Pop culturephiles take note: as of the early 2010s, the stealth superspeedboat in “The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage,” is still on the Disney lot, ready to use in future projects.
“The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage” was a 1991 Disney series where a ghost pirate from the 18th Century, together with a modern day Wall Street slickster and degenerate, discover they have to save 100 lives or else Satan will drag the pair to Hell for eternity. To help them do this, an inventor on the island builds them a superspeed boat for stealth missions in the Caribbean. An early member of the cast was Roma Downey, just before her breakthrough in “Touched by an Angel.” Though the TV movie was popular, the show only lasted a single season.
If you grew up between 1947 to the 1970s, you’re probably familiar with the RCA Indian head test pattern.
It was transmitted at the end of the broadcast day and at regular intervals during the day, so TV owners could calibrate their sets, and broadcasters could check their signals. Each part of the transmission had a function.
“The name is Grady, five feet short in stockings and boots, a slightly distorted offshoot of a good breed of humans who race horses. He happens to be one of the rotten apples, bruised and yellowed by dealing in dirt, a short man with a short memory who’s forgotten that he’s worked for the sport of kings and helped turn it into a cesspool, used and misused by the two-legged animals who’ve hung around sporting events since the days of the Colosseum. So this is Grady, on his last night as a jockey.”
“This is the face of terror: Anne Marie Mitchell, forty-three years of age, her desolate existence once more afflicted by the hope of altering her past mistake—a hope which is, unfortunately, doomed to disappointment. For warnings from the future to the past must be taken in the past; today may change tomorrow but once today is gone, tomorrow can only look back in sorrow that the warning was ignored.”
“Portrait of an American family on the eve of invasion from outer space. Of course, we know it’s merely fiction - and yet, think twice when you drink your next glass of water.”
“The Salvadore Ross program for self-improvement. The all-in-one, surefire success course that lets you lick the bully, learn the language, dance the tango, and anything else you want to do - or think you want to do.“
“My life had been space. It had been missions, projects, and expeditions. There had been no time for intrusions that took the form of a woman’s face, a voice, a short month of a man and a woman drawing together, becoming a part of one another, reaching tentatively into that strange and mysterious pond of love and then watching the ripples that came from it. But now I think of these things. Now they come to mind, now in the darkness, in the cold, the solitude, the stillness, the loneliness. Now there comes a feeling of warmth.”
“Portrait of a nervous man: Oliver Pope by name, office manager by profession. A man beset by life’s problems: his job, his salary, the competition to get ahead. Obviously, Mr. Pope’s mind is not on his driving. Oliver Pope, businessman turned killer, on a rain-soaked street in the early evening of just another day during just another drive home from the office. The victim, a kid on a bicycle, lying injured, near death. But Mr. Pope hasn’t time for the victim, his only concern is for himself. Oliver Pope, hit-and-run driver, just arrived at a crossroad in his life, and he’s chosen the wrong turn.”
“We are all travelers. The trip starts in a place called birth, and ends in that lonely town called death. And that’s the end of the journey, unless you happen to exist for a few hours, like Bunny Blake, in the misty regions of The Twilight Zone.”
“Each man measures his time; some with hope, some with joy, some with fear. But Sam Forstmann measures his allotted time with a grandfather’s clock, a unique mechanism whose pendulum swings between life and death, a very special clock that keeps a special kind of time…”
Ya’ll don’t have any idea how fucking brave and needed these plot lines were.
This was before Ellen came out.
This was before civil unions.
This was before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
This was when your ass could be fired, blacklisted, and shunned with no legal protections for even being hinted at being gay.
And the Golden Girls said “Fuck you, Fuck this, we’re doing it anyway.”
I think it should be noted that Blanche’s quote about AIDS is also “It is not god punishing people for their sins” and that the episode also deals with slutshaming.
I don’t know if people realize how much activism these women did for gay right and during the aids crisis. If you think about it they were all long established in Hollywood and Broadway. They had tons of friends personally affected and dealing with the aids crisis. Estelle Getty lost a nephew. I think they helped plant seeds in people who watched Golden Girls that helped make things a little more normalized and mainstream.
“You are a composite of all the things you believe, and all the places you believe you can go. Your past does not define you. You can step out of your history and create a new day for yourself. Even if the entire culture is saying, ‘You can’t.’ Even if every single possible bad thing that can happen to you does. You can keep going forward.”
Happy birthday to the great, groundbreaking Oprah Winfrey!
