inceptive Fredericton habitation days for me were the Walt Disney episode, "It's Tough to Be a Bird", on a mid-afternoon of a sunny Sunday, and musical Parks Canada vignettes aired between CBC Television programming on CBC Television affiliate, CHSJ- Saint John, New Brunswick. Most especially in the intervals between The Friendly Giant and Mr. Dressup and Mr. Dressup and Sesame Street on weekday mornings. And I remember looking out of one of our house's windows one evening at the many, many Fredericton South lights across the Saint John River.
Still more memories of my earliest days as a Fredericton resident. All of them involving no interaction with young neighbours or possible friends. I sat with my parents in our new living room and watched the Logan's Run theatrical movie as it was being presented on television by the CTV television network late in the evening (i.e. 9 P.M. to 11:30 P.M.) of Saturday, September 3. I worked with my mother on the making of somewhat reasonable facsimiles of Space: 1999 Moonbase Alpha uniforms (an ongoing project that had started months earlier when we were in Douglastown). I accompanied my mother and grandfather on some daytime shopping expeditions while my father was still at work in Chatham. A convenience store on Sunset Drive in Nashwaaksis was an occasional stop during our outings, and therein I would swiftly set hands upon the latest edition of TV Guide magazine, intent on seeing what I could expect for Space: 1999 on CBC Television and CHSJ-TV come the following Saturday. And my parents and I went to the Fredericton Exhibition on the Sunday before Labour Day, and it was there where I learned that cable television was not to be available to us at home for at least a year.
I did not have my first really cogent experience of the general unfriendliness of my peer group in suburban Fredericton (Fredericton North where I now lived was called Nashwaaksis), and the differences between semi-rural and suburban schools until September 12, 1977, my first day of Grade 6. Whereas the final day of school of Grade 5 in Douglastown had been for me one of the best school days, the first day of Grade 6 in Fredericton was arguably one of the worst. The worst up to that time, I can say with certainty. I found that I was the only new Grade 6 pupil, and I had to wait until classes were at least a half-hour in session before I was escorted to the Grade 6 classroom to which I was assigned on the top floor of the western wing of Park Street School, a modern, suburban school of 6 grades with 3 classes each and a built-in gymnasium/auditorium. It was cold and clinical unlike the homey feel of Douglastown Elementary. As I was directed to my seat in the 6A classroom, the judging eyes of 30 pre-teenagers were on me. I could hear snickers which I, indeed very sensitive and impressionable, instantly interpreted as rejection. I quickly was uncomfortable amid an age group whose members had already formed their cliques and had no place for a newcomer. Especially an egocentric and rather naive newcomer with a disinclination to approach others without invitation to do so.
| Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong. -Leo Buscaglia |
My new peers were of another kind. They were coarse, disagreeable, sometimes openly hostile, or at the very least, indifferent. Some of them teased and taunted by speaking disparagingly about me when I was within earshot. Others openly expressed disdain for the things in which I was clearly interested. There was another Kevin in the class who expressed his displeasure with me for "stealing" his name. I reeled at the very early discovery that these youngsters had no interest in outer space beyond it being a setting for the movie, Star Wars, that I had yet to see. And I cannot say that the space setting of Star Wars was particularly enthralling for them. The difference between them and the Douglastown schoolmates (in my class and in grades a year or two behind me) with whom I had enthusiastically conversed on space and pulp science fiction concepts was starker than anything that I, in all my wide-eyed naivete, ever imagined. Space: 1999 was dismissed throughout my Park Street School Grade 6 class- and the other two Grade 6 classes in the school- as inferior to Star Wars or maligned as total garbage.
I was very upset when I came home for lunch on my first Grade 6 day. I had thought that the morning was never going to end! Every day seemed that way for several weeks.
My mother had stayed at home to prepare a spaghetti meal for lunch for me on that first Grade 6 school day, but the tears in my eyes, my runny nose, and the plaintive lump in my throat prevented me from enjoying the lunch. I wanted more than anything not to have to go back to school, and I stated my wish that we never moved to Fredericton.
I completed the first school day and the entire, gruelling, first school week that September, looking forward to the weekend and Space: 1999 and the Saturday morning television shows that I would be watching on cable television at my grandparents' house. The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour, soon to become the 90-minute Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, on CBS was a highlight of the Saturday cable television viewing experience. And there was a new, half-hour-long future space adventure television series named Space Academy (also on CBS) whose previews depicting technologically lavish spaceship exteriors and interiors had caught my notice on numerous Saturdays before its premiere. Sadly, The Sylvester and Tweety Show, which had always launched the CBS Saturday morning line-up in 1976-7 television season, had not been granted a second year on the air on CBS.
As I stood solitarily near the school entrance at recess and on each morning and post-lunch afternoon, during both sunny or rainy weather on that first school week, I was aghast at how often I was witness to a physical fight in the school yard, and at how the other children of Grades 4, 5, and 6 seemed to revel in the violent spectacle before them. The widespread use of the four-letter word beginning with the sixth letter of the alphabet was also more than a little disconcerting. It was used casually or abrasively, beratingly, in the form of an adjective, and for cursing purposes as an interjection. I had never heard that word, in any capacity, among the pupils at Douglastown Elementary. The Grade 6 boys of my new school were contemptuous of any intellectual learning and wanted to throw paper around the classroom, goad each other into violence, and utter crude epithets at the girls in the class, who mostly seemed to like those remarks. I dreaded Physical Education class, which during Grade 6 was on Thursday afternoons. And for good reason, for that was when the boys were given carte blanche to indulge their aggressive physicality and bully anyone like myself who was not as endowed as they with size, muscles, or agility- or with prowess in many sports. Further, I was anything but pleased when it was announced that on Friday mornings, starting on September 23, we would all be having swimming lessons at the Lady Beaverbrook Gym on the University of New Brunswick (U.N.B.) campus. The fact that I had aqua-phobia and was extremely uneasy in a swimming pool did not qualify me for an exemption, and I was scared of possibly hyperventilating in the swimming pool and the other children labelling me as any number of variations on the word, coward. Fortunately, I had an understanding swimming instructor who allowed me to wade in the shallow end of the pool and submerge myself ever so gradually in the water, but even so, it was a stressful Friday morning every week until the swimming lessons ended late in October.
During a Friday afternoon after Friday morning swimming, the Grade 6 classes of Mrs. O'Hara (my Grade 6 class' teacher) and a Mrs. Clogg merged in Mrs. Clogg's classroom for some reason, and a couple of the boys in Mrs. Clogg's Grade 6 class approached me, asked me if I liked Space: 1999, and then cackled cruelly at my affirmative answer. Absolute garbage, they proudly declared it to be. As by extension was I for liking it. They sneered, uttered some pejorative with some variant of the ubiquitous-at-Park-Street-School four-letter word, and left me standing there, humiliated. As I have said, outside of the then-current Star Wars movie, outer space and science fiction carried little, if any, value with my sixth grade peers, Space: 1999 being especially scorned. And even Star Wars was not resoundingly popular among the majority of my new peers, actually.
A small number, two or three at most, of the Park Street School Grade Sixers liked Star Wars enough to have a shirt with a picture from Star Wars on it, and there was one person in my class who owned the paperback novelisation of Star Wars and had very little to say to me other than an affirmation of the superiority of Star Wars over Space: 1999. My classmate was not unpleasant, per se, in stating his affirmation, but the attitude of others in the Grade 6 classes had much increased my sensitivity about the subject of my favourite television series and the distinct lack of welcome in Grade 6 classes at Park Street School for me as a keen aficionado of it.
The weeks passed, and I "soldiered on" in my distinctly less than gratifying situation at school. And more than ever before I was reliant upon television as a gratifying force in my life. Imaginative television. Cable television at my grandparents' place. Over-the-air broadcast television at ours. My father bought a cheap set of rabbit ears antennae by which the over-the-air signals of CBC-affiliated CHSJ-TV and CTV/ATV were received on our Zenith floor model television in our new Fredericton home.
Memorably viewed on that television in one of the corners of our new Fredericton living room was the first part of the Bionic Woman two-part episode, "The Bionic Dog", shown at 8 P.M. on CTV/ATV on Saturday, September 10. Having watched and audiotape-recorded that day's CBC Television serving of Space: 1999, the episode thereof titled "Space Warp", from 5 P.M. to 6 P.M., at my grandparents' house, I was returned by my parents to our new home on Linden Crescent, Nashwaaksis, sometime between dinner and 8 P.M.. I missed most of "The Bionic Dog: Pt. 2" on Saturday, September 17 because my parents, my grandparents, and I went to church that evening; when I joined it, bionic woman Jaime Sommers and her forest ranger boy-friend were searching for the episode-titular bionic canine in a wilderness soon to be ravaged by fire. Although The Bionic Woman was consistently provided by CTV/ATV to television viewers in my parts of the world from its premiere in early 1976 to its termination in 1978, in the U.S., it crossed television networks from ABC to NBC in September, 1977. "The Bionic Dog" was the first bionic action transmitted by NBC. I was aware of such through TV Guide. The Bionic Woman episode structure changed in the ABC-to-NBC move, previously having either prologue or immediate main titles opening and subsequently, post-move, opting for the pre-main titles "teaser" that was rapidly becoming the norm for hour-long television series episodes. However, the main opening titles stayed the same, as , too, did the font for episode titles.
After The Bionic Woman had showed to the people of North America what a bionic dog could do, it revisited some old enemies. On the next two Saturdays, those of September 24 and October 1, came the exciting Bionic Woman two-parter, "Fembots in Las Vegas". 8 P.M. on CTV/ATV, both of those Saturdays. The son of John Houseman's robot-making-and-controlling Dr. Franklin of the previous television broadcast year's Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man three-parter, "Kill Oscar", was now in control of the fearsome robotic units called Fembots. My mother and father viewed both parts of "Fembots in Las Vegas" with me in our new house's living room, and when the antagonist, Carl Franklin, pulled off his facial features to reveal that he was a robot resembling in construction the episode-titular, menacing Fembots, my mother memorably chimed with Jaime Sommers' proclamation of, "Oh, no. Come on. No."
Also memorable were the 1977-8 season premiere of Charlie's Angels, with Cheryl Ladd replacing Farrah Fawcett-Majors in that television series' regular cast of actresses (I was eating an English muffin pizza baked in our toaster as I watched that Charlie's Angels episode); the first episode of Lou Grant, the dramatic "spin-off" of The Mary Tyler Moore Show; the 1977-8 season opener of M*A*S*H, with Major Charles Emerson Winchester replacing Major Frank Burns at the 4077 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital; episodes of Logan's Run (including the 90-minute-long opener to that television series airing on Friday,. September 23); the American science fiction/fantasy television series, Man From Atlantis, starring Patrick Duffy as an amphibious and heroic survivor of a lost continent; The Making of Star Wars television special; and an episode of Donny and Marie spoofing Star Wars.
The Making of Star Wars aired before I saw the actual Star Wars movie. There were scenes of the movie in it, certainly. But the impression that I received from The Making of Star Wars was mostly of the interaction of the two droid robots, See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo. Not tremendously exciting.
After enduring my first week of school in Fredericton, I was at my grandparents' place on Saturday, September 17, 1977, watching and audiotape-recording the spectacular first season Space: 1999 episode, "War Games", from 5 to 6 P.M.. I remember my long wait through most of the afternoon hours for the 5 P.M. Space: 1999 broadcast that day, as I walked through the rooms of my grandparents' house after Saturday morning programming on U.S. television received by Fredericton's cable television service had concluded. It was raining through most of that afternoon. And finally, 5 o'clock arrived, and I was seeing Mark IX Hawk spaceships and the people of Moonbase Alpha going to Red Alert.
I appreciated very, very much the opportunity to see an episode of Space: 1999's first season in English, such being very, very rare for me indeed before then. And what a spectacular episode it was! I was anticipating seeing another first season Space: 1999 episode on the following Saturday. And on Monday, September 19, in the evening as dusk was commencing, my parents and I went for a walk. Park Street. MacDonald Avenue. Maple Street. Rather hilly Fulton Avenue. And then, within our sight was what we called "the mini-mall", the York Plaza along Main Street, Nashwaaksis, and one of its stores, the Pic N' Puff, a variety store offering candy, greeting cards, toy models, and magazines. Magazines including TV Guide. The issue of TV Guide for the week to begin September 24, its cover showing Canadian singer Rene Simard, was on a shelf in the Pic N' Puff on that evening of September 19, and it was in my hands within a couple of seconds of my discovering it there. I flipped through the pages, intent on reaching the printed revealings of Saturday programming. And listed for 2 P.M. on Saturday, September 24 was Space: 1999, with a synopsis for an episode about a frozen planet whose inhabitants are immortal. There was a soothsayer in the episode, so the TV Guide text did tell, played by someone named John Shrapnel. And a Freda character, credited to an actress name of Mary Miller. All CBC Television stations in Canada's eastern Maritimes, including New Brunswick's CHSJ-TV, were listed to be airing that episode. And I could not wait to see it. I had not seen it before. Not in English. Not in French. The presence of Barry Morse as Professor Bergman among the actor and character notations accompanying the synopsis, indicated that the episode was first season, as "War Games" had been.
As my parents and I ascended Fulton Avenue's sidewalk on our way back to home, my thoughts were with the Space: 1999 episode with a frozen planet that I was expectedly going to be seeing on the Saturday to come. To this day, whenever I walk up Fulton Avenue and look at the houses along it, I think Space: 1999 and "Death's Other Dominion" (what I would come to know as the title of the episode with the frigid planet of immortal inhabitants), and the Monday, September 19 evening outing on foot with my parents and that listing for Space: 1999 in TV Guide. But as the television listings in newspapers The Daily Gleaner and The Telegraph Journal would tell as that September Saturday approached and arrived, CHSJ-TV was to opt for a musical television programme called Canadian Express for 2 P.M., the CBC television stations in the other eastern Canadian Maritime provinces showing the Space: 1999 frozen planet episode at that time while New Brunswick would be deprived of it.
As September 24 dawned for a sunny Saturday, I awoke with hope that TV Guide might be right. I remember that day almost as though it were yesterday. The Snoopy and Charlie Brown alarm clock ("Hey, Snoopy! Wake up. I know you're allergic to morning.") in my bedroom sounded at 7 A.M. and within an hour my father and I were at the Fredericton Market to give away my cat Frosty's two kittens. And from there, joined by my mother, we went to my grandparents' house in Skyline Acres, whereat I watched WAGM- Presque Isle, Maine's broadcast of the CBS television network's signal including The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour and a Space Academy episode, "Hide and Seek", about mysterious disappearances of space station personnel. Thereafter, we returned to our Nashwaaksis home, where I sat through such CHSJ provision as Davey and Goliath and Custard Pie in wait of 2 o'clock. Was I to be treated to the familiar lavishly imaginative aesthetic of the Space: 1999 universe? No. After the CHSJ television station identification faded, it was the mundane visualisations accompanying the music of Canadian singers. My disappointment stung me very acutely. I was not to be granted occasion, then or for the foreseeable future, to watch an episode of Space: 1999 that had not previously been within the range of my eyes and ears. I might never be granted occasion to watch it and to have it on audiotape. All that I had of it was its novelisation in the book, Collision Course, authored by E.C. Tubb, and a bunch of black and white pictures in that book's U.S. edition's photograph section. Those and my imagination of the episode transpiring on colour motion-picture film. And, alas, CHSJ would do the same thing two weeks later. Preempting a 2 P.M. CBC Television transmission of a Space: 1999 episode that I had not before had the pleasure of viewing in either English or French, preempting such episode in favour of Canadian Express. On that occasion, TV Guide magazine was in accordance with the newspapers in prognosticating Space: 1999's preemption by CHSJ. The episode guest-starred one Ian McShane as an Alphan technician turned into an energy-consuming being, as the TV Guide synopsis for it did reveal.
The only visual references that I had then, October of 1977, for how that Space: 1999 episode about the Alphan technician played by Ian McShane, looked, were some black and white photographs in a picture section of a book of Space: 1999 episode novelisations, The Space Guardians, by one Brian Ball, its U.S. edition. And also a clip, lasting no more than a second, of the McShane character about to have his body invaded by an alien force, with a camera zoom into his face, that was part of a minute-long promotion for Space: 1999 in French on the francophone CBC television network, Radio-Canada, that promotion having met my eyes a few times in July, three months earlier (I did not know what episode the said clip was from). Plus, on a Space: 1999 vinyl record album, there was a colour photograph of a transmogrified McShane character opening a nuclear reactor door. What visualisations I did have of the episode had me yearning to be able to see it. Would I ever be able to watch it and to possess it on audiotape? Not on Saturday, October 8, 1977 would that be possible for me. I was at my grandparents' place with my parents as 2 P.M. arrived that day- and CHSJ broadcast Canadian Express again. My parents then endeavoured to offset the disappointment delivered upon me by CHSJ, by buying for me a late lunch at McDonald's, Prospect Street, uptown Fredericton. A Big Mac and French fries.
By the way, the Snoopy and Charlie Brown alarm clock was a new addition to my bedroom post-move-to-Fredericton. My mother bought it and gave it to me as a present as my first day of going to school in Fredericton was imminent. It awoke me on the sunny morning of that very disagreeable first school day for me in Fredericton, Monday, September 12. I would have that clock primed for stirring me for morning for the remainder of 1977. Day after day after day in September and October as the vestiges of the sunny summer of 1977 faded and autumn clouds, autumn air, and autumn leaf colours grew prevalent, I would rise to the sound of the amiable, effusively cheerful Charlie Brown, not long thereafter going outdoors and walking to a location evidently devoid of those qualities.
As I was not particularly impressed with my new school peers, and nor they with me, I kept to myself, which did leave me isolated and, of course, lonely, with my parents as the only familiar faces in an alien world. Not surprisingly, my inclination to shyness and reclusiveness, which I had all but eradicated by my fifth year in Douglastown, returned in full force. I went close to three long months in Fredericton with virtually no friendly companions in neighbourhood or at school. My parents both worked from 8 A.M. to after 5 P.M.. So, on each weekday, I departed a house then devoid of people, for school at approximately 8:15 A.M., endured mind-numbing loneliness there, and came home to alone eat lunch (an oven-heated Swanson dinner, usually turkey or fried chicken), and returned to school in the afternoon on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays (there were no classes for Fredericton elementary school pupils on Wednesday afternoons). Occasionally, I went to Kentucky Fried Chicken on Main Street, just a foot path and a residential block or two away, for a lunch consisting of a couple of delectably spicy chicken pieces and some French fries. I arrived at home after a long afternoon of lonesome toil with pen and pencil, and by myself watched television (CBC children's programming such as Stationary Ark, Pencil Box, and What's New? and local (i.e. CHSJ-TV) fare, The Little Rascals, Scooby-Doo, and Flipper) until my mother and father came home, at usually sometime between 5:30 and 6.
On Wednesday afternoons, I would watch Midday Matinee on ATV, and, on CBC and CHSJ-TV, The Edge of Night and a CBC children's variety offering called Homemade Television. And sometimes walk down to the Nashwaaksis Main Street York Plaza's Pic N' Puff store for a mid-afternoon stroll. Wednesday, October 19, 1977 was atypical for the frame of time that was 1977's autumn, as on that day's afternoon, my father was not working (why that was the case, I do not recall), and he and I went to the Fredericton Mall mid-afternoon, and there I found, at Beegie's Bookstore, The Making of Space: 1999 by Tim Heald. My father bought that book for me, and I remember intently perusing its pages while my father and I were in the Met department store in the mall. Later in the afternoon, I was seated on our living room sofa reading my new book, a treasure-trove of information on Space: 1999, its production, its episodes, while I was watching Homemade Television on CBC Television via CHSJ-TV. At around 5 P.M., I walked to Kentucky Fried Chicken to bring home a dinner.
But as I say, that Wednesday afternoon was atypical for my Wednesday P.M. hours of the autumn of 1977. I was usually alone. Alone watching Midday Matinee and The Edge of Night. Alone walking the streets of Fulton Heights, Nashwaaksis. Alone.
On Monday or Tuesday, my father would be at home briefly mid-afternoon when I was in school, and he would leave on the dining room table for me the issue of TV Guide magazine released for the week to come starting the next Saturday. Some weeks, I would have to go to a store to buy TV Guide. The reading of the magazine filled some of my time alone in the house in advance of my parents' late-afternoon return home from work.
Oh, I would sometimes play Space: 1999 by my lonesome in the rooms of our new house, occasionally cosplaying with garments altered by my mother to resemble those in Space: 1999, or with some Space: 1999 merchandise purchased from Fredericton stores, such as the Remco Space: 1999 Utility Belt bought from the select-product-out-of-catalogue retail store, Consumer's Distributing, on Fredericton's Prospect Street on Saturday, October 29, 1977. Such solitary amusement passed some of my time on a number of days.
What a miserable existence for an eleven-year-old! To be so lonesome while other, accepted children were experiencing some of the best times of their childhood. My parents sympathised with me, but there was little that they could do to improve my condition. I thought about my Douglastown schoolmates of old, wishing that I was with them. I would look northward as I wandered the Park Street School playground during recess time period, wondering what my Miramichi friends were doing at those precise moments.
Fortunately, I still had the reassuring feeling that somewhere in the world I did have friends and months earlier had been happy in their presence. I remained in contact with Michael and David F. back in Douglastown. David F. soon moved to Chilliwack, British Columbia, and I was henceforth mailing letters to him at his new address in Canada's west. With Michael, I exchanged letters and talked often by telephone. One of Michael's telephone calls to me was during the 6-P.M.-to-7-P.M. CBC broadcast of the Space: 1999 episode, "Black Sun", on Saturday, October 29, 1977. While Moonbase Alpha was passing through the episode's titled space phenomenon, I was conversing on the telephone with my best friend of my former community. I jumped at the opportunity to go to Douglastown to stay with Michael, as he was inviting me to do, on Remembrance Day weekend. Indeed, that weekend is very vividly remembered as the best that I had had since moving away from Douglastown. It was a most welcome relief from many weeks of loneliness in Fredericton, a chance to be back in my old surroundings, with my closest, best friend there.
My father conducted me in our car to Douglastown and Michael's place on Remembrance Day morning. Remembrance Day was on Friday that year (1977). As we were moving along the hundred miles of highway between Fredericton and the Newcastle-Douglastown-Chatham region of New Brunswick, the skies were totally cloudy, as was the norm for Remembrance Day, and on the radio station that we were listening to, was a song by one Napoleon XIV called "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!". I remember noting my amusement at that song, in conversation with my father. We had a Dairy Queen lunch in Newcastle and reached Michael's driveway behind our old Douglastown home by early afternoon. It was so very, very pleasing to be again in my former habitat and in the company of my best friend. The grey skies and leafless trees and intermittent drizzle could not dampen my exalted gratification in that arrival to be with Michael again, and in being so very close to where I had lived for five mostly positive years. My father went back to Fredericton, and Michael and I went indoors, to spend an afternoon of play and conversation. We played Space: 1999. And that evening, we watched Logan's Run while eating Jiffy Pop popcorn. The next day, a mainly sunny one, we watched Coming Up Rosie and Spiderman and then accompanied Michael's mother on a shopping expedition to Chatham. And she later prepared Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for us for dinner.
On that Saturday evening (November 12, 1977), an episode of Space: 1999 about a tentacled space monster aired on CBC Television after being joined some five minutes in progress due to an overlong college football game. It left quite a haunting impression upon me, in the same way that Jekyll-and-Hyde cartoons had done. I knew from the episode's novelisation and from an adaptation on a vinyl record (both of which I had brought with me on my visit with Michael- and The Making of Space: 1999, also) that there would be a man-eating, octopus-like creature in the episode, and I was too frightened to watch when the monster boarded a spaceship and consumed three of the four-person crew. But I heard its crazy noises and the screams of its victims and watched the expression on Michael's face and on those of his mother and sister, who were watching the episode with us. As The Muppet Show was being shown after Space: 1999 that evening, Michael and I were in his kitchen audiotape-recording our reactions to the Space: 1999 episode with the monster that had, to quote Michael, "an eye the size of a plate". And I remember Michael trying to comfort me as I was preparing to go to bed that night, as I was worried about having nightmares about the monster.
The monster was the most gruesome, most ghastly manifestation of "the other" that I would have thought possible. A huge, screaming, multi-armed creature that feeds on human beings. Technological man and his many equipment marvels, indeed his sophisticated energy weapons, were no match for its macabre feeding frenzy. It was a representation of all that is monstrous about our universe as can be imagined by older generations. And as with "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", the representation and the very notion of the monstrousness was both frightening and compelling. This Space: 1999 episode, "Dragon's Domain", would also have an elusiveness about it. An elusiveness that would augment for me its attraction quotient.
And experiencing for the first time this Space: 1999 episode with my closest, best Douglastown friend, did clinch its impact. Such was occurring during a rare overlapping of two of my life eras (Era 2- Douglastown and Era 3- Fredericton), and strangely enough, the episode had a combination of styles of the television show's two seasons: the horror of the first season and the more human characterisation of the second. The second season had been shown in the previous broadcast year (1976-7) when I still lived in Douglastown, and the first season was now being shown after I had moved to Fredericton.
I was to lose contact with Michael, though. As previously said, in early 1979, he moved to Toronto, Ontario. A year and a half later (July, 1980), he visited me a rather changed person who was irritated by me in my retiring ways and degree of avid fascination with imaginative works. And I suppose irritation usually is a mutual thing, for I reacted with that to him in his more urbane and noticeably very trendy persona. We no longer had a rapport. And we had not much in common anymore. Other than our memories of old times to which nostalgia had yet to fully bloom. After we parted at the Fredericton bus depot on a July, 1980 rainy Monday morning, I was not to see him again. My efforts to regain contact with him in 1988, after my interest in my life in Douglastown and in all my friends there returned in a big way, were met with dismay and disinterest. My stated nostalgia for our times together as young boys was not endearing to him at that young-adult stage of his life, and my imaginative fancies and how I expressed my affiliation to such, just did not find favour. In 1988, I had been totally out of touch with everybody from Douglastown since 1980. My last exchange of letters with David F. had been in 1979. To Michael, my stated wish for reconciliation and a reunion must have in 1988 seemed to be a totally "left-field" overture.
But all of this for another time. And another era, even. Back now to November, 1977. Michael and I had a most remarkable long weekend together in November, 1977. I can still visualise it, all of it, crystal-clear in my mind's eye.
I returned home, to Fredericton, on the afternoon of Sunday, November 13, 1977, Michael and his mother bidding farewell to me as I boarded a S.M.T. bus in downtown Newcastle. It was a rainy afternoon, and I was seated in the back seat of the bus, with a man to my left repeatedly wiping condensation away from the bus window to his left. I had "Dragon's Domain" still very much in mind, contemplating it, reading its novelisation and thinking still more about it, during those two hours on the bus. And it was quite apropos for the weather to have been what it was for my return to my place of loneliness. My parents collected me at the bus depot in Fredericton, and we were on our way home from there as darkness was descending over the city in which I now lived. That evening, I had a bath in preparation for a new week of school and watched the second part of The Six Million Dollar Man's "The Dark Side of the Moon" two-part episode. And I listened to portions of my audiotape-recording of "Dragon's Domain" that evening and in the morning next day before walking to school. The weather that next day, Monday, November 14, was even drearier, and it matched my mood about being back in Fredericton. My father was not able to bring TV Guide home for me that afternoon; so, I walked after school to the Pic N' Puff store to myself buy TV Guide, and it was snowing (the first snow of the year's pre-winter, late-autumn time period) as I walked down MacDonald Avenue and along Maple Street en route to the York Plaza and its Pic N' Puff store. I remember that walk so very vividly! And the Space: 1999 episode synopsised in that TV Guide for the following Saturday was "Earthbound".
The TV Guide was correct. "Earthbound" was the Space: 1999 offering of Saturday, November 19, 1977. Airing before it was Curling Classic, which was returning to the CBC Saturday schedule for late autumn and winter months leading to a mid-March Labatt Brier tournament- as had been the case in the previous broadcast year. And in 1977-8 as had been true of 1976-7, Curling Classic was at 5 P.M., Space: 1999 at 6 P.M.. I audiotape-recorded "Earthbound" on a Radio Shack Realistic C-90 "compact cassette" that I purchased in the morning of same day, and joining it on that same audiotape was the sound of an ATV broadcast of Frosty the Snowman sometime early in December. The ill-fated audiotape with all that I had on it self-destructed not very long after that, jamming, un-spooling, crinkling, snapping in my machine. Yes. That age-old problem for the hobby of Kevin McCorry of collecting favourite entertainments on "compact cassette".
And on November 26, CHSJ threw a wrench of another kind into the works where my collecting of Space: 1999 was concerned. Up to that day, CHSJ had not, to the best of my knowledge, inserted its own commercials into CBC Television programming unless that programming was "videotape-delayed" by CHSJ. When the live feed of the CBC was being transmitted synchronously by CHSJ, the CBC advertisements had always been relayed faithfully. But on November 26, 1977, CHSJ placed its own commercials into all advertisement intervals during Curing Classic and Space: 1999 as those television programmes were being transmitted on the CBC. And the placement was sloppy. There would be a second or so of a CBC advertisement before CHSJ began its own set of commercials. And the sloppiness was so egregious that the epilogue for the Space: 1999 episode, "End of Eternity", was almost entirely missing (three thirty-second commercials were put by CHSJ into a minute-long CBC advertisement interval). I would surmise that CHSJ sold commercial time within the two CBC Television programmes, as they came before the 7 P.M. Moncton Santa Claus Parade in CHSJ's schedule, and viewership for the parade was expected to be large, perhaps building during the two preceding hours. CHSJ might have been able to sell advertising time at a premium price for all three telecast items. And, alas, response by advertisers was evidently so lucrative that CHSJ was motivated to maintain the practice in weeks to come. Which was bad for me, me who wanted to see every precious moment of the CBC's Space: 1999 transmissions. The epilogues of the next two telecast episodes, "The Full Circle" (on December 10) and Guardian of Piri" (on December 17), also had thirty seconds of them "lopped off" by CHSJ.
Between CHSJ preempting episodes and preventing some part of others from being seen, I would say that I and other New Brunswickers may have been the most disadvantaged viewers of Space: 1999 in all of Canada. I cannot say this with certainty, as I did not know the practices of all other CBC-affiliated broadcasters. But in my research of listings in newspapers for Space: 1999 broadcasts in some other parts of the country, I have not come upon a television station that preempted Space: 1999 CBC broadcasts as much as CHSJ did, during the CBC full-television-network airing of the spectacular television series betwixt 1976 and 1978. And I doubt, I really do, that a broadcaster other than CHSJ was quite so inclined to punctuate Space: 1999 episodes with sloppy, and sometimes overlong, insertions of non-CBC-Television advertisements.
One of the CHSJ commercials in the Space: 1999- "End of Eternity" broadcast of 26 November, 1977 was for a Saint John apartment building.
Whilst cable television was not available in our home during the initial thirteen months of our living in Fredericton, my parents and I were limited- at home- to ATV and CHSJ-TV. Those were all that could be received. In autumn of 1977, The Flintstones was being shown on ATV from noon to 12:30 P.M. when I was at home for lunch on weekdays. I vividly recall watching the Flintstones episode, "High School Fred", while alone at our new home for lunchtime from school. At some later date, ATV replaced The Flintstones at noon with The Brady Bunch, and it is The Brady Bunch that I remember most as the television attraction when I was eating Swanson oven-heated meals for lunch while in Grade 6. The Brady Bunch episode, "Sergeant Emma", in which housekeeper Alice's regimentation-and-fitness-minded cousin Emma replaces her at the Brady residence for a time, I definitely remember seeing at a lunchtime on a 1977-8 school day. I also recall the investigation of the murder of Adam Drake on The Edge of Night, the theme music for Stationary Ark, and Little Rascals instalments with comedies entitled "Roamin' Holiday", "Dogs is Dogs", "Pups is Pups", and "Hide and Shriek". "Roamin' Holiday" involved the mischievous four boys, Spanky, Alfalfa, Porky, and Buckwheat, running away from their homes and thinking that they can outwit the owners of a store and bakery. And "Hide and Shriek" found Alfalfa, Porky, and Buckwheat in a mechanised "haunted house" amusement establishment and the three of them believing everything that they encounter to be genuinely malevolent. And I remember the theme song for Flipper, a television series about boys and a dolphin, that aired on CHSJ-TV from 5:30 P.M. to 6 P.M. each weekday afternoon. My parents would come home from work as I was watching Flipper.
It was by way of ATV that I saw the first episode of Alice, a situation comedy about a greasy spoon in Phoenix, Arizona run by a cantankerous fry cook named Mel. Or at least I presume that it was the first episode. It was the one in which a startled waitress, Vera, discharged a large quantity of drinking straws from a wrapper, sending them flying all over the diner counter. I remember that episode airing at 7 P.M. one autumn weekday evening in 1977. Alice, in weekday reruns, would become a regular fixture of my eighth- and ninth-grade school days. Lunchtime fare, it was. By then, we had cable television and the CBS television network affiliate, WAGM, on which the Monday-to-Friday weekday reruns of Alice could be seen.
The aforementioned ATV 1977 broadcast of Frosty the Snowman was cut, as I remember. A scene was excised with a film splice. That was not the first time that I saw Frosty the Snowman. I had seen it once or twice when we were living in Douglastown, those viewings also having been by way of ATV. The 1977 showing of it is the one that always comes to mind when I see or hear tell of that Christmastime television special. Possibly this was because I was more in need of uplifting of spirit, such as by said television special on the evening of its airing in in late 1977, than I had been in the years previous when I saw it. And for however long such uplifting of spirit might last. The children in Frosty the Snowman were certainly not like those with whom I was forced to congregate in rooms of Park Street School. They did not use coarse language, sneer, or be berating. Frosty was created by thoroughly agreeable youngsters of most benevolent nature, and resurrected through the love of a particular child. My need for a spirit boost, and one associated with a strengthening of belief in the goodness of people, was met with that Frosty the Snowman viewing, and perhaps such is why that viewing is always the one that springs forth in my memory when I see or hear mention of Frosty the Snowman. Also, maybe it was because of my audiotape-recording it in 1977, my never having done so before, that that airing of Frosty the Snowman was the one that crystallised in my long-term memory. Though the "compact cassette" onto which it was committed was, sadly, not long for the world.
And ATV was continuing to be my source for The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman as both television series progressed into the middle episodes of their final seasons (though nobody then knew that the then-current seasons of them was to be their last). I remember watching an early December, 1977 telecast of an episode of The Bionic Woman in which Jaime Sommers was sidelined, scarcely in the episode at all, and which had the bionic dog, Max, at heart of the action. The title of the episode was "Max". And it showed Max with a widow and her son who had become his owners. The son, a young man, was played by Christopher Knight, late of The Brady Bunch. I do not know if episodes being filmed simultaneously was the reason why Jaime was largely written out of "Max", or if a tired, ill, or disenchanted Lindsay Wagner (Jaime) had requested a holiday from production of the television series, but it was certainly a disorienting experience to see a Bionic Woman episode with Jaime absent for nearly the whole of it. The Bionic Woman and The Six Million Dollar Man did not function as ensemble cast television shows. In both, the lead character was always expected to be at centre of the drama and the action.
I watched every Logan's Run episode shown on CHSJ in 1977's autumn months, including "Crypt", which aired on CHSJ on November 11 when I was at Michael's place in Douglastown. That was the episode that Michael and I watched while eating Jiffy Pop popcorn. One of the episodes, "The Innocent", I judged to be tedious. And among the more interesting episodes was one that had the idea of people being divided into two identical-in-appearance corporeal beings, one noble, the other savage. Or, as the episode called them, "positives" and "negatives". Definitely a tapping of the concept of duality in human nature, and within that concept is atavism, a regression to the ancient, the ancestral, the primitive, the base. It is the concept underpinning "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Another episode involved aliens from space. And another was a nod to the concept of time travel. The last Logan's Run episode that I remember seeing on CHSJ was "The Judas Goat" (guest-starring one Nicholas Hammond, later to be Peter Parker/Spider-Man in a short-lived Spider-Man television series).
Sometimes, when television programming of interest was not to be found on CBC (and CHSJ), I would watch, on ATV, Headline Hunters, a television game show produced by CTV, with three contestants identifying the specific person or event referenced in a newspaper headline. I remember watching a number of showings of Headline Hunters, all of them mid-evening, in the living room of our house in Fredericton in our earliest months as residents of New Brunswick's capital city. As regards other television game shows, I could be entertained by the pricing games on The Price is Right, which was an early evening ATV provision, and the funniness of the panelists and the stories requiring a comedic word fill on Match Game, which, in final four months of 1977, was on CHSJ in early afternoons and viewable for me on Wednesdays.
These were among my many, many experiences with television in our not-yet-connected-to-cable-television home in 1977-8. And my watching and audiotape-recording of Space: 1999 on CBC Television towered above them all, of course. That is when CHSJ-TV allowed it to do so.
As I have above addressed, CHSJ's coverage of the CBC television network's Saturday Space: 1999 broadcasts was inconsistent in the autumn months of 1977. The aforementioned slapdash insertions of CHSJ commercials into episodes was galling, to be sure, but, as I also have said, some whole episodes were preempted by CHSJ. New Brunswick was probably the worst province of the country in which to be, where viewing the CBC's airings of Space: 1999 was concerned. I would wager that to be the case.
Yes. As I have said, the Space: 1999 episodes run by the CBC at 2 o'clock in the afternoon on Saturday, September 24 and Saturday, October 8 respectively, were not shown on CHSJ and therefore unseen through New Brunswick, while they did air on CBC-owned-and-operated television stations CBHT- Halifax, CBIT- Sydney, and CBCT- Charlottetown listed in TV Guide magazine's Eastern-Maritime Canada edition. Those episodes were "Death's Other Dominion" and "Force of Life". I was with my parents as we three walked to "the mini-mall" along Main Street, Nashwaaksis, and into the Pic N' Puff store there, on the evening of Monday, September 19, and in TV Guide on the Pic N' Puff shelf was full listings for all television stations east of the New Brunswick-Quebec border, apart from Newfoundland. "Death's Other Dominion" was scheduled for Saturday at 2 P.M. on CHSJ along with the CBC television stations in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, and through that dire week at school I looked forward to seeing for my first time ever the frozen planet, or ice planet, episode novelised in the Space: 1999 book, Collision Course, but the newspaper television listings that I read on the evening of Friday, September 23 and on the morning of Saturday, September 24 told that there would be no Space: 1999 on CHSJ that weekend. Enduring the school week had been for nought, where Space: 1999 was concerned. I was profoundly disappointed. Yet, I watched CHSJ at 2 o'clock on Saturday to see if perhaps TV Guide was right and the newspapers were wrong. But no. CHSJ telecasted Canadian Express while in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, people were watching Moonbase Alpha's encounter with the immortal inhabitants of a frozen planet. At least with "Force of Life" on October 8, TV Guide was in agreement with all of the newspapers in not listing Space: 1999 to air in New Brunswick on CHSJ. Still, I was watching anyway on the remote chance that CHSJ changed plans. But, again, no. Canadian Express ran roughshod over my favourite Moonbase on CHSJ.
To this I would add that for people in New Brunswick in communities close to the New Brunswick border with Nova Scotia and along the New Brunswick eastern coast, there was possibility of receiving a CBHT or CBCT signal, if one had a somewhat large television aerial and favourable atmospheric conditions. I had been able to tune CBCT in with amazing clarity on our living room colour television in Douglastown on a Saturday in August. I sometimes wonder whether I could have seen the two Space: 1999 episodes, "Death's Other Dominion" and "Force of Life", on September 24, 1977 and October 8, 1977, respectively, on CBCT had we stayed in Douglastown and not moved to Fredericton. It is quite possible. The weather on those two Saturdays was fair, atmospheric conditions likely similar to those of that day of my untrammelled success at receiving CBCT, with winds that may be been conducive to the CBCT signal crossing the Northumberland Strait between New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and reaching our former home. Sadly, I will never know if such was the case. Our home in Douglastown was our past, not our present. And in Fredericton, in central New Brunswick, where we now lived, there was practically zero chance of receiving any CBC Television signal not transmitted by CHSJ.
All other Space: 1999 episodes shown by CBC Television that autumn were on CHSJ. And I did finally have occasion to view the two aforementioned episodes on CHSJ when the CBC reran them on March 18 and April 8, 1978. I could never be a hundred percent certain that CHSJ would transmit any episode. Also, as had been the case some years earlier with The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour on the CBC, I became a habitual homebody on Saturdays in the event of an earlier-than-scheduled broadcast of Space: 1999, which did happen sometimes.
That said, I continued to go to my grandparents' house to watch and audiotape Saturday morning cable television through September and into October. As I have said, on the morning of September 24, my father and I gave away Frosty's two kittens, that we had brought with us from Douglastown, at the Fredericton Market, and then, with my mother, went to my grandparents' abode for me to enjoy my weekly dose of cartoons, including The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour, and the new, live-action deep space adventure, Space Academy, on CBS as relayed by WAGM. Most days, if I did not remain at my grandparents' place to watch and audiotape Space: 1999 there, then I was sure to return home by 1 P.M. at the latest and to stay there for the balance of the day, never straying far from my television screen. By the end of October, I was tiring of the Saturday ritual of waking early and dressing and eating and then going to my grandparents' house in Skyline Acres on the other side of Fredericton. I decided that a less frequent (e.g. once a month or two months) serving of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour would suffice until such time as I had cable television in my own home, and Space Academy, although spectacular, was not enough of a pull for me to venture away from home and go to my grandparents' house every Saturday A.M.. Besides, repeats of the Space Academy episodes were appearing early that television season. ATV, which I received on television at home with CHSJ (those were the only two television stations receivable in Fredericton without cable television), had Spiderman at 9 A.M., and I was more than satisfied to remain at home to watch that, along with Rocket Robin Hood, which still had a Saturday morning presence, as part of the variety-hour offering called ATV Funtime. CHSJ had Coming Up Rosie at 8:30 in the morning, and I always had an inclination to watch that. There was also, at 11 A.M., George, the offbeat, live-action, half-hour children's television show about a fully domesticated Saint Bernard dog in the Alps. Watching these kept me aesthetically engaged or at least entertained until the afternoon, when I would occupy myself with some solitary play of Space: 1999 with the utility belt I had purchased from Consumers Distributing on the Friday before "Black Sun" on Space: 1999 on October 29 or the Moonbase Alpha model (with tiny, inch-long Eagle spaceships) bought at the Consumers-Distributing-like Cardinal store in the Fredericton Mall on the morning of November 5. My eye would turn to the television set, with my audiotape recorder primed, at every half-hour, on the possibility of a surprise early broadcast of Space: 1999 on CHSJ and the CBC. There were, alas, full-network CBC preemptions of Space: 1999 on November 5 and December 3, both of which I knew about several days in advance.
"Fountain of Terror"/"Fiddler On the Loose", "Diamond Dust", "Blotto", "The Vanishing Doctor Vespasian"/"Scourge of the Scarf", "Rollarama", and "Trip to Tomorrow" are the Spiderman episodes that I most vividly remember watching on television in my Fredericton living room on Saturday mornings in 1977 and 1978. By that time, Spidey's episodes were aired out of production sequence. ATV had not shown "Thunder Rumble" and "Cold Storage" for some considerable time, whereas "Blotto" was shown twice, as I recall, in 1977-8. Not that I would complain, for "Blotto" was my favourite Spidey outing. The George episode in which little Freddie had a taxi service with the titled Saint Bernard pulling a wagon, aired on the morning of October 29, the day that Space: 1999's "Black Sun" episode was shown on CBC Television at 6 P.M.. That was the first Saturday morning since moving to Fredericton that I stayed at home. Some Saturdays during the spring of 1978 I did undertake a morning's removal from my house to buy an audiocassette or a packet of audiocassettes (Memorex C-90) at Kelly's Stereo Mart in the King's Place mall in downtown Fredericton, for use in recording the same day's Space: 1999 episode. And I purchased a quite impressive stereo audiocassette deck from Kelly's Stereo Mart in advance of the rerun of "The Last Enemy" on Space: 1999 on June 24, 1978. There was also an electronics store called L & R Sound next to Victory Meat Market on Fredericton's King Street. I bought some SONY audiocassettes there in early June of 1978, whilst I eyed with then-futile acquisitive intent a SONY videocassette recorder on display at the L & R store and thought how marvellous it would be if I could only have use of that technology to archive Space: 1999 in my home.
Grade 6 in Fredericton (1977-8) typified my remaining school years. Uncomfortable and feeling unwanted by my peers and rather unnerved by the seemingly institutional size of the school (and the schools became larger and larger as I went to junior high and then senior high), I did what was expected by teachers and nothing more. I spent as little time at school as possible. If I excelled at anything, I was rather tight-lipped about it. Our Grade 6 teacher, Mrs. O'Hara, was a strict disciplinarian. She had no qualms about detaining the whole class because a segment thereof was misbehaving. She constantly "slave-drove" the class so that even something as fun as constructing puppets for a school play performance, "The Reluctant Dragon", became a tedious chore. I longed for the end of each school week so that I could see Space: 1999 on Saturday evening.
And on all too many weeks, the Friday dismissal from class was late. Late because the misbehaviour of certain of my classmates resulted in Mrs. O'Hara ordering a full-class detention. While most of the other children at Park Street School were joyously going home for the weekend at close to 3:30, I was sitting face-down at my desk not because of anything that I did wrong but due to the rambunctious and insolent conduct of the boors of the 6A class, combined with Mrs. O'Hara's insistence on collectivising guilt. And not arriving at home until 4 o'clock, or 4:15. In all five of my previous school years in Douglastown, not once, not a single time, did I have to remain at school in detention after the usual dismissal time. Nor had I ever been in fear of receiving a detention. And now I was having to experience such again and again and again through no misconduct of my own. My mother returned home from her first parent-teacher interview with Mrs. O'Hara and said that Mrs. O'Hara had told her that I was in her opinion a good pupil. Why, then, I asked, must I sit in detention? My mother answered that Mrs. O'Hara did not want to give preferential treatment to anyone. "Yeah, right," I sardonically responded.
I can still see in my mind's eye the empty school yard as I stepped out of Park Street School on my way to home after a Friday afternoon detention. And I can still remember how glum and how sullen I felt as I moved through the path to Linden Crescent and then along the sands of the unpaved street along which I resided. Glum and sullen at losing some thirty to forty-five minutes of my weekend at its most initial phase. "Right from the top", as it were. More than a little indignant at the injustice of it all. And aware, very much aware, of how unpleasantly upended that my school existence now was. So much for coming home on Fridays after school being a time of happiness. I entered into a house devoid of any people other than myself, with only my cat, Frosty, to keep me company, as I would sit in the living room and start watching television. By the time that The Little Rascals was finished at 5 o'clock, my mood would have mellowed somewhat. Though it had been later than expected, I had come home. I was home. Gladly. Awaiting my parents' return there from their day's work and their cooking of supper. And looking forward to what the weekend had to offer. Space: 1999. A visit to one of the malls. A purchase of something. A book, maybe. Or an audiocassette. Or a toy or toy model. And maybe even a long-distance telephone call from Michael.
Space: 1999 was a crucial element of continuity in my dislocated, topsy-turvy life. My Boy Meets Alpha memoirs contain a detailed remembering of my early months in Fredericton as CBC Television was opting to air as a full-television-network presentation the episodes of Space: 1999's first season after twelve prior months of broadcasts of Season 2 Space: 1999. Space: 1999 had been of immense interest as my primary entertainment fascination in my final, outstanding year in Douglastown and continued to be so for my first, deficient year in Fredericton. My former schoolmates had been quite supportive of my admiration for the aural and visual aesthetic and stories of this television show, and it is natural, I think, that I would dearly appreciate the memory of such positive surroundings and of that which was of central attention at the time. However, I was not as yet aware of how much of the retrospective emotional phenomenon called nostalgia was going to factor into my regard for and response to Space: 1999.
As previously articulated, Space: 1999 had caught hold of my imagination in an exceedingly enormous way. It was the fantastically bold crystallisation of many of my juvenile interests, fascinations, fears, and yens for heroic archetypes. It had two quite different seasons, but in their own way, the two seasons both impressed me to tremendous extent in their look, their sound, their ways of portraying and depicting the universe and its many worlds and denizens, and their conception of Space Age life, hardware, and transportation. And both seasons were important in aiding my adjustment to a change of habitats. The television show as a whole bridged the gap between two very different life eras. My attachment to it was multi-faceted. Visceral (as purely exciting entertainment). Aesthetic. Deeply personal. And, as I would eventually discover, nostalgic. Words would usually fail me in explaining my inability to expediently and thoroughly "move on" to something else.
In years to follow, I would be on the defencive often in regard to my love for Space: 1999. My peers at school in Fredericton were unwilling to understand- or incapable of understanding. But most of the defending would eventually be to aficionados of the science fiction genre. Snobs who would argue that Space: 1999 fails to meet a strict and rigid definition of science fiction. Even though it was described in TV Guide magazine as science fiction as was Star Trek. Even though Space: 1999 books would be found in the science fiction section of bookstores, near to the books of Star Trek. Ultimately, I can capitulate and call Space: 1999 fantasy. Space fantasy. Science fantasy. Or science fiction/fantasy. Such does not alter the fact of its imaginative scope and its appeal to me. Certainly not.
But how cruel of life to hurl adversity at me almost without relent in years to come because Space: 1999 had been so powerful a grabber of my imagination and such an important factor in my endurance of the latter half of 1977 and because I had become quite staunchly loyal in defending it, especially the integrity of the in-Douglastown-viewed and most fondly remembered and appreciated second season! One scarcely expects at this stage of my life story that by the time that the 1999 year would be a reality, I would be lamenting, in fact cursing, Space: 1999 for the confounded put-downs, the sheer hostility that I had to suffer because of my two decades-plus of dedication to it. Season 2 of Space: 1999 was going to be utterly destroyed before my anguished eyes, by fans of the television show, no less! What I was forced to bear from my fellow Fredericton Grade Sixers because I fancied Space: 1999 was nothing compared with what was to come when I would join organised Space: 1999 fandom and be a part of it, more or less, for 17 tumultuous years.
I was alike with my new school peers in one respect, however: disliking Mrs. O'Hara. When our music teacher, Mrs. Wilkins, came to the 6A classroom and enquired if anyone in our class would be interested in joining her, Mrs. Wilkins, for practice sessions, during school hours, for performing in the Park Street School Christmas music festival, the entire class volunteered to participate in that music festival. Everyone. Anything to be away from Mrs. O'Hara's tyranny and relentless workload.
Mrs. Wilkins' music classroom was on the opposite side of the Park Street School upper floor hallway from that of Mrs. O'Hara and a short distance nearer to the front of the school. Linden Crescent, my home street, was visible from the windows of Mrs. Wilkins' classroom. The musical notes, the writing of music, and the different styles of music composition were all that I learned in Grade 6. All of it from Mrs. Wilkins. Mrs. O'Hara was a terrible teacher. I learned nothing from her, except for what foolscap paper was. She had a partiality for foolscap paper and demanded that all Mathematics assignments be submitted on that particular form of leafy sheet. She would say the word, foolscap, with emphasis on the two os. Most days in Mrs. O'Hara's classroom involved doing tedious assignments out of the reader textbook, On the Edge (of which, apart from its sickly green cover colour, I have no memory whatsoever), and marathon Mathematics work on the foolscap. The hours in Mrs. O'Hara's classroom seemed interminable. Especially in the afternoons. I often had my eye on the clock, wishing that I could will time to accelerate. And praying that my boorish classmates would not cause the school day to be extended with a full-class detention. Doing the Park Street School 1977 Christmas music festival for Mrs. Wilkins was an enormous relief from the stultifying despotism of a Mrs. O'Hara classroom. It was a pleasure to do it, and it helped me to attain the spirit of Christmas that year.
The evening of the Christmas music festival was that of Monday, December 19. I remember arriving back at home after the Christmas music festival, to see A Charlie Brown Christmas on CBC Television from 8 P.M. to 8:30 P.M.. Also memorable about December of 1977 were: the Man From Atlantis episode, "C.W. Hyde", involving an unpleasant personality change, caused by a strange fluid from the sea floor, in the C.W. Crawford character of that television series, on ATV on a weekday night; the disappearance of the Logan's Run television series from CHSJ-TV (I surmised that it had met the same fate as Planet of the Apes had met in 1974: mid-season cancellation); Pinocchio in Outer Space having a reprise on ATV Midday Matinee, on Friday, December 23 (I had first seen it on Midday Matinee one day in Douglastown in Era 2; it brought its viewer to Mars for encounters with malevolent life forms and outlandish Martian technology); buying Space: 1999 book-and-vinyl-record combinations from a department store, a Space: 1999 toy Moonbuggy from, of all places, a Sobeys grocery store in Nashwaaksis' York Plaza, and new Space: 1999 books (of Space: 1999 second season episode novelisations) from Beegie's Bookstore; watching and audiotape-recording such Space: 1999 episodes as "The Full Circle", "Guardian of Piri", and, on December 24, "The Infernal Machine" on Saturdays; and receiving Star Trek walkie-talkie communicators for Christmas, in addition to Space: 1999 colouring books.
1977 closed with a New Year's Eve on a Saturday night, on which I was alone at home watching, and audiotape-recording, the Space: 1999 episode, "The Last Sunset", during what was the final gloaming of 1977, a year of exceptional import in the course of my life. I cannot say that I have ever before or since had a year that began and ended with my life having changed so drastically in the interim. If anyone had told to me in January, 1977 what the end of that year would be like for me, I would not have believed it.
As the final hours of 1977 were ticking past me, I was focused upon my aforementioned new acquisitions of December, 1977, and some others, including a battery-operated toy Space: 1999 stun gun that I bought from a downtown Fredericton store early that month during a snowy day that had caused cancellation of school, and a few Space: 1999 jigsaw puzzles that I laboured to assemble in the early days of 1978. The Space: 1999 second season episode novelisation books purchased that December had received several hours of attention, and would enjoy many more. I had bought two of them on the evening of Friday, December 16, another on a weekday of the week following that, and yet another on December 31.
I proceeded into 1978 with a new diary in which was preserved for many years chronicles of my daily routines for 1978's inaugural month. I lost interest in making entries into the diary by the end of January, but what was written recalled many a long day of school, snowstorms not severe enough to cancel school (much to my chagrin), solitary viewing of weekday afternoon television programming, and anticipated watching and audiotape-recording of Space: 1999 each Saturday. Noted in the diary was my bringing of my audiotape machine to my grandparents' place on the morning of Saturday, January 7, 1978 (to audiotape-record The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour, presumably) and forgetting to bring the microphone of the machine with me when my parents brought me home early in the afternoon. I had to promptly go back to my grandparents' house to retrieve the microphone, so that my audiotape-recording facility was fully intact for my capture of the sound of Space: 1999- "The Last Enemy", which was broadcast that evening at 6 P.M..
I had a throat cold on the first week back at school after the Christmas holidays. That school week started Monday, January 9. School days for me in January seemed longer than most of those of the four months previous. The minutes dragged by as I anticipated reading the latest TV Guide at home on Monday or Tuesday, or, on one memorable day, my father having for me on his 6 P.M.-approximate return home from work a replacement copy of the Space: 1999 book, Alien Seed, and an Adidas gymnasium suit, with a jacket with collars not unlike those of the Space: 1999 second season Moonbase Alpha overgarments. On another day, as my father and my mother's return to home from work was very close, I saw a advertisement on television for a new movie, Starship Invasions, circulating in theatres. My parents and I saw Starship Invasions at the Nashwaaksis Twin Cinemas on the evening of Friday, January 13.
On Sundays that month, my father routinely conducted me to Dairy Queen, Devon, Fredericton North, for lunch. I quite liked the bacon and cheese hot dog that that particular Dairy Queen franchisee then offered. The only drawback to it was that the cheese was put under the frankfurter in the bun and was cold. I would always have the previous Saturday's Space: 1999 episode in my thoughts as my father and I sped our way to the doors of the fast food restaurant with the Brazier hamburgers and the drawings of Dennis the Menace characters.
Some memorable midday Saturday outings with my parents in early 1978 included one on February 4 when we went to a health food store, The Good Earth, on Main Street, Fredericton North, and another on February 11, when we went to Westminster Books in Fredericton's downtown and I there found sitting in the science fiction/fantasy section one copy of Orbit Books' incarnation of the Space: 1999 book, Moon Odyssey. I fancied a pristine copy of that book to replace the one that I had from a spring-of-1977 purchase, and so, I handed some money to the Westminster cashier, and a new Orbit Books Moon Odyssey was mine.
The highlight, for me, of the year that was 1978 was the third week in February, on which I went to Toronto, Ontario (Canada's largest city) with my parents by train. My mother had a Victorian Order of Nurses conference to attend there, and my father and I were to accompany her into Canada's metropolitan heartland. The Victorian Order of Nurses paid all of the travel and accommodation expenses for my mother and her family on that week.
It was only because my mother was in an administrative capacity after her August, 1977 transfer from Newcastle to Fredericton, that our going to Toronto on the Victorian Order of Nurses dime in 1978, was possible. If my mother were a rank-and-file V.O.N. nurse as she was when we were in the Miramichi region, the February of 1978 McCorry experiencing of Toronto, would not have happened. Of this, I am sure.
On Friday, February 10, I presented to Mrs. O'Hara a note from my mother asking that I be excused from school for the entirety of the following week, for our family's trek to and from, and our experience of, the Canadian city of the three os. I relished the idea of escaping the despotic classroom of Mrs. O'Hara and the ill-manners of denizens of the suburban Fredericton learning establishment.
As a matter of fact, I had been long scheduled to have to remain at school after class dismissal on the afternoon of Friday, February 17, to do some classroom chores, including washing the chalkboards, pounding erasers, cleaning out the pencil sharpeners, et cetera. Every pupil in Mrs. O'Hara's class was required to do them at least once, and my turn at them was imminent. Fortuitously, my not being at school in Fredericton on that day, was going to absolve me of those labours. But, alas, my avoidance of having to do them, was only for the time being. The following Friday, February 24, would be my unlucky day for staying late at school to perform the work of a custodian. The sting of this was mitigated more than sufficiently by my week's travel vacation with my parents, and by all of the experiences and acquisitions conferred upon me by that travel vacation.
On the evening of Saturday, February 11, I was in front of our living room television, watching and audiotape-recording the Space: 1999 episode, "Ring Around the Moon", and after that, shortly after at 7 P.M., my parents and I went to the Fredericton train station on York Street to board the first of two passenger railroad transports that would convey us to Toronto in central Canada. We had a sleeper berth, and I brought my newly purchased Space: 1999 book, Moon Odyssey, in its pink-coloured Orbit Books edition, with me to read on the train, in addition to my memories of the "Ring Around the Moon" episode that had been shown on CBC early in the evening. There was on the front cover of Moon Odyssey a picture of Barbara Bain as Dr. Russell in a scene from "Ring Around the Moon". When I remember travelling by train to Toronto in 1978, it is always Moon Odyssey and "Ring Around the Moon" that together come to mind.
We changed trains at Montreal in the province of Quebec on the next morning (Sunday, February 12) and for the remainder of our journey to Toronto, we were in a coach-style train car. We arrived in Toronto late Sunday afternoon. And there we stayed for four days in the Sutton Place hotel close to Yonge Street. Yonge Street was viewable from our hotel window. On our first night in Toronto, even though it was a Sunday, the lighting in Toronto's downtown retail business district was a dazzling display of neon-lit colours. I remember my father remarking about how resplendent big city Toronto was. I was in awe of the sights outside our window. This was the first time that I was in a large city, and it was more impressive than I had imagined a big city to be, from all of the books that I had read, all of the pictures that I had seen in them. Not only the neon lights of miles and miles and miles of ground-level retail stores, but the tall buildings, also. Structures of height spread outward as far as my eye could see.
Beginning the next morning, I, with my father accompanying me, shopped all along Yonge Street for Space: 1999 merchandise. From a Coles Bookstore on Yonge Street, I bought Orbit Books' edition of Astral Quest, which was an assemblage of four Space: 1999 episode novelisations including that of "Dragon's Domain". I had already had the Pocket Books edition of Astral Quest and had for quite some time been curious about the appearance of Orbit Books' version of it. As I discovered, it was mossy green in colour with a most bizarre style of the book's Astral Quest title being in the same style of print as Space: 1999, but increasing in size with each letter/number character instead of decreasing. My father and I had lunch at a Yonge Street McDonald's restaurant as I regarded my Astral Quest book with some considerable satisfaction. The clerk at the bookstore had to rifle through a drawer beneath the book shelves in order to find the single stocked copy of Orbit Books' Astral Quest. I was reading the book intently during a French toast breakfast on the following morning in the Sutton Place diner.
My father and I, in our hotel room, watched such Star Trek episodes as "The Galileo Seven" and "The Devil in the Dark" in the mornings before going on shopping jaunts, and I ate spaghetti and pizza at spiffy restaurants in the Eaton Centre on Yonge Street, and, on our first evening in Toronto, shish kabob at the Sutton Place restaurant.
And my father and I had a spaghetti lunch one day at a place called Dino's on Yonge Street a city block or two outside of the Eaton Centre. It was outstanding! My father would always say that it was the best Italian meal that he ever had.
Every day that we were in Toronto, the weather was mild. Mild for February. Either sunny or overcast with temperatures above zero in the high single digits, and scarcely any wind. Traces of snow, powdery snow, on the sidewalks were melting. No ice. My father and I comfortably traversed city block after city block. On almost every one of them was a store with but one sign above its doorway and one word on the sign. Books. Coles Bookstore was an exception to this. As was a store called Cine Books, The Film Book Shoppe.
In addition to the Orbit Books Astral Quest, I bought Orbit Books' Breakaway, Collision Course, and Lunar Attack, all three of them brand new copies to replace the ageing ones in my holdings. Lunar Attack was a Yonge Street Coles purchase at the same time as Astral Quest. At one bookstore, I found the Pocket Books versions of Lunar Attack and Astral Quest sitting on a shelf, spines outward. But the condition of them was not mint, and I chose not to buy them. A Space: 1999 Pocket Books publication that I did buy while in Toronto was Phoenix of Megaron (from a bookstore in the Eaton Centre).
In our hotel room upon my father's and my return thereto after our outings along Yonge Street, I was building a stack of Space: 1999 books, as my father and I were awaiting the completion of my mother's day at the Victorian Order of Nurses conference, and our subsequent dinner as family of three. At our dinners, my father and I recounted to my mother our experiences of shopping on Yonge Street, my father speaking of distance from our hotel of the particular bookstores that we visited, and me saying what books in particular that I had bought.
Also a by-me-transacted-for item within the stores of metropolitan Toronto was a Space: 1999 Hawk spaceship model toy. I bought it at the Eaton's store in the Eaton Centre. And my father and I went via subway to a shopping mall in suburban Scarborough, where I purchased from the Zellers department store there a profoundly desired Mattel Space: 1999 Commander John Koenig doll. I telephoned that Zellers from our hotel room to ask if it had the Koenig doll, and I was elated to receive an answer in the affirmative. A piece of non-Space: 1999 merchandise obtained in Toronto was a Little Rascals framed portrait showing all of the precocious youngsters of that comedic stable of yesteryear.
Our subway ride to Scarborough was, to date, the only time that I have used that form of public transportation. After my father and I disembarked the subway in Scarborough, we had to walk across a wind-swept, snow-layered field to reach the Zellers. I have the highest respect for my father's stamina in keeping his pace identical to mine on all of those shopping marches. And on that one, the one to Zellers, in particular.
My parents and I were back in Fredericton on the morning of Friday, February 17 and hastened to a Maugerville kennel to collect an upset Frosty, who had stayed there during our Toronto trek. We journeyed to Toronto again in December, 1980.
The Space: 1999 episode, "Space Brain", was on CBC Television on the Saturday after we returned to Fredericton. I remember seeing synopsis for it on CBC Toronto-area television stations for that same Saturday while reading a Toronto region issue of TV Guide when I was browsing at the Sutton Place's convenience store. On the Monday following that Saturday, I came home from school in the afternoon to see, to admire, and to bond with, a Space: 1999 toy metal Eagle spaceship (I was certainly gaining many a Space: 1999 toy that month) purchased by my father earlier that day from Fredericton Levene's department store (he left for me the gorgeous metal toy on the dining room table sometime around 2 o'clock when he was at home on a respite from his work duties). It, along with the issue of TV Guide for the following week, the next Saturday's Space: 1999 episode being synopsised as "The Testament of Arkadia". CHSJ-TV sloppily inserted its own commercials into CBC advertising intervals in that episode, much to my renewed chagrin. And as I will delineate, it would not air again in the spring and summer rerun broadcast time frame.
When CBC Television broadcasted Space: 1999's "The Troubled Spirit" episode on March 4, 1978, CHSJ was memorably late in switching off the microphone for television station identification at near mid-episode, and the distinctive sound of the CHSJ announcer's microphone's deactivation was heard right after Koenig said, "Mateo, no one is accusing you." Beep-clink!!! Something else that I would mention about "The Troubled Spirit". Whenever in later weeks, months, or years I heard the music to CTV's Question Period, a Canadian national political discussion television show on Sundays, it reminded me of the more strident sitar music notes that accompanied the climactic battle between Dr. Dan Mateo (Giancarlo Prete) and his half-body-scarred, murderous ghost in "The Troubled Spirit".
I remember being alone at home while watching CBC Television's repeat of Space: 1999- "War Games" on March 11 at a 3 P.M. airtime (advanced by three hours because of special televising of the Labatt Brier curling championship). And I was alone at home on March 18 when, from 6 P.M. to 7 P.M., Space: 1999's "Death's Other Dominion" episode was permitted by CHSJ-TV to be viewable on CBC repeat broadcast. My parents were visiting relatives on those two occasions.
The CBC March 11, 1978 broadcast of "War Games" contained scenes that were not in that episode's showing on September 17, 1977, and cut some scenes that had been in the episode's telecast of the previous September's seventeenth day. It was normal for the CBC to cut different scenes out of an episode each time that that episode was broadcast. There were some exceptions to this. An episode could air multiple times and on each broadcast be missing the same scenes, and "Alpha Child", "Another Time, Another Place", "Black Sun, "Matter of Life and Death", and "Space Brain" were examples of such that come to mind. But mostly, Space: 1999 episodes airing on CBC were cut differently for each broadcast. I remember in late winter or very early spring in 1978 combining two audiocassette machines to try to meld my two audiotape-recordings of "War Games" (those of September 17, 1977 and March 11, 1978) to arrive at a complete copy of "War Games", and doing so in our house's bathroom with the door locked. I was unlikely to be disturbed in the bathroom, and I wanted an hour of uninterrupted time to do the work on combining the two audiotape-recordings into one rendering. I was doing the duplication of audiotape-recordings using the microphone recording technique, placing the microphone of the audiotape-recording machine on the speaker of the audiocassette playback machine- and adding to the ambient noise factor, essentially doubling it in the duplication. A few months later, in June of 1978, I learned to copy audiotape-recordings by connecting machines by "line out" and "line in" cables, after I bought a tabletop audiocassette machine of some bulk, from Kelly's Stereo Mart.
I remember the anxiousness that I felt as I had the TV Guide for March 18 to March 24 in my hands. "Death's Other Dominion" was my expectation for the Space: 1999 episode to come next after "War Games" as it had done the previous September, and I was not wrong. Would CHSJ preempt it again? My most fervent wish was for that not to be the case. And the relief that I felt at sight of the CHSJ television channel number being amongst the television stations slated to air "Death's Other Dominion" on March 18, was tremendous! Same was true of my sight of the TV Guide listing for Space: 1999 for April 8, that included CHSJ with the three other Canadian eastern Maritimes CBC Television stations in being scheduled to air episode "Force of Life". The two Space: 1999 television series entries denied by CHSJ to my eyes, my ears, and my audiotape-recording mechanism in 1977's autumn, were at last coming my way.
The TV Guide for March 18 to March 24 had Lindsay Wagner as Bionic Woman Jaime Sommers on its front cover. And the TV Guide for April 8 to April 14 had on its front cover Polly Holliday, Linda Lavin, Beth Howland, and Vic Tayback, in their roles as staff of Mel's Diner in Alice.
In my first six months of going in Fredericton to a school replete with sneering, foul-language-as-pejorative-spouting, disdainful boys and girls, I found a sense of comfort at home from some particular television programming and television advertising. For instance, a religious cartoon television special, Noah's Animals, that I audiotape-recorded late in 1977. Its emotionally uplifting songs and dialogue, listened-to by me from audiotape in the morning minutes prior to my going to school on many a day in early 1977. And there was a Tetley Tea commercial with little cartoon men doing a dance to catchy music with "ye olde English" refrains. I found the visuals and sounds of that to be rather soothing, evocative of a sense of harmony and community and decent propriety. Notable also was a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial that began with a statement of, "Spices, from the four corners of the Earth," followed by a camera pan around assembled containers of spice, a heaping pile of white flour, and a bottle of golden vegetable oil, with accompaniment of a pleasant-sounding, invoking-of-sentiment-for-living-in-better-days-with-kinder-people, twangy music. I loved the sound of that. And there was the enduring cartoon television series, Linus the Lionhearted, of lovable cartoon characters, one of them even having the word, lovable, in his name, appearing on some weekdays on CHSJ-TV. Nice people did exist in the world beyond Fredericton. They had to exist- to have made such edifying television presentments. And, harking back to television viewing routines of my earliest Douglastown years, the dependable Sunday-evening-after-dinner duo of Walt Disney and The Beachcombers on CBC Television and CHSJ. Nary a single swear word to be heard in those television shows. Not even from the disagreeable, roguish, and aggressively log-claiming philistine, Relic.
I also found much the same sort of edifying solace in Professor Bergman's good-bye-to-Alpha soliloquy and its accompanying music in Space: 1999's "War Games" episode. The CBC, alas, cut that soliloquy short in the March 11 repeat broadcast of said Space: 1999 television series entry. But I still had it in full on audiotape from "War Games"' September 17, 1977 airing.
By the spring of 1978, my social situation in Fredericton was improving. I had made acquaintance with a number of Grade 4 boys, among them a David B., a Tony, and an Eric, each of whom, to varying extent, were followers of space science fiction/fantasy. Of the then-current and widely popular Star Wars, for the most part. David B. was the only one of them who was extensively familiar with Space: 1999- and Space: 1999-adherent, though with a sizable caveat. David B., Tony, and Eric did not share the quality of my fondness for Space: 1999, but were mostly willing to abide it. Even respect it. Somewhat. Provided that they did not become annoyed at what could be regarded by some of them, or most of them, as an inordinate amount of attention given to Space: 1999 in my conversation. Or one item, one huge item, in particular under the Space: 1999 umbrella. One that David was sure to berate. One about which discussion was sure to be stifled at his insistence. But all in all, it was, to be sure, a welcome relief from the utter disappreciation of my Grade 6 peers. I did not have any objections to having younger friends. My closest friend in Douglastown, Michael, had been three years junior to me. And I had many other younger friends there. In fact, I quite liked having younger friends because they filled the void from having no brothers. However, what was to be consistent for all relationships with younger people in Fredericton was that I would, by necessity of age difference, be outside of their groups on the occasions that meant most to them- and I was to remain in this sense foreign to their primary social existence.
None of this was foreseen by me at this time (1978). Nor would it have mattered if it were foreseen. I needed friendship, whenever and from whomever it would be offered. And there I was, in a neighbourhood where the only persons who would have anything to do with me were these boys of younger age. I accepted friendship with them and was their playmate, conversation partner, et cetera whenever they would opt to include me in their social lives.
An outstanding and much notable memory of the spring of 1978 is that of sunny Saturday, May 6, 1978. A day that I remember very vividly.I expected that the Space: 1999 episode, "Dragon's Domain", would make a reappearance on CBC Television that Saturday- if the same sequence of Space: 1999 episodes was to be followed in spring and summer that year by CBC Television as had been put forth on that television network in the preceding autumn and winter. Which had been the case for several weeks since March 11. I saw TV Guide magazine for May 6 to May 12 with its release to stores on May 1. My father bought that issue of TV Guide for me on that day, and it was awaiting me on a table at home. Yes, "Dragon's Domain" was to air at 4 P.M. on Saturday, May 6. I was on my house's front steps looking at the TV Guide television listings minutes after arriving at home from school on May 1- and I was dismayed by what I saw.
Channels 3, 5, and 13. Space: 1999. The episode synopsis read as: "Dr. Russell (Barbara Bain) recounts the far-fetched explanation offered by the sole survivor of a disastrous 1996 space probe." Yes, "Dragon's Domain" that certainly was. Only 3, 5, and 13. 3 being CBHT (CBC Halifax), 5 being CBIT (CBC Sydney), and 13 being CBCT (CBC Charlottetown). Where was 4 (CHSJ-TV- Saint John)? Nothing at 4 o'clock on CHSJ. I glanced up the printed broadcast schedules for the day and at 3:30 saw, for channel 4, New Brunswick Liberal Leadership Convention.
My face clouded completely. But wait. Maybe CHSJ was going to videotape-delay Space: 1999? No. No listing to that effect. I was seized with a mood of downtrodden despair. I had yet to see "Dragon's Domain" from start to finish. I had yet to view the pre-credits prologue, the opening credits, and earliest post-credit dialogue. Because the episode had been joined already in progress on its previous CBC airing on November 12, 1977. And I wanted the opportunity to see the episode again. CHSJ and New Brunswick politics had interceded on this. It was the convention that elected Joseph Daigle to the Liberal leadership, to be defeated by Richard Hatfield's Progressive Conservatives later that year (1978).
But in the "Showtime" supplement of The Telegraph Journal read on Friday, May 5, good news. Space: 1999 listed for CHSJ-TV at 6 P.M. on Saturday, after the convention coverage, videotape-delayed by CHSJ from its 4 P.M. airing on CBHT, CBIT, CBCT. Beautiful, I proclaimed. The Telegraph Journal was usually more reliable than TV Guide when it came to predicting CHSJ's intentions, as both The Telegraph Journal and CHSJ-TV were owned by wealthy businessman K.C. Irving.
So, that sunshiny Saturday morning, I felt confident of a viewing later that day of Space: 1999- "Dragon's Domain". I accompanied my parents to Fredericton's downtown. We stopped at King's Place Mall and at Kelly's Stereo Mart, where I bought a three-pack of Memorex C-90 "compact cassettes", one of which was designated by me to house the anticipated Space: 1999 broadcast that day. As we were walking about King's Place and its parking garage, we saw people with Joseph Daigle pins on their jackets scurrying about. I remember asking my father who in heck (I wanted to say the word, hell, but I was a youngster, for whom that word was expressly forbidden) Joseph Daigle is, anyway. And why are the people all pronouncing his last name as Daig, the final two letters being silent? Hatfield was very probably going to win the next provincial election again; so, why go to all of this trouble? I tried not to fret too much, for at least I was going to see and audiotape Space: 1999- "Dragon's Domain" that day- even if it was to be at 6 P.M. rather than at 4 P.M..
We proceeded to my grandparents' place in Skyline Acres, and there I used a pen to label one of the Memorex audiocassettes as Space: 1999- "Dragon's Domain". My anticipation was building as we returned to home at around 2:30, going along McLaren Avenue, and me in the car's back seat having a look at the vast farm property on McLaren as we passed it. And at home, I prepared my audiocassette recorder and "hunkered down" for the wait for 6 o'clock. As I visualized the coming triumph of at last seeing the first minutes of "Dragon's Domain", I watched the leadership convention on CHSJ.
Ah, what does first and second ballot mean? What would going to second ballot mean for elapsed time of the convention broadcast? I was going to discover the protracted length of a leadership convention, and I was not going to be happy.
6 o'clock came, and the convention was ongoing. Still. I clenched my teeth in aggravation as I realised that at the very least, "Dragon's Domain" was going to be joined in progress. Again. But, no. Not only that. The convention did not end until very close to 7 o'clock, and CHSJ followed it with The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, the then-usual 7 P.M. fare on Saturday. I fussed and fretted. Then, I joined some of my new, younger friends for some evening outdoor play on the Crescent Linden and tried to "let go" of my burning resentment over what had happened. I seemed destined never to see the first five minutes or so of "Dragon's Domain".
Happily, CHSJ did videotape-record "Dragon's Domain" that day from its CBC Television signal source, CBHT, though I did not know that for approximately two months. Yes, CHSJ planned to air a videotape-delayed-from-May "Dragon's Domain" at 5 P.M. on a Saturday (July 8) over two months hence. But CHSJ was unable to do so because a preceding sports telecast went almost an hour beyond its allotted airtime. And so, "Dragon's Domain" was shown by CHSJ-TV at 6 P.M. on Sunday, July 16, 1978 completely by surprise in lieu of Walt Disney.
On Saturday, May 20, CBC Television's 6 P.M. telecast of Space: 1999's "End of Eternity" episode looked like it would not be shown in New Brunswick by CHSJ-TV, CHSJ opting instead to air an episode of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams at that hour, as indicated in The Telegraph Journal. My parents and I decided to depart our Fredericton place at around 11:30 A.M. for a day's travel to and from Newcastle-Douglastown-Chatham. I visited with Michael for an hour or so in the afternoon. And my parents and I then dined at the home of my parents' Chatham friends, the Hutchinsons, and returned to Fredericton as daylight was slipping away. It was dark by the time that we were passing the village of Taymouth on approach to the Killarney Road on the frontiers of New Brunswick's Capital Region.
The Saturday after that saw Space: 1999 settle into a from-then-onward regular 3 P.M. airtime, though I was expecting for it to be shown at 4 P.M. (as all television listings had indicated). My father summoned me to the living room television at the first glimpses and sounds at 3 P.M. of the Space: 1999 episode, "The Full Circle". I was entertaining David B. in one of the McCorry house's back rooms at the time, and he stayed at my place with me to watch that day's Space: 1999 broadcast. Thereafter, David and I joined Tony, who had also watched "The Full Circle" that day, for some baseball in a vacant lot along Maple Street.
Baseball was played in that vacant lot on some weekday afternoons after school, also. I remember Tony arranging some of those games and asking David B. and I to join him and the group of Grade 4 boys he had brought together. Of course, this was on days when I did not have to endure a full-class detention at school. The spring of 1978 was memorable for full-class detentions after Friday afternoon Art class. A male Art teacher whose name I cannot remember came to Park Street School to a portable classroom on Fridays, and our Grade 6 class had him for Art in the hour before the anticipated dismissal bell. Some of the boys in the class delighted in taunting him with effeminate repetitions of his words and in saucily talking back to him when he objected to their conduct. And I of course knew what was going to be the result of this after we returned to the 6A classroom and the Art teacher complained to Mrs. O'Hara about the insolent behaviour. "Put your heads down!" I was not sure who I resented more as I sat at that desk with my face pressed against the desk's surface on a sunny spring Friday afternoon. Mrs. O'Hara or those boys. I remember going home one day of detention and seeing baseball-playing activity in the vacant lot from the vantage point of my front window. I could see past the houses on the other side of my street down to a section of the vacant lot.
Some additional memories of the spring of 1978. Charlie Brown's All Stars! aired on CBC Television on the evening of Friday, May 19, and I put an audiotape-recording of that Peanuts television special broadcast on the same Memorex C-90 audiocassette that contained the sound of Space: 1999- "Death's Other Dominion" from its March 18 showing on CBC Television. I listened to that particular audiotape many a time in the spring weeks of 1978. I would often listen to my audiotape-recording of Charlie Brown's All Stars! before leaving home to go to school in mornings of that spring. Same as I had done with my audiotape-recordings of the cartoon television special, Noah's Animals, and of the first-time-ever airing of What a Nightmare, Charlie Brown (a Snoopy-centric Peanuts television special about sledding in the Arctic and the first of the Peanuts television specials made after the death of ace Peanuts music composer Vince Guaraldi) in the winter previous. On Thursday, May 25, I had to have an aching tooth removed by the Brunswick Street dentist whom I started seeing on that same day. He yanked the tooth out of my mouth before the one injection of Novocain given to me had reached full effect, and I screamed with the excruciating pain that I felt with that procedure. I also remember a sunny weekday afternoon on which Tony and his friend, Neil, partook in quite a wild cushion fight in my basement that extended to the outdoors.
And also from spring of 1978 I remember CHSJ airing episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show at 3:30 P.M. on Saturdays in April preceding 4 P.M. Space: 1999. Most especially remembered is this being the case before "Force of Life" was telecast on April 8. I remember developing a fever on Saturday, April 22 as that day's Space: 1999 episode, "Another Time, Another Place", was coming to an end at near 5 P.M., and my grandparents visiting after supper as I was laying down on my bed. I stayed at home on the next school day, a rainy day; my fever had broken, but my mother did not want to chance sending me to school. I have vivid recall of watching through my front window my friends coming home from school that day's afternoon. I remember a game of television tag (anagrams of television shows being written in a sketched television diagram in the sand, and the person giving the correct answer to the anagram puzzle having to run in a circle and race the "questioner" person back to the diagram television, the winner of the race being allowed to be the next "questioner"). One day, a group of us also played Star Wars in the school yard, with me, being eldest in the group, having to be the Ben Kenobi character. And lastly, I recollect sunny Saturday morning shopping expeditions with my parents downtown in Fredericton at Simpsons-Sears on Queen Street and at the Zellers department store with its two entrances, one on Queen Street, one on King Street (we entered and exited the store usually through its portals to King Street), and its escalator (the only one in Fredericton) to its second floor, where its toy section had Star Wars action figures in stock.
On the final Friday of school that year, Mrs. O'Hara's Grade 6 class travelled by train to the New Brunswick city of Moncton, 100 miles east of Fredericton, for a sight-seeing and shopping tour. There, at Highfield Square mall, I bought a Tusken Raider Star Wars action figure, a quite rare item in the stores in Fredericton (both it and the Jawa action figure were definitely the two most difficult Star Wars action figures to find in stores in the Capital Region of New Brunswick, as my friends would attest), and a Space: 1999 Pocket Books edition Astral Quest book to replace my earlier one thereof, which was falling apart. On June 21, the school games day involved several teams with children from Grades 4, 5, and 6. Tony, one of my new friends from Grade 4, was on my team, my partner, actually, in the three-legged race and other events, and our team did enjoy an overall first-place finish. My school year, dire as it was for the most part, was amazingly ending in a rather satisfying way.
In mid-1978, my suburban Fredericton social circle widened to include, in addition to Tony, David B., and Eric, 4-years-my-junior Mike J., my next-door neighbour until his family moved to Arizona in 1980. Mike J. had a sister named Krista and a significantly older brother, Hugh. Tony's younger brother, Steven, also joined in our fun and games.
In the spring and summer months of 1978, CHSJ showed television movies every Thursday night, and the most memorable ones were It Happened at Lakewood Manor, a.k.a. Ants! (which I saw the on evening before the day that my class at school travelled by train to Moncton), The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, and Deadman's Curve. There was a late-night, i.e. 12:25 A.M., showing of Earthquake on CHSJ on the same Saturday- June 17- that Space: 1999's "The Last Sunset" episode was rerun. I stayed awake until the end credits of Earthquake that night, audiotape-recording the movie.
It was either on that CHSJ broadcast of Earthquake or a later one, in 1980, that the CHSJ announcer introduced the movie by saying, "There's a whole lot of shaking going on." The CHSJ announcer had a droll sound to his voice when he said that. That announcer was Don Armstrong, the "voice of CHSJ", and he always spoke the television station's call letters as "CH-S-J-a-a-ay-TV", going quite fast through the C and the H. And his enunciation was similar in his stating of movie titles. "Gable and Lombar-r-r-d. Tonight at 12:25 on CH-S-J-a-a-ay-TV."
My viewing of Earthquake by way of CHSJ on June 17, 1978 was the third time that I saw the movie. The first time had been at the Uptown Theatre in Newcastle in November of 1974, and the second had been via a Wednesday evening showing of it on CHSJ in early 1977. With the second viewing, I had come upon scenes that I had not seen before, scenes involving a married couple on an aeroplane, plus some others with the characters played by Marjoe Gortner and Victoria Principal. There was also a narrated prologue with sights of the San Andreas Fault that I had not seen in the movie at the theatre. For CHSJ's June 17, 1978 telecast of Earthquake, most of these scenes not in the theatrical version of the movie, were excised. The narrated prologue remained, however. All of those scenes would be in the movie on its further CHSJ airing in 1980. I would add that my second viewing of the movie had been incomplete, as it was a school night and I had to go to bed quite some time before the movie came to its end. Earthquake had impacted my tender, young psyche quite forcefully in my first viewing of it, unsettling me, giving to me much to ruminate with regard to the forces of nature and technological man's vulnerability. The aesthetic of the film had rather a tight grip upon me too.
For its June 17, 1978 airing of Earthquake, CHSJ, in the afternoon of that day, ran a short preview of the movie. All that comprised the preview was a romantic scene between Stewart Graff (Charlton Heston) and Denise Marshall (Genevieve Bujold) some time before a major earthquake strikes Los Angeles. An odd choice of scene for a preview of a disaster movie. Maybe it was the first scene of one of the reels of film, and a CHSJ broadcast technician just happened to pull that reel off of a shelf.
Further on It Happened at Lakewood Manor. A made-for-television movie about a resort hotel beset with hostile and poisonous ants, it had many a tense and/or disturbing scene within its two hours. Not long after It Happened at Lakewood Manor was shown on CHSJ, there was a made-for-television movie on CHSJ about killer bees (The Savage Bees). And not a considerable time after that, there was a transmitted-on-CHSJ television movie about tarantulas (Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo). "Bug movies" were an "in-thing" for CHSJ. Kingdom of the Spiders was another one. It was shown rather later on CHSJ. 1980, I think.
My first experience of a movie in a Fredericton theatre following my move to that city was of- surprise, surprise- Star Wars. I wanted to see if all of the accolades, all of the hype, for this allegedly better-than-Space: 1999 filmed work of the imagination, were/was in fact warranted, or if it was all much ado about nothing. My parents and I attended the Queen Street Gaiety Theatre's Sunday matinee performance of the George Lucas space epic on Sunday, October 30, 1977. I found Star Wars on first viewing to be flashy, noisy, and quite simplistic as a tale of heroes going to the rescue of a girl, who is held captive by the evil villain, that villain, of course, garbed in black. Having come to know the space science fiction/fantasy genre via, among other things, Space: 1999 and Star Trek, I did not care much for the "lived-in", less-than-immaculate version of the long-in-the-tooth technological society depicted in Star Wars, nor the rather drab costumes of the characters for whom I was supposed to cheer. The antagonists had the more appealingly sophisticated science fiction/fantasy hardware, wardrobe, and general iconography. It was on the whole an entertaining movie (though the droid robots' bi-play in the first third of the movie had been for me something of a patience-taxing "slog" and the movie's weakest part, by my reckoning). But it really did not grab me and elicit a really emotional, much less an intellectual, response. Its aesthetic appeal to me was not at all comparable to that of Space: 1999. I still just did not comprehend what all of the fuss was about. It is true that a matinee provides seldom the best conditions for experiencing a movie. Yes, there were plenty of wailing, very young children in the audience, and most irritating were two teenage girls who, seated directly behind us, kept hitting the back of my chair. Between these distractions and I suppose my predisposition not to favour the movie because it was being used against Space: 1999 by a number of my peers at school, I was not an instant citizen of what one might call the Star Wars Nation. Such was to change in the next few years.
I should add that I did like the look of See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo, and that of most of the other Star Wars robots. That much is true. The first Star Wars action figure toy that I bought was that of Artoo-Detoo. But with regard to the droid robot personalities, my fancy was not captured. Certainly not when the droids were conversing among themselves. For me, robots tend to be interesting in their interaction with people, and/or when they are an antagonistic quantity. The rather affectedly sympathetic See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo communicating with each other for so many minutes and then separating and being apart on the theatre screen for more minutes, was a drain on my engagement with Star Wars as I first saw it.
On the evening of Friday, April 7, 1978, the day before the long awaited rerun of Space: 1999's "Force of Life" episode was to be on Space: 1999 on CBC and CHSJ, I was with my father at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 to see Breaker, Breaker, a movie I evidently was eager to see because it was shown on television advertisements for it, to have plenty of scenes of transport trucks crashing into houses and other buildings and causing calamity on a large scale. For some reason, that kind of ruinous action appealed viscerally to both myself and my father.
In the summer of 1978, three visits to the local cinemas are memorable. The first of these was on the evening of Saturday, July 8. Space: 1999 had been preempted for two weeks in a row, and I was desperately unhappy about that. My parents suggested that the three of us go and see a movie, and it so happened that at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 there was playing a deep-space war epic called Battlestar Galactica. I sat with my mother and father in the second cinema of the Nashwaaksis dual-theatre establishment, enjoying the unfolding, dazzling spectacle of a far-away stellar system's populace fighting for their collective survival against raiding, besieging, humanoid-exterminating robots called Cylons. This was the theatrical film version of the soon-to-be-telecast, three-hour premiere episode of the television series of the same name. I thought that the Cylon robots looked something like Star Wars' Darth Vader. Indeed, the entire premise of the movie seemed to be cut from the same cloth as Star Wars, but it appeared to be more to my liking. The special effects seemed to be of the same calibre, and more prolific as space combat scenes were longer and on a mostly wider perspective. There was no prolonged and quite boring sequence of scenes of two robots on a vast desert landscape to slow the movie to a crawl in its opening half-hour. Rather, the action was fast and furious and almost never relented until forty-five minutes into the movie. The Colonial heroes had some quite eye-catching hardware and Space Age clothing. And Lorne Greene was immediately recognisable to me from Earthquake. This time, he did not die as a disposable character but was the enlightened leader of the heroic community that began a fascinating migration across space in a diverse array of detailed spacecraft, including one which read on its hull, "Colonial Movers- We Move Anywhere," bringing a chuckle out of my mother. And Greene was surrounded by what looked to me to be an ensemble cast of veteran and promising young actors. I enjoyed Battlestar Galactica so much, and so did my friends who viewed it on their own excursions into Nashwaaksis Cinema 2, that we played Battlestar Galactica by times in the summer of 1978, bought the novelisation of it from Beegie's Bookstore in the Fredericton Mall, and were pleased to learn that it was coming to television that autumn with weekly episodes on Sunday evenings. I was still first and foremost a Space: 1999 enthusiast, but I would not object to a secondary visually dynamic, televised space opus in my impressionable, pre-teenaged life. I did not then, in the summer of 1978, know that the CBC intended to drop Space: 1999 from its schedule come September. On another Saturday evening during the summer of 1978, my parents and I were in the same Nashwaaksis cinema, watching Heaven Can Wait, the Warren Beatty movie about a football player's premature death and necessary reincarnation. And I was at the Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 yet again, this time by myself, to see the Sunday matinee showing of The Bad News Bears Go to Japan on August 6, the day after Space: 1999's episode, "Space Brain", was rerun on CBC. It was the first Bears movie that I had seen. Scarcely a good introduction to the little-league baseball team's boast-worthy exploits. I did not see their first and by far best movie until it appeared on evening television in the autumn of 1978.
Oh, yes. There was also the August of 1978 evening on which my father and I went to the Plaza Cinemas to see the killer bee movie, The Swarm. I know. The less said about that movie, the better. The Savage Bees, airing on CHSJ-TV that summer, was, whatever its production budget as a made-for-television movie, a much better dramatisation of the concept of killer bees than was the ineptly-written and ineptly-directed The Swarm. The book, The Swarm, from which the movie of same title was derived, probably was more satisfying a telling of the story of killer bees coming to the U.S.; I had the book but never read past the text in its preface.
A particularly tenacious remembrance that I have from summer of 1978 is of a couple of Monday afternoon solitary walks down and then up Nashwaaksis' Douglas Avenue, an IGA grocery store being at the foot of that street, at its intersection with Main Street, that IGA grocery store selling TV Guide magazine sometimes earlier than other places such as the Pic N' Puff store. Vividly do I remember ascending the long hill of Douglas Avenue and reading listing for Space: 1999 in TV Guide's July 8 to July 14 issue and its July 15 to 21 issue. The former of the two issues had CHSJ-TV alone (i.e. without CBHT, CBIT, CBCT) scheduled to air some unspecified episode of Space: 1999 at 5 P.M. on Saturday, July 8. I had my mother telephone CHSJ-TV that Saturday morning to ask what Space: 1999 episode was to be telecast, and the CHSJ receptionist could only say, "It's an old one." So my mother reported to me. I feel quite certain (certain enough to assert it essentially as factual) that CHSJ intended to show a videotape-delayed-from-May-6 "Dragon's Domain" on that day. But because of longer-than-expected CBC sports programming, Space: 1999 did not appear on July 8 on CHSJ-TV. It was preempted. And it had also been preempted on CBC Television on the Saturday previous to that. TV Guide synopsised "Missing Link" as the episode of Space: 1999 to air on all CBC Television stations at 3 P.M. on Saturday, July 15. And that was what happened. And as I have said, CHSJ finally did show the videotape-delayed-from-May-6 "Dragon's Domain" in lieu of Walt Disney on Sunday, July 16. I believe that CHSJ, its intentions to show the episode on July 8 having been thwarted, chose to air it in the next available vacant airtime. That being Sunday, July 16 at 6 P.M..
I remember audiotape-recording both "Missing Link" and "Dragon's Domain" on their broadcasts that July, 1978 weekend onto SONY Chrome audiocassettes. I started buying SONY "compact cassettes" of chromium dioxide (hence, SONY Chrome) variety in July of 1978 from L & R Sound. They were touted by the clerk of that electronics store as being of a quality superior to the standard SONY audiocassette that I had been buying. They had a distinct chemical smell to them, and I fancied the grey print on the audiotape label. In December, my father bought for me a large box of the SONY Chrome audiocassettes as an early Christmas present, and those audiotapes would be utilised for my captures of audio of television programming of late 1978 and first quarter of 1979.
On the weekdays straddling that hazy and muggy July 15 and July 16 weekend, a company called P.D. Moore was placing sod in the yard of the McCorry home to finally bestow upon our home a green lawn. I remember thinking about the "Missing Link" episode of Space: 1999 as I, through our house's living room window, watched the muscly P.D. Moore employees working in the humid air to spread pre-grown grass onto our front yard.
In the final week of July in 1978, Michael rode a S.M.T. bus from Newcastle to Fredericton and stayed with me for a number of days. My father and I collected him at the S.M.T. bus depot on Regent Street in the Fredericton downtown, and we promptly had lunch at Dairy Queen, Michael telling me everything he knew about what was happening in Douglastown. I remember Michael and I spreading sleeping bags out onto the living room floor, and the two of us watching an episode of The New Avengers, "Medium Rare", as we were snugly zippered into those sleeping bags. I remember showing to Michael my latest audiocassette-recording-and-playback equipment (purchased that year's June at Kelly's Stereo Mart) and my audiotapes of Space: 1999 episodes, including "Dragon's Domain" with which Michael and I had already shared a connection through its earlier telecast on CBC Television on November 12 of the previous autumn while I was staying with Michael at his place. And I vividly visualise the sunny Friday evening on which Michael and I walked along Maple Street and down Fulton Avenue to the Pic N' Puff store, where Michael browsed the toy model kits on a shelf at back of store, beside which was a television set showing what looked like an aerial view of an alien planet. For a second, I thought that the CBC was offering impromptu a Space: 1999 episode. "The Metamorph" from the Season 2 Space: 1999, perhaps. Michael commented bemusedly as I suggested that possibility, before it became obvious that we were looking at something else entirely. Michael memorably watched the "Ring Around the Moon" Space: 1999 episode with me on its CBC Television rebroadcast on July 29, from 3 to 4 P.M.. That and also the Bionic Woman episode, "The Martians Are Coming, the Martians Are Coming", airing on ATV that evening from 8 P.M. to 9 P.M..
In the summer of 1978, with my new-found younger companions (Tony, David B., et cetera), I played baseball in the vacant lot along Maple Street parallel to Linden Crescent South, and, nearer to my home and theirs, guns, television tag, hide-and-seek, and scenarios from Battlestar Galactica and Space: 1999. I remember David B. declaring that Tony be in the Victor Bergman role for our playing of Space: 1999- and especially Tony's retort of, "I don't want to be Victor. He's stunned." I do not think that Tony was referring to the balding professor being the victim of an unconsciousness-inducing anti-personnel weapon. One of our pretended Space: 1999 episodes brought us to a house under construction on Linden Crescent West, a house that would be owned by the Sprague family. We imagined that the partially built house was a crash-landed derelict spaceship.
Our group turned the unfinished basement of my house into first a Space: 1999 then general science fiction club (with us lining all of the then-available Star Wars action figures (twelve of them in total) from our combined collections on a shelf), then into a hotel, rather like the garage in Douglastown had been, with cardboard room dividers, many pictures on the walls, and beds constructed from old sheets and cushions. As previously stated, I was not particularly impressed by Star Wars when I first saw it with my mother and father on the afternoon of Sunday, October 30, 1977. But the action-figure-collecting bug bit into me just as firmly as it did into my friends, first with Star Wars, then with Battlestar Galactica.
As part of the basement-conversion-into-hotel project, my friends and I snipped some movie attraction advertisements out of the Fredericton area newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, and stapled them to the wooden beams of my basement. An advertisement for a drive-in theatre's showing of Star Wars was among what we had cut out of the newspaper for wooden-beam "wall" adornment for our hotel. On a weekday, Tuesday, August 8, 1978, during the general science fiction club phase of our summer's activities in my basement, my friends and I went upstairs and watched some of the movie, The Green Slime, on ATV's Midday Matinee. On the day before that, David B. came to my place to announce that he had seen the TV Guide magazine listing for Space: 1999 for the next Saturday (August 12), in advance of my acquisition of that particular issue or TV Guide. He said that he had seen the word, halt, in the episode synopsis. It was synopsis for the logically expected next episode in the CBC's Space: 1999 broadcast sequence repeated from the previous autumn and winter. Namely, "The Testament of Arkadia". But on sunny August 12, CBC broadcast of both a Pope's funeral and the Commonwealth Games meant preemption for Space: 1999. I was coming out of our house's washroom when my parents informed me that they had just heard the CBC's announcement that Space: 1999 would be preempted. And "The Testament of Arkadia" was the only Space: 1999 first season episode not to see rebroadcast on the CBC Television network in spring and summer, 1978. On that Saturday's morning, I remember playing with Star Wars action figures with Mike J. on his back porch's steps. My father and I had been to Beegie's Bookstore earlier that morning. And there I had bought The Swarm book.
In mid-July of 1978, my parents bought a new stereo for our living room. It was Hitachi brand and comprised a radio, a vinyl record player, an audiocassette deck, an amplifier, and two large speakers. I do not remember the dealer from where they bought the the stereo, but I am fairly certain that it was not Kelly's Stereo Mart or L & R Sound. A young man delivered the stereo to our house and installed it in the living room, and he did all of the wiring of the stereo for us. He was very conversant and seemingly expert in audiotape software, and I had a prolonged conversation with him on what the best audiocassettes were. Memorex did not rank most loftily with him, as I recall, though it was my favourite brand of audiotape. He spoke highly of TDK and SONY and Audio Magnetics. My mother was adamant that I not gain umbrage over the audiotape machine in the stereo, that it belonged to the family as a whole, but I fancied the look of it, and the audio playback quality, boosted by the stereo amplifier, was superior to that of my own audiocassette deck. Within about a month and a half, the audiotape machine in the stereo was my primary audiotape-recording apparatus. One of the first things that I remember using that stereo audiocassette machine to record onto "compact cassette", was the Space: 1999 episode, "The Troubled Spirit", by way of its repeat broadcast on CBC Television that was on Saturday, September 16, 1978. That was the final Canada-wide CBC telecast of Space: 1999 in the English language. I remember watching the volume unit (VU) metres swinging back and forth while I listened to the sitar music of that episode's prologue. I ran an extended microphone cable from the stereo audiotape machine to the speaker of the living room television, to do "off-air" audiotape-recordings, and often combined my audiotape recorder purchased in June, 1978, with the stereo audiotape deck to make burnished copies of audiotape-recordings from television. The Hitachi stereo audiocassette machine was used for capturing or burnishing the audio for 1978's last vestiges of Space: 1999 on CBC and CHSJ-TV, Battlestar Galactica in autumn of 1978 and early 1979, Cosmos 1999, French-language version of Space: 1999 in 1979, and some movies on television in 1979 and 1980.
Some other summer of 1978 memories. Walking with my parents down Douglas Avenue one weekday evening after having seen The New Avengers' episode, "The Lion and the Unicorn". Sitting on David B.'s doorstep with him and my other friends and speculating on the front cover look and episode-novelisation composition of a mysterious Space: 1999 book, The Edge of the Infinite, of whose existence I had recently become aware. Seeing Tony on his return from a summer's hockey school. Tony's cousin, Gary, talking quite insistently about the apparent similarity in physical appearance of magazine cover model Cheryl Tiggs and actress Cheryl Ladd ("Big deal!" was what I sarcastically opined to myself on that matter). Attending David B.'s birthday party along with Tony and Eric, it involving a lunch at McDonald's. Learning with distress that Mork and Mindy was going to supplant Space: 1999 on CBC Television that autumn, and my friends all insisting that Battlestar Galactica coming to television that same autumn would be sufficient compensation for losing Space: 1999. And my being distinctly unenthusiastic about having to go to Grade 7 at yet another different school, the first day of the new school year looming closer and closer- and then inevitably upon me.
My young friends did to an appreciable degree fill a gap in my life caused by the move away from several same-age and younger friends in Douglastown, but we were separated when I went to Grade 7 in the nearby Nashwaaksis Junior High, while they remained at Park Street Elementary. Grade 7 was no more agreeable than Grade 6. School days were longer. And I did not much like having to change classrooms and teachers several times each day. Why? The corridors and stairwells of the school would become congested with unruly, vulgarly exclaiming, potentially bullying teenagers. That plus my needing to adjust to several teachers and to their peculiar traits, temperaments, and expectations, instead of just one teacher.
A consistent fact of the Fredericton schools to where I had to go, was that the air quality was not ideal. The air was always very dry. The inside of my nose would fill with hardened membrane and itch, and on many a day mid-afternoon I was craving very, very much a cold, tasty drink (e.g. something orangey) for my dry throat. Not tasteless water at room temperature from a school fountain, to where I shrank from asking permission to go, besides, thirsty though I may have been. Such was the case especially with Nashwaaksis Junior High School. And my hands would become like sandpaper. Fredericton High School's air was most particular in causing that. I do not remember having any of these issues at the school in Douglastown, which, unlike the Fredericton schools, was not in an institution-type building. It was in what had been a shipbuilder's home. A house, essentially. The dry air in the Fredericton schools did add to the disagreeable nature of my school experience in my Fredericton years.
And I would also mention the lighting in the Fredericton schools. All classrooms in the Fredericton schools had fluorescent lighting, which somehow made me feel less than fully alert and would induce a lethargic feeling as school days progressed through morning and afternoon. Classrooms in Nashwaaksis Junior High School had a window, a single window. Many classroom windows, alas, faced north or were in morning hours in the shadow of trees to the east of the building. Light from the outdoors was far from optimal. The school in Douglastown had the room lights that one would expect in rooms of a house, and natural outdoor light pouring into the classrooms from four windows. I do not remember ever feeling lethargic or of deficient alertness in any of the classrooms at school in Douglastown.
Battlestar Galactica on Sunday at 9 P.M. preceded my bedtime, after which was a night of slumber followed by the start of five consecutive days of school, a string of days of which I would always feel wary, for school in Fredericton was not "my oyster". The premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica, "Saga of a Star World", airing on Sunday, September 17, 1978, was scheduled to "clock-in" at three hours. My parents allowed me to stay awake until midnight to watch (and audiotape-record) all of it, but the last half-hour of it was delayed until sometime past midnight for a news report about a Middle East conference. I had to go to bed and miss the final Battlestar Galactica half-hour that night. And on the Monday thereafter, I went to school, ate a Beaver Foods lunch in the cafeteria, and came home in the afternoon to a TV Guide issue left in the house by my father, and read the Battlestar Galactica episode synopsis for the following Sunday, describing a virus afflicting Galactica fighter pilots. First, though, I had a forlorn look at Saturday's listings in dashed hopes of seeing Space: 1999 there.
At my new school, peer exclusivity still prevailed as cliques from elementary schools had been transplanted into the junior high school environment. There was again no room for a relative newcomer to the city, particularly one of rather rural background with, in my age group in Fredericton, uncommon interests. I began to have what could accurately be called a double life. Shyness and social passivity were Kevin McCorry's attributes at school, where I continued in Fredericton to be an outcast, but around home, in the company of my younger friends, I had fun and was, like I had been in Douglastown, an organiser and leader in projects on my property, in this case, my basement.
When I was with friends who showed affinity and unbounded appreciation for me, I was at ease. When surrounded by friends who I knew accepted me and clearly wanted to be with me, who initiated friendship and the occasions for which for us to be together, my social skills were mostly there. I was eloquently communicative, boundlessly creative, comfortable with sharing with my friends any idea, any interest, and forthright in expressing my opinions about practically anything. I had come quite some ways from the petrified, quiet, abjectly retiring wallflower that I had been in Grade 1. But I still was wary of rebuff in new social situations, or circumstances wherein my friends had others in their company, or whenever I had to approach someone without invitation to do so. And because of an egocentric condition of mind, the result of being an only-child and as such the "spoiled" darling of my parents, and indulged for years as leader by accepting and almost always cooperating friends, I had not as yet gained an ability to decentralise my point of view, to perceive myself from "outside of the box", to regard my conduct through the eyes of others, and to relate, to empathise with their feelings if I unwittingly hurt them.
When I left Douglastown, I was effective at interacting one-on-one and in social groups already known to be welcoming of me. In such situations, by Grade 5, I was distinctly in my element, talking with no inhibition about whatever interested me. But obviously I still had some way to go yet in becoming a fully adjusted, complete social success. I had to lose my tendency to egocentricity and my disposition of shrinking from by myself initiating contact with others, and gain some modicum of outgoing personality, and with it a capacity to view myself through the eyes of others. At school in Fredericton, I regressed utterly to what I had socially been in Grade 1 in Douglastown, while around my Fredericton home I had found a handful of younger friends who allowed me to lead them in creative projects and playtime fun, not unlike my buddies in Douglastown. But they diverged from my Douglastown pals in that they were not willing to submit to my decisions or my guidance on a constant basis. They wanted their own opportunities to lead, with me following them, and if they thought that I was asserting myself into an inordinate number of opportunities to be the leader, they would not refrain from open criticism, in much the same way that Eric criticised me for excessive or predictable conversation on certain subjects. And were I to refuse to concede to their wish to don the mantle of creator and coordinator, they would go their own way and do their own projects. Mike J., for example, built a tree house for himself and his friends in the wooded area behind the houses on my and his side of Linden Crescent. David B. wanted to have his basement play area with sit-in cardboard space-fantasy vehicles, and so did Tony, who also spearheaded an audiotape-recorded rendition of Star Wars using the voices of himself and his friends. I would participate or not, depending on my interest in being a part of what they were doing and their forgiveness of my stubbornness on the issue of leadership- and, of course, on a still-open invitation for me to join in the endeavour. I, along with Eric, teamed with Tony on the Star Wars audiotape project. Around home, all in all, I was able to retain, without building upon, most of what I had progressed toward, in the five Douglastown years. A leader and a proponent of interest and insight on imaginative subjects. I was not as outspoken a proponent on some subjects, mind. For fear of a verbal "smack-down". But I was certainly more comfortable than I was at school. At school, I lapsed completely into social lethargy and the wallflower persona, teased and bullied as rather standard practice. Teasing and bullying of me was not exactly an everyday procedure, but happened often enough for me to be constantly mindful of, and anxious about, the distinct possibility of experiencing an unpleasant teasing or bullying incident. Enough for me to hew resolutely to the wallflower's keep-a-low-profile ways. And to hate the oppressive environment in which I was required to face that possibility and adhere to those ways.
During the course of the early-to-mid 1980s, my best friend of that time period helped me to progress further, to submit without resistance to the ideas and guidance of others in creative endeavours as often as others did to mine, and to be complimentary, tactile, and outgoing enough to speak people's names. And at least sometimes- though still anything but frequently enough- to understand others' feelings. That is another era, though. In Era 3, I was, with regard to personal development, in a state of regression at school and static around home.
In the final quarter of 1978, my father joined Fredericton Transit as a bus cleaner and mechanic, and worked there Monday through Thursday and every second Friday and Saturday from 6 P.M. until 2:30 A.M.. An advantage to my father's new job was that he was provided with bus fare tickets in bulk, enabling me and a friend to ride the buses to the downtown and Fredericton South upper-hill mall area whenever we wished to do so. My father also had access to the bus schedules throughout the city so that I could plan expeditions into the Fredericton business districts in advance of departing from home.
On my birthday in 1979, Tony, David B., Eric, and I all went to see the 1966 movie of Batman being screened at the Gaiety Theatre, and it was a verbal one-upmanship sparring event between Tony and David through the afternoon at the theatre.
On sunny Friday, November 10, 1978, a holiday from school due to Remembrance Day that year being on a Saturday, Linden Crescent was in the process of receiving cement street curbs in advance of its paving later that month, and I remember Tony, Eric, and myself marvelling at the procedure for moulding the street curbs to specifications. The three of us that afternoon walked to the Pic N' Puff store on Main Street, where we discovered an issue of Future magazine with a Battlestar Galactica article therein, but I was most intrigued by a picture of a back issue of said magazine's sibling publication, Starlog, with a Space: 1999 montage drawing on its cover. The cantankerous elderly lady who owned the store did not appreciate the three of us perusing the pages of the magazines on her shelves and ordered us to either buy something or depart the premises. We were none too pleased with the way that we were treated, though I did not refrain from returning promptly to the store with sufficient funds to buy that particular magazine. I longed to have that Space: 1999-oriented back issue but was unsuccessful in this regard until December, 1980, when, in Toronto, I found that magazine, Starlog Issue Number 2, in a comic book collector's store as my father and I were en route back to our hotel from a tour of the CN Tower. The much sought-after early issue of Starlog was tremendously appreciated as I read it in our hotel room, though it was not as overwhelmingly informative and visually appealing as I had hoped that it would be. But at least that was one instance circa 1980 that I was not disappointed in a quest for something relating to Space: 1999.
The McCorry household was at last linked into the Fredericton Cablevision network on the weekend of September 30-October 1, 1978, just in time to witness the second half of the Battlestar Galactica "Lost Planet of the Gods" two-part episode on multiple cable television channels on Sunday, October 1 at 9 P.M., although due to mandatory television programme substitution, it was the CTV/ATV broadcast feed on all of those television channels. With cable television at my bidding, I plunged headlong into the delight of Saturday morning entertainment from American telecasts, and most especially the ability to see a Bugs Bunny/Road Runner transmission in the comfort of my own home, something I had not experienced since the CBC terminated its association with the grey bunny and his cohorts in 1975. Tony and I followed the weekly, 90-minute Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show compilations, in which cartoons were presented in a completely unfamiliar sequence. Seated by myself in my living room, I saw "Hyde and Go Tweet" again after more than 3 years, on the morning of Saturday, December 9, 1978, as the second cartoon in the 90-minute instalment, coming after the hospital laboratory visualisations of "Hot Cross Bunny" and before "To Beep or Not to Beep" and other cartoons such as "Piker's Peak" (fourth cartoon in that Bugs Bunny/Road Runner instalment), "D' Fightin' Ones" (fifth cartoon in same) , "Tweety's S.O.S.", and "A Bird in a Bonnet". I remember that coming the day after the evening on which I bought a Battlestar Galactica Cylon Warrior action figure from Mazucca's variety store in downtown Fredericton.
Tony and I fervently sought to view "Hyde and Go Tweet" again, and this time together at his place or at mine, but week after week we were treated to practically every other cartoon short then in the then CBS television network package, and to excessive showings of "A Pizza Tweety-Pie" and "Shishkabugs", among others. "Hyde and Go Tweet" did not recycle again until the December 9 instalment was repeated on June 9, 1979, and again Tony was not with me. He came out of his house and approached me on our street to talk briefly about "Hyde and Go Tweet" later on that overcast, drizzly day in advance of him and Steven going to a family gathering; they were already dressed in their special occasion clothing. When "Dr. Jerkyl's Hide" surfaced on CBS' Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show that broadcast year, it was on the final Saturday in July, 1979 (the January running of the same instalment had been preempted on WAGM due to high school basketball coverage), and on the same overcast, mid-summer day as the afternoon wedding of my cousin. I was thinking about Sylvester's disturbing metamorphosis as I went with my parents to my grandparents' house after lunch and then to the church of the ceremony and to the reception party at the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel. Tony yet again was not with me during the viewing of that other regularly appearing on Saturday morning Jekyll-and-Hyde Warner Brothers cartoon. He was not with me for much of that summer of 1979. Via cable television at my home, I also became reacquainted with Space Academy and first experienced its close relative, Jason of Star Command. WVII, the ABC television network affiliate out of Bangor, Maine, was transmitting Jonny Quest early every Saturday morning, but despite the obvious enthusiasm for it by David B. and some of my other Fredericton associates, I found it mostly unengaging. Primitive and superstitious peoples in swamps and jungles really do not fuel my imagination, and far too many episodes were oriented thusly. Also, the music that was often same as that in The Flintstones, sounded distinctly disorienting in the supposedly more realistic universe of the two adventurous generations of the Quest family.
Movies that I remember seeing on television in the final quarter of 1978 included Phase IV, a 1974 Anglo-American film about intelligent and poisonous ants, that was telecast on Midday Matinee on the afternoon of Friday, November 10, 1978. Tony, Eric, and I started watching it with it already in progress, after we had come to my place following a visit by us three to the Pic N' Puff store, at which I had discovered Future magazine. And on the Sunday preceding 1978's Christmas Monday, I saw, by myself in the McCorry family living room, the original, 1968, Charlton Heston Planet of the Apes movie on WVII-TV, as a mid-to-late afternoon broadcast offering. The reveal at the end of it, that the ape planet was a war-ravaged Earth on which human civilisation had fallen, was unexpected and disturbing. For some reason, the concept of the world of the intelligent apes being far-future Earth had escaped my notice when I had followed the Planet of the Apes television series back in 1974. Probably because my friends and I had all missed the ATV airing of the television series' first episode. I had also previously seen Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth of the Planet of the Apes movies. But to me Conquest of the Planet of the Apes seemed to be set on an Earth separate in both time and space from the world of the intelligent apes. And the apes had not gained total ascendancy over man all over the planet, at that movie's ending.
My cat, Frosty, used to follow me into the woods behind our Linden Crescent abode, and one day in 1979 she even followed me all of the way to the Main Street Pic N' Puff store and back to home. Tony one day commented that if he saw Frosty, it meant that I would be somewhere nearby, and he was right. Frosty was a loyal companion, but on her own terms, at her distance. Born in 1975, she was a part of my Douglastown life now with me in my new, Fredericton surroundings. She slept on the water heater in the basement every night and was always waiting in the morning at the basement door to be given access to upstairs. She had a taste for bacon and most other meaty foods. She would utter a br-r-r-r sound before she would cry. She usually came at a run when I called her name at our door and was usually waiting at said door for my parents and I to return from one of the Fredericton malls or from my grandparents' house. She was the longest lived pet that I have ever had, remaining with me until her death in 1991.
September of 1978 was a time of upheaval for my preferred television programmes. Space: 1999 was cancelled on the CBC; September 16, 1978 was the date of its final national English Canadian broadcast on the country's foremost television network. I lamented this as I walked home from Grade 7 at Nashwaaksis Junior High on many an overcast autumn, 1978 day. Spiderman was soon to be gone from ATV. Rocket Robin Hood was gone as of that September. And neither of them would again be seen in my part of the world until ageing leaves started turning yellow or red in 1981. The New Avengers and both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman ceased production and were cancelled on ATV. The much-heralded new television season mostly felt to me like cold comfort. I did not appreciate Mork and Mindy for it usurping Space: 1999's airtime on CBC. But my friends were so very enthused about the new television spectacular of Colonial Warriors combating the skirted robot Cylons, that I allowed some of their ardent admiration for all things Battlestar Galactica to pass along to me. The theatrical feature film culled from Battlestar Galactica's three-hour premiere episode, that I had seen at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 in the previous summer, had been impressive, visually, conceptually, and in actors' performances. There were some alien worlds and weird creatures. It boded reasonably promising for the episodes to come. But no sooner did Battlestar Galactica settle into its hour-long format than it became mired in Wild Western cliches and space battle footage reused to the extent of wince-inducing tedium, and even had the irritatingly sardonic Match Game panelist Brett Somers as an amorous vixen chasing a reluctant Lorne Greene on the usual Wild West frontier planet. Battlestar Galactica nonetheless compensated for a time after Space: 1999 had been foisted off of the air by the CBC. But it was never an adequate replacement, and I was delighted when the French version of Space: 1999, Cosmos 1999, returned for a rerun on CBC French starting on Monday, January 8, 1979. My interest in the French language was sparked like never before, and my mark in French in Grade 7 shot upward from 79 to 91!
As fate had decreed, Space: 1999 was my prominent entertainment interest during this time period and for many, many years to follow. As with its Saturday-on-CBC predecessor, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour, there is a memory, if not many memories, associated with every single episode. It meant as much to me in Fredericton during my many solitary days of pining for companionship, as it did so affectingly in my socially popular and immersed condition in Douglastown. Attached to it was memory of so many pleasant times at school and around home with friends and a wider supportive Douglastown community. And for quite some time, my fondness for Space: 1999, in its manifesting, in my awareness of it and expressing of it, acted as something of a proxy for my fond regard for Douglastown. Space: 1999 signified comfort, better days in a most appealing place- in addition to its own intrinsic values of intricately detailed and imagination-engaging otherworldly visualisations and dazzling special effects, appealing music, fascinating concepts, and dynamic characters- especially the Commander. It was for many years in Fredericton the precious item upon which memories of Douglastown were crystallised- though I was not fully conscious of this. My yearning to have Space: 1999 in my life was in no small way influenced by my hankering for something of my Douglastown days to be with me in the forefront of keen interest in Fredericton, even during later years, the early-to-mid-1980s, when Fredericton was of itself for the most part quite a hospitable and fun place. I was in a veritable state of mourning when the CBC terminated in 1978 its Saturdays run of Space: 1999. And I was overjoyed when after four bleak months, Moonbase Alpha meandered back into my televisual orbit, when the French-language CBC restored Cosmos 1999, French version of Space: 1999, to its programming schedule in January, 1979, after, for Cosmos 1999, an absence of more than a year. Cosmos 1999 had been broadcast at 8 P.M. on Saturdays in the 1976-7 television season, and there had been a number of episodes that I experienced in French before they were seen by me in English.
So thrilled, so edified, was I by the return of Space: 1999 in some form, to my life, that I was determined to audiotape the francophone versions of all episodes as they aired in 1979 on Monday nights at 8 P.M.. I audiotape-recorded the first episode to be shown in 1979, and it was "The Metamorph" (in French, "La metamorphose"). Aired on CBC French after an evening sequence of news and the talking-heads interview production, Acadiana, immediately preceding it at 7:30, and followed at 9 P.M. by a rural drama called Terre humaine, Cosmos 1999 was somewhat differently presented than its linguistic counterpart had been on CBC English. There was usually no commercial sequence after the episodic hook (in the case of Season 2) or prologue (for Season 1), unless either hook or prologue and the first act of an episode were quite long. The first commercials tended to be fourteen or fifteen 15 minutes into every episode. Removal of episode scenes for commercial time was at a minimum during the Season 2 episodes, all of which were shown on CBC French on Monday nights in 1979 from January to June. As I now had cable television, picture and sound reception for CBAFT, the CBC French television station broadcasting out of Moncton, was almost perfect, except for atmospherically quirky evenings in the summer. "La metamorphose" was particularly gratifying for being the first Space: 1999 that my eyes were beholding in close to four months, and it was the first Season 2 episode that I was watching since September of 1977. Plus, I had not seen "The Metamorph" in any capacity since December of 1976, when I had been very much integrated in my former environment. The music and sound effects were evocative of overwhelmingly fond sentiment as I heard them on transmission of "La metamorphose" on the cold, winter's evening of January 8, 1979, and as I listened to them on my audiotape on the next day after school. I could scarcely wait as I left school in my usual rush to be out of the large-scale presence of abrasive, and of me potentially abusive, peers, and to be back at home, playing my audiotape of Moonbase Alpha's encounter with volcanic planet Psychon and revelling in the music that played as Commander Koenig and his team are boarding and launching Eagle 4 for a rendez-vous in space with the deceptive alien, Mentor. Tony, coming out of Park Street School, joined me as I was walking from Nashwaaksis Junior High to home and said that he had seen "La metamorphose"- and the first time ever for him to have experienced "The Metamorph", in any language- and was very impressed by it.
I thought the sentiment being stirred within me to be for Moonbase Alpha and its characters and the awesome television show itself. To a substantial degree, it was. But my fondness for Douglastown and my life there was tied into the comforting feel of the reunion with Space: 1999- Season 2. In a very real sense, this was my discovery of the phenomenon called nostalgia. Not that I fully- or even partly- comprehended it as a definitive construct, in terms of my own experiences and its meaning in general. But I was feeling it. Oh, yes. The petals of the flower that was my nostalgia were stirring, beginning to open. The full bloom of the nostalgia would not be reached for several years yet. Not until the end of my fourth life era. But the process toward it had most certainly started. Oh, yes.
It was not that I had never before experienced loss of something to which I felt strong attachment. While living in Douglastown, I had experienced loss, for instance that of the CBC weekly telecasts of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour (said termination of telecast on CBC of Bugs and the Road Runner happening in 1975). The loss hurt deeply, and I subsequently missed that television show so very much. Nostalgia can be, and often is, powered by a loss. But the longing to have back what was lost becomes nostalgic after a passage of time adds to the feeling of disconnection. And it can be most palpable if there are, concurrently, also lost close associations with people. As certainly had been the case with my leaving of Douglastown at close to the time in 1977 at which the CBC's broadcasts of Season 2 of Space: 1999 stopped. Space: 1999 and my initial series of cogent experiences with it, mostly through its second season, had become inextricably joined to my remembrance of living in Douglastown and my fondness for my years there- especially the final one of which Space: 1999 had been a very, very significant part. Such was how Space: 1999 had come to serve as a proxy for my fondness for my Douglastown years, and as I heard the music of Season 2 again with Radio-Canada's French-language run of it in 1979, I was feeling nostalgia for it and, with it and through it, Douglastown.
Granted, nostalgia is unusual, highly unusual, for a thirteen-year-old. One might even say that I was unique to be feeling nostalgia at age thirteen. But then, my circumstances were not what one would call common. Only-child, moved from semi-rural home village to suburban surroundings at between eleven and twelve years of age, not accepted by peers in new habitat after having reached something of a pinnacle of social success prior to moving.
I was at my living room television, audiocassette recorder ready, every Monday evening in the first nine months of 1979. "All That Glisters", "The Exiles", and "Journey to Where" followed "The Metamorph" on CBC French on the other Mondays of January, 1979. Between the first and second episodic acts of "Journey to Where", I recall a lengthy interlude with montage of scenery from predominantly French-speaking locales in New Brunswick. I quite liked the image of an Eagle of red-striped middle section rising off of the Moon, an image which was used by CBC French as a bridging photograph on return to Alphan intrigue and action following all commercial sequences. With my audiotape-recording of "Les Exiles", I hummed the music that played over the episode title and guest cast and production crew credits of said episode as WKRP in Cincinnati was being shown on CBC English later in the Monday, January 22 evening. Tony's brother, Steven, expressed admiration for the character of Tony Verdeschi after "Tout ce qui Reluit" (French title of "All That Glisters") had been shown and as I was contemplating the always awesome sight of the red-skied desert world depicted in said episode.
Among my four first Fredericton friends (David B., Eric, Mike J., and Tony), Tony was the only one to be at all attentive of the revival- in rebroadcast- of the French-language Space: 1999, and to watch it and be somewhat encouraging of my rather unorthodox intention to audiotape episodes in a language in which I had yet to achieve anything resembling fluency. David B. had no liking whatsoever for the second season of Space: 1999, and for that reason was decidedly spiritless regarding Cosmos 1999 on CBAFT (French CBC's channel for Canada's eastern Maritimes) in early 1979, in addition to balking at the strange language that was, by the magic of dubbed audio, being spoken by the Moonbase characters. And not being much of an enthusiast for either of the two seasons of Space: 1999 and equally as refusing as David at watching Space: 1999 in French, Eric was quite unaffected by the reemergence of the Space: 1999 universe into the television viewing options of Canadians in 1979.
Not surprisingly, I had no use whatsoever for Battlestar Galactica by that time, and it had, in any case, hamstrung itself by all but eliminating the menace of the enemy Cylon robots in their destroyer fighter spacecraft and concentrating instead on insular, i.e. within the Colonial spaceship fleet, antagonists and the threat posed by the rather hackneyed humanoid fascists of the Eastern Alliance of planet Terra, which was revealed not to be Earth toward which Lorne Greene's Adama was leading his people, contrary to the quite obvious (even to me at the age of 13) fact that Terra is Earth in certain languages. I was never convinced that Battlestar Galactica was ever as worthy of my reverence as Space: 1999. The battles between fighter spacecraft and the detailed and realistically moving Colonial spaceships, including the titled space battlecruiser, and the characters and their futuristic garb were appealing enough, despite recycled footage. But the crucial ingredient missing was a curiosity and sense of wonder about space and the infinite possibilities of planetary environments and alien life forms, Battlestar Galactica instead offering gunfights Wild-West-style and encounters with frontier planets with more motifs of the old American West. And in the later episodes, a murder mystery and other rather uninspiring story material. The last Battlestar Galactica episode that I audiotape-recorded was the two-parter, "War of the Gods" (guest-starring Patrick Macnee of The New Avengers). I then plunged fully into the francophone presentation of the odyssey of Moonbase Alpha, frustrated by the in-my-Canadian-region-only preemptions of the fifth and tenth transmitted episodes, "The Mark of Archanon" and "Brian the Brain", for local programming, the former preemption being for something called La Cabane about a rustic family (which Tony and I worried might be intended to permanently replace Cosmos 1999 on CBAFT), and the latter happening on CBAFT in favour of the cultural talk television show called D'Amour et d'eau fraiche (English translation: Of Love and Fresh Water).
After La Cabane preempted Cosmos 1999 on Monday, February 5, I expected the worst, and although all television guides had Cosmos 1999 listed for February 12, I watched CBAFT early in the morning that day before going to school as the programming day was outlined by an announcer. I was relieved to hear the statement that Cosmos 1999 would be shown in the evening at the 8 P.M. airtime.
I was however, dismayed, when I looked out the window that morning and saw what looked like a burnt section of sofa on Tony's front lawn and a piece of transparent plastic over the big window of his house. My father told me that there had been a fire on our street the night before, and I deduced correctly that Tony's house had been where the fire was. I went to school that morning troubled by what had transpired, and I did not see Tony that day. I watched and audiotape-recorded "One Moment of Humanity" on Cosmos 1999 in the evening, with an eye out the window every now and then, wondering what had become of Tony. I saw him on the following day, Tuesday, after school, and learned what had happened on Sunday night. Chimney residue had ignited the fire, and Tony and his whole family escaped the burning house via the big window after a blazing part of sofa had been thrown through the pane of glass. Tony, his brother, and his parents were staying at Keddy's Motor Inn for as long as their house was being repaired.
In the early months of 1979, as Tony joined me after school for an hour before his mother arrived at my house's driveway to collect him, the two of us conferred at some length about Cosmos 1999 and Star Wars. My reappraisal of Star Wars was definitely happening at the behest of Tony, who was its most loyal supporter- without attacking my most beloved work of space fiction. Tony regarded Cosmos 1999 with an open mind and seemingly always enjoyed the episodes presented. At my house in my living room, he watched with me Cosmos 1999's "Deformation spatiale" (in English, "Space Warp") on the evening of Easter Monday in April. I was suffering a severe cold sore at that time, as I recall. Tony and I both collected two waves of Star Wars action figures, Jawa and Snaggletooth being the problematic ones to locate- though both of us did manage to find them, and a variety of related toys, including the TIE Fighter, the X-Wing Fighter, the Death Star (complete with a retractable walkway, tractor beam control unit, and trash compactor), the Land Speeder, and the Creature Cantina, the last of which I bought in Bangor, Maine, U.S.A. together with Space: 1999 Moonbase Alpha playset during a Labour Day weekend, 1979 sojourn there with my father. I totally rethought my first reaction to Star Wars. Battlestar Galactica, now a one-season flop on television, suffered in comparison in 1979 to George Lucas' epic movie series in every way, to my eyes. Star Wars had an integrity to its story that Battlestar Galactica now lacked due to its floundered transition to television series format. When Star Wars was re-released to theatres in the last few weeks of the summer of 1979, I went to see it again, this time at the Plaza Cinema 1, and not this occasion with my parents but with Tony and his brother. Even the slow-paced part of the movie situated on Tatooine with the two robots was enjoyable, and I had the emotional and intellectual response to the overall story, and especially its climactic Death Star trench battle, of which I had been completely devoid on my first experience of the adventures of Luke Skywalker in the galaxy far, far away.
Tony encouraged me to broaden my perspective on the science fiction/fantasy genre and on Star Wars in particular, such that I was not only almost as ardent an adherent as he to the 1977 movie that changed cinema forever, but receptive with boundless enthusiasm to the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, whose fabulous showing in 1980 at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 was an event of a lifetime. In the meantime, as The Empire Strikes Back was still in production, Tony and I went to the Fredericton theatres, usually Nashwaaksis Cinema 2, to view many more movies with a space orientation. And on television, besides Monday evening's Cosmos 1999, we watched Saturday A.M. cartoons. I remember Tony being with me on the Saturday morning of March 24, 1979, watching the 90-minute The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show and Tony being rather amused by Bugs' tele-o-phone quip in "Barbary-Coast Bunny" and the bulldog's, "It just don't add up!" remark in "Cheese Chasers", two of the cartoons in the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show instalment of that day. "A Witch's Tangled Hare", with Bugs and Witch Hazel in the midst of the Castle of Macbeth and famous scribe William Shakespeare, was watched as the last cartoon of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show on the same sunny, early June Saturday that Tony and I went to the matinee performance of Starcrash at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2.
On the second weekend of May in 1979, Tony was away to Bangor, Maine. His family liked to stay at the Koala Inn there and to visit the many vendors of toys and books and other movie-and-television-related materials. For almost all of that largely overcast weekend, I was moping around the neighbourhood, plaintively missing my best friend. On Saturday night on ATV/CTV's Academy Performance movie was The Cassandra Crossing, the disturbing and thrilling tale of a trans-European passenger train infected with plague and en route to a concentration camp in Poland, ahead of which is a much-in-disrepair bridge that the authorities know will not withstand the weight of the train. Most of the people in my neighbourhood, including Tony and Steven while they were in Bangor, saw this movie and were talking about it for some days after its broadcast. While Tony was gone on his May, 1979 travel to Yankee terrain, I spent some portion of my time with some of the much younger children on Linden Crescent and Kelly, a girl who lived across the street. There was a for-sale and unoccupied house on the corner of the southern stretch of Linden Crescent, and a group of us played Simon says on the steep driveway leading to the house's indoor garage.
On Saturday, May 19, 1979, the Saturday of the annual May long weekend with Victoria Day Monday, I went to Douglastown with my parents for a visit to my old stomping grounds. Michael by then was gone, having moved to Toronto. I talked with Evie and his friend, Peter, for close to an hour. At the newly opened Northumberland Square Mall in Douglastown, my mother, father, and I ate at the Coffee Mill restaurant and I bought an audiocassette tape, a Memorex C-90, with which to record the Cosmos 1999 episode, "Le spectre", due to be transmitted on the next Monday. In Chatham, at the same bookstore at which I had bought some Space: 1999 books in 1977, I found an issue of Starlog magazine with a "Many Faces of Maya" Space: 1999 article, two pages in length, therein. I was quite fond of that Starlog magazine issue, for the article and also for the reason that it was purchased in Chatham, and it is truly a pity that a bully in my Nashwaaksis Junior High Grade 7 class a month later extorted the magazine from me and, I presume, destroyed it.
On CBC French on the Monday of that long weekend was "Le spectre" on Cosmos 1999. With its mention of voting, "Le spectre" was quite an apropos episode for that week, for it was shown on the day before the famous 1979 Canadian federal election that yielded Joe Clark's short-lived Conservative government. I detested the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau and wanted to see the blue Tories win that election. They did, and I was indeed happy, but I did not understand the media's misgivings about the long-term viability of what they were calling a minority government. A year later, Clark's Tories were defeated both in the House of Commons and at the polling booths in a subsequent election that saw Trudeau returned to power.
June of 1979 was quite an eventful month for Tony. He was away in Saint John, where dwelled much of his extended family, on the Monday that "Devil's Planet" was on Cosmos 1999, and that was one of the second season episodes that he would not yet see for several more years. I recall being very impressed by my re-experiencing of the last Season 2 episodes, as each was transmitted in French on those sunny and warm Monday evenings. Tony was particularly admiring of the exciting scenario and the character portrayals of "The Immunity Syndrome", which was shown on Monday, June 11 on CBC French. In a rather less critical but nonetheless quite bizarre analogue to the distress of his Moonbase Alphan namesake in "The Immunity Syndrome", Tony was to require medical attention on the week of June 11, when, during a street baseball game with Eric, myself, and one or two much younger children, Tony broke his ankle. He was irate at me for my asking him if he was "all right" after he fell to the pavement. That plus a few other stinging rebukes in those early Fredericton years at my enquiring thusly when Tony or others had evidently hurt themselves left me instinctively at a loss for words and not sure how to respond to someone who has tumbled to the ground. Joey, my best friend in later years, was to be rather appalled at my lack of overt, vocal concern for a fallen playmate, but it did come from some rather unpleasant retorts in these earlier years to my enquiries as to whether someone who has fallen is "all right".
Tony was transported to hospital where his foot was put into a plaster cast that he was to wear for a few weeks. For many days, I did not see Tony. It was as though I was blamed for his condition and forbidden to be in his company, while others in the neighbourhood, Steven's friends mainly, told me that they had been with Tony and signed his cast. Eventually, I was permitted access to Tony's house and did sign his cast, and Tony came outdoors to socialise with me and others and to partake somewhat, in his foot cast, in whatever games were being played. Tony still had his foot in cast on the final day of the school year, as I met him on the way to my home. By Monday, July 2, as I was with him at Consumers Distributing, both of us buying a Star Wars toy, Tony's cast had been removed. He watched the "Collision Course" episode of Cosmos 1999 with me at my house that evening and could scarcely contain his laughter at Victor Bergman's exaggeratedly fey way of running down the steps to Main Mission Control. Tony enjoyed poking fun at the Bergman character whenever he had occasion to do so.
One day in the summer of 1979, Tony and I found a G.I. Joe jeep-buggy that was a fair approximation of the Space: 1999 Moonbuggy and a good fit for the Mattel Space: 1999 dolls of Commander Koenig and Professor Bergman that I had. I quite fancied it. That summer, we collected Star Wars bubble gum cards available at the Pic N' Puff store. The collecting of those bubble gum cards was a factor of import in moving me away, far, far away, from the distinctly tepid, even grudging, reaction that I had had to Star Wars in 1977, and in establishing within me a rather hearty appreciation for the Star Wars universe. It, along with Tony's enthusiasm for all things Star Wars and the continuing merchandising of toys and other items. One sunny summer morning in 1979, I bought a Luke Skywalker as X-Wing Pilot Star Wars toy action figure from a Steadman's department store existing for a short time at the Nashwaaksis York Plaza, me walking to and from that store by my lonesome. And there would be a re-release of Star Wars to theatres toward the end of August.
From January of 1979 through the months of mid-winter, late winter, spring, summer of same year, my following of Radio-Canada's broadcasts of Cosmos 1999 meant also some ancillary awareness of Radio-Canada's other programming in those months. I sometimes watched Radio-Canada and CBAFT in hopes of seeing a minute-long promotion for Cosmos 1999 that Radio-Canada was known to show in its other television show broadcasts. And within Cosmos 1999, there was promotion for other television series offerings on the airwaves of French-language television in Canada. In 1979, Radio-Canada had a slogan of, "Faut voir ca." There were made-in-Quebec situation comedies, A cause de mon oncle and Jamais deux sans toi. And a 5 P.M. weekdays children's television series name of Bobino. And dramas by the names of the already mentioned Terre humaine (which followed Cosmos 1999 on most Mondays in winter and spring), Les Brigades du Tigre (which came after Cosmos 1999 most Mondays in the summer), and Sous le signe du lion. And nature and entrepreneurship documentaries such as La Vie secrete des animaux, Aux Frontieres du Connu, and Defi. And a copious array of talking-head interview television series, including the aforementioned Acadiana (which preceded Cosmos 1999 in the winter and spring), and Propos et confidences (which came before Cosmos 1999 in the summer). The cartoon television show, Bagatelle, was running on Saturdays at 6 P.M., as it had done in previous years. And La Femme Bionique, francophone version of The Bionic Woman could be seen at 8 P.M. on Saturday evenings.
In the early summer of 1979, Tony and I began what we called Cine-Audio. Movies and television shows on my audiotapes played for audiences in my den, with me providing explanatory narration as needed. There was no admission fee, as I recall, for it required of me enough persuasion as it was to talk people into coming to a sound-only "showing" of something. The first "show" that we had in such a format was The Bad News Bears, audiotape-recorded by me from its second television performance on ATV on a Saturday evening in late March of 1979. The Cine-Audio of The Bad News Bears in late June of 1979 was a rousing success. My den was full of enthusiastic listeners, and The Bad News Bears was the kind of movie that, audio only, required very little in the way of exposition on my part as to what was happening. As mentioned elsewhere in my recounting of this era, Tony became rather scarce in that summer of 1979, and I hosted most of the remaining summer-of-1979 Cine-Audios by myself. Other Cine-Audios: two remaining English-language Space: 1999 audiotapes in my collection, they being the episodes, "Dragon's Domain" and "War Games"; a Laverne and Shirley episode about a supermarket shopping spree; and the movie, Logan's Run, that, like The Bad News Bears, I had audiotape-recorded from a Saturday evening television presentation, and it was anything but a success because everyone in attendance found it boring with long, dialogue-less parts to the movie, and my explanations of what was occurring being insufficient to hold their interest. And so, Cine-Audio floundered, with the neighbourhood inhabitants derisively referring to it as "snot-t-io". Attempts to revive it in the autumn of 1979 and the summer of 1980 with the initial outing of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (audiotape-recorded from television), a version of Star Wars with voices provided by Tony and myself, and, played on the reel-to-reel audiotape recorder given to me by my parents for Christmas in 1979, The Black Hole (audiotape-recorded by me when it was playing at a drive-in theatre) and The Bad News Bears in "Breaking Training" (from television), were successful at the outset, but I always eventually in my presentation sequence arrived at a movie or something to which nobody wanted to listen. Oh, God!, with George Burns and John Denver, transferred quite effectively onto an audio-only medium, but nobody was interested in bending an ear in its direction. I remember audiotape-recording The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from a MPBN (PBS- Bangor, Maine) broadcast on a December, 1979 Saturday afternoon during the PBS viewer-support-pledge time period. Starring Jack Palance in the dual role, it was the first non-spoof and live-action variation on Robert Louis Stevenson's "bogey tale" that I ever saw, and despite the rather un-monstrous visage of Palance as Hyde, I found the two-hours-long movie to be more than a little disturbing. I had it on audiocassette for several months but felt decidedly uneasy about giving to it a listen, and, heavily dependent on its alternately lavish and dreary visual presentation for its conveying of mood, atmosphere, and by occasion quite shocking surprises, it would not have yielded a satisfying Cine-Audio.
The final iteration of Cine-Audio, in spring of 1981, only had one presentation, the James Bond movie, Live and Let Die, audiotape-recorded from television on a Sunday in the previous winter. Attendance for that was small. Two people, I seem to recall.
The latter half of 1979 was a poor, dark time, to say the least, to be a Space: 1999 enthusiast on my part of planet Earth. There was no sign of the slightest possibility of the television show returning in English on the CBC. Cosmos 1999 on CBC French continued on Monday evenings into the summer, "Le retour des Dorcons", in English, "The Dorcons" (last episode of Season 2), being followed by "A la Derive" (in English, "Breakaway", the first Season 1 episode) in late June, close to the day that I finished Grade 7. I was excited to finally have the opportunity to see the entirety of Space: 1999's opening episode, my having missed the first two-thirds of it on its one and only full-CBC-Television-network broadcast in September of 1976. And I looked forward to re-experiencing the entirety of Season 1 thereafter. That was not to be. Not where I lived. In September, 1979, fortune would plummet like a lead balloon for Cosmos 1999 in Canada's provinces east of Quebec, and for its faithful viewers there.
"A la Derive" was followed on CBC French by "Collision Inevitable" ("Collision Course") and "Un Autre Royaume de la Mort" ("Death's Other Dominion") and "Puissance de la Vie" ("Force of Life"), after June gave way to July in 1979. I remember buying a small coiled (coils at top of pages) notebook and using it to catalogue Cosmos 1999 episodes and their guest star(s) as those episodes aired that summer, drawing on each page in the notebook the Cosmos 1999 title in accordance with its font and its left-to-right diminishing of letter and number size as shown in the main Cosmos 1999 opening. And I strove always for my word printing to look as professional as is possible for a thirteen-year-old's hand. And I used the "avec la participation de" Cosmos 1999 designation for guest star(s) above the guest star(s) listed. And from an audiocassette of Space: 1999 music that I borrowed from the Fredericton Public Library, I placed a piece of pulse-pounding disco music (one not written by either of the two Space: 1999 music composers) onto some of my audiocassettes of Cosmos 1999. One of those audiocassettes was a SONY C-60 that I bought from a Pedersen's Electronics on Main Street, Nashwaaksis. It was for audiotape-recording the episode, "Question de Vie ou de Mort" ("Matter of Life and Death"), in early August. I also bought an AKAI C-60 audiocassette with a tea green label, for audiotape-recording "L'Enfant d'Alfa" ("Alpha Child") in September.
Alas, as the latter half of 1979 was progressing through summer, CBC French began treating Cosmos 1999 shabbily, removing most of, and sometimes the entirety of, the episode prologues. Both "Un autre royaume de la mort" and "Question de Vie ou de Mort" were shorn of prologue. And "Le Retour du Voyageur" ("Voyager's Return") came very close to suffering the name fate. In addition to this, the picture and sound reception during "Puissance de la Vie" in mid-July was atrocious. Severe microwave broadcast signal interference from some other television station. In September, Cosmos 1999 was moved by CBC French from Mondays at 8 P.M. to Wednesdays at 6 P.M.. The last Monday evening CBC French Cosmos 1999 broadcast was of "L'Enfant d'Alfa", with "Le Dernier Crepuscule" ("The Last Sunset") scheduled to start the Wednesday evening run for the weeks and months to come. I was ready for the first Wednesday at 6 P.M. broadcast when I learned that the CBC French television station (CBAFT) in my region of the country wanted the 6:30-7:00 P.M. airtime for a local television news programme called Coup d'Oeil, and to fill 6:00-to-6:30 P.M. with La Fine cuisine d'Henri Bernard. Thus, for New Brunswickers like myself, Cosmos 1999 was gone. TV Guide magazine was slow to indicate this, in that it listed Cosmos 1999 on CBAFT on Wednesday for three weeks that autumn before coming into agreement with the Daily Gleaner and Telegraph Journal newspaper television listings that had the correct CBAFT broadcast schedule printed.
I can visualise in my mind's eye that first Wednesday (September 19, 1979) when Cosmos 1999 was supplanted on CBAFT by La Fine cuisine d'Henri Bernard and Coup d'Oeil. After I watched an episode, "The Reflex Gun: Pt. 2", of the Japanese animated cartoon science fiction/fantasy television series, Star Blazers, on Bangor, Maine's WVII from 5:30 P.M. to 6 P.M., I changed channel from WVII to CBAFT. After CBAFT television station identification, there was a La Fine cuisine d'Henri Bernard card that after a few seconds faded to black. And then, the main introduction to that television show began. I felt my heart sink into my belly as it was all too apparent that I was not to see Cosmos 1999 that day, or any other subsequent Wednesday. The run of Space: 1999 episodes in French in 1979 was being brought prematurely to an end in my section of Canada.
And so, for the final third of year 1979, the remaining first season episodes , including my most anticipated, "Le Domaine du Dragon", would not be transmitted in New Brunswick or in any of eastern-Maritime Canada, except in the communities nearest the New Brunswick border with the province of Quebec. It was a bitter, bitter, bitter disappointment. Again, I was left with no Space: 1999 in any form to which to look forward during tortuous weeks of school- and Grade 8 (1979-80) to come was to be my worst ever year at school in terms of how I was treated by my peers. TV Guide magazine had listings for a CBC French television station (CJBR) in Rimouski, Quebec; so, through TV Guide, I was privy to precisely which Cosmos 1999 episode I was missing each week. Missing of viewing, and missing of audiotape-recording. After first season episodes had completed their 1979 run on CBC French, the full second season was granted another transmission along the airwaves of francophone television in Canada, also at 6 P.M. Wednesdays on CBC French, from late December, 1979 onward into 1980. And not a single one of those telecasts was offered by CBAFT. I was far out of range from being able to see and commit to audiotape any further episode of Cosmos 1999 post-"L'Enfant d'Alfa" of 10 September, 1979. I could only read the TV Guide synposes for episodes shown on Rimouski's CJBR on Wednesday. This particular torment lasted until the spring of 1980, when the CBC French television network pulled Cosmos 1999 from transmission everywhere else in Canada. After 1979's September 10, I did not have occasion to view anything televised of Space: 1999 until a late-night showing in May, 1980, on ATV, of Destination: Moonbase Alpha, a Space: 1999 "movie" culled from the two-part "The Bringers of Wonder" episode. Said "movie" was repeated on ATV on a Wednesday evening in May, 1981, and then there was no Space: 1999 whatsoever in the remainder of 1981 or in any of 1982, as my beloved television series faded in people's memories, becoming a forgotten commodity of past time. Some of my new, younger acquaintances and friends had no knowledge of it at all.
Further, by 1979, it was becoming next to impossible to find Space: 1999-related merchandise in stores. Space: 1999-related toys were gone from store shelves. Packets of Space: 1999 bubble gum cards, of all things, occasionally surfaced in unusual locations, but not clearly visible to consumers (I will later elaborate on this). As to the books, Beegie's Bookstore had cleared away its stock of Space: 1999 novels (Pocket Books' editions of the first season episode novelisations and original novels; Star editions of the second season episode novelisations), Coles Bookstore in the Regent Street Mall was also devoid of the Space: 1999 books that it had used to stock (the Orbit editions of the first season episode novelisations), and Westminster Books on King Street rarely ever sold Space: 1999 books (I only ever recall the Orbit Books' edition of Moon Odyssey being within the cloistered Westminster inventory). A short-lived bookstore in King's Place mall had a few copies of the Pocket Books' edition of Collision Course, which were gone in advance of that book dealer's closure of business. The University Bookstore on the University of New Brunswick campus had, in addition to most all of James Blish's Star Trek books, the first two Space: 1999 Season 2 episode novelisation books in plentiful supply, and I was there to buy one or both of those Season 2 books in the summer of 1980- and in 1981 was eagerly incorporating into my by-then-enormous television-and-movie-based collection of print publications, the Blish Star Trek books. I had in early 1978 placed an order for the Pocket Books' edition of Breakaway (which I had yet to ever see) at Beegie's Bookstore and had entirely forgotten about that order when in the spring of 1980, I arrived home from school one sunny day and found this Space: 1999 book on the kitchen table. My father had been at Beegie's Bookstore to collect it after a Beegie's clerk had telephoned him to report completion of my order.
I eventually found most of the Space: 1999 books, previously used by other people, to replace my disintegrating copies. One exception was the Pocket Books edition of Moon Odyssey, which I was never able to procure from any bookstore, first-hand or second-hand, in Fredericton. The one copy that I ever had of it, bought from Gallivan's Bookstore in Newcastle in spring, 1977, had long ago split into pieces and had been junked. The binding of that particular paperback had been quite weak. Other Space: 1999 books came back into my orbit in near-mint condition, much to my profoundest gratitude! That was by way of routine visits to downtown Fredericton second-hand book dealer, United Book Store. And along with the first few of such findings began, by the end of 1979, a quest to buy books based on any and all of my favourite entertainments. I was purchasing old comic books, too, when some of them caught my notice on the United Book Store shelves. I sought, usually in vain, to acquire the Charlton Comics' Space: 1999 series of both colour comic books and quite elaborate black-and-white illustrated magazines. I found three of the colour comic books in my intensive searches through the varied stacks of comic books at United Book Store, and Tony located one of the black-and-white illustrated magazines at the Book Broker in Saint John, bought it, and sold it to me for twice what he paid for it.
Starlog magazine had fairly regular attention given to Space: 1999, mostly by way of a column called "Gerry Anderson Space Report". The "Many Faces of Maya" article in the Starlog issue that I bought in Chatham in May of 1979, was an incidence of that column. From 1979 through to 1981, I always looked for "Gerry Anderson Space Report" first when I opened the latest issue of Starlog, and it usually, though not always, was about Space: 1999. Still, in the aggregate of printed pages of Starlog, Space: 1999 was very much in the shadow of Star Wars, Star Trek, and whatever current productions of movie or television science fiction/fantasy were garnering interest from science fiction aficionados, or fans, in general. The people to whom Starlog was being marketed. And I would occasionally be subjected to derisive comments in the Starlog letters section from readers who did not fancy Space: 1999.
In 1980, Starlog offered a Space: 1999 Technical Notebook touted as being the definitive guide to Space: 1999. It was advertised on the back cover or in the sale pages of many a Starlog issue. Its outer cover looked very appealing, and the sample blueprint of the stun gun, likewise. It also had a comprehensive episode guide section, the advertisements said. Needless to say, I coveted it- especially during a year (1980) when new Space: 1999 merchandise was so very rare, and the old was vanishing fast, or receding into darkest corners, in stores in both New Brunswick and Maine. It was expensive, and my father was not very eager to purchase it for me, especially through mail order, as that was the only way that it could be acquired. Still, I was able to persuade him. The order was sent. And nothing came. I waited and waited and waited. Nothing. My father was not interested in trying a second time to buy the item, and I had to just "give up" on ever having Starlog Publications' Space: 1999 Technical Notebook in my possession. It was becoming all too normal, the circumstantially frustrating outcomes whenever I wished some substantial reconnect with my favourite space opus.
I tried to replicate the Space: 1999 Technical Notebook with my own handiwork, with some help from my mother. But it was no substitute for the genuine article.
Also to elude me were hardcover books of Space: 1999 episode novelisations. The Fredericton Public Library had all six of the first season episodes novelisations in hardcover format in its stacks. In 1980, I wanted to buy those books, but the library refused to offer them for sale. Many years later, they were gone, presumably sold for a dollar or two in some clearance sale. Not that it would have mattered to me then in any case, for the books had deteriorated way, way below my standards of acceptability. Over the years, I occasionally did go into the library to see if the books were still there and examine their condition. The library also had a "compact cassette" of Space: 1999's first season music released by RCA Records. In summer of 1979, I borrowed that audiotape and made copies of it. Oddly enough, there were two dynamic music tracks on it that did not hail from either of the two seasons of Space: 1999, and I loved those more than the actual Space: 1999 music on that audiotape.
As the decade of the 1970s was nearing its end, I was spending money less and less on toys and more and more on books, in addition to my continuing purchasing of audiotape on which to record my favourite entertainments.
I had been using audiotape to collect television series episodes since 1973. My collecting of movies on audiotape started some while after the move to Fredericton in 1977. The "compact cassette" had been almost entirely the format of audiotape adopted by me for such an acquisitive hobby. And that decision had been mandated in no small part by my parents and by how much money that they were prepared to spend to indulge me in my quest to possess my favourite television shows. "Compact cassette" was the least expensive audiotape format. In my pre-school years, my parents had owned a reel-to-reel audiotape machine. It was, I thought, an impressive piece of equipment, though what ultimately happened to it, I cannot recall. As a result of its presence in our home for the time that it was there, I knew of reel-to-reel audiotape's existence, but it was much more expensive than "compact cassette" and 8-track audiotape. And my parents opted, while we were living in Douglastown, to support an interest by me in collecting audiotape in the "compact cassette" format.
The dependability of the "compact cassette" and of the various brands thereof, was a learned concept for me whilst I was evolving as quite the peculiar audiophile. I had to learn "the hard way" that audiocassettes could be, and all too often were, prone to breakage. Some brands of audiocassette were less likely than others to jam and to un-spool and to crinkle and to snap, but, as I discovered with each year that passed, there was no brand of "compact cassette" that could be guaranteed to have a lasting life. It was a learning process for me as I was collecting, as to which brands- and which lengths- of "compact cassette" were better, less likely to churn a mess of crinkled audiotape out of a machine. Along the way, I lost countless audiocassettes and precious recordings to the ravages of deterioration. Deterioration by sudden and destructive event. The jamming and un-spooling of audiotape. Philips audiocassettes were, I discovered, the least dependable- and I had used them in the audiotape-recording of several Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour episodes. Memorex C-90 and Memorex C-120 were more prone to the usual jamming and un-spooling than the Memorex C-60. Unfortunately, I used many of them for episodes of Space: 1999. Radio Shack Supertape "compact cassette" was likewise rather less than reliable in its C-90 length. It would be agonising to do a tally of how many precious audiotape-recordings were lost to "compact cassette" breakage.
Also, in early 1978, operating still with lack of knowledge about wired-together audiocassette machines yielding superior audiotape-to-audiotape copying, I was going microphone-to-speaker in making copies of audiotape-recordings and had found that ambient noise was lowest in the closed bathroom of our Fredericton home. I combined CBC Television broadcasts of episodes of Space: 1999 for most complete possible renderings of episodes, editing the audiotape-recordings of them on different dates together by copying. I have above remembered doing so with the episode, "War Games", using my audiocassette-recordings of the September 17, 1977 and March 11, 1978 CBC broadcasts of that episode (different scenes cut in the two broadcasts) to achieve a complete episode, though with an inferior, microphone-to-speaker-on-second-generation sound quality. I stupidly erased many of the original recordings and next stupidly junked the second-generation copies when I finally, in June of 1978, attained an impressive, bulky audiocassette deck capable of making an audiotape-to-audiotape copy via a wire connection from another audiotape machine. The results were greatly superior to those old, microphone-to-speaker copies, my increasingly perfectionist tendency went "up a notch", and I started erasing my old copies, foolishly thinking that I would have occasion to audiotape all of those Space: 1999 episodes again from CBC Television broadcast, i.e. that the CBC would not stop airing Space: 1999 anytime soon. In June of 1978, I thought so. Why did I think so? The question is meant to be rhetorical- but I can give the answer. Naivete. Limited experience of the wide, wide world. Naivete and its usual attendant hopeful thinking. Hopeful thinking even in the face of so obviously evident rebuff, by my Fredericton school peers, of that television series called Space: 1999. I wanted to yet believe that my Fredericton peers were not representative of the general population. And that viewership throughout Canada would continue to be sufficient for the CBC to commit to further years of transmission of Space: 1999. When Space: 1999 was cancelled by CBC Television in September of 1978, I had little more than a dozen episode audiotape-recordings remaining. My parents had by then acquired a Hitachi stereo with an audiocassette machine of some considerable dynamic range. Those audiotape-recordings received a sizable number of playings, most particularly in the months following CBC Television's 1978 termination of Space: 1999 airings. And all too many of them did not last for posterity.
Anyway, I persisted with collecting audiocassette-recordings of television shows and movies until Christmas of 1979, when I, frustrated with the recurrent loss of audiotapes and worrying about the future for what I then possessed on audiocassette, asked of my parents to give to me a reel-to-reel audiotape machine. And they did. It was an AKAI machine. AKAI was reportedly the best of all of the manufacturers of reel-to-reel audiotape decks. I began immediately the process of converting the collection of audiotape-recorded television programmes and movies that I then had. Open-reel audiotapes were not easily and inexpensively acquired, but over the course of a number of months, I had enough large spools of reel-to-reel audiotape to contain everything that I held in my personal archive of audiotape-recorded entertainments. That archive expanded as the months passed and I continued audiotape-recording various items. I had many episodes of Cosmos 1999. A couple of surviving audiotape-recordings of Space: 1999 episodes. Destination: Moonbase Alpha. The Return of the Pink Panther and The Pink Panther Strikes Again. All three Bad News Bears movies. The Black Hole. Oh, God!. Three James Bond movies (From Russia With Love, Live and Let Die, and The Spy Who Loved Me). Logan's Run. Earthquake. Some episodes of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. A Star Trek episode, "The Enterprise Incident", audiotape-recorded from television while we were in Toronto in December, 1980. The debut episode of Mork and Mindy from an ABC television network rerun thereof in 1980 (my resentment of Mork and Mindy for it having replaced Space: 1999 on CBC Television, had dissipated by 1980). The opening episode of Battlestar Galactica from an afternoon's telecast of it on Bangor, Maine's WLBZ-TV. The SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back television special. An ABC News Close-Up television special about space exploration. Et cetera. Except for The Black Hole (already mentioned in these memoirs as having been audiotape-recorded at a drive-in theatre), the movies that I had on open-reel audiotape in 1980 and in 1981 were audiotape-recorded from television. Earthquake memorably aired on CHSJ-TV late at night on New Year's Eve in 1980, and I stayed awake to capture the audio of its telecast, which offered the full extended television version of the movie. I thereby had a much more satisfying audiotape-recording of Earthquake than the one that I already had from a June of 1978 CHSJ broadcast, whereupon Earthquake had been shown shorn of almost all of its made-for-television scenes.
Because the reel-to-reel audiotape machine was huge and not portable, I retained "compact cassette" for the audiotape-recording of movies from drive-in theatre audio speakers (as with the audiotape-recording of The Black Hole) and other uses. The reel-to-reel audiotape machine was choppy and awkward when it came to editing; edits were best done on audiocassette, the finalised recording then being transferred to open-reel audiotape. The linking of machines by audio cables minimised "generation loss" in the copying process. The finalised audiotape-recordings of movies often fit perfectly on one side of a large open-reel audiotape, and I put another movie on the "flip side" of the same reel-to-reel audiotape, having "double-features", with me labelling the audiotape box to that effect.
I had the reel-to-reel audiotape machine until mid-1982, using it to capture the sounds of a few episodes of Spiderman aired on television in March and April of 1982. Those were the last audiotape-recordings that I chose to make.
Before advancing to the collecting of RCA VideoDisc in fourth quarter of 1981 and subsequently to collecting videocassettes starting in second quarter of 1982, audiotape and books were how I satisfied my acquisitive nature as regards my favourite entertainments. My room (and sometimes the den adjacent to my room) was filled with audiotapes and books, and the reel-to-reel audiotape machine towered over my bed.
Tony and I together used to ride the bus to the downtown and the mall districts of Fredericton to buy whatever books of interest that we could find. In the summer of 1980, we were avidly absorbing the Beegie's and Coles supply of Star Trek Photonovels, collecting all 12 of them. When my Douglastown era best friend, Michael, was visiting me in July of 1980, I was with him on a Saturday at Beegie's in the Fredericton Mall, buying the Photonovel of the episode, "Metamorphosis", and eyeing intently that of "All Our Yesterdays", for which I parted with my money after Michael left on his bus for Newcastle in the Miramichi area and thence for Toronto. The last time that I ever saw Michael, I was thinking more of buying a book than I was of an again impending separation from my best friend of more than five years. I cannot blame him for resenting that, if maybe he does. Even if as a buddy duo he and I were not any longer compatible in outlook, interests, or disposition, and were during almost the entirety of that visit in disagreement and discord.
Michael was still largely an easy-going extrovert, but he had, in his time in Toronto, evidently lost some of his capacity for unconditional acceptance, one of the essential elements for successful rapport with me. I was, I regret to say, as egocentric in 1980 as I had been in Douglastown. No less so, but really no more so. Being a pal to me had not been difficult for Michael in the past, but Michael and I had been apart for quite a long time, and our interests and points of view had differentiated, and with the willingness on his part to accommodate himself to me having seemed to decline somewhat, it was, I suppose, inevitable that relations would sour during his stay with me in 1980. He was critical of several things about me, such as habits and interests that did not match his conception of what was sufficiently trendy to be "correct". And as at school in Fredericton, I tended to withdraw to my interests when I was being criticised for not conforming to the standards and expectations of others. My resultant retiring behaviour during Michael's stay certainly did not help matters.
I was never, not even in Douglastown, responsive to a criticising kind of approach. Not from anyone. And for Michael's stay with me in 1980, I wanted to go about my life as it was then, with Michael accompanying me in the same unconditional way as he did once upon a time. But such just was not going to happen. To the stores for books I went with Michael my reluctant and impatient companion. And to the Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 we two walked for a Friday matinee viewing of The Empire Strikes Back- my second occasion at seeing that awesome stretch of celluloid, and Michael's first- and he was underwhelmed by the movie, most particularly by its ending. I remember Michael's 1980 visit vividly throughout, from the Thursday evening at the S.M.T. bus depot during which my mother and I received Michael at that location for a subsequent dinner at the Nashwaaksis McDonald's at which he was speaking with praises for his new life in Toronto, to the Friday of the Empire Strikes Back comic book adaptation in paperback format that I bought from the Pic N' Puff store and the Empire Strikes Back matinee, to the Saturday of the Fredericton Transit bus ride to Beegie's Bookstore and a Star Trek Photonovel, to a Sunday during which Michael's boredom with me and criticism of me reached a summit, to the less than auspicious departure. In retrospect, I can see how my tendency toward "bookish" ways and progressively more enamoured and weird otherworldly fascinations had become alienating for him. But also, he was not totally the Michael I used to know, and that was disaffecting for me. And I lacked understanding of his perspective and interpreted his reaction to me as a growing, unshaking, imperative hostility, as his acceptance of and friendliness toward me gone.
I allowed communication with Michael to lapse after that. It was, I believe, my turn to write a letter, and I procrastinated in doing so. My procrastination continued indefinitely, as I consistently could not find in myself the will to sit and write a letter to my estranged friend. My disaffection with him from his last stay with me and my lack of understanding of his perspective on that stay just did not allow for that. Plus, I had no experience in writing a letter to an estranged friend, no knowledge in how to begin to compose one. And I would need to do a quite large amount of pride-swallowing to make a start on such a letter, and that was too tall an order for me then, and for a long time. Michael did not write to me to enquire as to my intentions. And we were hence essentially incommunicado. I was in Toronto with my parents in December of that year, 1980, and declined while there to telephone or visit Michael. In 1988, I tried to reestablish contact with my earliest best buddy but received something of a critical rebuff. All of this having been said, fact is that Michael was a profoundly appreciated presence in many of the best, and several of the most formative, years of my life. He is vital to the overall impression of my Douglastown years, the whole of Era 2, as being very positive. No matter what happened to him and to our friendship, I will cherish always the myriad of excellent times that I spent with him. I still have dreams in which I have a reunion with him, in Douglastown, of course, and within the house that he used to inhabit. But such an event must forever remain the stuff of dreams, for Michael in 1988 told to me in no uncertain terms that he would never return to New Brunswick.
Now would seem as suitable a time as any, to do an enumeration and description of my Fredericton friends.
Before I proceed in doing so, I must state that in describing my Fredericton friends, I am not always gushing with compliment. In order to elaborate fully on why friendship in Fredericton was, for me, not disposed to be stable, lasting, free from tribulation or alienation, on why there was an all-too-general lack of consistency and permanence in my Fredericton friendships, I do sometimes have to write frankly about my erstwhile friends, in telling how impactful their ways and their words or actions were to me and to my friendship to them. I am not writing from a "high horse" of perfection and righteousness. Quite the contrary. I am more critical of myself than I am of any friend. And it must be said that I am not passing judgement for all time on any of these people. They were minors, as was I. We were children in the process of growing our personas and learning along the way the rights and wrongs of life. They may be quite different people as adults. But things happened the way that they did, certain friends (especially those based only or primarily in this life era) were not compatible with me when it came to interests, tastes, perspectives, modes of sociability, et cetera. I found myself gravitating toward some friends and away from others, and sometimes individuals not my friends would contribute to division between my friends and I. These things have to be addressed, for my social situation in Fredericton to be delineated in all eras, and in all years, months, weeks, and days within eras.
David B., two years younger than myself, in Grade 4 when I was in Grade 6 (1977-8), was the first friend I was to find in Fredericton, after close to three lonely months in the environs of my neighbourhood and school. One late autumn day in 1977, I was descending the stairwell inside the Park Street School's two-storey wing's entrance when I passed David B., who expressed approval of the Alpha Moonbase Space: 1999 badge (that I had received as a mail order bonus item for the Moonbase toy assembly model that I had bought from a Fredericton Mall store called Cardinal on November 5, 1977) on my blue autumn-winter jacket (similar to those worn by the Space: 1999 characters in the "Death's Other Dominion" ice planet episode) that I was wearing that day. He said that he was a keen admirer of that television show, a television show that had few, very few, enthusiasts in Fredericton, my experience so far had depressingly told.
It was on the Wednesday between the CBC's Saturday broadcasts of Space: 1999's "Earthbound" and "End of Eternity" episodes, that I again met David B.. Wednesday afternoons were school half-holidays for Park Street Elementary pupils, and on that particular Wednesday, November 23, 1977, at around 2:30 P.M., I was leaving my house for a walk to the Pic N' Puff store, when I encountered David B., who was riding his motocross bicycle. He convinced me to cancel my walk and to accompany him to his house, which was on the other side of my street at a two o'clock angle to my front door. David's house was the largest, most distinctive construction on my street of otherwise mainly cookie-cutter architecture. His house had two floors plus a basement, a sprawling living room area, and a two-car garage, and in his upstairs bedroom, sitting in glory on a shelf was the Mattel, 2-foot-long Space: 1999 Eagle spaceship that I coveted so very much! David B. was the second person I knew who had that magnificent toy, Sandy in Millbank adjacent Douglastown having been the first. Also in David's jealously guarded possession was the Mattel Commander Koenig doll that I had as yet been unable to procure from any department or toy store in the Miramichi or Fredericton areas, a compelling Charlton Comics' magazine adaptation in black and white of "The Metamorph" episode of Space: 1999's second season, and colour comic books, vinyl records, and other items.
In David's basement were more impressive space toys and, in the Battlestar Galactica days, a large box that David turned into a sit-in Land-ram. He was the first on my street to have the then-rare Jawa Star Wars action figure, complete with a cloth robe.
David B.'s parents had an abundance of money, hence their ability to own such a large house on a school-neighbouring street in a suburban community. In his family, David was the youngest of two children. His older sister was named Rhonda. He was dark-haired and had greyish-brown eyes, his build average. David B. was almost immaculately groomed, with his clothes, even his jeans, giving the appearance of selective style. A higher standard of dress than most of the children in our surroundings. David's personality was distinctly outgoing, though he could alternate between being cosy or cavalier. When David B. was with someone he approved of and liked, he could be noticeably excited, his words piling over one another in a haste to eloquently express himself in a sophisticated manner. He had a habit of using mismatched expressions like, "For crying Pete's sake," and of arranging our pretend play-games of Space: 1999 situations so that he was in the role of every dominant male character, leaving me to be the eccentric, egghead, and rather fey Bergman, the brainy computer genius, Kano, and the female characters. I was none pleased with being routinely subservient to a younger person- or anyone for that matter, but I was desperate for companionship and acceptance, and my parents encouraged me to cultivate friendship with David.
During the remainder of 1977 and early 1978 were some patience-straining moments. I remember falling flat on my back in the foyer of my house one day after school while I came into my doorway and my wet-snow-covered boots slid on the floor as I was rushing to answer the telephone, the person on the other end of the receiver being David, who had seen me arriving home and had not given to me enough time to properly secure myself indoors and remove all outdoor garments, before he initiated the ringing of my telephone. He would, as he bit devouringly into the orange Popsicle that I gave to him, tell of the negative things that others at school were supposedly saying about me. He was adamant that I scarcely touch any of his impressive toys and printed media, while he had not that much reverence for my possessions. Playing the Star Wars Escape From Death Star board game in my living room one Wednesday afternoon, he gloated over his winning outcome, provoking an angry reaction from me. And come baseball season, spring of 1978, I learned how abrasively competitive he was when on an opposing team. He could at other times be possessive of me to an extent that, in his case, I found to be more disconcerting than flattering.
David was not popular then among his same-age peers, but neither was I with mine. Through David, I did become acquainted with my next-door neighbour, young, hyperactive Mike J., and a fellow Linden Crescent inhabitant, Tony, whose house on the opposite side of the street was at a ten o'clock angle from my door and who liked to berate David at every opportunity but who still called upon David to play baseball- and me along with him. David and I followed the CBC broadcasts of Space: 1999's first season of episodes through December, 1977 and the winter and spring of 1978. He had already seen every first season episode in the 1975-6 television year, by way of cable television in Fredericton, while I, then living in Douglastown, had been almost utterly deprived of Space: 1999 until the CBC began its national run of the television show with Season 2 in 1976-7. David liked to tantalise me with his knowledge of episodes that I had yet to see. He held Season 2 in contempt and was unwilling to hear my accolades for it. He even refused, when we were playing Space: 1999, to allow me to use the first names of characters as the Season 2 Moonbase Alphans did, preferring the more formal first season forms of personal address. In 1978, David paired with his next-door neighbour, Eric, as the two of them, pretending to be the motorcycle constables of television's CHiPs, rode their identical motocross bicycles on the section of our street in front of my house. Eric quickly became David's best friend. Their fathers, too, were best friends. My friendship with David was not long for the world as I wearied of David's social style and as I became closer and closer with Tony, whose antipathy toward David kept growing, and as David and Eric and Mike J. all connected in 1979 with a nemesis of mine, name of Andre, who that year moved into a house on Linden Crescent. David has the distinction of being my one Fredericton associate ever to meet one of my Douglastown pals, when Michael visited me in Fredericton in late July of 1978 for a number of days (him having come from Douglastown to Fredericton on a S.M.T. bus as I have previously remembered). I remember being rather apprehensive at how easily David and Michael became friendly with each other, but that was toward the end of Michael's visit and was the only time that Michael and David interacted. By the time of Michael's second stay with me in Fredericton for part of July, 1980, David and I were not on speaking terms. In adult years, David and I have been cordial to each other when our paths have crossed. We did not constitute good friends as boys, as things transpired. But as men, we can be quite friendly acquaintances.
Eric was more a friend of a friend (David B.) than my friend in the strictest sense. For awhile very early in the summer of 1979, he was together with myself and Tony, and Tony's inordinate attention toward him was problematical for me. But that was a transitory situation while David B. was away somewhere. Eric and I seldom were together as a twosome; we were, in 1978 and early 1979, part of the larger Linden Crescent group of boys. Eric was, like David, two years my junior. He lived next door to David, at an almost 3 o'clock angle to my front door. He dwelt in the only other really impressively designed house on the street, with a two-storey construction, a basement, and large garage. Eric was mechanically minded and quite the pragmatist. Television and movies had scant intrinsic, imagination-stimulating or aesthetic value to him. They were momentary entertainment with which to pass the time or alleviate boredom. Eric was more interested in carpentry, motor mechanics, bicycles, and basketball and baseball. He was scathingly critical of what he called my excessive and predictable choices of conversation topics, i.e. Space: 1999 and most science fiction television programmes and movies, the disaster film, Earthquake (of which I had an audiotape-recording from a late-night showing on CHSJ in June, 1978), et cetera. But I do recall a day or two that he and I spent together in the 1978 summer being rather enjoyable for the novelty of it. I found him one morning working on some carpentry project in his backyard, approached him, and talked with him for more than an hour, and he was instrumental in helping me to transform my basement into a make-believe hotel in 1978. Eric had rusty brown hair, dark eyes, and an average build, though slightly taller than David. He, like his older sister, was bowlegged, most obviously when he wore shorts. I used to wonder how he was able to withstand what I thought was quite painful posture. I do not know why I remember this, but I was with the other boys in Eric's basement one Saturday afternoon late in 1978 when Eric used the head of his Artoo-Detoo Star Wars action figure as a nose picker. I was never under any illusions that Eric's first allegiances were not to David, and when the relationship between David and I became strained, so too was that between Eric and myself. Eric was somewhat captivated by my sworn enemy, Andre, and he joined Andre in invalidating me from a distance at every opportunity. One sunny Saturday morning in 1980, Eric and Mike J. threw a firecracker at me at close range with no warning as they sped past me on their bicycles, thinking the deed to be funny. From where I was standing, it was anything but. By the autumn of 1979, there was not much good will left between Eric and I, and I honestly did not feel much of a sense of loss for that, though I was annoyed that Andre had something of an enticing hold over him. In 1984, while I was in Grade 12 and he was in Grade 10 at Fredericton High School, Eric sat next to me on the afternoon school bus once or twice, but no words were spoken.
I would add that when Eric did verbally lash me for talking about Space: 1999, Earthquake, et cetera, for the excess and the predictability of my conversation about such subjects, not once did any of the others with us come to my defence, saying, "Lay off of Kevin. If he wants to talk about Space: 1999 or whatever, let him. He enjoys talking about those things. Let him talk about them." Lacking anyone in vocal support of me, I would yield to Eric's criticism. I broached the subject of Space: 1999, or whatever else, sparingly. And, when David B. was present, I refrained from talk of Season 2 Space: 1999. This was not a tenable situation for me come 1979 and the return of Cosmos 1999 to Canadian television, starting with a French-language run of Season 2 Space: 1999. I could no longer curtail to any degree my enthusiasm for and desire to talk about my favourite television show while in company of friends in and around my home, and I was no longer going to try to do so. If Eric or David or anyone else found such to be intolerable, then best we be no longer together. We started quarrelling. Eric threw a clam at me one day in summer of 1979. And then Andre moved into a house on our street, and I have said above what then came to pass.
Mike J. was my next-door neighbour, younger than me by four years and two years the junior of the other dominant boys on my section of Linden Crescent. He was hyperactive (with all of us restricting his access to our valued toys and other destructible materials), very impulsive, and aggressive at times, but was usually a happy-go-lucky personality type. He was quite like Eric in primary interests but had more of an accepting taste for the space science fiction/fantasies that I enjoyed. I remember playing with Star Wars action figures with him on his back steps. He invited me to his upstairs room once to show me his large collection of Mad magazines and comic books, nearly all of them missing their covers. And on the evening of a power failure in the chilly autumn of 1979, he invited me, along with my cat, Frosty, over to his place for the duration of the blackout while my mother was away for most of that evening. I liked Mike J., though I did distance myself from him for the most part, mindful as I was of his frequently manic disposition and potentially destructive impulsivity. He accompanied me to my first ever viewing of a James Bond movie, Moonraker, on a Saturday matinee at Fredericton's Gaiety Theatre in early August of 1979, while Tony was preoccupied entertaining a cousin to my complete exclusion. Mike had a slightly thinner than average build and was a fountain of energy. He wore long, blond hair underneath baseball hats, and during games of hide-and-go-seek, it could be difficult at a distance to determine whether I was looking at Mike J. or my later best friend, Joey, whenever I was "it" at home base (my chimney or that of my other next-door neighbours, the LeBlancs, usually). Mike frequently diverged from us, to be with Craig, one of Mike's school peers and who lived up the street, Linden Crescent West. I knew Craig through Mike but did not establish any kind of relationship with Craig until 1982, after Mike had moved away. Mike's affinity for Andre was as "off-turning" to me as was David B.'s and Eric's connection to the enemy mine, and Mike and I were less and less cordial most days as a result but still occasionally pals. He was never one to hold a grudge, and I think he found my intolerant conduct where Andre and others' loyalty to Andre was concerned, to be puzzling. Mike was the youngest of three children in his family, and they moved out of Fredericton in 1980, resettling in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.A.. Mike visited our neighbourhood for a week or so in the summer of 1982, and thereafter I never saw him again.
And now, my best friend from 1978 to 1982, Tony.
I met Tony in the yard of Park Street School during recess late in the winter of the 1977-8 school year David B. introduced me to Tony, who was enthusiastic to a notably significant extent about Star Trek and Star Wars. A recognisably avid interest in television programmes and theatrical films set in outer space was most certainly cause for me to regard Tony as potential friend material. I was quick to discover that Tony and David B. were not best of pals. They were Grade 4 classmates and both lived on Linden Crescent, but while that meant that they were acquainted with each other, it was not necessarily conducive to friendship. Tony at his age at that time had quite the witty repartee, and was not afraid to express his dislike for people whom he regarded to be self-inflated or having a domineering, dependent, and very tactile approach to courting friendship. Tony routinely liked to dismiss and berate David, always with a droll choice of invalidating words. David's mother intensely disliked Tony and was not afraid to call him a disturber of a certain unmentionable substance, and there was certainly no affection in Tony for David as a result of that. Tony was also inclined to nickname other people, like young Mike J., whom he called "Jinx", no doubt because of Mike's hyperactivity resulting in some toy damage, though in most cases around that time (1978), Tony's wittily critical manner seemed harmless, intended with affinity. With regard to people he liked, at least. I found Tony's intensive interest in imaginative outer space adventure and his confident, social quipster personality to be rather appealing, and in the spring months of 1978, as Tony orchestrated a series of baseball games, that included me, in the vacant lots along Maple Street behind the houses on the southern part of Linden Crescent, I gravitated to Tony and away from David, whose cause was scarcely helped by David casting aspersions upon my admittedly then-still-tenuous ability to play baseball. And my angry retorts to David in these instances evidently impressed Tony. By June of 1978, Tony was telephoning me to meet out of doors and talk, including one rainy evening in June when Tony and I were wandering around the concrete area alongside Park Street School's eastern end, talking about a variety of shared tastes and interests. On a sunny Saturday morning, Tony and I were teammates, just the two of us, in a Maple Street vacant lot baseball game, and we won, to our shared elation. And Tony and I, though being in different grades, were on the same team, partners in fact, during the school track-and-field day on the morning of June 21, 1978.
I ought to qualify that Tony's primary "selling point" for me as a friend was his distinctly intensive interest in imaginative outer space opuses, and his social quipster personality was less a factor, a secondary one, in my rapport with him. Among my four earliest Fredericton friends, and everyone I was encountering at school in Fredericton, Tony was the one person in my new surroundings to appreciate works of the imagination with the same sort of approach and in the same manner as I. Considered. Everything in a work and in the making of a work as a sound basis for conversation at length. Not restrictive in what could be talked-about vis-a-vis imaginative entertainment. I derived comfort from that, in a new habitat wherein I was not at ease, and not in my league, as it were. Eric and Mike J. just did not give thought as I did to entertainment. Eric could "cut me down" for delving too much, by his reckoning, into one of my favourite subjects for which he did not have much, or any, affinity. Mike J. was accepting of the entertainments that I fancied and would have some fun and frivolity with them, but was not conversant at length in them or in their appreciation. And David B. had a "take-no-prisoners" approach. One had to go along with him in his closed mind about certain things, and allow him to be the prevailing one in all discourse. No alternative would be allowed. And David's contempt for Season 2 Space: 1999 and his expectation that I keep silent on that subject, did "rub me the wrong way". How could it do otherwise? Especially during my reunion with Season 2 Space: 1999 through its French-language version, in 1979?
I would add that Tony's social quipster personality was transitory. As time passed, it metamorphosed. First into a rather less witty way of being critical, hyper-critical, of people. And from there, a more and more reserved approach to expressing opinion on people's ways. I will say that the changes were gradual. Not at all sudden. I would not hazard a guess as to what brought about the changes. I was not privy to very much of Tony's experiences in classrooms, my never being with him therein, and for most of his life within the walls of his houses and his interactions with his parents and his brother I was not present with him. I will say that Tony never was effusive in expressing his appreciation for someone, or something. In this regard, there was always a reservedness about him. Oh, Tony would have enthusiasm for the latest space movie, certainly, but not effervescently so. His was a restrained enthusiasm. Restrained, though in some cases still quite substantial, quite intensive. Expressed through possessions, or through quiet wearing of something alluding to his enthusiasm, rather than through passionate conversation, or expressive countenance and/or body language. Tony would talk at length about his interests, keeping emotion very much in check throughout his verbalisation. Something caused reservedness to rise to become his dominant personality trait as he advanced through his adolescence. By mid-1982, Tony had arrived at his fully reserved persona. And would retain it for the remainder of the time of our knowing each other. In his relationship with me, Tony's reservedness was definitely at its summit by mid-1982, his inclination even to come to my place for a social visit reducing dramatically. He had already stopped telephoning me. And his saying my name was a thing of the past by then.
Tony's mother was a real estate agent, and his father a supplier of groceries for supermarket chains in Atlantic Canada. Most of Tony's extended family lived in the city of Saint John, sixty miles south of Fredericton.
The summer of 1978 was one of group dynamics and for the most part good fun among myself, Tony, David, Eric, and Mike J.. We were a reasonably functional social unit that summer, differences though there were between pairs of us. Tony and David. Me and Eric. Me and David. Functional our social unit was for games of baseball. For playing of guns, Battlestar Galactica, and sometimes, sometimes, Space: 1999 (first season of it). For the club and hotel transformations of my basement. For David's birthday party. And for "hanging out" at my place or on David's front steps. Yes, the summer of 1978 was, by and large, a fun one because of the functionality of that social unit. In the autumn and winter that were to follow, increasingly cold weather pushed us more and more toward indoor socialising, and over the course of those months our social unit was splintering into twosomes, Tony and I forming one such. And by early 1979, there was no doubt that Tony was my best friend, as we followed the Sunday night travels and tribulations of television's Battlestar Galactica and the Monday night French-language broadcast of Cosmos 1999, and as we collected and played with Star Wars action figures and other space toys, in addition to the cardboard sit-in Star Wars X-Wing Fighters and Viper Battlestar Galactica fighters that Tony and his brother, Steven, had constructed in their basement.
It was on a late-1978 weekday afternoon that Tony contacted me on the telephone and invited me to go with him to see The Cat From Outer Space, which was being screened at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2, and we went together that evening to said cinema to view that movie, a Walt Disney Productions offering about an extraterrestrial feline on Earth. And thereafter, Tony and I would go to theatres together to see many a movie. Godzilla Vs. Megalon, with a matinee at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, also with a Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 matinee. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (on a Saturday, April 14, 1979 evening film projection at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2). Starcrash (on a Saturday afternoon screening at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2). The Muppet Movie (Mike J. accompanied us to see that at the Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 on a weekday afternoon in early August of 1979). Star Wars (offered by the Plaza Cinema 1 on its 1979 re-release). Meteor (with a Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 Saturday matinee). The Black Hole (Tony's brother, Steven, was with us to see that one at Plaza Cinema 1). The Empire Strikes Back (on its opening night at Nashwaaksis Cinema 1). Flash Gordon (with a Saturday matinee at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 and with Steven and some of his friends with us). Hangar 18 and Outland (my mother accompanied us to see those at Plaza Cinema 1). The Final Countdown (a matinee at the Gaiety Theatre was how we saw that movie, a time-travel yarn involving a 1980 aircraft carrier thrown back in time to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941). Superman II (at the Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 on an evening showing on its opening night there). For Your Eyes Only (as an early-summer weekday matinee at Plaza Cinema 1). The Great Muppet Caper (as a Nashwaaksis Cinema 1 matinee) . Condorman (some fluffy Disney fare at Plaza Cinema 2). Under the Rainbow (a lacklustre and forgettable comedy at Plaza Cinema 2 starring Carrie Fisher, who was Princess Leia in Star Wars, Chevy Chase, and many midgets). Several vintage James Bond movies shown as matinees at the Gaiety Theatre. Numerous others. We encountered each other at a theatre, subsequently sitting together for a movie viewing, on a few other occasions. A Gaiety Theatre 1981 Sunday matinee of Battlestar Galactica. Time Bandits on a Sunday matinee at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 in January of 1982. The Trail of the Pink Panther at Plaza Cinema 1 with a matinee screening there in late 1982. Our days of seeing movies together at theatres came to an end in 1982.
After we saw Under the Rainbow together late in 1981's summer, there was nothing in theatres of interest to us for the remainder of 1981. And after that, we were only ever together in a cinema if we just happened to go there separately for the same movie showing, i.e. the showings of Time Bandits and The Trail of the Pink Panther.
In addition to my times at the movie theatre with Tony, there were, in this, my third life era, a number of movie-viewing experiences in which I was unaccompanied. I entered the Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 by myself to see The Bad News Bears Go to Japan in August of 1978, as previously mentioned. As, too, did I for my first viewing of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (when I saw it with Tony, that was my second experiencing of it), Star Trek- The Motion Picture, Battle Beyond the Stars, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, and my second seeing of Moonraker, which had a re-release to theatres in 1980, and for its re-release it was projected onto the screen of Nashwaaksis Cinema 2. I saw The Bad News Bears Go to Japan and Star Trek- The Motion Picture at matinee screenings thereof; it was in evening hours that I cast my eyes upon the Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 screen for the other films mentioned in the previous sentence. Through Gaiety Theatre matinees for vintage films, I saw, unaccompanied, such movies as Shane and Thunderbirds Are Go. Thunderbirds Are Go at the Gaiety marked my first experience in a movie- or television-show-viewing with the pre-Space: 1999 puppet productions of Gerry Anderson. I had discovered the existence of such puppet work in an article in Fantastic Films magazine and had been curious to see some of it on a screen. And on seeing it in Thunderbirds Are Go, I was rather unimpressed, though that movie involving a trek to another world was interesting enough to hold my attention for its full running time. I saw several movies by myself at the Plaza Cinemas in this life era and the next. And some others with my parents with me. Without a doubt, the era of my life in which I spent the most time in a movie theatre, was this one, Era 3. It was a halcyon time for imaginative cimema, the late 1970s and early 1980s, between the first circulations to theatres of Star Wars and those of Star Wars' first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, and a year or two after that. Most especially movies set in outer space or on alien worlds. My favourite kind of movie, most definitely. And that of Tony, too. My inclination to go to movie theatres waned as I, in 1982, began a videotape collection and was henceforth prioritising my monies in the financing of that, and as new fantastic happenings on film started becoming fewer and farther between. And Tony and I did not go together to movies anymore, even when there was a movie set in space being screened.
A constant of these friends of mine of my early Fredericton years, David B., Eric, Mike J., and Tony, and a positive one, very much so, is that they were not speakers of profanity. And that, in Fredericton, in their age groups as in mine, was rare. Exceedingly rare. I will never forget walking the yard of Park Street School when I was in Grade 6 and every day hearing profanity issuing from the lips of the multitudes of children of various grades at the school. Whatever differences that these friends and I may have had in the span of time that we constituted friends, it was of no small comfort to me to know that they would not fling profane four-letter words in my direction, even if they were not on side with me on some particular subject of conversation or some project decision or how some game being played was going. I was especially impressed with Tony's restraint when he was in sudden physical pain. Not even then did Tony use the four-letter word starting with f, or say a profane word for bodily emission, or use the Lord's name in vain. He never cursed. He never swore. And I admire that. Very, very much. I cannot say that I am as in control of myself at times of sudden physical pain, or when I fall to the ground whether the fall is painful or not. Whether or not there is any injury. I never use the four-letter word beginning with f (I despise that word), but I do say the Lord's name in vain before the word, damn, or the name of the Son of God. Usually on reflex. Not with deliberation. And quite loudly. One of my failings, for sure.
Tony was somewhat on the heavier side of the weight scale. Although he played sports like baseball, he tended to keep running to a minimum. He was a connoisseur of popular entrees and enjoyed heaps of butter on his mashed potatoes and corn on the cob, and almost always had greasy bacon for breakfast. And his family extensively frequented fast food establishments. I, too, was a lover of fatty foods and none too athletic, but I ate smaller servings and my metabolism was such that it did not lead to weight gain. Quite the opposite, in fact. Anyone looking at Tony and myself was apt to remark at how different we were in physical appearance. Not entirely different, though, as we both had brown hair and blue eyes.
Tony liked to wear T-shirts with Star Wars visualisations on them, and his other choices of clothing were what was in style. He had not known much about Space: 1999 prior to meeting me but was intent upon seeing every episode that this television opus had to offer, including the ones about which I spoke most highly. Tony did tend to choose me first and foremost when he wanted someone with whom to see the latest movie spectacular, although I was more than a little upset when he occasionally invited someone else, a same-age classmate, to accompany him, and it has to be said that Tony could be rather dismissive of me when others were with us. And he was apt to recoil from me if I complained about that or was the least bit possessive in word or deed. Such conduct was, after all, symptomatic of the kind of person Tony hated. There was a distinct imbalance in the dependency department as I was more reliant on Tony than he evidently was upon me, though there was really little doubt that I was Tony's first choice of companion as he began his socialising in his leisure hours. During February to April of 1979, Tony's family had to dwell at the Keddy's Motor Inn on Fredericton's south side because a chimney fire had rendered their Linden Crescent home uninhabitable until such time that it could be repaired, and every day after school, Tony came to visit with me before his mother would collect him, along with his brother who was visiting friends of his own, before supper. My affinity for Tony by the spring and summer of 1979 was supreme. I delivered a welcome home card to him, signed by various people in our neighbourhood, when his family returned to their restored home early in April. That spring, Tony rode his bicycle to Nashwaaksis Junior High School daily to meet me there and conduct me speedily to home, with me doubling on the back of the bicycle. We compared collections of bubble gum cards relating to Star Wars, Superman, Battlestar Galactica, Space: 1999 (from surprise bags sold at the Pic N' Puff store), and later The Empire Strikes Back, and both amassed huge numbers of books and magazines based on movies and television shows of our fancy, while continuing to go to see whatever new, and not so new, movies were playing at the Fredericton cinemas.
Tony had not seen the Space: 1999 episode, "Dragon's Domain", on any of its CBC and CHSJ-TV broadcasts. His only knowledge of it was from an audiotape-recording of it in my possession, some pictures of it, and its novelisation in the book, Astral Quest. And of course my memories and impressions. Tony's desire to see it contributed to my growing longing to see it again, and to eventually possess it on videotape. It proved to be still more elusive, and the more elusive that it was, the greater my interest in it and my yearning to see it and to and have it. We both hoped to see it in French in the 1979 run of Cosmos 1999, and it did not air that year on Radio-Canada until months after CBAFT opted to cease transmitting the Cosmos 1999 television series in Canada's eastern Maritimes. December 5, 1979. That was the day that year that "Le Domaine du Dragon" was telecast on Radio-Canada on Quebec television stations and in other places to the west of Quebec. Tony had seen little of Space: 1999, in English or French, between 1976 and 1978, and when he was watching Cosmos 1999 in 1979 (he intently viewed almost every CBAFT broadcast of Cosmos 1999 that year), most of the episodes that he saw were totally new to him. And much as he wished to see "Dragon's Domain", Space: 1999 was not his favourite opus of imagination. Star Wars had that distinction. First and foremost, Tony was "into" Star Wars. One day, he quietly printed, with an ink pen, the two-word title to his favourite work, on the right leg of his blue jeans. Star Trek would have been the "runner-up", I think. And Space: 1999 would be in third place, tied, possibly, with Battlestar Galactica (or some of it), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Black Hole, and Alien.
As close as Tony and I were, he drew a sharp line when it came to going out on a limb for me. If I was being verbally accosted by somebody, Tony would hold his ground and his tongue, and if I was at all upset by what had transpired, as I usually was, Tony was not interested in listening to my laments. Tony's inclination to label and outright reject people became rampant by 1980, and he maintained what he called a "queer list", which was as long as Bugs Bunny's nephew's Christmas wish list in a Bugs Bunny's Looney Christmas Tales cartoon in which the Tasmanian Devil was in Santa's attire. Anyone (including fictional characters like Professor Bergman in Space: 1999) whom Tony thought had a fey, prissy, overbearing, domineering, clinging, tactile, and/or overly affectionate disposition was instantly on the list- and I always had to be careful that I did not qualify for the dubious distinction of being added to it. Tony's father thought me to be unsuitable as Tony's best buddy in any case and was always auditioning new people for Tony to befriend. To Tony's credit, he always returned to me, though I was always in a kind of disconcerting limbo for the time that Tony was with those other people. And to this I have to add a prolonged visit by Tony's cousin, Gary, in the summer of 1979, during which Tony was to have no contact whatsoever with me. Even so, Tony was my constant best friend from late 1978 until mid-1982, although as early as the autumn of 1981, I was becoming more and more interested in a new potential best friend, name of Joey, whom I had known since June of 1979.
Tony's brother, Steven, was exactly four years junior to Tony. Both of them were, in fact, born on leap year days, a rarity that merited to them media attention nearly every time that we were in a leap year. Steven shared Tony's enjoyment of fatty foods in quite generous portion, and had his own particular taste for canned pastas like Alpha-Getti. Like myself, Steven was fond of soft drinks, and by all accounts he drank whole 2-litre bottles of them within one or two days. Steven's weight, unlike Tony's, was average, possibly because Steven had more of an energetic physicality about him, but his high-fat, high-sugar diet led to the discovery, when he was thirteen years of age, that he had a full-fledged diabetic condition. And he began having insulin injections. Steven had brown hair, like Tony, but his hair, unlike Tony's, was curly. He had a vertical scar on his centre forehead, the legacy of an early childhood accident. In the early years that I knew him, Steven was submissive and quiet, following Tony around and attracting unfavourable comments from me and others for dropping his bubble gum in the sand and immediately putting said gum back in his mouth, and for wearing baseball hats bearing the emblem of Canada's then-perennial losers, the Toronto Blue Jays. In 1980 and early 1981, Steven became quite infatuated with me, much to Tony's oft-spoken annoyance. But it was a phase through which Steven passed quickly, and by the fourth quarter of 1981, Steven was a leader among his age group, and he was best friends with a boy on Woodmount Drive, which ran parallel to Linden Crescent East and to which Tony and Steven relocated in July, 1980 (they had lived on Linden Crescent until then). Steven's new best pal was very irreverent toward me, and it was not long before Steven's regard for me turned into a grudging tolerance as long as I did not irritate too much by my rivalling presence as a neighbourhood leader, in games and in the presenting at my home of VideoDisc/videotape shows. I remember in spring of 1982 being subjected to regular verbal abuse by Steven and his new best friend whenever I would come to see Tony, who was playing with Steven and with several of Steven's associates, in their (Tony and Steven's) backyard. One day, a Friday, in June of 1982, I reacted to such abuse with a stinging, heated rebuke, after which I immediately departed for home. The verbal assaults subsided for awhile, but under certain conditions, like the competition of baseball games, they were revived with intensity. And my soon-to-be-best friendship with Joey (whom Steven never really liked) in the early 1980s did, I believe, contribute to Steven's diminished esteem for me. Toward the end of the 1980s, however, Steven turned into a very nice young man, more outgoing than Tony, and was friendlier and more inclusive toward me than was Tony in the early 1990s.
In June of 1979, I became acquainted with Joey, a younger fellow who had just moved into a house very near the top of Linden Crescent's eastern side. We two met one evening when Joey was among a group of boisterous youngsters having fun near a rock in the front yard of a house at the turn of Linden Crescent from flat to inclined road. By 1982, Joey would be my best friend, and remain so for five eventful and highly cherished years.
Joey was the most dynamic friend that I have ever had. There is no simple way to describe him. He could be easy-going or rather intense from day to day. He was six years younger than me, and yet in some ways, e.g. technical matters, more knowledgeable. He could disassemble and reassemble a bicycle without any assistance required. His Caucasian skin was slightly dark and tanned quickly in the summers. His light brown hair, which he liked to wear long and straight, flowed like golden rays of light from under his baseball hats. From his grey-blue eyes could come the most piercing stare. There was a wrinkle under one of his eyes that apparently came from squinting, which he did frequently. I also remember his wearing an eye patch during the first year (1979-80) that I knew him. The first time I saw Joey, he was repeatedly pulling up his pants (on his sides and then on his front), a Joey trait for as long as I knew him. And he was fashionable; whatever clothes were in style (jeans, corduroys, rugby pants, rain pants, army pants, muscle shirts), he would wear, and always appear like a trend-setter rather than a trend-follower. For a year or two, he used expressions like "dang" and would "double-take" like the boys on The Little Rascals did, whenever anything surprised him. After he abandoned these, he would express surprise by skeptically or rather incredulously asking for confirmation of what was said. He could some days be intense and disinclined to smile at anything, even the funniest pratfalls in a comedy movie that I was showing to him, and on other days he would be grinning warmly and laughing. He was spontaneous and unpredictable, appearing at my bedroom window as early as 7:30 in the morning one summer day in 1984, or calling to me on the telephone to arrange a meeting at 8:30 in the evening in the middle of winter. Like myself, he loved ketchup potato chips, chocolate Swiss rolls and most other sweet foods, and Coca-Cola- and he would pour heaping tablespoons of sugar on his Rice Krispies, but his weight never exceeded average, due, I guess, to genetics and an active lifestyle. Joey and I could both go to the Pic N' Puff store and buy potato chips and candy and eat all of that junk food with no weight gain, while the woman at the videotape rental shop in the York Plaza on Nashwasksis' Main Street would look at us and think that Joey and I were brothers.
A dweller of the uppermost and the first numbered house on the eastern side of the eastern slope of Linden Crescent, Joey was the oldest of two children. His sister was named Angie. His mother was a member of Fredericton's University of New Brunswick clerical staff, and his father worked for Eastern Bakeries, manufacturers and distributors of Butternut Bread. In his home, Joey had a basement bedroom and bathroom. The walls and dresser drawers of his bedroom were decorated with photographs of players representing his favourite hockey and baseball teams, the Montreal Canadiens and Expos. Joey's bedspread and bedroom curtains were red, matching the team colours of the Canadiens.
Joey's bicycle was his pride and joy, and he rode it nearly everywhere he went. He loved to participate in any games that the neighbourhood boys were playing, no matter how rough and rowdy the games might become. I would say that he was the most athletic of all the people with whom I have ever been friends. He once had a shirt that read, one hundred percent muscle, which he said was most apt for him. He played organised hockey and baseball every year in addition to whatever recreational games of road hockey or street baseball were going. He frequented gymnasiums and had Tae Kwon Do training. At the age of 10, 11, 12, he was quite a powerhouse, and he had a formidable image with many of the boys his age. Some of them called him a bully- an unfair and simplistic description. Joey had, like myself, moved into our neighbourhood some time after the people in his age bracket had formed their alliances and cliques. Joey knew what it was like to be left out of things. He had no difficulty in the friend-making department. Most of the time he could indeed be very outgoing. But retaining friends' attention and loyalty proved for him, as he mentioned to me on occasion, to be something of a challenge, particularly with clique affiliations from before his arrival in the neighbourhood still predominating. I understood that, certainly.
Joey's heart really was golden. He was fiercely loyal to his friends, and was so to me especially. He would never, when present, stand idly while I was being verbally abused or my integrity, dignity, or competence was under attack. He would be there by my side, telling my detractors to desist from the verbal slings and arrows, and, if need be, pulling assailants off of me. And he was a superb listener, supportive at times that I was despairing of something, like my supposedly not being successful in applying for a golf caddying job. He encouraged me to talk about whatever was troubling me. No matter how egocentric my rants were, he would talk me through them. He had the unique ability to pull me out of occasionally gloomy moods. If he saw that I was struggling to do something, like carrying my videocassette recorder to my home following a videotape copying session at Tony's place, or staying on my feet as I mowed a steep lawn slope, he would rush to my aid. He was a tactile person, and would put his hand on my shoulder or even hug me as a gesture of affinity and gratitude for my friendship to him. He would sit with me on my doorstep for evenings past sunset, talking with me about whatever was of interest to us at the time. He was my insistent partner-teammate in whatever games (baseball, badminton, et cetera) that we could put together. He wanted to be my assistant in every videotape show that I was preparing to have for the fellows of the neighbourhood, which was not always possible, as previously established routines with Tony, my assistant in all shows as far back as 1978, had to be maintained, so my instinct told me. I understand now how Joey's lashing out at me on occasion was a result of my disappointing him at earlier times, although then, his abrupt turns of disposition toward me were mystifying, and I did back away, offended, from him. Joey was, it is now clear to me, a rare find as a buddy. The eventual loss of his presence in my life, due primarily, I now think, to a series of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, was devastating. My efforts later to reconcile with him were doomed to flounder, because they consistently failed to address the real issues that contributed to our pulling apart, and were in any case obstructed by some intense bitterness. I do miss him constantly. There is not a day that goes by in the summers that I do not think back to the truly good old days with Joey, with that bittersweet feeling of good times, long past and gone forever.
Joey enjoyed Spiderman and James Bond, especially the Roger Moore version of Agent 007. And it was I who introduced both of those imaginative entertainments to him. Joey was eager to please and willing to accommodate himself to whatever television and cinema I admired. He was also very appreciatively attentive toward the Superman movies, the Star Wars trilogy, and such down-to-Earth fare as the Inspector Clouseau films and The Bad News Bears. Space: 1999 was quite a daunting challenge for him because I lacked a truly sequential videotape library of episodes (they came trickling into my possession in a scattered fashion) by which to introduce him properly to the premise and characters of the television series, which was, in any case, absent from television stations and available cable television channels in New Brunswick from 1979 to 1990. Joey's willingness to share my enjoyment of Space: 1999 was hampered further by the all too evident connection I had with Tony as a result of it (my use of Tony's videocassette recorder in addition to my own machine to copy episodes acquired from Nova Scotia to remove commercials, combined with Tony's more thorough knowledge of the television programme and his experience of it with me via the CBC French broadcasts in 1979), which Joey, I believe, found bothersome and disaffecting. I also made the mistake of favouring Tony as my assistant in all video shows of Space: 1999 for the neighbourhood youngsters, alienating Joey further from it and, I regret to say, from me. But Joey tried to find common points of reference. He sat with me for hours watching my videotaped Spiderman and Flintstones episodes in 1982 and 1983, he partnered with me in a Return of the Jedi/Space: 1999 appreciation club in my basement in 1983, and he did join me in evenings' casual viewings of such Space: 1999 episodes as "The Rules of Luton" and "All That Glisters" and found them to be engaging enough as an hour's worth of escapism. I was in the process of showing to him the tentacled monster episode, "Dragon's Domain", on August 8, 1983, when we were interrupted by a ringing of my doorbell and an invitation to partake in a baseball game. He invited me to go with him to see E.T. on Labour Day weekend in 1982, but I was saving my pennies to buy Star Wars on videotape and declined to accompany him- a decision that I have always regretted. And, dressed in a white turtleneck shirt similar to my own, he sat with me on the slope of my lawn one warm summer night in 1984, looking up to the stars as I delighted in the opportunity to share with my best pal my keen knowledge of astronomy. He also once told me that his favourite television show was Rocket Robin Hood, no doubt largely due to his middle name being Sherwood. A very endearing allegiance of taste, nevertheless.
I met Joey in June of 1979. We played a few street baseball games together, games in which Tony was also a participant. I remember Tony complaining about Joey's left-handed, ball-lobbing pitching technique and the short in length baseball bat that Joey had supplied for the games. The summer of 1979 proved to be quite a trial for me due to Tony's absence for the almost whole of July, while he was at his woodland camp with his family, and then because Tony kept me at a distance for close to three weeks in August while he was entertaining his visiting cousin, Gary, from Saint John. I had met Gary during the previous summer (1978) and been cordial with him, but for some reason, I was to be persona non grata where Tony was concerned during the entirety of Gary's stay at Tony's house in 1979. I walked by my lonesome to the newly opened Tim Horton's Donuts on Nashwaaksis' Main Street on many a summer morning in 1979 and wandered the neighbourhood for several afternoons, watching Tony and his cousin having fun in Tony's yard, and feeling more than a little glum. Eventually, I encountered Joey, who was riding his bicycle on our street, and Joey and I connected for several days, playing baseball games with two girls, Kelly and Teena, and Simon says- with the same girls and a few other neighbourhood persons. I walked to Tim Horton's Donuts one afternoon, and beside me on his bicycle was Joey, and Joey had to wait on the Wallace Avenue side of Main Street for me to buy some of Tom Horton's tasty confections, because Joey's mother had forbade him to cross the busy Main Street.
Cosmos 1999 provided a reliable index for Tony's and my time spent together in the summer of 1979. Between "Death's Other Dominion" and "Force of Life" (both of which Tony watched with me at my place) in early July, Tony was away to his summer camp location, and then I believe on the Tuesday after "Force of Life", Tony was gone again, and with his family's travels and his cousin's visit, Tony was absent from my side on a consecutive run of Cosmos 1999 Monday night broadcasts consisting of "Earthbound", "Voyager's Return", "Matter of Life and Death", "Guardian of Piri", and "Ring Around the Moon" and on near all of the days between them (a notable exception was the day in early August on which Tony, I, and Mike J. saw The Muppet Movie). It was on the evening that "Ring Around the Moon" was aired that Tony's cousin departed Fredericton and Tony came to my house to see me as Commander Koenig was talking the Tritonian space probe into willing its own destruction. Tony and I then went to his house at 9 P.M. and sat in his basement television room and watched CBS' Bad News Bears television series as we chatted about what had been experienced by us in terms of imaginative entertainment in the weeks that we had been apart. There were but two more Cosmos 1999 episodes to come before the school year started on the Tuesday after Labour Day weekend, and on most of Labour Day weekend I was away with my father to Bangor, Maine. So, this shows how much of the summer of 1979 that Tony and I were separated. He and I did derive the full advantage of the summer days left to us, at the expense, unfortunately, of my association with my new friend, Joey. However, being on the periphery, if that, of my then best friend's life for most of the summer was something to which I had never been accustomed, and it was not something that I wanted to have to experience year after year. Although Tony and I continued our quite reliably close and regular rapport that autumn, in particular following together the deep-space adventures each weekday afternoon of the good spaceship Argo of Star Blazers, I was anything but eager to have to go through further prolonged disconnections from my best friend during what should be the best season of the year.
Tony, after Gary's departure to return to Saint John, came back to me, and was displeased to find that I had connected with Joey. Tony was still my best friend, after all- even after he had excommunicated me for the duration of his cousin's stay. My other first Fredericton friendships, i.e. with David, Eric, et cetera, had been mostly floundering, and when coarse basketball enthusiast and super-athlete, Andre, had arrived on Linden Crescent in the summer of 1979 and openly denounced me and my interests, all but one of my earliest Fredericton friends had flocked over to him. The exception, who resisted or refused the allure of Andre and stayed with me, had been Tony. I felt a distinct loyalty to Tony and a willingness to oblige Tony in whatever he wanted. And Tony wanted me to turn Joey away whenever Joey came to my door whilst Tony and I were occupied on some project, and, I am sorry to admit, I conceded to Tony's wishes. I did not envision that a few years later, Joey would replace Tony as my best friend. It is to Joey's profound credit that he gave to me another opportunity to be a pal to him after I disappointed him so much at Tony's bidding in 1979. However, first impressions never really disappear, and the negative impression I left upon Joey in 1979 must have lingered with him. It had to. And each time over the years that I failed, for whatever reason, to respond to Joey as he wanted me to, must have reinforced that first impression. He told me years later that he did have dreams of clobbering me in front of Tony's house in 1979 or 1980. A sensible reaction, under the circumstances, and it is clear as crystal to me now. Sadly, at the time, I did not see beyond my immediate concerns, and a future best friendship with Joey just did not appear to be on the cards. I did not know that a few years later, Joey would become my most outstanding friend. I was unable to foresee how different the dynamic of my social life would be in the 1982-7 time period.
And next, there was Craig, another significant player in the Fredericton half of my upbringing. I became regularly associated with Craig at the same time, almost, as Joey was attaining the centre stage position as my best friend. I had known Craig, having been introduced to him by Mike J., as early as 1978, but had not an inclination to be with him in any capacity. He was, like Mike J., four years junior to me. He lived around the corner and up the street (Linden Crescent West) from me. And unlike most of the other younger people in the neighbourhood, he had seemed content from the start to have no connection to me at all. Indeed, it was only an expedient need in both our parts to have someone to fill a foursome for a two-against-two baseball game that brought Craig and myself together. And that happened in June of 1982. Craig's best friend at that time was his next-door neighbour, name of Adam, who was some three years junior to Craig. Craig had brought Adam under his wing and was training him to be as capable a baseball player as he (Craig) was. And Craig and Adam were quite the juggernaut. No matter who I had with me on my team, I proved time and time again to be unable to defeat them. They did have a "home field" advantage of always playing on their sloped part of our street, and if I must say so, I felt that second base, a manhole cover, was too far into the "outfield". It was nigh impossible to achieve a double or triple, unless the ball was pounded a large distance up the street or the outfielder was not adept at throwing, and I was never particularly happy or competent as an outfielder, which my frequent teammate-partner, a girl named Kelly, insisted that I be while she pitched. Even when Joey joined us, and it was him, Kelly, and myself against Craig and Adam, we still lost. I was under no illusions that Craig prized my presence any more highly than my use to him as an opposing player. And I do not believe he ever regarded me as a good player, which was why he arranged conditions, whenever he could, so that I was not on his team. Even after early spring of 1983, when the place of the games with Craig changed to the flat part of the street in front of my house and then to the concrete area or the baseball field at Park Street School and I had not Kelly but other teammates- some of them powerful indeed at bat- and started winning my share of games, Craig still preferred not to be on my team. He did, however, become impressed quickly with a tall, English teenager name of Philip, who moved into our area sometime in March of 1983 and whom Craig initially paired with me, while Craig was again teammates with Adam. With me pitching and Philip as outfielder, we won the majority of these decisions. Craig's relationship with Adam began to decline during their losses to Philip and I, and by spring of 1984, Craig preferred Philip as a teammate and was rebuffing Adam. Bitterness crept into the formerly ideal rapport between Craig and Adam, and Craig and Philip were stalwart teammates through the mid-to-late-1980s. Craig and Adam would find their way back to each other sometime later.
Craig was slightly rotund but quite active. Weighty enough to have a powerful amount of force as he swung his baseball bat, though I did have a knack for retiring him at home plate with some selective pitches. He caught baseballs with efficiency, and when he pitched, he always threw unhittable junk, with which he used to delight in frustrating me. He had impeccably parted and groomed dark brown hair under his frequently worn baseball hats, fair complexion, dark eyes, and a somewhat wide face. After I had played baseball with him one time, he was at my door constantly, asking me to play, always against his chosen team, of course. I can count on one hand the number of times that Craig and I were teammates, and every time it was during a challenge from outsiders. Only for a short while in the summers of 1982 and 1983 was Craig really a friend to me in a definitive sense. He deftly deflected, on my behalf, a verbal assault upon me by one of my same-age, school detractors (who was also the area newspaper carrier from 1978 to 1984), which by itself was enough put a stop to said detractor's outspoken attitude toward me. Craig on a Sunday afternoon in August, 1982 invited me to a couple of strings of bowling at the Nashwaaksis Bowl-a-Drome. He asked me to bring my videocassette machine and my videotape of Star Wars to his family room for a viewing of that movie for an afternoon, August 4 of 1983, and I had him and Philip in at my place to view Moonraker and other James Bond movies. But there was no doubt that Craig's appreciation of me was very limited. He was not tactile or very outgoing. It was unlike him to call to me if he saw me at a distance. He came to my door or approached me, baseball gear in his hand, when I was outside. Craig hated Joey, and for Joey the feeling was mutual, though Joey tolerated Craig and even agreed to play baseball with him for my sake. Craig did not think much of Tony either, and Tony was not Craig's staunchest supporter nor a regular player in Craig's games, but they respected each other's abilities to play the sport.
By 1984, Craig and Philip were usual teammates and best friends, and the more that Philip was with Craig, the less he was the taciturn Briton and more the sharp-tongued competitor that Craig often was. Yes, Craig, when he wanted to be, could be caustic in my direction, subjecting me to a verbal whipping, with the enthusiastic cooperation of many others present. When not in the process of playing baseball or trying to manufacture a game thereof, Craig could be witty and fun to talk with, though he was anything but politically correct in the jokes and the limericks that he liked to tell. Joey used to ask me why I bothered being in the company of Craig, and I answered that it was baseball, only baseball. Nothing more. The opportunity to play games of baseball several times a week, which was the norm in the spring, summer, autumn of 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1986. Being active in those years was certainly good for my physical health, and when I was ahead of my game, winning as the deciding pitcher, I was on top of the world. For that, unconstant, indifferent, only occasional as a friend he may have been, Craig was worthwhile, a part of what I will describe as my best time in Fredericton (Era 4: 1982-7).
In addition to these individuals was an array of other persons present in my life in Fredericton into the 1980s, persons some years my junior with whom I had amicable and respectful relations, though not often on a one-on-one basis but rather in a group dynamic of the playing of baseball and other games or in the watching of movies or television series episodes exhibited at my place for all comers, or by their being at Tony and Steven's house while I was there copying and editing some videotape-recordings. Most of them were peers and associates of Steven and lived in a sector of our neighbourhood away somewhat from the Andre effect which I have described as regards most of my earliest Fredericton friends. And they either were absent during the least enjoyable baseball games or if there at those, are not remembered to have joined in any unkindness directed at me by others. Some of them will be mentioned as I go along in these memoirs. I hasten to emphasise that I intend no diminution of their part in my life and no offence to them in omitting them thus far. Their being with me was indeed noteworthy even if it was through substantially less of the one-on-one sort of company that I shared with friends who I do mention and describe in detail in the preceding paragraphs. Each and every one of these fellow inhabitants of the Linden Crescent and Woodmount Drive area of Nashwaaksis, Fredericton, did contribute to the best of times for me in the early-to-mid-1980s.
Of what the decade of the 1980s had to offer, I was completely unaware as I proceeded in the autumn of 1979 with Grade 8 at Nashwaaksis Junior High and my then-best friendship with Tony, who was that year (1979-80) in Grade 6 in Park Street Elementary.
For the daily routine of 1979-80, I walked alone to school and came home for lunch at 11:30 and sat in my den, watching reruns of Alice (on CBS) at 11:30 and The Flintstones (on CTV) at noon while I ate the soup (tomato, celery, Lipton's chicken noodle, Chunky beef) prepared for me by my father (he now worked during nights, for Fredericton Transit, and my mother worked during days). His food was rather like that of Mel Sharples, the gruff cook and owner of Mel's Diner on Alice- sometimes! Then, I had a Mars candy bar for dessert before leaving home to return to school at 12:20. After school, I was joined by Tony, who often bicycled to the junior high school from Park Street Elementary to meet me, and I doubled on his bicycle for a swift journey home. Cosmos 1999 had been cancelled on New Brunswick's and the whole of Canada's eastern Maritimes' French CBC television station, Moncton's CBAFT, in September, 1979. A Japanese animated cartoon science fiction/fantasy epic, Star Blazers, began being broadcast weekdays on Bangor, Maine's WVII-TV at almost the same time that Moonbase Alpha on Cosmos 1999 faded from New Brunswick into the depths of space. I watched Star Blazers after supper, at 5:30. Five o'clock's The Edge of Night preceded Star Blazers.
Alice and The Flintstones were my lunchtime television programmes of choice in 1980-1 also, as I continued to come home from school for a lunch prepared by my father.
Star Blazers offered depictions of a variety of worlds, including several of the planets of the Solar System, with imagination in abundance in many cases. The premise of its first twenty-six episodes was that Earth had been sickened by radiation inflicted upon it by an alien aggressor and that a cure for what would terminally ail the Earth as a life-bearing planet could be procured from a beneficent, beautiful woman on a distant world. A machine that could remove deadly radioactivity and reverse the effects of radiation poisoning upon man's natal planet. Radiation-caused illness also afflicted the Captain of the heroes, and he succumbed to it prior to the heroes' triumphant return to Earth with the obtained mechanism. Curiously, I was ill a number of times in the school year (1979-80) in which I was regularly watching Star Blazers. I remember one day having a relapse of an illness right after watching an episode of Star Blazers.
The condition of Earth in its scourged state in Star Blazers reminded me of the desolate Earth rendered in visualisations in Space: 1999's "Another Time, Another Place" episode, which was shown one more time in French on the Radio-Canada television network's broadcasting stations outside of the eastern Maritime provinces of my country one Wednesday at 6 P.M. in 1979's autumn.
My teachers at Nashwaaksis Junior High School were mostly unremarkable, as were the subjects that they taught. I was developing a distinct distaste for Mathematics, aggravated by the fact that my Grade 8 teacher of the subject was often unintelligible. Science appealed to me when its focus was off the Earth and into space, which was seldom the case. My teachers of that frequently only assigned textbook material to read and on which to answer questions in writing, and then left the classroom, allowing my disagreeable peers to indulge in their aggressive and derisive antics that could include intimidating and humiliating me. Science's sub-discipline of biology could not have interested me less, and we seldom in Grade 7, 8, or 9 dabbled in practice in the chemistry element of our Science course. I despised Physical Education and Shop class, in the latter of which I barely merited a passing grade, and a rather shrilly voiced and sarcastic Art teacher killed whatever interest I had in that field of study and endeavour. The Language Arts curriculum in Grade 7 contained the forgettable novels, Owls in the Family and The Silver Sword. In Grade 8, we read the slightly more interesting Shane and The Red Pony. In Grade 9, we endured the dull The Pigman and The Pearl.
Mathematics class was extreme ennui equalled only by the tedium of Canadian history in Social Studies in Grades 7 and 8 and Shop classes in Grades 8 and 9.
The only really enjoyable courses were Grade 8 Language Arts with Mrs. Brooks, when we were encouraged to creative write and compile a book about a chosen subject (I, of course, chose space), and Grade 9 Social Studies, taught by Mrs. Urquhart, when we learned about Europe, Russia, Russian history, and Asian lifestyles. I recall seeing Nicholas and Alexandra (a 1971 movie about the Russian Revolution) with all of my Grade 9 peers (i.e. all Grade 9 classes) one Friday afternoon in the spring of 1981. Nicholas and Alexandra, in my estimation, was nowhere near as bad a film as everyone else thought. The surprise presence of many Space: 1999 guest actors in supporting roles in the film was a big plus for me. And it also had Tom Baker (known to me a few years later as the Fourth Doctor in the British Doctor Who television series) playing the pivotal role of Rasputin, the mad, lecherous monk. The visuals of the movie were gorgeous, the scope epic. Still, all of this said, Nicholas and Alexandra fell short of being as dynamic as Superman, which was watched in our school theatre during Winter Carnival week in Grade 8.
Nashwaaksis Junior High was substantially larger than Park Street Elementary. It had as many as nine classes per grade, a huge gymnasium, several art, science, and industrial arts laboratories, an auditorium, a cafeteria, and a library. Less clinical than Park Street School only because its floors were carpeted, Nashwaaksis Junior High was all the more daunting in its size and the size of its student population to someone who did not fit into his peer group. As previously stated, air and room lighting were not of the best quality, in my experience. And I was often sick. In Grade 8, I missed nearly the whole of the Winter Carnival Week (only returning on Friday to see Superman), which was before March Break, and was sick again just a few weeks later.
Winter Carnival Week at Nashwaaksis Junior High School was not the first occasion for me to see Superman, however. I viewed it with my parents in early summer of 1979 at a Fredericton drive-in theatre. There had been some considerable reluctance on my part to enter the world of the Man of Steel. I had come to think of DC Comics' signature super-heroic character as being rather- for lack of a better word- corny. His costume and his trademark declarations before ascending to flight were what I particularly found to be wince-worthy. But the Superman bubble gum cards that Tony had showed some images that would have been quite at home in Space: 1999, especially the ripping apart of the surface of a planet in its death throes, reminiscent of the Space: 1999 episode, "New Adam New Eve", and the damage inflicted upon California by a massive shifting of the Earth at the San Andreas Fault, a premise with which I was already very familiar by way of Earthquake. The angelic-looking technological civilisation in space, on Krypton, also seemed curiously like something I might see in the Space: 1999 aesthetic. And when I saw Superman at the drive-in theatre, it far, far exceeded my most genial expectation. The grandeur of the visuals and the solemn though still appropriately light-hearted in places style of storytelling, altogether part of what the movie's director, Richard Donner, called verisimilitude, were an indeed effective grab for me. And further, Superman at times even sounded like Space: 1999. Sound effects from Space: 1999 could be heard in Superman (as they could also be heard in the James Bond films). Superman and its first sequel will always be among my five most admired and enjoyed film spectacles. My parents and I did not remain at the drive-in theatre for the second movie of the evening, Oh, God!, which I later viewed on and audiotape-recorded off of television in 1980. My mother, father, and I attended that same drive-in theatre in 1980 for me to audiotape The Black Hole (which I had earlier seen for the first time with Tony at the Fredericton Plaza Cinema 1 during Christmas vacation in 1979) and then to watch The Late, Great Planet Earth, which concerned the prophecy of Armageddon of which Herbert W. Armstrong used to speak on the radio in my room was I laid in my bed in Douglastown.
I was allowed by my mother to stay awake until midnight on some evenings to watch on television such cinematic spine-chillers and spine-shockers as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1978 version with Donald Sutherland and Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy), The Omen, Damien: Omen II, and Carrie. Even with the removal of their most violent content, these horror movies had me trembling with fear and by times jumping out of my chair in startled fright. I guess that these most downbeat, pessimistic films were really quite apropos in the rather dark, depressing times that I was having where my viewing of television and my lack or acceptance at school or outgoing best friendship around home was concerned. I do not believe that I ever had more consistently gloomy and unsettling times in front of the television screen in all of my born years. Even my most nightmare-causing experiences with Space: 1999 and the Warner Brothers cartoons were not as violently gory or ended on as gloomy a note as did these movies. The amount and degree of revolting, grisly death was without peer in anything else that I had before encountered.
My viewing and audiotape-recording of Destination: Moonbase Alpha on Friday, May 30, 1980 (or I should actually say Saturday, May 31, 1980) constituted up to then the latest hour to which I had been permitted to be awake. ATV that night aired Destination: Moonbase Alpha as a late-night movie presentation from 1 A.M. to approximately 3 A.M.. It was indeed fortunate for me that that broadcast was on a night not preceding a school day. If it had been on such a night, there would have been no way that my parents would have allowed me to stay awake until 1 A.M., much less 3 A.M.. I remember that evening and night so very vividly. My mother was away to some V.O.N. conference in another city, and my father was working his evening-to-night shift at the Fredericton Transit garage. Thus was I alone at home as I watched and audiotape-recorded Destination: Moonbase Alpha and as I passed the many hours prior to that. I remember the television set being in the farthest corner of the back room of our house. I recall seeing the CBS repeat broadcast of the Incredible Hulk episode, "The Slam", at 9 P.M.. I remember the seemingly interminable ATV late-night newscast preceding the late movie. I can hum the beats to the introductory music for the ATV late movie. And in my mind's eye, I can still visualize the delightful appearance of the ITC Entertainment logo and the newly constructed opening to that Space: 1999 movie, introducing setting, situation, and characters for persons not familiar with the Space: 1999 television series-proper. The music accompanying first glimpses of that opening had been hitherto unknown to me, but it felt so right, so very right, for the nostalgia-generating experience that I was about to have. It was nothing less than magical to see Space: 1999 again and to hear in English, simultaneously with the visualisations, the dialogue exchanged by the Space: 1999 Season 2 characters, an experience savoured again for the first time since September 10, 1977. It felt like a reunion with old friends with the nostalgic "rush" that one would expect to come in unison with the convivial renewal of friendly association.
And again, I was experiencing a nostalgia for my old life in Douglastown vicariously through a reconnection with Space: 1999 and its characters. I remember the film jumping as Tony Verdeschi was walking into Command Centre to see a contact on the big screen. I remember where every commercial interval was inserted by ATV into the movie. I recall my hitherto unaccustomed feeling associated with being awake and mobile at 2:30 A.M. as I beheld the exciting action building to a climax at the Nuclear Waste Domes. I remember fancying the Oliver Onions song playing over the end credits as I readied for bed. I was only in bed for a few minutes before I heard my father walk into house after his work shift. Next morning, that of the overcast May 31, 1980, I felt somewhat groggy and not at my best, but I immediately and ecstatically set to work on polishing my audiotape copy of Destination: Moonbase Alpha and transferring it from "compact cassette" to open-reel audiotape.
My mother spent a ton of time, a whopping amount of time, away from home in the first years after our move to Fredericton. In addition to her usual morning-to-late-afternoon, Monday-to-Friday stint on the job at the V.O.N. offices, she was often at meetings in the evenings. In the months of 1979 when Cosmos 1999 was on Radio-Canada (CBC French) on Monday evenings, I was alone in the house while watching several of the Cosmos 1999 second season episodes. In that year, I watched many an episode of Eight is Enough on Wednesdays while by myself at home, and same notation for quite a few of the Incredible Hulk second season episodes on Friday evenings. I remember one 1980 or 1981 evening in the back room of our house watching the entirety of The Towering Inferno in a CTV presentation of such, and my mother not being home when the movie was done and I was preparing to go to bed. And first time that I saw The Bugs Bunny Howl-Oween Special, on Wednesday, October 25, 1978 at 9 P.M., my grandparents were with me in our home's living room. My mother was away to somewhere. And my father had by then started working at Fredericton Transit and had to labour from early evening deep into the night.
I remember also being alone in my den on a number of Saturday nights as I watched episodes of Return of the Saint on CBC Television and CHSJ. That was in 1980, I do believe. Around the time, I think, that Destination: Moonbase Alpha aired late one night on ATV. Spring of 1980.
I had had no prior experience with the Saint character, one Simon Templar, as I had not seen any of the episodes of the 1960s The Saint television series starring Roger Moore as Mr. Templar. Nor was I aware of any earlier movies with other actors in the Templar role. Return of the Saint was not set in space. Nor did it have any sense of the fantastical, unlike The New Avengers, for example. Action in the episodes was sporadic and brief. However, the leading character, played by Ian Ogilvy, was likeable in his unpaid missions of mercy, his selfless heroism, and he had a James Bond-ish flair to him that was clear to me from the first scenes of him that I saw, and I was, in 1980, beginning to become a connoisseur of James Bond. And I liked the style of the opening of Return of the Saint, with the Saint represented as a stick figure with a halo. Also, Return of the Saint was unmistakably an output of Great Britain. Indeed, the production and distribution company credited for Return of the Saint was the same one, ITC Entertainment, that had yielded Space: 1999. And because a certain corps of thespians active in the U.K. tended to be employed for the most part in works of ITC, I could rely on seeing a familiar face from Space: 1999 among the guest stars of the episode of Return of the Saint that was being telecast on a given Saturday night. Among the talent of the acting profession in the U.K. to have worked on Space: 1999 and Return of the Saint were Catherine Schell, Prentis Hancock, Zienia Merton, Anton Phillips, Judy Geeson, Aubrey Morris, Giancarlo Prete, Carolyn Seymour, Sarah Douglas, Anouska Hempel, Shane Rimmer, and Stuart Wilson. Space: 1999 and Return of the Saint had some directors and writers in common, too. Charles Crichton, Ray Austin, Tom Clegg, Kevin Connor, Peter Medak, Anthony Terpiloff, Terence Feely, and John Goldsmith. The credits to an episode of Return of the Saint were usually quite a treasure trove for me. I appreciated every occasion that I had to watch Return of the Saint, with due thanks to CHSJ for opting to transmit in New Brunswick the CBC's showings of the darings-do of the Saint- though I did balk at buying any of the Return of the Saint books that I occasionally came across at Westminster Books in downtown Fredericton.
McDonald's Nashwaaksis opened in early 1980 in the area of the Nashwaaksis Place mall that included the Save-Easy supermarket and the Nashwaaksis Twin Cinemas. The franchise of the Big Mac coming to Fredericton North spelled doom for Shakie's Hamburgers, which was on Main Street in Nashwaaksis across the road from the York Plaza. Also not long for this world in the advent of Nashwaaksis McDonald's was the Dixie Lee Fried Chicken outlet next to the York Plaza and directly across Main Street from Shakie's. Tony, Eric, and I had lunch at Shakie's Hamburgers one sunny August day in 1979, the 25-cent hamburgers there being its primary attraction. Later that day, in the afternoon, Eric threw a clam at Tony and myself while we were seated within Mike J.'s tree house. The clam on hitting the tree house floor in front of us exposed its oyster, splashed fluid on us, and on me especially, and reeked as all creatures of the sea typically do. A clothes-wash and bath removed the clam's odour. Still, the incident exacerbated a growing rift between Eric and myself. He had also one 1979 day when doubling me on the back of his bicycle, done a sudden "pop-a-wheely", sending me careening, rear-end first, onto the pavement. I was displeased about that, for sure.
Dickie Dee ice cream wagons were a routine element in our neighbourhood starting sometime near 1980. Tony, myself, and others would always hear the bell of Dickie Dee and would scurry indoors to ask our parents if we could buy a Drumstick ice cream cone or some variant of the Popsicle. Dickie Dee's mobile business was a popular and successful operation in the Fredericton residential zones until at least the mid-1980s, although the prices of the products being sold became rather prohibitive as the years passed. Linden Crescent was every Sunday morning visited by another impressive vehicle, the green-and-white Sunday school bus for the Devon Park Church, which sported the name of Abraham above its front windows. Kelly and her brother, Scott, who lived across the street used to board that bus, and Tony and I would often speak of them as, "...jumping on Abraham."
When my Grade 8 Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Brooks, said that the next subject in that school course would be Public Speaking and that each student would have to stand at a podium in front of the class and talk for 3 minutes on a chosen topic, nearly everybody moaned or sighed. Some openly protested. While I was naturally nervous and apprehensive (especially as I was not treated anywhere near as favourably by my peers in Fredericton as I had been treated in Douglastown), I decided to make the best of the opportunity and to choose what was still my favourite subject for my talk. The others were choosing controversial issues or mundane occupations for their talks; but, I chose space. Outer space. It was something on which I could speak with some authority and substantial enthusiasm.
Students in alphabetical order delivered their speeches over a time period of several days. My talk was somewhere in the middle. As had been the case in Grade 5, but with no visual aids, I gave a talk on space, this time discussing stars and planets, and managing to cover all essential information in the mere 3 minutes allotted. Of course, I had brought cue cards but did not use them much. My talk sounded spontaneous rather than planned, and I moved my eyes around the room as I spoke. I must been rather efficient, because on leaving the classroom that day, I was asked by Mrs. Brooks if I wanted to participate in the school public speaking contest. She said that I had done a very good job and that I was a prime candidate for a repeat performance in a larger contest. Of course, I accepted. And although I was considerably more nervous (also rather sick with a scratchy throat), I gave my talk in the contest with the same gusto, but did not win.
However, that I was selected as one of the top public speakers in my class was an achievement. One that has given to me a certain confidence in public speaking, at least when it involves subjects with which I have experience and affinity.
Tony, my one remaining associate from 1978-9, shared my enthusiasm for science fiction, and, in 1979 and 1980, we went to Fredericton's movie theatres to see many films. The Empire Strikes Back was most memorable.
The anticipation on the part of Tony and myself in advance of the release of The Empire Strikes Back to the movie theatre nearest us, was growing geometrically in the spring of 1980. And there was much on the bookshelves vis-a-vis The Empire Strikes Back to interest us that spring. Paperback books, magazines, and fold-out posters. And there was a brief promotion for The Empire Strikes Back in an episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century airing on NBC, Tony and I listening to it over and over again via my audiotape-recording of said Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode. "The Plot to Kill a City", it was called. A special 90-minute cut of the original two-part episode of that same title.
Gravitating fully back to the subject of The Empire Strikes Back, I continue with my memories of the weeks leading to the theatre premiere of said Star Wars movie. I bought the blue-covered novelisation, written by Donald F. Glut, of the second produced movie in George Lucas' epic space fantasy at Westminster Books on a sunny Saturday morning in May of 1980 while by myself on a bus-conveyed shopping expedition in the downtown Fredericton area, and began my plunge into its imaginative text during school private reading times. I had acquired via special mail-in order the Boba Fett action figure toy. And one Sunday afternoon at the Pic N' Puff store, I happened upon a full-colour magazine version of the Marvel Comics adaptation of the movie, its cover a vibrant mix of orange-red and pure white with scenes on ice planet Hoth. I had insufficient funds on my person with which to buy the magazine, and was about to hasten to my home to obtain the necessary dollars when I saw a little boy noticing said magazine and imploring his mother to buy it for him. It was the only copy of the magazine that the Pic N' Puff store had on its shelf, but I was a bit reassured by the boy's mother's initially frosty reply to her son's plea of, "But mom, it's neeeeeewwww!" I hurried to my home and was back at the Pic N' Puff store in ten minutes with money in hand. But when I arrived there, the forlorn outcome was plain for my frustrated eyes to see. Said magazine was nowhere to be found, and one easy guess as to how that had come about! I was never to buy that Marvel Comic Empire Strikes Back magazine but did manage to find and buy no less than two copies of it (from the Pic N' Puff store, funnily enough) in the format of a paperback book, having same orange-red and white cover visualisations as on the magazine. Tony possessed it in both formats.
I bought Starlog magazine issues with extensive coverage of The Empire Strikes Back in April, May, and June of 1980, along with the official magazine of the movie, which I acquired at the Fredericton Mall on a Saturday morning in late June, before going with my mother and father to my grandparents' house, where I had a very unnerving viewing of a 1-o'clock-to-3-o'clock movie on CHSJ-TV entitled Encounter With the Unknown. Narrated by Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame, it contained three stories of nerve-racking horror and suspense allegedly based on factual occurrences. The first of them involved a grieving mother of a misfit youth killed accidentally in a prank engineered by three college boys. The mother wreaked havoc upon her son's inadvertent killers by forecasting their individual deaths by land or by sky on the seventh, fourteenth, and twenty-first days following her son's funeral; one by one each of the grim prophecies came true. And the second story, the most haunting and unsettling part of this televised movie, concerned a hole in the Earth in the Missouri hinterland in 1906, from which emanates a ghoulishly hideous moaning noise and into which a father ventures in search of his son's lost dog- and minutes later following an agonising scream, he is pulled out of the hole, his eyes white, his disposition one of permanent insanity. I was aghast at the second of these scenarios as my parents and I came home that afternoon, and it remained foremost in my thoughts as I was showing to Tony the aforementioned Empire Strikes Back official magazine while standing with him at the foot of my driveway on that overcast Saturday afternoon.
In the accursed then absence (ATV's May 30, 1980 late-night showing of Destination: Moonbase Alpha excepted) of Space: 1999 on television stations in my area, The Empire Strikes Back had become in 1980 my Holy Grail. I had to have in my possession anything and everything connected with what Tony and I most simply and affectionately called, "Empire", including the movie itself in all of its visual splendour, an impossibility by any commercial means in 1980. Its premiere at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2, Tuesday, June 3, 1980, had been marked on the calendars of Tony and myself as a must-attend event.
First performance was to be at 6:45 P.M.. Knowing as we did the probability of there being a ponderous queue at the movie theatre doors prior to the first ever presentation of The Empire Strikes Back in Fredericton, Tony and I planned to meet after school at 3:30 approximately and then walk together to the Nashwaaksis Twin Cinemas, stopping en route thereto for dinner at the Nashwaaksis McDonald's, which was in close vicinity of the destination theatre. I impatiently awaited, as I always did at the oppressive and cliquishly exclusive centre of teenage ennui that was Nashwaaksis Junior High, the sounding of the intercom beep signifying end-of-school-day dismissal. I hastened to depart the school and begin my briskest possible walk to my house at which to deposit my books and gather some cash for evening's awe. And to my surprise Tony was nowhere to be seen on my homeward journey from school on the Crescent streets of Lilac and Linden, and his house on my street had evidently not been entered by him as yet that afternoon. I sat on my front step waiting for any sign of life from Tony's domicile or for Tony to come from the direction of Park Street School. I waited to no avail until a quarter after four o'clock. No telephone call from Tony had been received indoors by my father. I decided to go solo to the Fredericton North business district on Main Street, walking in the radiant June sunshine the streets leading to Nashwaaksis Place and the McDonald's restaurant and Cinemas Nashwaaksis. Perhaps Tony would rendez-vous with me at McDonald's. I ordered a McChicken and French fries and ate them in the seating area of the fast food establishment, peering often at the corner to the cashier area to see if Tony would appear there, tray of vittles in hand. I finished my meal with still no sign of my friend, and I was in no way surprised to find that there were people in line outside the theatre doors, parallelling the poster-adorned windows of the Nashwaaksis Twin Cinemas building, but the string of eager theatre patrons was not as protracted as I thought it might be, and my heart pumped fast with enthusiastic joy at the certainty that I was to be admitted to the fantastically imaginative extravaganza. After my first few minutes in the line, I saw Tony at last coming in my direction. He joined me, the six or seven people behind me in the line being less than pleased, I am sure, to have an additional person ahead of them. Of all of the days for Tony to have been in detention with his entire Grade 6 class, it had to be that one!
With the opening of the doors to the Nashwaaksis Cinemas, the line moved rather quickly past the lone cashier on duty, and Tony and I bought our popcorn and soft drinks and seated ourselves in the centre of Cinema 2, about one-third of the way back from the screen. Cinema 2 was filled to capacity when the curtain rose, and what we all saw far exceeded expectation. From the scenes of the convincing stop-motion-effected Tauntauns on ice planet Hoth to the rolling Hoth landscape seen subjectively from the interior of the Rebel Snowspeeder in search of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo to the Imperial assault with the AT-AT Walkers upon the Rebel base on Hoth to the pursuit of the Millennium Falcon in a field of asteroids, one such nearly colliding with Han and company in the Falcon, to the amazingly believable, little Yoda on the jungle planet of Dagobah to the climactic sequence on the Cloud City of Bespin, Tony and I were popping our eyes along with everybody else in the movie house and gleefully exclaiming often at the sophisticated film-making techniques, the breathtaking scale and beauty of the film's visuals, and the almost non-stop action in space and on the mind-bogglingly astounding alien worlds. There had never been anything like this experience at the movie theatres before. I fell in love with The Empire Strikes Back, through and through, and it remains my absolute favourite movie of all time. And to add to the sublimely appealing effect, there were even some actors from Space: 1999 in it as Imperial officers. I did not immediately recognise them at first, because the milieu and costumes in which I was seeing them was so very different, but I liked General Veers immensely for his austere efficiency (that he was played by the same actor who was the ruthless Jarak in the "Alpha Child" Space: 1999 episode must have registered in my mind, too), felt like Admiral Ozzel was someone whom I had before seen meeting a ghastly end (and indeed he did, as monster fodder in Space: 1999's "Dragon's Domain"), and was also affected by Captain Needa, at whom the people in the theatre laughed when he said that he would be apologising to Lord Vader for the Millennium Falcon having escaped from him. Silly Captain Needa! We all know that nobody fails Darth Vader and lives. And so, the actor who was an Eagle spaceship pilot in Space: 1999's "Guardian of Piri" episode, had a death scene on the Star Destroyer Executor floor before the Dark Lord of the Sith.
I needed a toilet interval nearly half of the way through the movie, and conceded to that need while Luke was about to enter a cave to confront the forces of evil. Tony and I laughed at Lobot, Lando Calrissian's assistant, referred-to by both of us as "the ear muff guy". And, although we both had the movie's adaptations in various printed forms, we were still unprepared for the revelation that Darth Vader was Luke's father. At movie's close, Tony and I remained in our seats to watch the credit roll, and I was pleased to see the names of actors of Space: 1999 pedigree. We then exited the theatre through the door nearest the right side of the screen whose images had so captivated us for upward of two dazzling and thrilling hours! We emerged from the back of the theatre building in the late evening sunshine of early June, talking with highest adulation for George Lucas and all that he represented. Throughout the movie and especially in the immediate aftermath of that forever most cogent outing to a movie theatre, I coveted George Lucas' ownership of "Empire". I wanted to own it, too. For the time being, I had to settle for a novelisation and comic book paperback and awhile later the hardcover Empire Strikes Back Storybook, with pictures from the movie, and a commercially available audiotape with a very condensed version of the movie's story. We were promptly collected from the Nashwaaksis Cinemas for transport to our Linden Crescent habitat by Tony's parents, who were in their car with Tony's brother, Steven, and who all were curious about Tony's and my reaction to the film. The two of us were gushing with praise at every aspect of it, and someone, I do not remember who, said that "Revenge of the Jedi" was the slated title for the third Star Wars movie to be produced.
I would add that with my appreciation of seeing actors from episodes of Space: 1999 in movies such as The Empire Strikes Back or Nicholas and Alexandra, there was a feeling of longing, of aching to see them in Space: 1999 again. As I checked with a movie's credit roll and saw the names of actors with a Space: 1999 connection, I always smiled but at the same time lamented (often only to myself) the scarce state of Space: 1999 in my area of the world. In 1980, 1981, and 1982, there was almost no trace of it besides the appearances of actors and actresses in other productions, or a packet of bubble gum cards in a surprise bag, or a second-hand book or magazine on a shelf, or Destination: Moonbase Alpha.
I would further state that my fascination with Space: 1999 (which had its start in Era 2) was a gateway to interests, several of them emerging and growing within this life era, in many other imaginative entertainments. Entertainments of acting cast including people who were in Space: 1999. Entertainments with similar production design. Entertainments with same style of visual effects, with some of the same sound effects, or with comparable sensibilities in depicting futuristic or otherworldly habitats, cultures, or means of transportation. Whether they be the Star Wars movies, Superman, the James Bond films, or an opus like Les Filles du ciel, aired-on-CBC-French-in-autumn-of-1979 francophone version of the short-lived 1975 Anglo-German television series, Star Maidens, whose production designer, Keith Wilson, worked on Space: 1999. Sometimes, simply being situated in space was enough to capture my dedicated attention. Star Trek, for instance, had little in common with Space: 1999 in acting and aural-visual aesthetic departments, but it being set in space with many, many alien worlds encountered, appealed to me in somewhat the same vein as did Space: 1999. Somewhat. To a lesser extent, but somewhat. If something was produced in Britain, the greater the probability of a Space: 1999 connection. If produced at Buckinghamshire's Pinewood Studios, greater still.
Star Trek was not airing on television at my "Terran coordinates" in any of the years of this life era. It would televisually resurface in autumn of 1983 in Era 4. My only immersion in the Star Trek universe in my life's third era was via books, via Star Trek- The Motion Picture (a quite turgid and tedious affair), via one episode ("The Enterprise Incident") viewed and audiotape-recorded late one Sunday afternoon during a December, 1980 stay in Toronto, and via a handful of episodes available in late 1981 and early 1982 on RCA VideoDisc. But even with such limited means of reference or experience, together with memory of seeing mostly third season Star Trek episodes in 1977, Star Trek was an interest of some significance. One of the ancillary interests that filled the gaps left by absent primary entertainment interests (e.g. Space: 1999) on television and in printed media.
Era 3 was a transitional time frame and for most of it many of my primary favourite entertainments were not being shown on any television station available to me in Fredericton. With Tony's support and encouragement, I delved into alternate universes, i.e. those of other works. Star Trek's was one such. Star Wars' was another. And Star Blazers'. I also saw presented on television many a movie that I had previously seen at the cinema or which was completely new to me, and Tony and I would talk about them on the morrow, or on the morrow's morrow. For example, Starship Invasions (which I saw for the first time at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 with my parents on a Friday evening in mid-January, 1978) aired on ATV/CTV on a frosty Sunday afternoon in early 1981, and I audiotape-recorded it from that broadcast and memorably chatted with Tony about it when we two were together en route to school on the next day. And 1978's faked-mission-to-Mars thriller, Capricorn One, was shown on NBC (and on Bangor, Maine NBC affiliate, WLBZ) in May of 1980. Also audiotape-recorded and discussed a day later. The much-heralded, much-anticipated television miniseries, The Martian Chronicles (with Barry Morse of Space: 1999 and many more veteran actors), was presented on CHSJ-TV in the evenings of three consecutive Saturdays in autumn of 1980. And then there was Moon Zero Two (1969), a made-in-Britain "space Western" set on the Moon and with Space: 1999's Catherine Schell in one of the leading roles, telecast by ATV on a Wednesday evening in spring, 1981.
And more 1980 and 1981 television viewing experiences are memorable, several of them involving Sunday broadcasts, such as CBC Television's repeat showing of 1978's What a Nightmare, Charlie Brown one sunny, frigid Sunday afternoon in early 1980 (Tony and I were at my house in the living room, watching that together), or evening family movies on ABC (and Bangor, Maine ABC affiliate, WVII) like 1974's Benji, or a shown-on-CBC episode of The Muppet Show in which guest Alan Arkin drank some "Ultra-Powerful Jekyll-Hyde Potion", or an ABC News sixty-minutes-in-length television programme about the future of space exploration, or CBC special broadcasts like Take Me Up to the Ballgame (a half-hour cartoon television special about a baseball game in an off-Earth location) and SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back (an hour-long look at the making of the visually very impressive second Star Wars movie).
It is amazing, even confounding, how apathetic and cynical my school peers were in 1980 toward the new Star Wars film. None of them had attended the June 3, 1980 premiere of it or had much interest in seeing it at all- and zero inclination to hear, much less respect, my impressions of it. Grade 8 (1979-80) was by far my most hated year at school, and my peers were the primary reason for that. The final few weeks of school in Grade 8 were diabolical, as one classmate, name of Robin, delighted in spitting at me as he passed. I had to constantly be wary of him and be ready to dodge his expelled saliva when he came close to me, in addition to weathering his verbal attacks. I despised him, needless to say. And nearly all of my other classmates. I was developing something of a misanthropic attitude as a result of my Fredericton school experience. But I still had hope for the future, that there would yet come a day in my lifetime at least some segment of the human species would achieve a stage of development of which I could be proud, leaving behind the degenerates, the lowlifes, the smutty, physically and verbally abusive members of our Earthly society to wallow in their depravity. I had not as yet determined just how much of the world was of the latter category of the human condition. However, as far as school was concerned, I resolved to withstand whatever adversity was flung at me, my interest in the very things of which my peers were so contemptuous being what kept me morally afloat in a tide of scorn or indifference.
There were, for sure, others at school who were treated much worse than I was, but that was seldom comforting, because from the way that those others fared at school, I had a benchmark for abuse that I had to constantly strive never to reach. Try as I did to become quite skillful at baseball- and around home I did become that somewhat, at school in Physical Education classes, I remained virtually impotent in the batter's box of the Nashwaaksis Junior High School field house's indoor-baseball-designated section, unable to hit the ball out of the "infield", if I hit it at all. And on the defencive half of the innings, I was forever put in the "far outfield" with the girls. In Grade 9, I was coaxed into being the upper part of a piggyback racing team, my partner being the tallest person in our class, if not our entire school grade, and after our first practice for the event, he threw me off of him before I could crawl off of him at my own pace. I landed flat on my back on the field house floor, the wind knocked fully out of me. It followed that I said no to being in the race and opted instead to be one of the student officials during track-and-field day. That way, I at least had my dignity and a sense of safety from injury. In fact, I think I was respected in this instance for my decision, at least by a sizable number of classmates. What had been done to me was utterly uncalled-for, especially as I had been trying to abide by the wishes of my classroom peers.
By rights I should not care about my peers and their opinions where I was concerned, because I simply did not like those people. I had not the slightest inclination to want to be part of their cliques. They after all still had no favourable regard for much of anything that appealed to me. But I also did not want to be the most reviled, most ridiculed, most bullied person in our school. So, I had to be mindful somewhat of the prevailing attitude where I was concerned and to not too much stoke the fire of peer disapproval. I suppose that is why I relented at first to my classmates' summons of me to be in the piggyback race. And it was a mistake, as circumstances proved.
Something to which to look forward on school days in 1980 were shopping expeditions by bus to either the Fredericton Mall or the Regent Mall, or to the Fredericton downtown, for book purchases. Either with Tony or by myself. Mostly by myself. On weekends and some weekday evenings. And on summer days, under the sunshine or in overcast or rainy conditions. Coles Bookstore in the Regent Mall had two of the Star Trek Photonovels, those of the Star Trek episodes, "Day of the Dove" and "Amok Time", that Beegies' Bookstore in the Fredericton Mall did not have in stock, and they were the only two Star Trek Photonovels that Coles Bookstore had on its shelves. I bought them both on rainy days in 1980 during shopping expeditions by myself with transference by Fredericton Transit buses. I bought an issue of Starlog magazine one rainy summer's day from Mazucca's variety store and was reading it while in the Skillet Restaurant in the Zellers department store of downtown Fredericton. There was an interview with DeForest Kelley in that Starlog issue, as I remember, and a photograph of a Star Trek episode, "Patterns of Force", not yet seen by me.
I remember one summer of 1980 shopping trek to the Fredericton Mall by myself of which my return to home was entirely on foot. I had somehow misplaced my bus ticket. And so, uphill I walked to the Prospect Street and Regent Street intersection, then down Regent Street to Priestman Street, along Priestman to York Street, and so on, crossing the Saint John River via the Carleton Street Bridge. I was home in about an hour and talking of my long walk to home with the youngsters outside on my street that sunny afternoon. And somehow, I still had energy enough for some street baseball. One sunny spring Saturday morning, I had bought a second-hand copy of Orbit Books' version of Space: 1999- Astral Quest from United Book Store (a remarkable find, that, for that version of Astral Quest had not been previously seen by me on the shelf of any Fredericton vendor of first-hand books) and was standing with that book on the sidewalk in front of the Fredericton Public Library, before I crossed the Carleton Street Bridge for a walk to home. And on another Saturday shopping expedition, one in the wintertime, I bought Battlestar Galactica- The Photostory from Beegie's Bookstore, and boarded the wrong bus for going home. In my panic to exit the bus after I discovered that it was going to Barker's Point, I left behind me on the bus the book that I had bought. That book had already slipped out of my hands once before, with a previous copy of it that I had possessed.
On some of Tony's sojourns in Saint John, he would visit a used book dealer called the Book Broker, and from a couple of his travels to Saint John, Tony returned to Fredericton and to me with some Space: 1999 items, particularly The Making of Space: 1999 and one of the Charlton Comics Space: 1999 illustrated magazines (the one with the stories, "A Lonely Emperor", "Class Determination: Alien Insecta", and "Another Name For Hell"), and I negotiated with him to pass into my acquisitive hands those Space: 1999 printed publications. My old copy of The Making of Space: 1999 was falling apart, and I had never before had the privilege of owning one of those stylish Space: 1999 illustrated magazines. And what can I say? The idea of Tony having anything Space: 1999-related that I did not have, or any Space: 1999 item in better condition than mine, was intolerable for me. Tony was not the enthusiast for Space: 1999 that I was. For the magazine, I paid to Tony twice the amount of money that he had spent to purchase it. I do not remember precisely what I needed to part with in order to persuade Tony to provide to me The Making of Space: 1999, only that it was a substantial amount of money and a number of things that I had owned. Tony "talked a hard bargain". Neither publication was in mint condition. Rather far from it in the case of the magazine whose cover and pages were fraying at the staples. There was text of "The Book Broker" accompanied by that vendor's Saint John address ink-stamped into the inner front cover of The Making of Space: 1999 and on the front cover to the magazine. I would no longer possess acceptable copy of either one of those items in 1982 (rapid entropy had overcome them), and would acquire them again.
Tony and I went to see "Empire" again several times, and I brought an audiotape recorder to a drive-in theatre in 1981 in an attempt to audiotape the movie, only to be thwarted when the machine chewed the tape and stopped recording before the Bespin segment of the movie began. Other films that impressed us greatly were Moonraker, Superman II, Meteor, The Black Hole, and Outland. Even the notoriously lame Starcrash (seen during a matinee on a sunny Saturday in June, 1979) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century had our enthusiastic attention with their futuristic and/or off-the-Earth spectacle. Two films which we were not able to see due to R-ratings were Alien and Saturn 3. We often watched Saturday morning television together, including The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, Jason of Star Command, and What's New, Mr. Magoo?.
Some additional memories of television viewing in 1979 and 1980 included seeing Woody Allen's satire on crime dramas, Take the Money and Run; Rendez-Vous Hotel, a CBS television movie of the week vehicle for Bill Daily (of television's I Dream of Jeannie) in which he is the frazzled owner of an upper-class hotel soon to be visited by the United States' most renowned and fearsome critic of the hospitality sector; The Streets of L.A., a television movie shown on CHSJ one Saturday evening at 7 P.M. while I was ill, and which was about a Los Angeles career woman determined to exact from a Hispanic group of vandals a payment in full for her car's tires that were slashed by said vandals; and Cry of the Penguins, with John Hurt as a young ornithologist assigned to McMurdo Sound in Antarctica to observe the mating and feeding habits of the most dignified fowl of the southernmost continent and its surrounding waters. I remember watching the last of these as a late-night movie on CHSJ whilst I ate a McCain chocolate pie. Also recollected is an occasion in which I was eating pizza pie into the wee hours of the morning. My mother was away to a V.O.N. evening meeting, and prior to WAGM's running of the original Twilight Zone television show ("King Nine Will Not Return" I believe was the episode transmitted), I mixed, kneaded, and baked for myself a Kraft sausage meat pizza. Why? I was hungry and found the pizza mix on the kitchen shelf. My mother was surprised indeed when she arrived at home shortly after midnight to see me watching Rod Serling's uncanny anthology entry about an aeroplane in the middle of a desert and feasting, slice after slice, on a pizza.
A festival of old James Bond films during the Christmas season of 1980 and early January of 1981 at Fredericton's Gaiety Theatre (which later closed in 1982) afforded to Tony and I the chance to see Thunderball, Diamonds Are Forever, The Man With the Golden Gun, and The Spy Who Loved Me. We viewed (though not us together) From Russia With Love on American network television, minus several key scenes, plus Live and Let Die, You Only Live Twice, and, in August, 1982, the fabulous On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which became a favourite. Dr. No was not seen until I had my first videocassette recorder, a Panasonic, in May, 1982, and rented the movie from a nearby club. At that time, videotape rental outlets were called clubs.
My growing interest in the James Bond movies, given birth with my viewing of Moonraker, the eleventh James Bond film, in August of 1979, was nourished by the fact that the James Bond movies were made at Pinewood Studios in England, same place of production as Space: 1999. Space: 1999 sound effects, particularly electronic beeps and the sounds and explosions, could be heard in the James Bond motion pictures, and somehow the James Bond movies' filming in proximity to the studios that yielded the look of Space: 1999, gave to them a quality similar to Space: 1999 with regard to camera exposure, colour temperature, and film grain- even though the camera crew was not the same for both productions. And apart from Dr. No, the James Bond movies had pre-credits sequences of variable length, not unlike the prologues of the episodes of the first season of Space: 1999. The style of the James Bond title sequences captured my fancy too. Each one of them surreal yet correspondent in concept and images with what was to be seen in the movie. I very much liked that particular aspect to the films. The lethal-gunfire-seen-through-gun-barrel effect which opened every James Bond movie, was also a stylish artistic "touch". The leading actor, be he Sean Connery, Roger Moore, or even George Lazenby, had panache, charisma, and gravitas, and the villains, all of them formidable, all of them played by larger-than-life actors, were always interesting with their peculiar attributes or fetishes and grandiose schemes for world domination put into operation from their technological headquarters. They had idiosyncratic henchmen whose eccentric procedures for dispatching victim characters were sometimes aptly administered unto them by Bond for their inevitable and deserved demise. I quite liked that. And I also liked how the gadgets given to Bond would always prove useful in Bond's struggle to survive or to learn a villain's secrets. Production designer Ken Adam's work was superlative, I thought, and I sometimes noticed similarities with Space: 1999 in his imaginative milieus for Bond's battles with the villains. The cinematography for places far and near was consistently gorgeous. The action pulses of the movies, mated with John Barry's expressive music, often instrumental renditions of a movies main title song, thrilled me viscerally and delighted me aesthetically. James Bond cinema had a rich history by 1979, and it was quite exciting over the subsequent three years to discover each of the existing movies in the James Bond movie catalogue. And their individual variation on the distinctive James Bond movie formula. And with my acquisitive nature, I wanted to possess them. All of them.
I would add that the womanising aspect to the James Bond character and his movies was not one of the things that I fancied. My friends, of course, all found it and the innuendo in character dialogue to be amusing and an appealing part of the experience of viewing the James Bond movies. And I would laugh along with them at the dialogue just to "fit in" with them. But it was a requisite of the James Bond movie to have a "girl" to be "gotten" by Bond at the end of the movie. I accepted that. And sometimes the scenes of Bond romancing his conquest of the day were accompanied by music recalling the movie title song, and that I must say I rather liked.
In the summer of 1980, I joined Tony in collecting bubble gum cards based on The Empire Strikes Back. We had already assembled all of what was offered in the Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica bubble gum card series, along with some of Superman and The Incredible Hulk. Also, oddly enough, packets of Space: 1999 bubble gum cards could sometimes be found in surprise bags being sold at the Pic N' Puff store. I stapled my Empire Strikes Back bubble gum cards in sequence into a Camp Fire note book. The most problematic cards in the Empire Strikes Back bubble gum card range were "A Gathering of Evils" and "Joined By Dack", while "Artoo's Bumpy Landing" was ridiculously easy to find. During this time, Tony moved to his Woodmount Drive home, and he did so while Michael was visiting me. Tony and Michael never met, and I doubt would have been friendly with each other if they had met. They would have been as incompatible as I now was with Michael.
Summer of 1980 was generally one of quite good quality, though it paled in comparison to all of my Douglastown summers and some of those to come in Fredericton. Tony was away for only a few weeks at the most. He and I together converted my basement into a hotel approximating its format of the summer of 1978, this time offering to our "customers" an audiotape heard with headphones, of either an extremely condensed, commercially available audio recording of Star Wars or the first 8 minutes of Destination: Moonbase Alpha, which I had wholly audiotape-recorded from a late-night transmission on ATV that June. Joey one day attended our hotel with a friend of his who shared my first name and surname initial. Tony had a T-shirt that he wore often in 1980 with a picture of a Jawa from Star Wars on it. I scoured the city's bookstores, sometimes with Tony in my company, sometimes not, for more television- and movie-related publications. One sunny, mid-summer day, I lost my bus fare and walked all of the way to home from the Fredericton Mall. I remember being particularly mesmerised by the Star Trek Photonovel of the episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before", and the eerie, silver-eyed transmuted Enterprise crew members featured in that very early entry in the Star Trek television series. I also discovered the James Blish Star Trek episode novelisations and sought to purchase all 12 volumes thereof. Volume 12 with its full episode appendix listing and James Blish obituary was the first of the numbered Star Trek books that I purchased one thundery evening at the Fredericton Mall, from which I rode a bus to home. I encountered Joey in the entrance to Zellers in the Fredericton Mall on one of my shopping expeditions and recall on numerous other such times in the Fredericton Mall sitting by myself at the canteen squares at designated places in the mall corridor and sipping a drink as I examined the book that I had bought from Beegie's Bookstore. After some searching to no avail, by way of on-foot transference from Fredericton Mall to Regent Mall, I found Star Trek 8, containing the novelisation of "Where No Man Has Gone Before", at Westminster Books in the Fredericton downtown core. Joey proposed to buy my Star Wars action figures to help me to pay for yet more of the books I sought to buy, but I declined his offer, in that I was not ready as yet to part with the toys that I had sought so avidly to acquire just one and two years earlier.
In 1980, I continued in my favouring of Tony over Joey in situations in which, it seemed to me, I was presented with an either-Tony-or-Joey decision. In 1979, I had at Tony's behest turned Joey away from my door, and in 1980, I remember one morning specifically during which Joey was with me and I walked with him in the direction of Tony's Woodmount Drive house and once there abandoned Joey so that I could, as prearranged, visit with Tony and compare Empire Strikes Back bubble gum card collections. I could kick myself a hundred times over for this. Hindsight is precise, of course, and my empathy now for Joey back then is quite strong. But in 1980, the state of things as I then perceived it was that Tony was my best friend, and the three of us, Tony, Joey, and myself, were not a compatible threesome. Tony did not want Joey in our company. It was not because Tony was possessive of me and wanted me to himself. Such a thing was contrary to Tony's persona. Rather, he did not like the significantly younger Joey and viewed Joey as an encumbrance to our shared concentration of attention upon whatever was of interest to us or whatever project on which we were occupied. One such was an audiotape rendition of The Muppet Movie with Tony and I providing the voices and Kermit the Frog's movie-introductory "Rainbow Connection" song requested by us of the radio station CIHI to open our version of the first theatrical film to star the exuberant characters of The Muppet Show; Tony and I, together with Mike J. had seen that movie one weekday afternoon in late summer of 1979 and were quite inspired by the cross-continental travel of discovery and ambition undertaken by Kermit the Frog and his growing group of friends and soul-mates. Whatever possessed us to want to do something so bizarre as to audiotape our voices as those of the Muppets, I do not know.
I ought to have been much, much more considerate of Joey's feelings and opted for him over Tony some of the time back then. I can only claim my egocentric mindset, inability to see beyond my immediate concern of Tony being my best friend, and my then as yet still insufficiently developed capacity for relating to others' sensitivities as the combined cause of such deplorable conduct of mine. The day would come when Joey would be my preferred buddy, but in 1980 I still did not foresee that. The effect of my repeated "brush-offs" aggravated by the tendency of the neighbourhood children sharing his year of birth, to exclude him from their fun, saying, "No joiners," whenever he would be seen approaching them, had to be taxing to Joey's belief in people and to his sense of place in our suburban world- and would by 1981 change Joey into a quite volatile, often very angry youngster. And he would be avoided as much for the hostility he carried with him as for the unwillingness of the boys of his age to include him in their already-begun games. In the summer of 1981, I recall him being nasty toward me a couple of times, hitting, pulling me to the ground, and sitting on me, and my wanting to be away from him in consequence of such incidents.
By the early 1980s, I was finally starting to gain some measure of an ability to understand others' feelings, to empathise with others, to put myself "in their shoes". However, I was still anything but a genius when it came to "connecting the dots" between my words or actions, or lack thereof, and those of others. At best, I was only proficient at critically observing myself and situations through the eyes of others approximately 5 percent of the time, and that was when selfish considerations did not cloud my capacity for doing so. Inevitably, though, it became clear even to me that Joey was being unkindly and hurtfully banished by the boys of his age in our neighbourhood, and I did indeed think it unfair of them to act so snobby toward Joey. One weekday evening in the autumn of 1981, in a yard on Epworth Circle, which was adjacent to Woodmount Drive, I was standing and talking with Tony at a distance from the action before us, watching as the neighbourhood youngsters in Joey's age bracket, some five or six of them, were ganging upon Joey and dragging him on the ground and down a grassy and muddy slope. Joey rose to his feet, pulled up his jeans, glared fumingly at the others, and staggered toward his bicycle, departing the scene of his harsh exclusion as the boys jeered at him. Tony would have had assumed a dim view indeed of any immediate move on my part to comfort Joey or speak on Joey's behalf, and I was as yet unprepared to risk my still best friendship with Tony, to say nothing of the probable caustic backlash against me from Joey's detractors of that evening. Still, I felt a distinct feeling of kinship with Joey over how his peers were acting toward him, and felt like a first-class idiot for having turned him away or abandoned him in favour of Tony. Even I, dense as I was, understood what was inducing the sullen, explosive, aggressive edge to Joey. And beneath his layer of austerity was, it appeared, an enthusiasm for many imaginative works of entertainment and a desire to follow somewhat in my footsteps and, whenever circumstances- or my decisions- permitted, to be with me in whatever I was orchestrating.
I had my first ever yard sale on Saturday, October 31, 1981. Joey had seen me preparing for that event on the day before it. Later in the afternoon on said Saturday, several hours after I had ended my yard sale, following a vending of many items such as encyclopedias, a complete set of stereo equipment, several books, and many of my Star Wars toys, I was walking by Joey's house and saw him in his driveway having his own small-scale yard sale. A very affecting effort of duplication of my activity of the day. Joey and I then went to my house, where, in my basement, Joey glanced over the pile of books that I had been unsuccessful at selling at the yard sale, and he was quite surprised to learn that I had relieved myself of virtually all of my Star Wars action figures. When I, with the proceeds from my yard sale together with my parents' generosity, had an RCA VideoDisc player atop my television set together with a growing amount of VideoDisc software and had begun showing my collected movies and television episodes- at no monetary fee- to all comers, Joey was keenly appreciative of the opportunity to at last really see movies and television shows as presented at my home. The formidable persona that he had adapted to himself would dissipate as he enjoyed what was being shown to him- and others- via my VideoDisc player. Only a day or two later, however, he would be pulling to the ground and pummelling disrespectful schoolmates of his. He had become a very complicated and dynamic personality. And the attention that I began giving to him in that autumn and the following winter and spring was noticed by him and guardedly reciprocated on an occasion-by-occasion basis.
Before early 1980, the McCorry floor model colour television had always been situated in our living room. My mother in January, 1980 decided to experiment with putting the floor model television in one of our house's back rooms (the one in which my bed was not located). The television was there when the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episodes, "Cruise Ship to the Stars" and "Space Vampire", aired for the first time. It was back in the living room for awhile and then was returned to a back room den placement sometime in March. I remember watching the Edge of Night episode with unhinged actress Nola Madison (played by Kim Hunter) confessing to the murder of wealthy socialite Margo Dorn (Ann Williams), on our television when it was in its second den position, a position that it would occupy until late 1981, when we moved it to the other side of the den. That floor model television would never again be in our living room. As the den changed rooms a few times, the television did, too, but it stayed in the den until April, 1984, when it was in the same room as my bed. Everything seen on the screen of that television from March, 1980 onward was seen from somewhere in our house's back rooms.
Tony and I had summer, 1980/spring, 1981 Cine-Audios in my bedroom, and I used my film-projector-like reel-to-reel audiotape machine to play my sound-only movies, among them The Bad News Bears in "Breaking Training", the James Bond thriller, Live and Let Die, and The Black Hole. There was a boy named Jason who at one of my Cine-Audio shows asked for a glass of Coca-Cola and promised to pay the 25 cent fee that I applied to it at a later time, and by my calculation of compound interest on his unpaid debt, he owes me a fortune. In summer of 1980, we had a new addition to our Linden Crescent surroundings, name of Troy, who was three or four years junior to me and who seemed to many of the boys of the age group of 4-6 years younger than myself, to be quite the epitome of the Arthur Fonzarelli (of television's Happy Days) brand of self-assuredness and "cool" worldliness. As was the case with Andre, I found that loyalties among younger associates tended to shift like a slide-rule, depending on whose disposition seemed most "in line" with their most current conception of the desirable older person. Troy and I did socialise quite cordially, and he went with me one day on the bus to shop at King's Place mall and at the malls atop the Fredericton South hill. Troy also attended my summer, 1980 Cine-Audio presentations of The Bad News Bears in "Breaking Training" and The Black Hole. As has already been stated, The Black Hole had been audiotape-recorded from an audio speaker at a drive-in theatre, and all other movies in my collection of audiotapes had been audiotape-recorded from broadcast on television, The Bad News Bears in "Breaking Training" and Live and Let Die being two such movies.
In September of 1980, I returned to Nashwaaksis Junior High for Grade 9 rather hopeful that now that Tony was in Grade 7 and therefore also going to that same school, that I would have a visible companion and ally at last and that my detractors would desist from their intimidation and invalidation. But to my dismay, Tony chose for several weeks to associate with members of his age group and not to be with me in the school yard or in the school foyer in the mornings. There was distinct consternation on my part about that. By the halfway point of that school year, Tony was associating with me in the mornings in addition to walking with me after school to either of our homes. But I was anything but inspired by the length of time that had to pass before Tony would be seen with me by the student body of Nashwaaksis Junior High. Grade 9 was better than Grade 8 for me, thank goodness, although it could still be very taxing indeed upon one's patience and coping-with-ostracism capacity. A smug pair of studious minions of the school's "brainy" clique, named Arvind and Mike, the latter of whom was my local newspaper carrier, used to delight in spreading gossip about me, including false allegations of my asking stupid questions of our Health teacher, and in telling me that the school's most notorious bully wanted to pound my face into the back of my head. For several weeks in the spring of 1981, Arvind and Mike had nearly everybody in the school, including many persons whom I had never met and who by all rights ought to have no knowledge of, much less any quarrel with, me, to address me with the nickname of "Cosmic", which was meant to be synonymous with "nerd" or "geek". Until Craig with some choice words in my defence in 1982 consigned both Mike and Arvind to their minuscule, contemptible place and silenced them once and for all, my two enemies were relentless in their ridiculing ways.
On Sunday mornings, WLBZ, the Bangor, Maine NBC affiliate television station received on our Fredericton cable television dial, was in 1980 and 1981 rather interesting in what it offered on its local, i.e. non-television-network, schedule. On Sunday mornings, WLBZ's programming day commenced with some religious evangelist content, followed by The Little Rascals, The Jackie Gleason Show, and 10 A.M. movies such as The Alien Factor and No Survivors, Please, interspersed by some rather downbeat Public Service Announcements. There was a time in 1980 when Bugs Bunny and other Warner Brothers cartoons were shown on WLBZ on Sunday mornings at 11:30. "Hurdy-Gurdy Hare", "Bowery Bugs", "Napoleon Bunny-Part", "Which is Witch", "Rabbit Hood", and the Road Runner cartoon, "Guided Muscle", were some of the cartoons offered. The Great Money Movie was WLBZ's weekday suppertime attraction, with such diverse and delectable selections as the Blondie movies from the 1940s, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, two-hour Planet of the Apes television movies culled from episodes of the 1974 television series, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century two-part episodes edited into television movies, The Time Machine (1960), and The Pink Panther (1964) and The Return of the Pink Panther, the latter preempted by NBC News coverage of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.
But in the main, for me, something was lacking with television circa 1980. Newly-produced Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Galactica: 1980, and The Incredible Hulk were a "mixed bag". Galactica: 1980 was abysmal. The Incredible Hulk (which was shown on Friday nights when WAGM would deign to patch into its CBS television network feed) held my interest, though many of its episodes were rather run-of-the-mill fare. And Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, though mostly off-Earth in setting, was not of a calibre approximating that of Space: 1999. Oh, Buck Rogers had captured my imagination when I first saw it, as did many an opus emerging into movie theatres and onto television screens between the first two Star Wars films. But it was somewhat lacklustre, I felt, as I followed its weekly episodes on ATV and NBC. Lacklustre in its imaginings of the otherworldly, and how such was visualised. I felt detached (and especially feel so in retrospect) from what was then on the slate of currently produced television. Most particularly that in the prime-time broadcast hours. Even such ancillary interests as those aforementioned were not of the same effect upon me as my Era 2 favourites. And this, together with the rather detached style of friendship offered by Tony, does tend to produce something less than a sentimental banking of memory. My favourite television series of the 1970s had, one by one, been removed from broadcast. I would fantasise about their triumphant return as widely watched and appreciated reruns, but for the time being, such was only fantasy- and I clung to it as much as I did to the memories and my appreciation of the fancied works.
To be sure, my longing for Douglastown and my way of life there was conjoined with my aesthetic and imaginative fondness for the likes of Space: 1999, Spiderman, Rocket Robin Hood, The Pink Panther Show, et cetera. Meanwhile, I settled for The Incredible Hulk, thrilling to the anger-triggered metamorphoses of Dr. David Banner, and thinking about the circumstances of those transfigurations on the Saturdays after each Friday night Incredible Hulk viewing. WAGM would frustrate me by preempting this often formulaic but always interesting television show at the most inopportune times. For instance, I did not see the first half of the most famous two-part episode about Banner and his alter-ego battling another man's evil "Hulk" creature, and it was not until 2001 that I was able to see the 2-hour episode in which Banner marries a hypnotherapist played by Mariette Hartley (of the Polaroid camera commercials) and "Homecoming", in which Banner goes to his childhood home on Thanksgiving. Le Mutant, a weird and wonderful, moody, six-episode, originating-in-France television series of near-future Earthly intrigue on CBC French on Saturday evenings at 8 P.M., and WLBZ's servings of Planet of the Apes, amongst other things, on The Great Money Movie helped to sustain me over this for the most part somewhat dismal time. Dismal for my associations with many old favourites of imaginative production. And dismal, also, for my having to go to an oppressive environment at school.
Many of my childhood favourites were absent from television in my area during the turn of the decade from 1970s to 1980s, and that was for sure a drawback, rather an ironic drawback, to the triumphant gaining of cable television at home. And Bugs Bunny was of diminishing interest as I had, by 1980, evidently exhausted the amount of before-unseen-by-me cartoons on CBS' 90-minute Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, the package of cartoons thereon becoming tedious, as the same cartoon shorts were offered year after year. In newly assembled episodes each season, yes. But still the same cartoons, of which all too many were repeated within the twenty-six instalments constituting a season. There were not as many cartoons on CBS Bugs Bunny/Road Runner post-1975 previously unknown to me, than I had thought prior to moving to Fredericton. This is to say, cartoons that had not been in any of the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour episodes on CBC Television, 1969-75. Or cartoons viewed by me by other means. And several of the new-to-me cartoons seemed to have been plucked from a different reservoir than had been those in Bugs Bunny/Road Runner instalments of the late 1960s. Cartoons such as "Dumb Patrol", "Freudy Cat", "Snow Excuse", and "Daffy Flies North". And coincidingly, there was a sizable number of cartoons of the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour season aired year after year after year by the CBC prior to 1975, that had fallen by the wayside on CBS. By the end of the 1978-9 Bugs Bunny/Road Runner season on CBS, their absence had been conspicuous. And would grow ever more conspicuous with each successive season, those cartoons continuing to be A.W.O.L.. "Big Bouse Bunny". "Bugsy and Mugsy". "Mississippi Hare". "Horse Hare". "The Unmentionables". The Tweety-and-Sylvester cartoon with the canary, the cat, and a bulldog in hospital (I did not as yet know its title, "Greedy For Tweety"). Numerous Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. A few of the Sylvester tussles with Speedy. "The Hole Idea". These were cartoons that I had known on The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour on CBC and wished that I could again see, that seemed never to appear anymore. And others, many others, were butchered by censors, with film splicing in the midst of cartoon action. So much so, that the desirability of episodes of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show as items for me to acquire, was nullified. I had stopped audiotape-recording all Warner Brothers cartoons by the autumn of 1979. And my interest in viewing the television show was in definite decline in the 1980s' first few years.
WLBZ's syndicated Bugs Bunny cartoon broadcasts, although with different cartoon selections from those on CBS, were finished almost as soon as they were slotted, and the transmission quality of WLBZ left much to be desired in any event. Signal was often missing when weather conditions were at all inclement. And if mid-summer atmospheric conditions were conducive to it, interference from television signals from distant broadcasters could overpower the transmissions of WLBZ, and those of WVII and WAGM also.
The early 1980s was definitely the nadir of my interest in the cartoons of Bugs and company, but the interest was not dead and six feet under topsoil. No way was that a possibility. The cartoons of Bugs, Tweety, Sylvester, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, and others had been such an enormous component to my yen for imaginative entertainment in its initial years, and years of fulfilling childhood experiences of which they often were a part, that my interest in them could not perish. And in time, it would regrow, first with a release of some of the cartoons on videotape, and then with revampings of the Saturday morning U.S. television network programme with the rabbit and his cartoon colleagues. This would not be until I was in another life era. My fourth life era.
In 1980 and in 1981, I opted often to go to downtown or uptown Fredericton on book shopping expeditions on Saturday morning instead of sitting at home in front of the television and watching The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. And in 1982, I remember playing baseball on a Saturday morning. Or watching something that I had acquired on home video media. Yes, that would eventually become a reality for me, before this life era will have been concluded. Oh, I would still watch the occasional Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show episode. I remember one episode with "Hyde and Go Tweet" coming after Bugs' voyage with Columbus in "Hare We Go". Mid-to-late-summer in 1981, that was, I think. I remember a Saturday with The Bugs Bunny Mystery Special mated with that day's ninety minutes of Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. I remember the Porky Pig-as-a-talent-agent cartoon, "Curtain Razor", being shown under the title, "Show Stopper", sometime in 1980. And I remember shaking my head in amazement at how awful the cartoon, "Music Mice-Tro", was. The characterisation. The cartoon animation. The music. Everything. That was after the cartoons pairing Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, of which "Music Mice-Tro" was one, had been incorporated en masse into The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show.
The Saturday of my old friend Michael's visit in July, 1980 was one of those Saturdays of morning-hours book shopping expedition. I that day bought the Star Trek Photovovel of episode "Metamorphosis". There was also the springtime Saturday morning when I bought a second-hand copy of Orbit Books version of Space: 1999's book, Astral Quest, from United Book Store. And the Saturday morning on which I bought the novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back at Westminster Books. The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show was not beheld by my pair of eyes on those Saturdays.
There was a range of product for the Warner Brothers cartoon characters that served as a stimulus for awhile for my attentiveness to those characters, while my inclination to following the broadcasts of their Saturday network television programme was decidedly not optimum. In 1980, Tim Horton's was selling drinking glasses adorned with images of the characters of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. And I collected them all. Each drinking glass had one specific character in his most routine pose for use in merchandising. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Foghorn Leghorn, Pepe Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Yosemite Sam, and Elmer Fudd were the characters utilised for the drinking glasses. Some were easier to acquire than were others, as I recall.
For Space: 1999 in 1980 and in 1981, two of the darkest years in my association with it, all what I had were the recorded-in-1980 audiotape of Destination: Moonbase Alpha, very few surviving audiotapes (e.g. of "Dragon's Domain" and "War Games") of CBC English's broadcasts, some 30 audiotape-recordings off of CBC French, the episode novelisation books and four original novels, a few colour comic books and a black-and-white comic magazine (Charlton Comics' Volume 4), my deteriorating steel toy Eagle purchased from Levine's department store in 1978, and a few other gradually disintegrating items, plus temporally receding memories of the visual presentations on television. Every attempt to persuade a broadcaster to transmit a repeat run of this television series was fruitless (as yet), and I was frustrated even in my effort to purchase Starlog Publications' Moonbase Alpha Technical Notebook via mail order. Apart from some successes in the Toronto bookstores during my December, 1980 time in Toronto, Space: 1999 was becoming elusive in any capacity. Oh, an occasional photograph of it might be found in a library book that I might discover on a lucky moment. Starlog magazine, which had never been satisfactorily favourable, let alone faithfully accurate, to the fabulous universe traversed by Moonbase Alpha, eliminated its "Gerry Anderson Space Report" feature in early 1981, replacing it with something called "In Syndication" that was promised to be inclusive of Space: 1999 but which never mentioned it for as long as I kept attentive to what Starlog was printing. I found that Space: 1999 tended to be a guarantee of frustration and heartbreak, and I dared not bring a Space: 1999 book to school, for that would amount to an open invitation to be berated without mercy. Star Trek and Star Wars were considered reason enough to look disdainfully upon me as Arthur Fonzarelli did upon Ralph Malph in Happy Days. It was truly a dismal time for an aficionado of Space: 1999 and outer space fantasy, and the other entertainments on which I had been weaned and that I had grown to love. Even Star Trek had been missing in New Brunswick for a number of years, with the releases to the theatres of Star Trek- The Motion Picture in 1979 and Star Trek II- The Wrath of Khan in 1982 probably raising many an eyebrow and young person's query as to what Star Trek had been.
Autumn of 1981 was to witness a positive reversal of fortune on my yearning to again see on television my favourites of bygone years, with the return of both Spiderman and Rocket Robin Hood to the televisual airwaves of New Brunswick. ATV had evidently forfeited the broadcast rights to both of those animated cartoon television shows, allowing CHSJ to purchase such rights. Spiderman became a weekday afternoon attraction on CHSJ, with Rocket Robin Hood being again a far-fetched and delightful facet of Saturday morning television viewing. I would start spending time in front of the television on Saturday mornings again, Rocket Robin Hood being the attraction of that for me.
For the time being, in 1980 and early 1981, I had my intensive interest in The Empire Strikes Back, and on television there was many a James Bond movie to watch. The Spy Who Loved Me, an aquatic Moonraker, the second James Bond film that I experienced (Moonraker being the first), was audiotape-recorded by me off of WVII on a Sunday evening while I was on Grade 9, and I found the Christopher Wood novelisation for it (I already had Moonraker's novelisation) on the shelves of United Book Store late one slightly inclement Sunday afternoon. By 1981, I had bought every Ian Fleming James Bond book. Each one of those had a front cover with a woman sitting or reclining on a giant gun.
Sightings of anything Space: 1999 in Fredericton were few and far between by the autumn of 1980. Notable exceptions to this were at the Nashwaaksis Junior High School Library. There was a hardcover copy of the Space: 1999 novel, Rogue Planet, on one of the library's shelves. I would look at it when I had occasion to be in the library for school work. Also in the library's stacks was a reference book on science fiction. I do not remember its title or what its front cover looked like, but on one of its pages was a picture of the "Dragon's Domain" episode of Space: 1999. Tony Cellini fighting the monster which the book described as "holocaustal". The book erroneously said that it was Martin Landau, not Italian actor Gianni Garko, as the character wielding an axe against the tentacled horror in the picture. One weekday's evening in 1980, I was walking up Lilac Crescent with Tony and Steven to the Nashwaaksis Junior High School library with the intention of making a photocopy of that specific page of that science fiction reference book. I am not certain of when that was. It was around 7 P.M. and dark outside. The air was rather raw. There was no snow on the ground. I would guess sometime in November. Tony was wearing his dark blue corduroy pants that he tended to wear only on special occasions, which was unusual as that visit to the library was nothing that would require garments more distinctive than everyday clothing. I made the photocopy, I was not very impressed with its quality, and the three of us returned to our homes. The photocopy picture was eventually fastened with Scotch adhesive tape to the box for my open-reel audiotape containing "Dragon's Domain" from its CHSJ-TV broadcast of Sunday, July 16, 1978.
Barry Morse made a surprise appearance on the paranormalist panelist CBC television show, Beyond Reason, in autumn of 1980. Beyond Reason, then, was a weekday afternoon after-school CBC offering, and it was hosted then by Paul Soles, late of the voice of Peter Parker/Spiderman on Spiderman. Tony and I were in my television room watching that television show that day, and our mouths opened wide at sight of Barry Morse in the guest chair. Three panelists, usually an astrologer, a graphologist, and a clairvoyant, would try to guess the identity of each guest hidden to them but immediately made known to the audience. My lower mouth hit the floor when clairvoyant Irene Hughes said that she sensed a connection with stars and planets and outer space in one of Mr. Morse's possessions that she was holding. And he later acknowledged, in the interview subsequent to his identity revealed to the panelists, that he was in a television series called Space: 1999. So, Ms. Hughes was right. And Space: 1999 received a mention. Something so rare, so very, very rare, on then-current media. I was grinning. I loved it. And I think that, even though he intensely disliked Barry Morse, Tony appreciated Space: 1999 being mentioned. He did not see my grinning. His eyes, as mine, were glued to the television. In his case, he was probably examining all of Mr. Morse's body language for something to lambaste.
Again, my mother, father, and I went to Toronto, in December, 1980, with a railway train being our method of transport to and from Canada's largest city. In what was rather close to being a copy of our travel from Fredericton to Toronto in February of 1978, we boarded a train on a Saturday evening. This time, though, we had to be bused to meet our train. We stepped aboard a bus at Fredericton's Lord Beaverbrook Hotel, that bus being designated as our means of conveyance to a train depot at Fredericton Junction. As in 1978, we had a sleeper berth on the train, which brought us to Montreal the following morning, and in Montreal, we boarded a coach-style train to go from Montreal to Toronto, arriving in Toronto shortly before Sunday dinnertime. While at the Montreal Canadian National train terminal, I was in a room with several tiny television sets, where I watched the Star Trek episode, "Court-Martial", in French. And there was a WHSmith bookstore at the train terminal, and I vividly remember searching in vain for books of interest to me there.
As was the case in 1978, our stay in Toronto was courtesy of the Victorian Order of Nurses, of which there was a conference that my mother was attending. And we stayed this time at the Delta Chelsea Inn, near to Yonge Street. Not very far away from the Sutton Place hotel where we lodged in 1978. Shortly after we entered our Delta Chelsea hotel room for the first time, I discovered that a Star Trek broadcast was imminent. I had brought an audiocassette recorder with me on this odyssey to Toronto, and I promptly did the set-up procedure to do an audiotape-recording of whatever episode of Star Trek would be airing. It was the third season episode, "The Enterprise Incident". One that I had seen before. Back in spring of 1977. After our return to home in Fredericton, I would transfer that recording on audiocassette to open-reel audiotape, on which it was safe from the self-destructive tendencies of the "compact cassette". After Star Trek was concluded, we went to the hotel restaurant for dinner.
At the Delta Chelsea, as had been the case at the Sutton House in 1978, we had a magnificent view of Yonge Street from our room window. Sam the Record Man and its neon sign was prominent. The Delta Chelsea was closer to the intersection of Yonge and Queen Streets and further from the junction of Yonge with Dundas Street than was the Sutton House.
And accompanied by my father, as in 1978, I combed the first- and second-hand bookshops, again for anything to do with Space: 1999, and this time also for anything pertaining to my newer interests in the Star Wars and James Bond films. And also my interest then in Star Trek. By December of 1980, television and movie "tie-in" books constituted a formidable portion of my belongings, and I was continuing to add to my collection of such books, grateful for any surprise finds with which I might be blessed. And most of the books would be resold in October, 1981 at my first yard sale, to fund my investment into VideoDisc and videotape collecting.
My father and I stopped at a Wendy's Hamburgers establishment for lunch on one of the days of our excursions onto Yonge Street for my hoped-for procurement of of many a book. And for the first time, I tasted a Wendy's Chili. I loved it.
In addition to purchasing several Space: 1999 episode novelisation paperbacks while in Toronto in 1980, including all six of the Orbit Books printings of the novelisations of the episodes of Season 1 (with a first-time buy of the Orbit Books version of The Space Guardians; the other five books were repurchases), I located and bought some hardcover Space: 1999 novels (Alien Seed, Android Planet, and Rogue Planet) at World's Biggest Bookstore on a street perpendicular to Yonge. World's Biggest Bookstore also had in its stock all five of of the novelisation books published by Star Books in the U.K., of Space: 1999's second season episodes, and there I rebought one of those, The Psychomorph. And after an afternoon's trek with my father to the C.N. Tower, I entered a collector's store called Silver Snail, from which I purchased Starlog Issue Number Two. Long had I sought that issue of Starlog for it was dedicated foremost to Space: 1999, the only issue in Starlog's whole publishing history to concentrate chiefly upon Space: 1999. It had in it many colour photographs of early Season 2 episodes, a full episode guide for Season 1 (one that adhered to the episode broadcast order of WPIX- New York City), and a partial episode guide for Season 2. I remember looking lovingly at the pages of that issue of Starlog after my father and I had returned to the Delta Chelsea, and while my father was watching daytime dramas on television.
And from a Coles Bookstore on Yonge Street near to Yonge's intersection with a Dundas Street, I acquired the James Bond book, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, and Starlog's Science Fiction Aliens and Fantastic Worlds "Photo Guidebooks". Science Fiction Aliens had a huge colour picture of the monster from Space: 1999's "Dragon's Domain" episode on one of its pages, along with a claim to "Dragon's Domain" being, "one of the earliest episodes of Space: 1999," with which the episode guide in Starlog Issue Number Two was in accordance, it placing "Dragon's Domain" at two in first season episode order. Broadcast second on WPIX it may have been, but "Dragon's Domain" was not an early episode in production order, it was not chronologically dated as happening at all soon after the television series opener, "Breakaway", and it was next to last in the Season 1 episode novelisations and in the CBC French Cosmos 1999 broadcast order.
I bought some Star Trek books also. Mudd's Angels, for one. All told, I was rather happy with what I had acquired in those days that we were again in Toronto. On our railroad transportation back to New Brunswick, while we were eating in the train's dining car, I was given by a conductor a cardboard representation of a VIA Rail passenger train car, which I rather fancied and retained for years. We returned to home to find that the first snowfall of that year had hit Fredericton, and we had to wade our way through the snow in the driveway to reach our house. My father cleared the snow from behind the car, and he and I went to a kennel to collect Frosty.
And near the end of 1980, I bought, from Fredericton's Westminster Books, a book about important movies of the twentieth century. It offered, for each film that it listed in alphabetical order, full information on acting cast and some information on production crew, along with a handsome black-and-white photograph. That book listed every James Bond movie in existence at the time of its printing, and it was my source for facts about and one visualisation of the produced James Bond movies that I had yet to see. It also had listings for all of the Peter Sellers Inspector Clouseau movies, including A Shot in the Dark, of which I had had no experience. It listed Star Wars and Superman and the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (I was not to see that movie until 1991). The photograph for the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde showed Fredric March as Mr. Hyde with a hand around the throat of actress Miriam Hopkins as a character named Ivy. I remember the photograph for On Her Majesty's Secret Service having George Lazenby in a rather eccentric-looking action pose with the Alps in the background. The listing for Goldfinger sported a famous photograph of Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) jovially menacing James Bond (Sean Connery) with a laser beam. Although soft-covered, it was a lovely book- and it shames me to say that after a few months of owning it, I cut pictures out of the book to affix to my boxes for open-reel audiotapes. I distinctly remember the photograph for The Return of the Pink Panther, showing Peter Sellers, Christopher Plummer, and Catherine Schell, being utilised for labelling the box for my audiotape-recording of said Pink Panther movie. I had another book, a Christmas gift from my parents in 1980, about television shows, an encyclopaedic listing of all television programmes of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that, although usually restricting itself to objective premise, production, and broadcast information for its entries, heaped harsh criticism and condemnation mercilessly upon Space: 1999. A very unpleasant read, that.
The final weeks of 1980 or the early weeks of 1981 would be when I first saw the above mentioned Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, the theatrical motion picture of the Space: 1999 producers, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. It had been made some years before Space: 1999. The future look of it resembled very little that of Space: 1999, but its concept was mesmerising and thoroughly engaging and, I thought, was befitting of Space: 1999. I marvelled at the technology on display and was in awe of its space and spacecraft visuals. WLBZ telecast it as a 5 P.M.-to-7 P.M. movie on a weekday. 1980's last weeks are also notable for Barry Morse of Space: 1999 being in Fredericton for a performance of Scrooge in Theatre New Brunswick's stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol. It is one of the great regrets of my life that I did not go to the Fredericton Playhouse to see the play and meet Mr. Morse. Tony detested Barry Morse with a passion, and he would probably have disowned me as a friend if I went to see the play, or if he was to learn that I saw it and did not tell him that I did. I remember there being a poster for the play on the wall of the foyer of Nashwaaksis Junior High School, and Tony and I were standing one morning in that foyer, and he was expressing some distinct disdain for the actor who was going to be enunciating, "Bah, humbug!" I should have gone to see the play and met Mr. Morse, anyway. It would have been such a thrill to meet him. Doubtless, I would have been tongue-tied.
In January of 1981, I had braces put onto my teeth. On January 6, the day after my birthday, I was to go direct from school in the afternoon to my dentist's clinic (from one torture chamber to another) and endure an ordeal of multiple tooth fillings, requiring a series of piercingly agonising needles in tender areas, few of which were sufficient to numb the harsh and seemingly interminable pain inflicted by the drill. I remember going to my grandparents' house with my mother after this Spanish Inquisition, watching the climax of a stabbing-with-hand-puppet murder mystery on The Edge of Night. I remember being extremely relieved to be through my dental surgeries, although I had another appointment with the same dentist a week later for more of the same. I next had to lay on my orthodontist's cot for an entire morning as the braces were applied to my teeth, and then went with my father in the middle of a snowstorm to the Sobeys grocery store in the Fredericton Mall for foods that would be easy for me to chew with the metallic encumbrances in my mouth, and then my memory is of being at home, trying to adjust to my new condition while watching the "Bedrock Hillbillies" episode of The Flintstones and feeling relieved to not have to go to school in the afternoon because the heavy snowfall that day had resulted in cancellation of the day's latter half's classes.
I would wear the braces for a year and a half, and then a retainer thereafter for a year. I have to admit that I failed to wear the retainer at all times, and my orthodontist was perturbed about that, seeing as he did that my teeth had begun to drift apart. When all was said and done, my front teeth were not perfectly situated, though their arrangement still looked much better than it did pre-braces.
During my many months as a young Frederictonian collector of books, I rode Fredericton Transit buses rather a whopping number of times. My father supplied me with the bus tickets with which I was able to travel to downtown or uptown Fredericton and back to home. I remember visits to the Fredericton downtown United Book Store on weekday evenings, Saturday mornings and afternoons, and Sunday afternoons. And sometimes going to a cafeteria-like restaurant in King's Place to peruse my latest purchases as I awaited the hour of the bus departing King's Place for Nashwaaksis. On one of those occasions, I had a rather frayed copy of The Making of Star Trek in my hands. On another occasion I had a Photonovel of the vulgar and sporadically funny movie, The Jerk, which Tony and I had seen one afternoon at the Gaiety Theatre. I bought that Photonovel from Westminster Books, if I remember correctly. It was fairly cheap, and I had found nothing else to buy, that day. I remember purchasing The World of Star Trek from United Book Store late one Sunday afternoon. Its spines were severely creased at the photograph sections. The real triumphant occasions at the bookstores were those when I came upon a Space: 1999 book. As I say, by 1980, in Fredericton, that was a rare occurrence. Even rarer it was to find one of those books in pristine condition.
In 1980 and in 1981, the Fredericton Mall Zellers had a rather deep bin of budget paperbacks that included a copious amount of Star Books. Star Books had been the U.K. publisher of the novelisations of episodes of Season 2 Space: 1999. Those books, paperbacks, had been Planets of Peril (which I bought at Gallivan's Bookstore in Newcastle in spring of 1977), followed by Mind-Breaks of Space, The Space-Jackers, The Psychomorph, and The Time Fighters (all four of which I purchased from the shelves at Fredericton's Beegie's Bookstore late in 1977). I was desirous of brand new copies of them, as the copies acquired in 1977 or replacements later bought, had deteriorated. The manner of deterioration of those books included spine creases, conspicuous signs of wear on the front covers, stains on the pages from food residue on my fingers or those of my friends (potato chip grease was particularly troublesome), and a patently silly idea of mine to mark on the books, in my unprofessional-looking handprinted lettering, the names of the novelised episodes in them, me subsequently regretting having done so and wishing for a pristine copy again. There was also that mysterious sixth book in that series of Space: 1999 publications, one The Edge of the Infinite. The one that I had tried ordering from Beegie's, only to learn of its out-of-print status. I routinely scoured that bin at Zellers, in search of books with the Star designation on spine or front or back cover. Alas, I never once struck what would have been for me the most glittery gold. The only items of note for me that my searches uncovered was a non-Space: 1999 book, The Time of the Hawklords, penned by Michael Butterworth, writer of all of the Space: 1999 books mentioned above in this paragraph, and a Bionic Woman book called A Question of Life, written by a Maud Willis. I had no interest in the former, and though I intended to someday buy the latter, I never did.
I did, however, possess a Bionic Woman book, Welcome Home, Jaime, published in the U.S.. I bought it from United Book Store. Along with some Six Million Dollar Man books. Also published in the U.S.. The U.S. books of the bionic duo were novelisations of episodes. I was not sure that the same was true of the ones from the U.K..
It was on one of those visits to Fredericton Mall Zellers that I encountered Joey as I was walking toward the store's entrance and the eastern edge of the Fredericton Mall corridor. I definitely remember feeling disappointed and frustrated after having achieved nil result in a protracted quest for a specific range of book in that bin, as I was on my way out of the store. And the sight of Joey pulled me out of a descent into a downcast mindset that would probably have lasted the day. We made eye contact, and we greeted each other and chatted briefly.
The books that I was collecting adorned numerous areas of my bedroom, sitting on the same shelving units that I used to employ in Douglastown to display my comic books in the McCorry garage. They, the shelving units, were metallic and quite lightweight, and designed to store books in vertical position in addition to horizontal. At the peak of my book-collecting hobby, in 1980 and 1981, my bedroom of our Fredericton home was brimming with colour from paperback book spines. And I also had a Darth Vader poster on my bedroom wall. I remember Tony expressing his approval for that.
Mrs. Brooks, who had been my Language Arts teacher in Grade 8, was my homeroom teacher and once again my Language Arts teacher in Grade 9. In Grade 9, Mrs. Brooks granted to us, her homeroom students, some portions of time of no small size, for private reading in the classroom. Most especially on days when Language Arts was our first period class, and our morning homeroom time blended into that. And I brought books from my collection to read privately during the designated time for such. Memorably, I brought the novelisation of The Return of the Pink Panther and read sections of that. And the novelisation of The Spy Who Loved Me, with a reading of large chunks of that. And the Ian Fleming-authored From Russia With Love. And James Blish's Star Trek 3, with which I read the whole of the novelisation of the episode, "Spectre of the Gun" (called "The Last Gunfight" in the book), and sizable portions of the novelised "The Doomsday Machine". Both were episodes that I had yet to see, though I had seen a picture in Starlog of the alien Melkotian in the former of the two episodes and was rather impressed at the design. "Spectre of the Gun", I thought, would have been an ideal candidate for Photonovel treatment if the Star Trek line of Photonovels had continued post-the-"Amok Time" twelfth Photonovel. And I read a few issues of Starlog. And Marvel Comics' adaptation of For Your Eyes Only, some days before I saw the actual movie. And one day, one day I was in a bolder than by then usual, for me, frame of mind (perhaps foolhardy would be a more apt description of it) and brought with me a Space: 1999 book, Astral Quest (Pocket Books edition), to school. No one tore it from my hand, thankfully. Nor did anyone spit venom at me. But I was in a front corner of the classroom out of usual the line of vision of most of the students in the classroom (certainly, the front cover of my book was), and was quite discreet at pulling the book out of my bookbag and returning it there. I do not think that anyone noticed what I was reading, that day.
In private reading in school year 1980-1, I had been reading James Bond most of the time. James Bond, which was rather more acceptable to all who sat with me in the classrooms of Nashwaaksis Junior High than "pulp" science fiction/fantasy set beyond the confines of Earth's gravitational pull. Surely, I ought to have been granted one day's outer space deviation from that, once in a while. Ah, but the peers of mine in junior high school judged space science fiction and my interest in such to be loathsome, despicable, utterly intolerable. I could not be sure of even one day's grace from the condemnations of the genre and of me for liking it.
I continued to go to school only for the amount of time required, involving myself in no extracurricular activities. Participation in Scouts, learning how to skate, and artistic undertakings all "fell by the wayside" in the move to Fredericton. I had come to detest school in a way, but my way thereof was rather different from that of my peers. They hated school because they were, by and large, uninterested in learning and wanted to laze around. I wanted to learn. But not in an oppressive environment where I had to maintain a low profile for fear of being verbally or physically assailed. And not in so heavily regimented a curriculum as was imposed at Nashwaaksis Junior High. Like everyone else, I was ecstatic at the possibility of a prolonged teachers' work stoppage starting in mid-June, 1981, when I was in Grade 9. There were only a couple of weeks remaining in that school year, but the less time that I had to spend at school, the better, especially when pleasant weather had arrived. I was also hopeful that the teachers' walk-out would delay school's opening in the autumn, for I was anything but eager to go to the enormous Fredericton High. But to the bitter dismay of all of us, the walk-out only lasted one day, a Friday, and the announcement came on the following Sunday evening that weekend-long negotiations had resulted in a settlement of the labour dispute. With some pique over this unexpected and unwelcome development, I stewed as I watched and audiotape-recorded The Pink Panther Strikes Again on its ABC television network broadcast that Sunday evening.
At home, I persisted in having Cine-Audios for the children in the neighbourhood. And in June, 1981, in the midst of the teachers' labour dispute, I started a weekend matinee and weekday evening series of "one-man" performances (with partial audio provided by cassette audiotape) of such things as the James Bond movies, Earthquake, and Star Wars, as the basement was converted into a theatre. Actual video shows became possible in November, 1981, when a VideoDisc player was within purchasing reach (videocassette recorders at that time were still above a thousand dollars in price, while RCA VideoDisc machines were close to 800 dollars). But the limited selection of VideoDisc titles on the market left me frustrated. Goldfinger was shown to excess, and my friends and I grew quickly jaded by it.
The "one-man" plays of the James Bond movies did not last past Thunderball (or, I should say, Goldfinger, as it and Thunderball were inverted in numerical order of the movies enacted, Thunderball being third, and Goldfinger fourth). My plans to do a "one-man" play of You Only Live Twice met with zero attendees, marking the end of that run of plays. In June of 1981, I had yet to actually see Goldfinger and simply concocted a story for it out of my own imagination and what little I knew of it. Its character names, mainly. And a bowler hat that decapitates people. I did same for Dr. No, which I also had not yet seen. One of the comers to the Dr. No play was a boy from South Africa briefly living in Nashwaaksis, at back of a new street called Juniper Court. He was highly enthused for the James Bond movies and was knowledgeable about some of the ones of the 1960s, Dr. No included. He commended me for my imagining of Dr. No. I only saw him that one time, sadly.
You Only Live Twice would also have been, in my play, mostly a fabrication of my imagination, as that, too, was, in June of 1981, a James Bond film not yet beheld by my eyes.
Since his moving to Woodmount Drive, Tony's presence in my life had become less and less prominent, at all times of the year. Summers seldom were our best time, but July and August of 1981 were abysmal. By 1981, I scarcely saw Tony on weekends. Almost never on Saturdays, and for at the most a couple of hours on Sundays. On weekdays, except for the few evenings in June of 1981 when I had the James Bond play performances in my basement with which Tony assisted me, I only saw Tony for an hour after school, or in the summers an hour or maybe two hours after lunch. Somewhat more than that if we were going to see the occasional movie together at one of the Fredericton theatres. While Family Feud was being shown in the summer on WVII, the Bangor, Maine ABC television network affiliate at 1 P.M., Tony would venture from his house to mine for a routine visit. And we would sit and talk for the umpteenth time about our shared assessment of some movie or television show or about there being nobody in our midst with whom to play a baseball game or some such thing. If I wanted to see Tony in the evening or on summer mornings, I would have to go in search of him, sometimes finding him with his brother and his brother's friends. There were yet still some good times to be had with Tony. On the first Friday of summer in 1981, just two days after the school year had finally concluded, Tony and I went by bus to the mall area atop Fredericton's southern hill to see the matinee premiere of the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only, at the Plaza Cinema 1. I had read that movie's comic book adaptation during the final day of school that year, and although it diverged significantly from its predecessor, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only still had adventure in exotic locations and plenty of action. Tony and I sat in the sunshine on the concrete steps leading to the Plaza Cinemas, and were admitted to our destination theatre in ample time to orient ourselves and ready for the exciting spy fare. We need not have worried about securing seating in an optimum part of the theatre, for the crowd at the Plaza Cinemas that afternoon was quite small. After the movie, we went to Orange Julius in the Fredericton Mall for a hot dog and then rode a filled-to-capacity rush hour bus to home. From that day at the movie with Tony, I had reason to think that summer of 1981 might be one of quality. Alas, it was to be mostly lonely and mainly boring.
Tony and Steven and their parents went to Toronto and were gone for almost all of July and some of August. Prior to that, my grandparents and parents and I went by car to visit with my uncle, aunt, and cousins in Elliot Lake, Ontario. That was a memorable vacation in that I watched many television programmes that were no longer seen in New Brunswick. On Sundays at 5 P.M., the Global television network's affiliate in Sudbury was showing the same episodes of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour that had been run by the CBC in the early 1970s. Instalment 18, with "The Windblown Hare", "Tree Cornered Tweety", "To Beep or Not to Beep", "The Dixie Fryer", "Tugboat Granny", "Bonanza Bunny", and "Hopalong Casualty", was telecast during my 1981 stay at Elliot Lake. Though my interest in the Warner Brothers cartoons then was at its lowest level, being able to see that episode of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour again after nearly six years, was an exceedingly delightful experience. I loved every minute of it. I can still visualise the basement television room of my uncle, aunt, and cousins, and the television on which I saw that vintage Bugs Bunny/Road Runner episode.
We, my parents, my grandparents, my uncle, my aunt, my cousins, and I, also went to the lake, picnicked on Kentucky Fried Chicken, and ventured in a motorboat onto the lake. And I saw Superman II, my second viewing thereof, at a cinema in the one mall in Elliot Lake.
The travel by my parents, my grandparents, and I to and from Elliot Lake brought us through North Bay and Sudbury, Ontario, and Montreal, Quebec. And also Quebec City along the beautiful coast of the St. Lawrence River. I sought to buy some books during our passage through some of these places, but all that I was able to find was Bjo Trimble's Star Trek Concordance. Frustratingly, no Space: 1999 books could be found at all. My mother was adamant that I adapt to that as a reality of the times, Space: 1999's heyday being years in the past. Travel was not going to be any longer necessarily lucrative in my quest for anything Space: 1999. At least, not with travel to modest-sized cities like North Bay and Sudbury. Or even Montreal.
Once back in Fredericton, I languished away countless summer days, excruciatingly bored, almost always by myself. After Tony had returned from Toronto and showed to me all of the science fiction and space fantasy materials that he had acquired there, we did not do much. Several 1981 summer afternoons were characterised by the two of us or just me sitting on my front doorstep and complaining about the lack of happenings on Linden Crescent. The two of us did several times go to the Nashwaaksis Twin Cinemas to view again and again our film favourites, The Empire Strikes Back and Superman II. Joey, myself, and some other young inhabitants of Linden Crescent a few times played Tic Tac Dough in sand, one of us acting as the host, with a hidden dragon, location known only to the host, that surprised the contestant looking for a Tic and a Tac on nine squares. On the whole, though, the summer of 1981 was one of dull lethargy, with high school looming on the calendar in early September.
Near the end of summer, 1981, I discovered an interesting storyline on General Hospital, the four o'clock daytime serial preceding The Edge of Night on the ABC television network. John Colicos, best known as the evil Baltar on Battlestar Galactica, was Mikkos Cassadine, a wealthy industrialist with an underground tropical island headquarters from which he hatched his apocalyptic plan to freeze Port Charles, New York with his invention- carbonic snow. The television show's three heroes, Luke Spencer, Laura Webber, and Robert Scorpio, infiltrated the Cassadine lair to stop Mikkos' diabolical scheme, with Mikkos being locked and frozen within his own snow-manufacturing apparatus. Tony and I revelled in this science fiction scenario, which continued into September, and Spiderman web-swung back into action in his classic 1960s television series rerun Monday through Friday at 4:30 P.M. starting in September, 1981.
Tony and I went one day near the end of the summer of 1981 to the newly-opened Wendy's restaurant on Prospect Street and then to the matinee showing at the Plaza Cinema 2 of Under the Rainbow, a comedy movie about midgets causing calamity in a hotel of the 1930s; it was of interest to us only because Carrie Fisher of the Star Wars movies was in it and because the movie trailer for it had been shown in advance of the re-screening that summer of The Empire Strikes Back, of which Tony and I indulged ourselves at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 in August of 1981, and which I had sought in vain to audiotape at a drive-in theatre performance later that same month, the audiotape recorder going haywire at the start of the Bespin Cloud City part of the movie. After our viewing of Under the Rainbow, Tony and I walked all of the way from the Plaza Cinemas to our homes, down York Street to downtown Fredericton and across the Westmorland Street Bridge (then only recently built and as yet unopen to car traffic).
Another memory of late summer of 1981 is that of a partly cloudy Saturday afternoon when Tony and I walked from Fredericton North to Fredericton South via the newly-constructed-and-not-yet-open-to-automobiles Westmorland Street Bridge, to Radio Shack in a plaza at the corner of Dundonald and Smythe Streets. The objective of the cross-city perambulation was a purchase by me of an open-reel audiotape. A Realistic Concertape 2400, to be precise. And onto said open-reel audiotape was to be committed five episodes of Season 2 of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century from Tony's collection of "compact cassettes" of that television series. I was itching to make some new additions to my reel-to-reel audiotape holdings of works of entertainment, and I already had the two-hour premiere episode of Buck Rogers and the second two hours of same, the episode, "Planet of the Slave Girls", and a further episode of a protracted length, "The Plot to Kill a City", and was interested in expanding the representation of Gil Gerard's Space Age hero in my personal library of audiotape. Tony was agreeable to loaning his audiocassettes to me for duplication. I think because the episodes being on open-reel audiotape meant that they would not be vulnerable to the all-too-frequent breakage process of the "compact cassette" (i.e. jamming, un-spooling, crinkling, snapping) and would be preserved for accessing anytime for back-up copies for him. I was at that point in time dedicated, as was he, to permanently retaining entertainment works on audiotape. Neither Tony nor I was then foreseeing of a paradigm shift in the collecting of movies and television series that was merely a couple of months ahead of us.
That day, Tony I embarked on our trek shortly after lunch. My parents were that afternoon visiting my grandparents, and they were not at home at the time that Tony and I departed the Linden Crescent and Woodmount Drive neighbourhood for the long walk to the West Plat area of Fredericton South where the aforementioned Radio Shack was situated. And they were not at home when we returned to McCorry abode and I began doing the audiotape-recording. It was an approximate two-hour undertaking, the walk by Tony and I to and from the Radio Shack, I would estimate. We crossed the bridge and moved down the off ramp to what would eventually be known as Riverside Drive, crossed that road, traversed the parking lot to a Queen Street grocery store, and started walking the sidewalk of Northumberland Street on our way to the plaza at corner of Dundonald and Smythe. I was successful a procuring an open-reel audiotape, the Realistic Concertape 2400, and on our walk back to our home neighbourhood, Tony suggested that we stop at a convenience store and eatery called Luckey Lunch at corner of Northumberland and Brunswick Streets, for something to eat. I was not hungry and declined to buy anything there and waited outside for Tony as he purchased a snack. And then onward we continued on our return journey, reaching my place sometime around 3 P.M..
What were the Buck Rogers episodes put onto that open-reel audiotape? One of them was "Testimony of a Traitor". That one, I definitely remember. And I think that the other four were "The Crystals", "The Satyr", "Shgoratchx!", and "The Hand of the Goral". The open-reel audiotape that I bought could hold five episodes, with the third of them split across the two sides of the audiotape media. I honestly do not remember listening to any of them after they were incorporated into my collection. None of them, I have to say, was much of an example of action-packed, exciting Space Age adventure. They were all exceedingly talky. And Buck Rogers was, moreover, not an opus that was of aesthetically substantive stimulus to me. But the evil double concept of "The Hand of the Goral" did appeal to my imagination. It was scarcely original by the time of that episode's production and broadcast, though, and it had been, in my estimation, much better rendered in Space: 1999. Goodness knows, I would have so much preferred to have been adding episodes of Space: 1999 to my holdings. And how! "The Crystals" and "The Satyr" were quality science fiction, in my estimation, the latter of them involving atavistic physical and mental change, a concept that, in its Jekyll-and-Hyde offshoot, had long been of fascination to me. But it had been, I thought, rather more intriguingly invoked elsewhere. And in imagined universes more aesthetically to my liking.
But it was novel undertaking, that long walk to Dundonald and Smythe that day. And it gave to Tony and I something to do on one of the days of a dying summer that had been, in the main, boring. I feel quite sure that Tony and I talked about boredom, that summer having been boring, as we were walking that day.
And at that time, it was quite rare for Tony and I to be together on a Saturday. I remember remarking to myself about that. I honestly do not remember if it was before or after the day that Tony and I went to the Plaza Cinemas to see Under the Rainbow. But summer was definitely on the wane in both cases.
A handful of things aside, summer of 1981 had been eminently dismissible. For me to not want a repetition of it should go without saying. I had been friends with Tony, with him my best friend, for a number of years. Although he and I had been separate for far too many summer days, the amount of time we did spend in each other's company from 1978 to 1981 had been quite substantial, enough for us to know each other's perspectives, impressions, and opinions on practically everything, and so much of these were simpatico that it was as though we were talking to ourselves for much of the time. Add to this a diminishing number of newly produced entertainments at which for us to marvel and have impressions (there was a very observable drop, by mid-1981, in the number of new space science fiction/fantasy movies and television programmes, a drop that would continue and become more pronounced in months to come), and a run of days during which he and I, if we were together, did little else but lament about our boredom. And the outcome was for me a powerful awareness of fatigue and ennui with what had been the status quo for several years, along with a wish for something different- and a much better summer to come in 1982 than what I had endured in 1981. And Joey, a few years older than he had been when I first became acquainted with him in 1979, came back into the equation as a likely buddy of some considerable importance.
In several respects Joey was quite the anti-Tony. He was not inclined, as Tony was, to reject people for being affectionate. Tony's reserve in how he responded to me and to items of interest to him and me, was increasing. Reservedness was becoming his dominant personality trait, and he had in any case never been much given to expressions of appreciation and fondness for one's friendship. Or mine, anyway. Joey, however, would speak- or act- his mind; if he did not care for the way that people were behaving toward him or toward persons or things that he respected, he would physically express his discontent, and if he liked what was being said or done, he would demonstrate his esteem with a hug. There was a refreshing forthrightness about Joey. He would state his affection as freely as he would any disaffection. He was as yet uninitiated in most of what I enjoyed to watch, and I found it quite positive and reinvigorating to be with him as he experienced many of those entertainments for the first time ever, with me by his side and in fact providing to him the opportunity to view many of those entertainments.
In the winter months of 1982 as I was having VideoDisc shows for my younger neighbourhood cohorts, Joey was willing to go that proverbial extra mile to be there for me "ahead of the pack" and to "lend a hand" in my preparations for a show. It is now clear to me that he wanted more than anything to be my assistant or partner on all such endeavours. Truth is that he reminded me more of Douglastown and of the quality of friendship there than did anybody else in Fredericton. In the 1980s, Joey was the only friend who consistently called me on the telephone. Tony had abandoned that procedure by 1980. In fact, by 1983, Tony had completely stopped visiting me at my house, whereas Joey did so- and daily in the summers. Joey's ascension to the level of best buddy was the most defining element of an era change.
The school year of 1981-2 as I was in Grade 10, coming home in the afternoons to watch Spiderman and planning Sunday afternoon screenings of selections from my VideoDisc collection, was when my rediscovery of Joey was in progress. I had not been looking forward to going to Fredericton High School, and it was, as I expected, an overwhelmingly huge place of often difficult learning, within which I became quite lost in the crowd, and as usual a loner therein. Fredericton High School was at that time the only senior high school in the city. Its size was dictated by the need to house and to educate every school-going aged-15-and-above youth in the Fredericton region. In its academic wing, it had three expansive floors of classrooms, including chemistry and biology laboratories and the like, and its Industrial Arts and Business Administration wings were two-storied. It had, of course, a large gymnasium, a cafeteria, and a library. It even had a bookstore. The washrooms had giant sprinklers spewing hot water that were activated by a press of a foot on a lever. I had to be bused to and from this hulking school every day, and until the Westmorland Street Bridge was opened to motor vehicle traffic in October, 1981, a congested Carleton Street Bridge meant slow progress to school each morning.
My average mark early in Grade 10 dropped by at least fifteen percent from Grade 9. My friends were in junior high or elementary school, and I was separated from them all day. For several months in Grade 10, school bus three did not bring me home until about 4 P.M., and I had only an hour before supper with which to socialise and/or to watch television. I soon quit riding bus 3 and boarded a much-swifter bus 101, with which I was able to reach my home by 3:40 P.M.. I was transported to school in the mornings in Grade 10 by bus 91 at the foot of Melvin Street. Different school bus routes were instituted in the autumn of 1982.
For the most part, I sleepwalked through my high school years, especially Grade 11, which I scarcely remember, usually managing to earn respectable but not outstanding grades. By that point of time, I was bored by almost the whole thing. Only modern history, geography, and Grade 11 English (reading Lord of the Flies and Fahrenheit 451) were interesting against the tedium of teenage life in which I just did not feel that I belonged. I was pestered and teased by a few of my homeroom peers in Grade 10, but after that, I was left to finish my school years without further unpleasant incident. I devoted my attention to my friends around home, all of whom years younger than me, by playing weekend or weekday evening street baseball, showing movies and television series episodes, and entertaining them at home.
The daily ritual of going to high school involved riding yellow bus in the morning, eating lunch at Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King (Fredericton's outlet of Burger King opened while I was writing my final examinations in Grade 10 in June, 1982), or Orange Julius (in the Fredericton Mall, across Prospect Street from the high school), and scrambling, with no time to return to my locker, to catch bus 101 (which departed Fredericton High many minutes before bus 3) to home at day's end. In the years that I was in Grades 10 and 11, I always came home anxious to see what episode of Spiderman would be aired at 4:30 on CHSJ. I was also very addicted to the crime-drama serial, The Edge of Night, which until mid-1982 still ran at 5 o'clock.
In Grade 10, my morning courses were French, History or Physical Education (History was on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Physical Education was on Tuesdays and Thursdays), and Mathematics. And in the afternoon, my schedule of courses consisted of Geography, Physics, and English. In Grade 11, my day started with Mathematics and then proceeded to English and then went through Chemistry and French toward a rather late time for lunch. The compensation for the late lunch was a short afternoon that was comprised of but two courses, History and Geography. In Grade 12, I had Computer Education (in the autumn semester only), Chemistry, and Economics in the A.M.. Then lunch, followed by English, Physics, and French.
I remember in Grade 10 braving the cold late autumn winds and bitterly cold winter winds of Fredericton's Prospect Street as I walked from Fredericton High School to Wendy's restaurant for a chili lunch, thinking en route thereto about what Spiderman episode I had seen the day previous on CHSJ and which one might be transmitted that afternoon. Some days, I went to Prospect Street McDonald's for a McChicken and recall counting the minutes of my final morning class (Mathematics) until the intercom would sound its dismissal signal, and then race to the McDonald's franchise near the school before the onslaught of teenagers of similar appetite descended upon the harried personnel of that fast food restaurant. I would be at home at 4:30, with Tony usually with me following his day in Grade 8 at Nashwaaksis Junior High, as the two of us watched Spiderman.
And Tony would sometimes come to me with a report on his classmates' opinions of the previous weekday's Spiderman episode. Opinions usually rather less than favourable. Some of Tony's peers were one day ridiculing Spiderman's episode, "Horn of the Rhino", and the utterances of the titular villain thereof. And almost all of them would often carp about Spidey's web-swinging in places where there are no buildings. One of Tony's teachers was, Tony said, rather captivated by the premise of the Spiderman episode, "Neptune's Nose Cone", of savages on a remote island worshipping a volcano and planning to drop a fallen-to-Earth rocket nose cone into the volcanic orifice, and spoke about it in front of class. Something about the concept had appealed to him. Maybe just its audacity. My own peers were characteristically unenthusiastic about Spiderman's reappearance on television, though some of them did watch it- probably just to look down their noses at it and feel superior to the makers of it and to people who like it. Imaginative entertainment was anathema to them. Even more than that if quality of technical production was in any way not to the most polished standard. Not that this was really of any great concern to me on a personal social level. Not by this point of time. I had no expectation then of a social life with peers at school. None at all. But it did serve as an indicator of what an outlier I was continuing to be among my peers at school. As I was as quiet as one was permitted to be, and left by my lonesome to go about my day in the hallways and classrooms of Fredericton High School- after the aforementioned pestering and teasing of me by my Grade 10 homeroom fellow students had subsided.
The return of Spiderman to television in New Brunswick was the second time that an entertainment from my earlier childhood had achieved a comeback, Space: 1999 through its francophone version of Cosmos 1999 having, in 1979, been the first. And this time, I was hearing the returned-to-my-life entertainment in the English tongue by which it had initially captured my interest.
The Mikkos Cassadine storyline on General Hospital was finishing, and Tony and I were delighted to have Spidey's crime-fighting or jaunts to otherworldly locales to anticipate each and every weekday. As ATV had begun doing toward the end of its run of this television series years previous, so CHSJ continued the practice; by this, I refer to the jumbled order of episode broadcast. The first two episodes to air on CHSJ in September, 1981 were "The Menace of Mysterio" and "Horn of the Rhino", and then some of the double-story first season episodes. Tony and I wanted to see the Ralph Bakshi-produced, "pier" episodes of Seasons 2 and 3 and were growing rather impatient for those. On the Friday of the second week, Season 2's "Thunder Rumble", an episode seldom having been shown on ATV, was telecast on CHSJ, and with that showing, the episodes of Seasons 2 and 3 started becoming more prolific on the Saint John broadcaster's airwaves. "Down to Earth" of Season 3 was transmitted on the following Monday. Next, there was a mixture of "web" (Season 1) and "pier" (Seasons 2 and 3) episodes for the few weeks to come, until the broadcast format settled into a "web" episode on Wednesdays and "pier" episodes on the other four weekdays. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the episodes selected for transmission. "Spiderman Meets Dr. Noah Boddy"/"The Fantastic Fakir" and "Fountain of Terror"/"Fiddler On the Loose" were repeated quite early in CHSJ's run of the television series, and "Down to Earth" and "Spiderman Meets Skyboy" also were shown a second time before several other episodes were aired once on CHSJ.
"Menace From the Bottom of the World" aired on Thanksgiving Monday. I remember sitting with Tony on some tree stumps on the Park Street School playground near to a small wooded area separating the Park Street School grounds from MacDonald Avenue, and that being approximately an hour before we went to my place that sunny, mild October afternoon to watch Spiderman with the smell of turkey, turkey gravy, and turkey dressing filling the house. On the overcast Friday before Thanksgiving weekend, CHSJ's offering of Spiderman was of "The Winged Thing"/"Conner's Reptiles". I remember hurrying to home from Tony's place some minutes before 4:30 P.M. and walking speedily through the backyards of houses of Woodmount Drive and Linden Crescent, intent on not missing any of that day's Spiderman telecast. And on the sunny Tuesday after Thanksgiving weekend was "Spiderman Battles the Molemen", which I do not believe was ever intended by Ralph Bakshi's production team to come consecutively after "Menace From the Bottom of the World". The two episodes are far, far too much alike to be shown one after the other. I mean, with the two of them airing that closely together, it ought to be as obvious as obvious could be that one was a vast recycling of the other. And, based on statements in the latter of them, they are clearly intended to be some time apart in Spidey's experience. And "Trip to Tomorrow", with its flashback to "The Evil Sorcerer", was broadcast on CHSJ that autumn a number of days before "The Evil Sorcerer".
To Tony's and my frustration, many of the episodes that we most wanted to see kept being held back, as an augmenting number of episode repeats and "triple-peats" and "quadruple-peats" were foisted upon us. We did not know in advance what episode would be airing on any given day. It was not until after opening sequence and song that we discovered what CHSJ would be presenting to us. "Criminals in the Clouds" was shown on Remembrance Day, and "Diamond Dust" two days after that, and between them CHSJ's repeat of "Return of the Flying Dutchman"/"Farewell Performance". By that time, repeats were increasing in frequency, and "web" episode broadcasts were becoming more common than the Wednesday-only offering of them that had been experienced for close to a month. CHSJ did not show "Up From Nowhere", "Swing City", "The Golden Rhino"/"Blueprint For Crime", "Rhino"/"The Madness of Mysterio", "King Pinned", and "The Origin of Spiderman" until the repeats were upon us in a multiple-days-per-week way. And by mid-December, first-run-on-CHSJ episodes were nowhere to be found. My favourite episode, "Blotto", had not yet been on CHSJ, and nor had "Rollarama", "Specialists and Slaves", "To Cage a Spider", "Diet of Destruction"/"The Witching Hour", and some others, whilst Tony and I were becoming annoyed (with plenty of tongue-clicks and sighs) at the tiresome appearances of "Horn of the Rhino", "The Night of the Villains"/"Here Comes Trubble", "Thunder Rumble", "Down to Earth", and "Spiderman Meets Skyboy".
Another television-viewing experience that I had in the autumn of 1981, in the evening and early nighttime hours of Wednesday, October 7, was that of my seeing for the first time 2001: A Space Odyssey, by way of a CBC Television broadcast thereof. I had heard tell of that 1968 motion picture. It was highly esteemed by prominent contributors to published discussions on science fiction movies and television shows. And its opening music had become part of the popular culture of the 1970s, routinely playing in product advertisements when there was emphasis on something being ahead of its time.
I liked the look of it. I liked the aesthetic of its depictions of space and astral bodies. I liked the spaceships and the Space Age hardware inside of them. And it was primarily for this reason that I did not abandon the movie part of the way through it, as it strained my patience with its dearth of dialogue through large swaths of it and its fixation at showing in protracted scenes even the most mundane of actions in weightless conditions on spaceships. It quickly became a chore to not defer to feelings of boredom with the movie. But I stayed with it. The technology on display was compelling viewing for me, as were the visualisations of space, worlds in space, and spaceships, and maybe the movie would eventually find some pace and some story-propelling situations. I was also interested in seeing actor Gary Lockwood as Dr. Frank Poole, Mr. Lockwood being the actor who played Gary Mitchell, silver eyes aglow, in the Star Trek "Where No Man Has Gone Before" episode of which I then had knowledge only through a Photonovel and a novelisation. Not even during the numerous intervals for commercials did I decide to "switch off". I stayed with the movie until its end credits and the CBC logo thereafter. The music in it. The majority of that, I did not like. I appreciate some centuries-old works of music, but not what I was hearing in the movie. The Strauss waltz. Not my cup of tea, and not what I thought appropriate for a movie set in future and in space.
The movie ran for three hours of television broadcast, and through that long duration of the movie, I at no time made any association with Space: 1999 in what I was seeing. Not even the designs of the Clavius Moonbase gave to me an impulse for a Space: 1999 comparison. They ought to have done so, as it is known that 2001: A Space Odyssey was in the minds of the producers and production designers of Space: 1999 when the look of Moonbase Alpha was first envisioned. And goodness knows I was usually very keen to harken back to Space: 1999 when experiencing productions other than it. With 2001: A Space Odyssey that evening and early night, the only connection that I made with Space: 1999 was in the word, odyssey, which was in one of the titles of the Space: 1999 novelisation books. I was oblivious to any other relation of my favourite television series with the set-in-2001 work of cinema that I was beholding. I would guess that my mind was focused on my struggle to find coherence in the succession of ploddingly paced scenes before my eyes.
For a long time over the course of the movie, it was not clear what the connection was between the seemingly interminable series of scenes with the monkeys and Dr. Floyd's business on the space station and thence on the Moon, and then it was, for another long time, equally unclear what a voyage to Jupiter had to do with Dr. Floyd and his team finding a Monolith in a Lunar setting. And even when the latter ambiguity was resolved with a recorded message by Dr. Floyd seen by Jupiter Mission commander Dave Bowman, the video screen showing Dr. Floyd was too small on my cathode ray tube for me to recognise him as the person speaking (and his voice lacked distinctive inflections for me to identify him as the man I had seen earlier). From my perspective, Dr. Floyd had disappeared at the end of the Moon portion of the movie, never to be seen again.
The Jupiter Mission section of the movie was somewhat salient in that it had sufficient dialogue to explain what was happening in the crisis with the computer, HAL (more than I could say for the Dr. Floyd and the monkeys parts of the film), but it was lumbered by excruciatingly long scenes of dialogue-less extravehicular activity. And for the life of me, I just cannot become excited at silent space scenes. I need sound effects, scientifically inaccurate though sound in space is. The problem with HAL was reminiscent of the struggle with the ALEX computer in The Bionic Woman, and I preferred the latter. I still do.
The final section of the movie made no sense to me at all. At all. It was just psychedelia for psychedelia's sake. And then the movie ended. There was no explanation, not even an attempted explanation, for what had transpired in the movie's last section, or indeed much of what had happened before then. There was not even admission by a character that what had happened was beyond comprehension. What happened to Bowman? Why was he suddenly gone from being in space near Jupiter to eating a meal in a regal hotel room? Not even did his ageing spark any recognition in me of a relation to Space: 1999, specifically to the episode, "Black Sun". My mind's focus was upon my efforts to glean some amount of sense in what I was seeing, compounded with a feeling of irritation. Irritation with the movie going back to being without dialogue and presenting unto me events that were confounding to me in my quest to detect some storytelling purpose as the movie was nearing the end of its running time.
I was not satisfied. I thought the movie to be wilfully obscure. Beautiful to look at, yes. But needlessly vague in what it was conveying, especially in its final minutes, and boring. I gave to it no thought after it was finished and the CBC went to newscast. And I did not have a conversation with Tony about it in the days after its airing. I opted to spend no more time with it than I had done on the evening that I saw it. Years later I would buy it on videocassette and watch it a few more times, still uncognisant of merit to it other than its look.
Also, I had had a long day and was tired. In addition to school, I had had an orthodontist's appointment (for him to examine the effect of my braces on my teeth) that day. I missed that day's showing of Spiderman on CHSJ (Tony later described for me what particular Spidey action that I had not had occasion that day to see) due to that appointment. I was not at home until after 5 P.M.. And then, I had homework.
Other television viewing experiences that I had in the last few months of 1981 were of the television premieres of the movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Moonraker. Both of them on November Sunday nights. I was, and am, more of an enthusiast for the latter than for the former, I have to say. Moonraker had been my seminal, very impressive immersion in the exciting and aesthetically interesting world of James Bond. I have always had rather a slight liking of the Steven Spielberg-directed 1977 movie about U.F.O.s and Earthlings having contact with the otherworldly. Slight but still enough to own a couple of books (novelisation and Photonovel) of it and to watch it when I have had occasion to do so- and no other options on such occasion for viewing imaginative entertainments. I saw it at Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 with my parents in 1980, during a reprise of it in North America cinemas, 1977 having been when it first was projected on movie theatre screens around the world.
And like many a North American with an eye for televised science fiction/fantasy, I, in 1981 and in 1982, followed the television series, The Greatest American Hero. In it, aliens bestow upon a school teacher fantastic powers through a suit not unlike that of Superman. Its action was always within Earth's gravisphere, and its antagonists were Earthbound for the most part. Some appearances by aliens come to Earth. After the cancellation of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in spring of 1981, newly produced situated-in-space science fiction/fantasy was not in the offering in U.S. and Canadian network television series, and The Greatest American Hero was an opus of that new era for imaginative productions. I liked the characters of The Greatest American Hero, and a sizable number of its episodes had interesting concepts. Including a tentacled, energy-eating monster being brought to Earth by an American Space Shuttle. My mother and I watched that episode together. "Oh, no. Not another one!" exclaimed my mother as the first glimpse of the monster's tentacles was had. She had had prior experience with tentacled alien life with a certain episode of Space: 1999. There was another episode about a supernatural force gaining possession of one of the characters, and another with the world in immediate danger of nuclear war due to an insane American General. Jeremy Kemp, who was in Space: 1999's episode, "Voyager's Return", guest-starred in an episode, title of "The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea", of The Greatest American Hero. That was of interest to me, as was true for any time when someone from Space: 1999 was in something that I was viewing. And I liked the music of The Greatest American Hero, and would sometimes hum some of it quietly to myself as I sat on an afternoon school bus, waiting to be conducted to home.
In 1980 and most of 1981, if a James Bond movie aired on television, I would audiotape-record it. I had stopped audiotape-recording movies on television before the broadcast of Moonraker in November of 1981. For me, audiotape was "old hat" by then, as home video was beckoning to me with a new system of hardware and software that was judged by my parents and I to be affordable for us. I would audiotape-record a few Spiderman episodes in spring of 1982. Apart from that, I had "hung up" my audiotape-recording microphone.
I remember the day of the "Spiderman Battles the Molemen" Spiderman episode's first airing on CHSJ, Tuesday, October 13, 1981, being the one on which I, in the evening, found Joey being set-upon by other boys of his age group of our neighbourhood and being dragged by them down a slope. I remember thinking about "Spiderman Battles the Molemen" while conversing with Tony as we two approached the yard, on Epworth Circle, in which the hostile action against Joey was occurring. Another Spiderman memory of 1981's last few months is that of Thursday, November 5, when the "Trouble With Snow" portion of "Trouble With Snow"/"Spiderman Vs. Desperado" was preempted by a CBC News report on Canadian Constitution talks. Spiderman was joined in progress with a series of commercials, followed by the title card to "Spiderman Vs. Desperado". CBC News coverage of the talks on the Canadian Constitution caused a full half-hour's preemption of Spiderman on CHSJ on another day that November.
And I remember CHSJ in final third of 1981 airing Battlestar Galactica "movies" on Saturdays at noon, those "movies" being mostly pairs of hour-long Battlestar Galactica episodes edited together. The CHSJ broadcast of one of them was on display on one of the television screens at Medjuck's Department Store, Prospect Street, Fredericton, when my parents and I were there on a Saturday in November. Our purpose there was to do some research on a new home video system that had my attention as a potential medium for me to build a collection, in video and in audio, of entertainments that I favoured. More on that to come.
The winter of 1981-2 was the snowiest and coldest one through which I had ever lived. On a couple of consecutive days in January, 1982, the temperature was minus 33 degrees Celsius in the daytime, with a wind chill factor registering at fifteen degrees colder than that. School was cancelled on those days due to the cold, and on one of them, a Tuesday, "Kilowatt Kaper"/"The Peril of Parafino" was the Spiderman instalment on CHSJ- an instalment that had not been on CHSJ until then. Tony was not with me on that day, and nor was he there in my television room on the next day, Wednesday, during which my hopes for a trend of first-run-on-CHSJ episodes were seemingly dashed with the "quadruple-peat" of "The Night of the Villains"/"Here Comes Trubble". The day after that was Thursday, January 21, 1982. My locker partner at school, one of my ridiculers in Grade 10, hid my snow boots, delaying my exit from the school so that I would be too late to board the early-departing-for-Nashwaaksis bus 101. I had to wait outside in a queue in the cold for bus 3, which was later in arriving at the school than it usually had been when I used to ride it months before. I was not at home that day until close to 4:15, and I was fuming with indignation and resentment. I sat in front of my television by myself as an advertisement for Walt Disney on Sunday evenings preceded the start of that Thursday afternoon's Spiderman episode. And it was "Blotto"! Its first time on CHSJ, and first time for me to see it again since 1978. My anger over what had happened at school shifted instantaneously to elation, faster than the title card for said episode could disappear to reveal the inaugural city-buildings-from-above perspective of the long-desired Spidey story. Tony was not with me on that day, but that was consistent with his history with me, for he had not been in my company either when my favourite, scary Warner Brothers cartoons were offered on The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. He had not even at his home seen that day's broadcast of "Blotto" and was dismayed when I informed him on the next day that it had aired at long last on CHSJ. That next day, Friday, "The One-Eyed Idol"/"Fifth Avenue Phantom", another first-run-on-CHSJ Spidey television series entry, was transmitted, before the eyes of Tony and myself. It looked most encouraging that on the week to follow the other hitherto withheld-on-CHSJ episodes would finally surface. "Rollarama" did rumble through the airwaves of CHSJ on the Tuesday, and I remember thinking that "Specialists and Slaves" would come next on the Wednesday, but, no, on that day on Spiderman was the "triple-peat" of "Revolt in the Fifth Dimension". No further first-run-on-CHSJ episodes came our way until a worn and faded, splice-riddled "Specialists and Slaves" emerged from who knows where during March Break week. "The Terrible Triumph of Doctor Octopus"/"Magic Malice" was unceremoniously telecasted for the first time on CHSJ later still, in mid-to-late March. Tony still was not with me when "Blotto" aired a second time- and then a third- on CHSJ in the spring months of 1982. Curiously, one of the first episodes that Joey watched with me on live broadcast (i.e. not a videotaped recording of mine) was, indeed, "Blotto".
A word now about CHSJ's quality of presentation of the Spiderman episodes. Dreadful, most of the time. Blotches of black tape on the film prints in advance of every commercial interval. Numerous splices, sometimes splices galore, on the films. Hairs on the films. Vertical film wear lines. Occasional slippage and vertical rolling of film in the CHSJ telecine machine. Inconsistent colour saturation. Some episodes having their "Next Week" promotional part, but most not. Almost each time that an episode would air, it would be from a different film print. The third broadcast of "Blotto" was from a film print missing the episode title card. One of the myriad-of-splices film prints was that of "Super Swami"/"The Birth of Micro Man". The two component stories of that instalment of Spiderman were reversed in sequence in that particular film print- and with the title card of "Super Swami" gone. And the film print utilised for CHSJ's first two showings of "Revolt in the Fifth Dimension" was so depleted of film frames and hampered with missing audio during key expositional scenes, that it was amazing that the episode could be understood. I also remember, in those two showings of "Revolt in the Fifth Dimension", the end of the Spiderman main opening losing its audio as Spiderman was web-swinging toward "camera". The audio dropped completely for half a second before an abrupt jump to episode title card (no fade to black for the main-opening-to-episode-title-card transition), which was not visible long enough to be read word-by-word. For CHSJ's third broadcast of "Revolt in the Fifth Dimension", film elements were in much better condition.
"Up From Nowhere" had its first CHSJ airing on rainy Tuesday, November 17, 1981. Tony and I were watching it together in my den and television viewing room. The episode about a scaly Atlantian scientist encasing New York City in a bubble and then sinking North America's most populated municipality into the ocean, seems to have been a victim of damage of its original film elements, those original film elements subsequently becoming as lost as Atlantis. Film prints that were produced out of those original film elements bear the marks of the damage, a scratch and a blurry line that together resemble a hair lodged in a telecine apparatus between lens and film. The damage lasts for more than a minute of the episode's running time, is on the episode as the Atlantian scientist is subjecting New York City to an earthquake prior to announcing his presence and intentions. The telecine machine operator on duty at CHSJ on 17 November, 1981 must have thought the damage that he or she saw in that section of the episode to be a hair. The episode was stopped midway through the damaged section, CHSJ going to a card for Spiderman and, "One moment, please". Music played with the card for about a minute. Then, the episode resumed from the point of time in it when the damage was first noticeably passed. The telecine machine operator probably thought that he or she had been successful in removing a strand of hair from the gate of the telecine deck. Every time that "Up From Nowhere" received a further CHSJ telecast, the same film damage was visible. Even when a totally different film print was being used. Sometimes, in those further CHSJ broadcasts of "Up From Nowhere", there were telltale signs of someone attempting to mechanically jostle a hair loose from the telecine apparatus without stopping the film. I cannot say that I remember seeing the "Up From Nowhere" film element damage in the 1970s when ATV was showing Spiderman. Maybe it was there on the broadcast film prints and I either did not notice it or forgot having noticed it. Or the film prints showing the damaged section may have entered into circulation after ATV's termination of its broadcasts of Spiderman. That is a possibility.
In final third of 1981, not long after Spidey was granted by CHSJ a return to television screens of New Brunswick, Rocket Robin Hood, too, was back on television in same Canadian province of by way of CHSJ. Like Spiderman, it had been gone from television broadcast airwaves in New Brunswick since ATV had stopped showing it some years earlier. Unlike Spiderman, Rocket Robin Hood was a once-weekly affair on CHSJ. On Saturday mornings. And I delighted in the opportunity to see its episodes again, to behold Rocket Robin Hood and the Merry Men banding together in space or on astral bodies of very impressively alien appearance or in a phantasmagorical dimension, to defeat formidable villains of some ghastly intention. Episodes of Rocket Robin Hood were aired on CHSJ in no discernible sequence. As was being the case with CHSJ's telecasting of Spiderman, episode broadcast order was a jumble. On one week there might be "Dementia Five", of Rocket Robin Hood's third season, and the week after that, "The Sad, Sad Sheriff of N.O.T.T.", of Season 1, and the week following that, "Lord of the Shadows", of Season Three, followed on the next three weeks by "Goritang" (Season 1), "The Incredible Gem of Cosmo Khan" (Season 2), and "Don't Make a Sound" (Season 1). Before Friday episodes of Spiderman, CHSJ would sometimes show a preview of the next morning's Rocket Robin Hood episode. Comprising the preview would be an excerpt from the episode. An excerpt lasting close to thirty seconds or one minute. Episodes of Rocket Robin Hood on CHSJ were marred by blotches of black tape in advance of commercial intervals as was the case for the episodes of Spiderman, but, all in all, Rocket Robin Hood episodes were in better condition on CHSJ than were those of Spiderman. There were not as many indications of wear in the film elements. And not as many film splices. However, none of the Rocket Robin Hood episodes shown on CHSJ in 1981, and in 1982 and in 1983, had their main titles, end credits, and character descriptions. Episodes opened with the title card to the first of the three episode segments, and the only division between the segments were the commercials. This had always been the case on ATV, too. CHSJ would fill airtime between the end of Rocket Robin Hood and the next scheduled television programme, with the cartoon shorts of one Mr. Magoo.
Also in final quarter of 1981, my parents finally relented to my agitating for a full audio-visual medium for collecting, archiving, and showing to friends and others of my neighbourhood my favourite entertainments. However, videocassette recorders were still in the thousand dollar price range, and when the RCA corporation unveiled what it touted to be the future for video technology, the RCA VideoDisc, that was supposed to be superior in audio and video to magnetic media, more durable, and most importantly for me at that time, more affordable, I jumped at the opportunity to join the VideoDisc revolution as my first foray into the realm of the videophile, especially when I read on a pamphlet what was slated for release onto RCA VideoDisc within the next two years, including every James Bond and Peter Sellers Pink Panther movie. Goldfinger, which I had yet to see, was already in the stores, along with the original Pink Panther (the one, released in 1964, with David Niven as the Phantom). These were in my first wave of VideoDisc purchases together with my RCA VideoDisc player, which was bought on Saturday, November 28, 1981 from Wacky Wheatley's Television and Stereo, at that time in the Smythe Street K-Mart Plaza. It was bliss to have at my fingertips the means to watch something whenever I wanted to do so, however many times that I wanted to do so. My mother and father struggled to pull me away from the television set for meals and to do my school homework. There I was in my television room that weekend with my VideoDisc player and purchased VideoDiscs of Goldfinger, two Star Trek volumes containing in sum "The Menagerie: Pt. 1", "The Menagerie: Pt. 2", "The City On the Edge of Forever", and "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", The Pink Panther, The Love Bug, and a Charlie Brown television special compilation, and my parents insisted on an adult-oriented movie for them to see for the first time, and what they selected was Airplane!.
Virtually every single one of those VideoDiscs was defective, some worse so than others. They had skips, places where the video and audio would jump rapidly through a scene or through several scenes. The flaw to the RCA VideoDisc system was all too evident that first weekend. The VideoDiscs were read by a needle like that on a record player, and even though the VideoDiscs came within a cartridge protecting them from exposure to dust and fingerprints, the tiniest scratch caused by stacking during shipping or negligence at the manufacturing plant, would trigger frenetic skipping. Wacky Wheatley's offered to replace the problem VideoDiscs, and the replacements, most of them of better quality, gradually trickled into my possession over my pre-Christmas school examination time period, Christmas vacation, and early January. A second wave of purchases included Planet of the Apes (the original theatrical movie with Charlton Heston in the lead role, that I had seen for the first time on television- on WVII, to be precise- on the afternoon of Sunday, December 24, 1978), The Bad News Bears, Star Trek- The Motion Picture, and Shane. Planet of the Apes was in terrible condition, and no satisfactory replacement was ever received.
I had a first time ever bona fide movie performance, picture and sound, in my television room on Sunday, November 29. It was The Love Bug, the endearing Walt Disney Productions film about a speedy Volkswagen with a mind of its own. Joey was in attendance at the show with two other boys. Tony had helped to bring viewers to the show. I had sent him to Joey's place, among others. Joey agreed to come, and he approached me at a run when he saw me at the foot of my driveway; he was that excited at the prospect of at last being able to watch a movie at my house- and for no admission fee, of course. Through the showing of the movie, Joey was periodically examining the shell cartridge in which the VideoDisc rested when not in use, studying its every detail, as I observed his curiosity with appropriate blend of amusement and affection, and he glanced at me frequently with an approving smile.
For Christmas that year, 1981, I received some movie theatre tickets and signs bought by my parents from Paul Burden Limited on Fredericton's Queen Street, and to my chin-dropping surprise, a motion picture film camera. Had I received a gift such as the latter six or seven years previous, I would have been euphoric, but by 1981 my interest in creating and showing my own film reels had been completely replaced by my ardent enthusiasm for assembling a personal library of favourite movies and television shows on a collectible audio-video software format. Still, the thought behind my parents' gift was profoundly affecting.
In the afternoon of a snowy New Year's Day, 1982, I had a further VideoDisc presentation, consisting of two Charlie Brown television specials, You're in Love, Charlie Brown and There's No Time For Love, Charlie Brown, and the James Bond opus, Goldfinger. Joey was again there, this time with a group of about 6 young fellows, everybody laughing lovingly at the audacity of James Bond's first really extravagant spy adventure, Aston Martin ejector seat, decapitating bowler hat, bomb in Fort Knox and all. During Goldfinger's latter half, Joey became rather restless and began looking under chairs and my sofa and pulling out from under those some discarded wrappers for After Eight chocolate covered mints that my grandfather usually bought for me for Christmas. Joey was demonstrating his interest in having an assistant's role in my VideoDisc shows.
On Sunday, January 10, one day after New Brunswick had been shaken by a mild earthquake, I showed The Bad News Bears, preceded by another two Charlie Brown television specials, It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown and You're the Greatest, Charlie Brown. For some reason, Tony and I had some difficulty that day in netting a crowd of viewers. Joey was the one person to join Tony and me in my television room, and he adored the main attraction. There was not a single moment of the movie when his attention wavered. He was captivated, completely engrossed in the rousing story of the Bears. He evidently found the scenario of rough-and-tumble, agony-of-defeat-and-joy-of-victory sandlot baseball to be rather more accessible than the often wildly fantastic world of James Bond. And the titled team of socially lesser regarded boys and one girl, altogether a group of underprivileged and appropriately irascible characters, including their coach (played to perfection by Walter Matthau), becoming contenders and challenging the most prestigious, most arrogant boys for the yearly pennant, provided for Joey an ideal means for juvenile identification with and cheering for an underdog. Joey looked at me from time to time and smiled, the twinkle in his left eye and his nodding head signifying that I had scored a 10 out of 10 for him where that day's movie selection was concerned.
So impressed was Joey that on the next Sunday, he telephoned me in the morning to ask if I was going that day to have another afternoon's offering of entertainment via VideoDisc and offered to come to my house and help me in the preparations for that afternoon's VideoDisc show. Joey and I cooperated in cleaning and vacuuming the television room, its carpet and its furniture, rendering it spic-and-span. When Tony arrived at my place after lunch and found Joey there assisting me, he was certainly surprised. Joey telephoned each of the possible attendees to ask if they wanted to come to the show. I was at a loss for an attracting VideoDisc to present on that day. All that I had were the ones that I had already screened, plus Shane, Planet of the Apes, and one of the Star Trek television episode compilations. Dubious about a movie about the Wild West or the slow pace of the science fiction items appealing to Joey and to the one person whom he had been able to corral into attending my VideoDisc performance, I opted for a repeating of Goldfinger, which was rather less positively received on this second time that I gave it a spin in my VideoDisc player for an audience.
On the following Sunday, January 24, I went to the Nashwaaksis Cinema 2 to see Time Bandits, a fanciful British movie about thieving midget time travellers and in which there were appearances by Sean Connery, Ian Holm of Alien, and many of the famous Monty Python comedians. And there amidst the chomping of popcorn and rows of seats, I encountered Tony, who had come to the same movie theatre for same purpose. Tony and I came upon each other again at a movie house when I was at the Plaza Cinema 1 in December, 1982 to view the dire Trail of the Pink Panther, a half-baked assembly of outtakes of the antics of the late Peter Sellers from the earlier movies in the Pink Panther film oeuvre of Blake Edwards. These would be the last times that Tony and I would ever be together in a cinema to watch a movie. Thereafter, we never again asked each other to accompany on a movie viewing outing, and never again were coincidentally going to the same theatre on the same day for the same movie showing.
On Sunday, January 31, I re-launched the VideoDisc shows with the format of a club, with everyone attending my Sunday afternoon VideoDisc presentations being a club member. I created cards of membership for everybody and distributed them from my closet which I had converted into an office. First gathering of the new VideoDisc viewing club was for TALES FROM MUPPETLAND, a combination of television specials featuring Jim Henson's unique and innovative mating of marionettes and hand-puppetry, which consisted of The Muppet Musicians of Bremen, in which four farm animals- dog, cat, donkey, and rooster- abused by their owners, giant "human" Muppets, become a tuneful travelling troupe and come upon a shed in the wilderness that happens to be the hideout for their three former masters, who have become bank robbers and who are scared senseless by the music generated by the animals that they used to own, and the explanatory-by-its-title Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas. The first of these Muppet television specials, introduced by Kermit the Frog, had my filled-to-the-brim television room exploding with laughter as all eight of the children therein, including Joey who was sitting on the floor right beside me nearest the radiator, delighted in the endearing and funny story before their eyes.
TALES FROM MUPPETLAND constituted the most popular VideoDisc show that I ever had, although the one on the following week was a close second.
Starting with TALES FROM MUPPETLAND and the re-launch of my VideoDisc shows, I was cataloguing those VideoDisc shows, listing everyone in attendance at each of them. I remember working on such during some free time in Geography class at school.
One day as classmates and I were awaiting entry to our classroom for Geography, I overheard a couple of them conversing disparagingly about Spiderman and CHSJ's arguably frustrating broadcast sequence of the Spiderman episodes, i.e. some of the episodes run more frequently by CHSJ than others. While I was in accord with them, absolutely, as regards CHSJ, I of course was not in alignment with their unfavourable opinion on Spiderman (opinion comprised of complaints about quality of cartoon animation, repetitive web-swinging scenes, et cetera, i.e. the refrains of unappreciative Spiderman viewers). One episode that they were referring to specifically was "Revolt in the Fifth Dimension", it having aired on CHSJ on the previous day for a third time.
February of 1982 was to be an unremarkable month for CHSJ's offerings of Spiderman in my estimation as there would be no first-run-on-CHSJ episodes aired in it. Just episode repeats, "triple-peats", and "quadruple-peats". But with my greatly attended and enjoyed-by-all VideoDisc show of TALES FROM MUPPETLAND on January 31 and the positive augur that day for my re-launch of the VideoDisc shows, I began February with rather a strong amount of joie-de-vivre. And the next VideoDisc show, that of February 7, would also prove to be highly successful.
Finally, RCA had released to its VideoDisc range a James Bond movie to go with Goldfinger on my shelf. From Russia With Love was expected to arrive at Wacky Wheatley's on pre-order on the Thursday preceding my next week's VideoDisc show. As providence would have it, school was cancelled that Thursday due to snowy weather, but the descending snowflakes were insufficient to stop me from going to Wacky Wheatley's and acquiring the James Bond movie about Istanbul, the SPECTRE crime organisation, and the Sean Connery-enacted James Bond riding the Orient Express, together with the long-awaited replacement VideoDisc for my earlier purchased defective second volume of Star Trek. Both VideoDiscs were in perfect condition, and I was ecstatic over that. My planned, announced-on-the-preceding-Sunday, highly anticipated showing of From Russia With Love on the afternoon of Sunday, February 7, 1982 was an unqualified success. I had some misgivings about slower pacing and the rather less grandiose schemes of the villains, but everyone in my television room, amongst them Tony, Steven, and Joey, loved every minute of what they saw and heard.
The evening of February 7, 1982 saw the television premiere of 1978's Superman, vastly expanded in its length and divided into two two-hour parts, the first of such airing February 7, and the second of which being broadcast on the following evening. I was all attention at the television of our den for the entirety of those telecasts of Superman, as I also was for a World War III television miniseries transmitted on the previous Sunday and Monday. World War III concerned a Russian invasion of Alaska and brinkmanship between the U.S. President (Rock Hudson) and the Soviet Premier (Brian Keith). It also starred David Soul, late of television's Starsky and Hutch, Cathy Lee Crosby, and Jeroen Krabbe, who would later play General Koskov in the 1987 James Bond movie, The Living Daylights. Other memorable television viewing experiences that I had in early 1982 were of the James Bond movies, Diamonds Are Forever and You Only Live Twice, the latter of which I saw for the first time in its early-1982 showing on television on ABC. I remember struggling to immerse myself in required reading of Oliver Twist for English class as I was awaiting the aforementioned airing of Diamonds Are Forever; Ian Fleming's modern super-spy, James Bond, adapted for film by Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz, was far, far more engaging for me than nineteenth century happenings penned by Charles Dickens.
As my VideoDisc showings continued, I followed From Russia With Love with a further showing of the James Bond movie series entry to come in direct sequence to From Russia With Love, that being Goldfinger. Yes, Goldfinger, again. Then, my two volumes of Star Trek on the next two weeks, followed by a repeat of From Russia With Love and a general (i.e. encapsulating all iterations of my VideoDisc shows) "quadruple-peat" of Goldfinger. Joey was at that particular Goldfinger show, protesting most vocally at the pointlessness and weariness of yet another presentation of Bond's tussle with the 24-karat ambitions of Auric Goldfinger, and was climbing the walls during the two hours that the movie was playing. I promised never again to show Goldfinger and kept true to my word. By then, everybody, including myself, was tired beyond belief of Auric Goldfinger and his raid on Fort Knox. Next was two weeks of Charlie Brown, including television specials Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown, It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown!, and Life is a Circus, Charlie Brown in a second RCA VideoDisc release of the misadventures of the lovable underachiever and his conceited, anthropomorphic canine. Then, the original Pink Panther movie, The Odd Couple (its Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon theatrical film version), The Return of the Pink Panther, and The Muppet Movie. We were considerably into April by the time that the last of these was screened on a television with VideoDisc. And it was shown at Tony's place using his RCA VideoDisc player (yes, he and his family had one, too, for a time) whilst my machine was being repaired for a faulty needle mechanism, which was part of a sequence of events that would bring me to the end of my tenure as an RCA VideoDisc accumulator. More on that to come.
After supper on the Wednesday of March Break week of 1982, I went by Fredericton Transit bus to the mall area of Fredericton South and to Wacky Wheatley's, where I purchased the RCA VideoDisc of the final, two-part episode of the 1960s television series, The Fugitive. And immediately upon my return to home on that day's evening, my mother and I watched The Fugitive- "The Judgment: Pt. 1" and The Fugitive- "The Judgment: Pt. 2". The RCA VideoDisc was almost faultless, and the two-part episode was highly enjoyable. I was viewing The Fugitive for the first time, having known of it but never before having occasion to see it. Barry Morse, Space: 1999's Professor Bergman, was in The Fugitive, as I had learned sometime prior to that evening, and it was a pleasant experience watching him as Lieutenant Gerard, the relentless pursuer of wrongly-convicted jail train escapee, Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen), Gerard in "The Judgment" finally accepting Kimble's account of what happened on the night of the murder of Kimble's wife and helping Kimble to find the killer, a one-armed man.
The final RCA VideoDisc that I was to acquire was The Return of the Pink Panther. In April of 1982.
My VideoDisc player one day went haywire while I was watching The Return of the Pink Panther, which in all VideoDisc copies that I could find of it, had a flicking hiss to the audio throughout the first flip side of said VideoDisc. My VideoDisc player's needle skipped violently on one playing of this VideoDisc, jumping through the first side at breakneck speed, and the VideoDisc player obviously had to be repaired. And when it was returned to me a couple of weeks hence, I inserted into it The Return of the Pink Panther and found to my bitter dismay one long skip on the first side, ergo that my VideoDisc of The Return of the Pink Panther had been ruined. With that, the camel's back had been shredded into a million fragments. Bye-bye, VideoDisc. Hello, videotape.
Wacky Wheatley's agreed to refund me for all of my VideoDiscs, and I was able to sell my VideoDisc player by way of a classified advertisement in the local newspaper. In late May of 1982, my father and I purchased a $800 Panasonic videocassette recorder from Video Home Entertainment Centre in the York Plaza near the Pic N' Puff store. A handful of coupons for free videotape movie rentals came with the machine, which like nearly all videocassette recorders of that time period, was a workhorse. It was very weighty, built to last for years. It was top-loading, had a mere two recording/playback heads, no noise-free pausing or reverse or forward scan, and inconsistent seamless editing capacity. And for remote control, all that it had was a pause button wired into the front of it, with just enough cord for the pause button to be operated by its user in a chair no more than a couple of feet away from the television. But the videotapes played in it did not skip, and I could record whatever I wanted to record from all received television stations.
First thing that I watched by way of the videocassette recorder was a rental videotape of Dr. No, the James Bond movie that launched that series of films, and the first time ever for me to experience said movie. I came home late from school one overcast day (I was late because school bus drivers were picketing, Fredericton High School refused to close during the bus drivers' labour stoppage, and we students had to ride public transit buses that were much slower to reach destination and also did not have schedules aptly compatible with school dismissal times; something of a long and convoluted story, this- but I think that I have described it saliently). I would say that the day was Thursday, May 27, 1982. I came home with the knowledge that my father would be bringing the newly purchased Panasonic videocassette machine into our home that afternoon before he went to work at approximately 5:45 P.M. (and he had already left for work by the time that I arrived home). It was sitting atop our television set, and next to it was the rented videocassette of Dr. No, which I promptly watched and enjoyed and coveted to own as I sat alone in our house (my mother did not come home until rather late in that evening). Next to be watched by way of the new videocassette machine was Peter Sellers' second Inspector Clouseau outing, A Shot in the Dark, also a hitherto unseen movie of curiosity to me. And then, on a sunny weekend in mid-June, Superman II and Arthur, the latter rented with the former from Video Home Entertainment Centre because my mother was interested in the acting of Dudley Moore as the titled chronically inebriated millionaire. I remember many of the neighbourhood youths, some of whom would never deign to attend an afternoon of entertainment offered by me via any other medium, congregating at my house that Sunday afternoon to view Superman II from the rental videotape. It was an informal movie showing if ever there was one. My television room was in quite a mess, and I did not start playing of the movie at a specific time.
Possession of a videocassette recorder was something of a rare privilege then, in my area. I would note that Tony and Steven also had a videocassette recorder, by the concluding days of the spring of 1982, them having abandoned the RCA VideoDisc at almost the same time that I did. Their videocassette recorder was an RCA brand machine with a "bell and whistle" or two beyond what my Panasonic had, but with much less reliability in recording multi-generational copies without loss of vertical synchronisation and a broken picture. What Tony and I then called "going off the air" for a second or so. The technical terminology for such an event was totally outside of our knowledge. The trigger for it seemed usually to be a pronounced horizontal line of video dropout on the playback videotape "fooling" a videocassette recorder into "thinking" that the vertical synchronisation bar had shifted.
Tony and Steven's videocassette recorder, unlike mine, had an audio dub function, making it possible to record a different audio track over recorded video. This would have enabled us to do audio commentaries for our favourite entertainments, but the thought did not occur to us at any time back then.
Years before the advent of the zero-frame editing videocassette recording mechanism, or, better yet, the flying erase head, achieving a seamless edit on a videotape, such as at the fade to black before a commercial interval and the fade-in back to a main television programme, was a very tall order. Tony and Steven's RCA videocassette machine always left a very pronounced colour multiburst, or dancing rainbow, for a second's worth of frames following an edit. My videocassette recorder could be made to do a seamless edit, if I did a precise number of frame advances following stoppage of recording, and then pressed record and pause simultaneously, the machine slightly moving videotape backward, backward to precisely where the recording had stopped, and then un-paused recording. A zero-frame edit many years before the nomenclature was patented by, I think, JVC. But precision was difficult with the video-noisy quality of frame-by-frame advances on my two-video-head unit. Never could I be guaranteed of a seamless, "rainbow glitch"-free place of edit. But I would try my level best to achieve one. Because I judged the colour multiburst to be intolerable. Especially when the dancing rainbow fitfully strides back and forth on the screen. The one sure way of having a videotape without any colour multiburst was to procure a pre-recorded one. Or either that or do no edits, leaving commercials in the recordings, or videotape-recording something from PBS, on which there were no commercials.
Tony and Steven had their videocassette recorder by mid-to-late June in 1982. I remember looking at it and selling a videotape to them for them and Steven's friends, and Joey, also, to watch on Friday, June 25. Joey had had a slumber party with some of his friends in his backyard tent the night before (the night following his June 24 birthday), and his group had converged with that of Steven on the afternoon of June 25. More on that later.
In 1982, videotape movie rentals were at the very dawn of their long, lucrative history. One that would last into the late 1990s. I was anything but content to rent videotaped movies. I wanted to own them. Prices circa 1982 were obscenely inflated, but I was determined to have a collection of my favourite entertainments. Magazines offered discounts on some desired movie videotapes, but I was reluctant to chance the mail-order process of acquiring them. I attempted a recording of a James Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun, from an ABC network television broadcast, but I did not accept the presence of commercials or the poor and obvious editing spots that would have been yielded by pausing the recording on every transition to a commercial sequence (I had yet to acquire the knowledge of there being a possibility of zero-frame editing with my machine). Tony offered to buy the recording of this Bond movie for the price of the originally blank videotape (at the time, even blank videotapes were quite costly: $20 for a T-120- and $30 for a T-160). The proceeds from my sale of that videotape to Tony went into my savings for buying one of the first two pre-recorded videotapes eyed by me for my incipient collection.
Those two pioneering pre-recorded videocassette buys were of Battlestar Galactica (the theatrical film version of the premiere episode of that television show) and A Shot in the Dark. Both of them used, rental videocassettes not in pristine condition. I remember obtaining Battlestar Galactica on one of the final examination days of the 1981-2 school year. I crossed the sprawling football fields of Fredericton High School in the warm June sunshine one afternoon en route to the K-Mart Plaza to meet my father there, our immediate destination being Fredericton North's Video Home Entertainment Centre for a purchase of Battlestar Galactica. The picture was skewed at top of screen on my television set and vertically rolled quite easily, but I was still gratified to have as my initial videotape movie in my collection something situated in deep space with plenty of futuristic hardware and some spectacular visual effects. A Shot in the Dark came later, approximately a week into the summer holidays. It was purchased by me from the Medjuck's department store on Prospect Street with money earned from lawn cutting and the $25 prize that I had been awarded for highest mark in French in Grade 10 (my interest in Cosmos: 1999 was still reaping quite a harvest where my grades in French class at school was concerned; French was the only subject at high school level in which I excelled). And from the proceeds of that videotape sale to Tony.
With my videocassette recorder, I was intent upon videotaping Spiderman from CHSJ-TV. "The Winged Thing"/"Conner's Reptiles" was my first videotape-recorded Spidey acquisition sometime in late May of 1982. Because reliably clean edits were seemingly next to impossible with my machine, I did not bother to try to achieve a polished, first-generation (i.e. direct from broadcast) recording of any Spidey episode. I left the commercials in my videotape recordings, hoping that eventually I would have the means of seamlessly removing them. Sadly, the quality of reception nose-dived at about this time. For more than a week, there was some rather intense sound distortion that discouraged me from even attempting a videotape recording, the result being that I missed episodes such as "Home" and "Horn of the Rhino". CHSJ's telecine apparatus had smudges and dirt on its lens, all of which were visible throughout all episodes of both Spiderman and Rocket Robin Hood. And Fredericton Cablevision had instituted the peculiar practice every weekday from approximately 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. of putting lines of audio-video noise on all television stations, the lines flashing like clockwork every second and tracking upwards on the television screen, and when they would reach screen top, the whole image would bounce and then the lines would appear at screen bottom for another upward cycle. At the same time, the picture on CHSJ especially, became noticeably grainier, improving immediately once the lines stopped flashing, usually toward the end of the 4:30 P.M. transmitted Spidey episodes. I never did receive a satisfactory answer from my cable television service provider for this extremely annoying compromising of quality that did last through the remainder of the 1980s. Many Spiderman episodes on CHSJ were marred by this phenomenon, exceptions being those episodes shown on rainy days and in the middle of winter, when the lines were gone, and the sound and picture were at their best.
Amazingly, I was in late May and in June of 1982 able to videotape about a dozen Spiderman shows without the lines. "Blotto" (a film print that was missing the episode title) was next to be successfully videotaped, and then "Neptune's Nose Cone", "Cloud City of Gold", "Criminals in the Clouds", "The Spider and the Fly"/"The Slippery Doctor Von Schlick", "The Menace of Mysterio", "Up From Nowhere", "Never Step On a Scorpion"/"Sands of Crime", and "The Vanishing Doctor Vespasian"/"Scourge of the Scarf". Those are the episodes that I definitely recall retaining on my videotapes for the summer of 1982 after CHSJ pulled Spidey from broadcast as soon as the school year ended. CHSJ completely by surprise showed "Menace From the Bottom of the World" on a Saturday morning early in July, and I was of course unprepared to videotape that. After "The Vanishing Doctor Vespasian"/"Scourge of the Scarf" on Wednesday, June 23, CHSJ bizarrely transmitted two Rocket Robin Hood episodes ("From Menace to Menace", "The Eternal Planet or Romarama") in Spidey's airtime to finish that week, and then for the duration of the summer, The Marvel Superheroes was on CHSJ each weekday at 4:30.
As desirable as Spiderman was for me as a videotape acquisition, Space: 1999 remained my most fervent wish. Now, having procured a videocassette recorder, I was in a position to at last own a collection of Space: 1999 episodes. Only one problem. None were, at the time, available on pre-recorded videotape or on broadcast television anywhere in my part of the world. In June of 1982, I wrote letters to both CHSJ and the CBC, asking most urgently for a rerun of my favourite television series. CHSJ replied first, bluntly saying that unless the CBC television network with which CHSJ was affiliated opted for a repeat showing of Space: 1999, there was no chance of it gracing the televised airwaves of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The correspondence received from the CBC was rather more heartening. It was not a, "Yes, we would be delighted to rerun Space: 1999." Neither was it an out-and-out no. Something to the effect that, "Your suggestion has merit, and we will look into the feasibility of it." With this letter to the CBC, I had, I think, laid the groundwork, or contributed somewhat to doing so, for one of the most gratifying facets of the era of my life to follow.
Yet, however encouraged I might have been by the CBC's reply to my letter in 1982, I still had no definite promise or frame of time for a re-engagement with Moonbase Alpha's trans-spatial odyssey, and so pursued other avenues for adding Space: 1999 to my videotape collection. I found in a magazine an advertisement for L.A. Films, which was offering, among other things, Space: 1999 episodes! I remember while running outdoors during Physical Education class in the last weeks of Grade 10 thinking about how awesome it would be to have Space: 1999 on videotape transfers from 16-millimetre film prints bought from this L.A. Films business. Especially the "Dragon's Domain" episode, which I had come to want the most. How such transfers could be done, I did not know. But as usual where Space: 1999 was concerned, I was disappointed, in that L.A. Films mailed to me a response to my letter of enquiry about its advertisement, telling to me that it had no Space: 1999 episodes in stock. I was offered a deal on Star Wars, however, which intrigued me for only until I learned a week or two later that George Lucas' far, far away galaxy was coming to prerecorded videocassette, courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Video, later that summer (1982). As Twentieth Century Fox had also, through its subsidiary, Magnetic Video, released ITC Entertainment properties like The Return of the Pink Panther, Capricorn One, and Saturn 3 to the home videotape market, I thought that a letter to that organisation regarding Space: 1999 might, just might, bring about- or help to bring about- the breakthrough that I sought. But the reply that I eventually received from Twentieth Century Fox was that home videotape rights to the Space: 1999 television series were unobtainable. Though constantly denied, it seemed, an incontrovertibly positive answer to my queries, I persisted in my desire to somehow and in some capacity have Martin Landau and Barbara Bain in their bell-bottom, beige slacks and zippered sleeves amid futuristic sets and imaginatively "far out" concepts and lavish alien planets and hideous alien creatures on videotape.
And to this I would add that although "Dragon's Domain" had become my most sought-after episode, I wanted so very ardently to possess all episodes of Space: 1999. Tony and I would sometimes play three wishes, and one of my wishes was always for, and I quote myself, "...all 48 episodes of Space: 1999 on videotape, no blips, no blops, colour and sound."
I was also resolved not to have another largely abysmal summer like that of 1981. In June of 1982, I saw Craig playing a game of catch with his young buddy, Adam, on their part of our street and approached the two of them about the possibility of having a game of baseball if we could find a fourth person for a two-against-two contest. We found Kelly, the girl who lived a couple of houses across the street from me, and the result was the start of a series of Craig-and-Adam-versus-Kevin-and-Kelly baseball games on the street in front of Craig and Adam's homes. A frustrating run of games, for sure, but it did result in Craig seeing me as a likely participant in all of the neighbourhood games of baseball and of other sports that he was able to arrange. And in the summer weeks to come, as I had a badminton net in my backyard, people from Craig's assembly of friends in addition to Joey and some of the boys in his sector of our neighbourhood flocked to my turf to play singles and doubles games of one of the few sports that I had been able to master.
Most important was that my increasing affinity for Joey was being returned by him, and during a baseball game in mid-June one evening on the section of our street along which my house was situated, Joey and I were teammates and winning quite ably. He was cheering and expressing his pleasure at how the game was proceeding for us. Then, my mother came out of my house and said she would be going to the York Plaza Shopper's Drug Mart and asked if I would like to come with her. Joey wanted me to do otherwise; he was pleading with me not to leave the game. And being the dimwit that I much too frequently was, I left the game. I did not even invite Joey to join me on the outing to the store for a candy treat. I just joined my mother in her car and departed the scene. Joey was rather snappy and dismissive toward me for some time after that evening, including the day of his birthday, Thursday, June 24, and its morrow, Friday, June 25, when Joey and a group of his friends had a slumber party in his backyard tent. While I was with Tony in Tony's backyard sometime in the afternoon on Friday, the 25, Joey with his party's entourage passed through the trees separating part of Joey's Linden Crescent backyard from that of Tony's on Woodmount Drive, and Joey delivered a stingingly negative comment about my rather thin physique. It was, I now understand, his way of expressing his displeasure over my actions on the evening of the baseball game. On the following Sunday, Joey was in the mood for mending fences. I encountered him after supper that day on the street while he was riding a tiny bicycle (not his usual one). He expressed interest in earning money to buy a variety of personally sought items, lauded my wish to do likewise, and thought my suggestion that we start a lawn-mowing operation for this purpose to be quite a good idea. He and I planned to start our grass-cutting venture on the next morning, and we did. The concept of it was two-fold-ideal. Not only would I have some cash to support my videotape purchases, but I could gain that money in hours spent with the person whose friendship interested me most in 1982.
Commencement of the summer of 1982 marked the end of Era 3 and the beginning of Era 4. Elements for a distinct, new period of life were now in place. Videotape collecting and recording. A welcome increase in the playing of neighbourhood baseball and other games. And most significantly, Joey becoming closer to me than ever before. The result was that 1982 was the best summer to be had after several years, and it was to be improved upon further by the summer to follow it. Not even the defeats in baseball on Craig's part of our street or my still unsuccessful efforts involving Space: 1999 could dampen my spirits. And those aspects of my experience were on the verge of turnaround in any case.
I was now a videotape collector, rather popular in my community for my provision of bona fide movie and television episode performances in the comfort of my television room- and badminton and other sports, too, plus a more and more witty turn of phrase. Instead of languishing alone or with Tony on my doorstep and complaining of the ennui of exclusion in suburbia, I was regularly sought as a player, co-worker, and affectionately regarded buddy. My social and academic situation at school was unchanged, but I always looked forward to evening and weekend- and occasional after-school- visits with younger friends. For years to come, I was happy. Although smitten by television and the capabilities of video technology, I spent most of my autumn, spring, and summer time outdoors, at work and at play.
Television programming and my life experiences did certainly continue to be interconnected in this third era of my life. Therefore, I offer Television Listings For Canada's Eastern Maritime Provinces: 1977 to 1978, Television Listings For Canada's Eastern Maritime Provinces: 1978 to 1979, Television Listings For Canada's Eastern Maritime Provinces: 1979 to 1981, and Television Listings For Canada's Eastern Maritime Provinces: 1981 to 1982. Therein are television listings for specific days ranging from the first full day in 1977 after I moved to Fredericton from Douglastown, to one of the first days of summer vacation of 1982.
McCorry's Memoirs continue with McCorry's Memoirs Era 4: He's a Pitcher and a Scholar and a Sci-Fi Fan (1982-7).
