7.15.2011

The Good Old Days

For those times when I'm feeling nostalgic


I hadn't even been born in 1987 when Over The Top was released, but it still deserves some recognition for epitomizing awesomely bad movies.  In between Rocky IV and Rocky V, Sylvester Stallone decided he had become too successful so he decided to star in a movie about an arm wrestler/truck driver who has to win back his estranged son from his evil father-in-law.


Believe it or not, that trailer doesn't even do justice to how completely ridiculous the movie is.  Between Stallone explaining to his son that arm-wrestling is a mental sport to the Kenny Loggins slow jams that play in the background for over half the movie, it's jam packed with cliches from the 1980's.  

My favorite part of Over the Top has to be the hilarious arm wrestlers and John Grizzly is the most memorable.  At one point he tries to scare an opponent by eating a lit cigar, he then tops that by drinking a can of motor oil, all for the sake of intimidation.







Who would have thought that giant anthropomorphic turtles who love pizza and partying and were trained to be ninjas by an anthropomorphic rat would provide the seed for an extremely successful franchise?  Personally, I think the pizza and the partying are what did it for me.

As a matter of fact, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Fall of the Foot Clan for the original Game Boy was the first video game I ever played.  I was four years olds and remember borrowing my brother's Game Boy and playing it for so long that the brand new batteries died.  I think my mouth was wide open in amazement the entire time.  Do you remember your first video game?  If you do, post about it in the comments section!

The three TMNT live-action movies also hold a special place in my heart.  The first two for actually being entertaining and for providing this hilarious scene from TMNT 2: The Secret of the Ooze (yes, that's Vanilla Ice).  The third is memorable for being the first movie I ever remember watching and afterwards thinking to myself, "Wow, that was a pretty terrible movie."  It did have a pretty hilarious movie poster though:
And somehow, everyone in 16th century Japan spoke English

As an added bonus, here is one of the most blatant rip-offs I've ever seen.  Referencing the show you are copying in your own intro is pretty ballsy.



2 comments:

  1. The first game I ever played was some Sonic game on Game Gear. It drained batteries like no other, but it had color, so it was pretty cool.

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  2. I remember the Game Gear! Amazing graphics for a hand held in the early 90's but it went through six batteries every three or four hours. The number of batteries it required to beat a long game cost almost as much as the game itself.

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