OK, this one may seem a bit weird, but I found it last week & decided to go in a different direction this week. When initially coming up with the idea for ’80’s Video-of-the-Week, I was really thinking only of music videos and specifically from two separate periods in my life: firstly, early MTV from when I was in high school (think Eurythmics, Duran Duran, the aforementioned A Flock of Seagulls & the Fixx & Bowie, plus Pretenders, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Squeeze, Men At Work, Men Without Hats, etc… you get the idea). I come from a family of early adopters of entertainment technology — we always had a big color TV & we had remote control long before most other people knew it existed; by the time MTV came around we had already had cable for years, including HBO when it was just movies and boxing; & we had MTV from the day of its debut; though I don’t recall watching the actual first video: The Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star” or any others on that first day.
My second golden period of music video viewing is from when I lived in Washington, DC in the late ’80’s and frequently (okay, almost EVERY Saturday night) went to Traxx (alas no link as they seem to no longer exist) and danced either in the video room (the screen was an entire high-ceilinged wall next to the dancefloor) or, weather-permitting, as it usually was, on the outside deck dancefloor (which had the same music as the video room) — we frequently had to run from the deck to the inside video room if we really wanted to see the video (think lots of Depeche Mode, Eurythmics again, Pet Shop Boys, Sinead O’Connor, The Cure, Big Pig, etc…),
But when I found “Falcon Crest” last week I just knew I had to post it. I always loved the hunting horns in the beginning. And of course I loved the part in the credits were Lorenzo Lamas is getting out of the pool & showing his hairy chest. Other than the opening credits, I didn’t really watch “Falcon Crest” (or “Dallas” or “Dynasty” — both also had great themes — or any other ’80’s nighttime soaps for that matter). My Dad watched them all, sometimes falling asleep with a cigar in his mouth. But it was too annoying to watch TV with him, as he was (& still is?) a total channel surfer; every time a loud commercial came on, he’d wake up & switch shows, but then he wouldn’t necessarily switch back to the original show in time & you’d miss half of it. It was far too frustrating for me. Sometimes my mother would watch with him, often falling asleep herself. Or she’d be in her “library” (a tiny room really meant to be the mainfloor laundry, but she wanted the laundry in the basement) reading the evening paper or Reader’s Digest. Pretentious little faggot that I was, I was likely be upstairs, on my parents’ bed, watching “Brideshead Revisited” or other such PBS fodder, on our other big color TV.
Also, in searching this on youtube, I stubled across lots of posts of the Alexis/Krystle catfights from Dynasty, many of them in German — check it out!
