This week I literally got a taste of the past. For some reason the McRib showed up in my area recently. On Wed, I didn’t make lunch so I went to McDs and had a McRib for the first time in roughly 40 years. I liked the McRib as kid and think I was the one of the few people where I lived that liked it but I am also not one of those idiots who long for it and follow where ever it goes like some Grateful Dead Head or McPork Butt.
It pretty much tasted like how I remembered it right down to the BBQ sauce smeared everywhere in the container making it one messy eat.
This main topic of this NOT is not about my personal taste, but more about memory. Have you ever had anything that was exactly as you remembered or did it disappoint or was it even better than you remember?
If you want to take a shot at my taste in processed pork products then okay because NOT.
Or anything else on your mind?
Serendipitous timing!
A friend gave me some Valentine’s Day candy today and it included some Palmer double crisp chocolates.
I thought they were Dove chocolates based on the shape, and then immediately had a strong memory of Easter baskets a great aunt and uncle made up for me when I was kid. Although they were Easter candies then, not hearts, but yeah hard stop happy memory and tasted the same!
I have a weird 6th sense for that eh?
It is good to relive those happy memories.
In my entire life I’ve never eaten a McRib. And it’s not because I shun McDonald’s. I totally eat there. Nor do I avoid pork products. Love me some hot dogs. And sausage. And bacon. I just could never get behind the McRib for some reason.
Stuff that hasn’t stood the test of time? A lot of popular music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I’ve mentioned before that I have Sirius XM. I’m an inveterate channel surfer, particularly since the controls are on the steering wheel and I don’t even have to reach or I can just bellow at Alexa to change the channel. I’ll run through the channels and come across old stuff I haven’t heard in 40 years.
There’s usually a good reason for that.
There’s got to be some weird nostagia hold for me with McNuggets. Because I find nothing about a McRib to be appealing at all, and I also have never had one.
But omg, processed chicken meat components made into a small patty shape and with a fake fried topping? Oh I’ll eat those.
A lot of 60s and 70s stuff is really bad. What is awesome from those eras is still awesome but there was quite a lot of crap. The 80s too but harder to crap on that decade because I grew up musically in the era so I still like what others might consider garbage.
By the way, I don’t know if it’s just me, but at least in terms of ’80s music (which is part of my living memory), it seems like a lot of the songs that later became canon were all but forgotten for a few years until someone dug them up after the fact and made them retrospectively ubiquitous.
I mean, sure, you’d still hear or see some of the older stuff, say, by Michael Jackson or Prince or Madonna or INXS or Duran Duran or whatever. But “867-5309/Jenny” or “Mickey”. . .? Uh-uh. And I think I’ve heard “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” and “Africa” more now than I ever did when those songs first came out – and this is even despite receiving (albeit and somehow losing) the latter on a 45 as a gift some months after it was released.
Much of the Early 80s New Wave is pretty much forgotten.
Sure. By them, maybe. . . .
When I was a kid, Converse All Stars were the perfect little kid’s shoe.
I tried them on as an adult to see if they were one of those simple is better things. Not really.
I think Chucks are one of those brands where for some people, they’re the perfect shoe. But anyone else, not so much.
I think when you weigh 40 pounds, the thin soles don’t matter much. Nowadays, I need more padding due to my extra, um, padding.
Yeah I am reduced to brands like Dansko for my foot support needs. I would love to wear the cute shoes I stupidly wore when younger, but the body says nope.
…biggest one I can remember would be the difference between how I remember this
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Planets
…& what it was actually like when someone I knew bought it as a box set some years back
…basically anything at all about how I remembered the heroes kicking ass…was actually stuff I imagined while the show cut back to re-using the same piece of stock filler-footage of “meanwhile, back at HQ, the completely superfluous robot you’ll never bother to learn the name of makes noises while pushing buttons & lights flash on some screens”
…in my head it was basically the unexpurgated japanese version, somehow…which is weird…because when I watched it as a kid I hadn’t even heard manga existed or that there was a japanese version
…but…yeah…sometimes you really can’t go home because it was never really there to begin with?
Yeah, I’m kind of scared to revisit Speed Racer for the same reason.
The 7 Zark 7 bits were filler after the American producers edited out all the violence and sex.
Zoltar was a trans person or hermaphrodite.
When they say robot tanks and planes. The Japanese original had the crews being BBQed by whatever energy beam the Spectra clowns were using.
For a kid’s show it had more deaths than most 80s cop shows per ep.
I watched it for the first time when it was shown on MTV in the very late-night/early-morning hours in the early ’90s, when I first started staying up late. It may have been the first thing I ever watched ironically, too, because the dialogue and delivery seemed SO bad. Hell, the one exchange that came to mind is even captured for (relative) posterity on IMDb. But since mere words on a screen can’t truly capture its essence, here it is all cued up:
You’re such a sweet little monkey, you don’t want a bomb!
Lots of TV shows really, really, really didn’t age well–and I don’t mean from 40 or 50 or 60 years ago. I mean, even in the 90’s when a show from the 70’s would come back in syndication and I’d watch it and then think, “wow, this really sucks.” Then there are shows that you might think are sort of timeless, like Michael Landon’s last series, Highway to Heaven. Holy shit, the cheesy schmaltz of that fucking show. It aired in the 80’s but was like it had been lifted straight out of the 50’s.
Then there are shows that are truly timeless, like M*A*S*H, or Cheers, which still have writing that pops, with great actors and solid pacing.
Um, I hate to break it to you because I can hardly believe this kind of thing myself, but Highway to Heaven and a show from the ’70s ARE shows from 40 or 50 years ago.
Ouch!!!!
Yeah I didn’t phrase that well. I meant even back in the 90’s when I would watch a show from the 70’s I’d be struck by how bad it was. For that matter there are shows from the 90’s that are basically unwatchable.
I had a Melona for dessert tonight while singing “M-m-m-my Melona!”, which is what I used to do with a friend in my late teens. They are just as great as I remember them to be.
Speaking of things that really didn’t age well, I never noticed until someone pointed out to me late in the Groupthink era that part of the chorus to that song goes, “Such a dirty mind/I always get it up/for the touch/of the younger kind.”
(Those words actually came out of the mouth of the man pictured above.)
Hidden gross lyrics are so frustrating. The one that always gets me is that fun song “In the Summertime” has this little vomit nugget in it —
“If her daddy’s rich, take her out for a meal
If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel”
Yuck. I never knew the lyrics just the M-m-m-my Sharona part.
See also: Grease. (Or don’t.)