Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Pointless Nostalgia

A Link to the Past

zelda.jpgMonday marked the 25th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, which means two things: 1) I get to briefly celebrate something I love, and 2) I am old.

Though Mario remains the more beloved character, Zelda is the more enduring title, because it was a progenitor of what video games have become over the last 25 years. Consider that it was the first game that:

  • Allowed you to save your progress, without the need of any codes or add-ons. Games like Metroid and Kid Icarus had made you input codes to get sort-of near where you last played, but only Zelda let you pick up exactly where you left off, with exactly as much stuff as you had when you left off.
  • Required an enormous amount of time to complete.
  • Had tons of secrets and extras you had to figure out yourself. Unlike most video games of the era, it was solvable not by repetition, but creative problem solving.

Zelda wasn’t meant to be a game you played for a little bit and then put down. It was meant to be a universe you immersed yourself in, one that you had to discover for yourself. That’s why it came with a map with huge portions of it missing. (I filled in my copy as I went along, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.)

These were all revolutionary ideas for the time, and technology had just advanced to the point where such a game was possible. The original game contained a small lithium battery that allowed you to save your game (as long as you remembered to reset before turning off the NES). It brought video games out of the scrolling, Flintstone-ian universe of Super Mario Brothers and into the world we know now.

My first encounter with Zelda was this bizarre ad. I can’t say this made me want to play the game, but it did grab my attention and intrigue me, mostly because I had no idea what was going on in it. The game itself is not so much the focus as the weird antics/voice of the man in the black unitard. (The man’s name is John Kassir, best known for being the voice of The Cryptkeeper. So, yeah.)

The first time I actually played the game was at my cousin’s house, which was where I probably played every new game–be it video, board, or other–for the first time. This detail would be unremarkable except that the reason I was at my cousin’s house at this time was because we all had to go to a family funeral.

The kids were not happy about having to abandon the gaming when it was time to go to the funeral home, so we brought along Zelda’s enormous instruction manual to examine at length, trying to learn its secrets and occasionally saying the names of the enemies in the same weird voices we heard in the ad above. We were doing this at a wake as people wept and grieved, completely oblivious. I do remember feeling the occasional pang of guilt but then, ooh look, Dodongos dislike smoke!

I’ve played almost every Zelda game ever for each system Nintendo’s put out over the years. (I think of myself as a Nintendo man the way some people think of themselves as Ford or Chevy men.) And while I’ve enjoyed many of them–particularly the ones put out for Nintendo 64 like The Ocarina of Time–the original remains my favorite, and I think not just for nostalgic reasons.

Zelda is one of those rare instances where subsequent advances in graphics and technology didn’t make the fun of the original pale in comparison. In retrospect, it seems not simplistic or cartoonish, but minimalist–if you can call something that requires to much time to play minimalist. It had exactly as much detail and complication as it needed, no more, no less.

I spent hundreds of hours playing the original NES games, but Zelda is the only one of them I can imagine myself wasting so much time on now. It’s one of the few I can imagine kids nowadays playing, too, because it is one of the few that wouldn’t look paleolithic to the gamer of today.

I am also sure that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, there will be a bunch of kids saying TEKTITES at my wake. Clearly, karma demands it.

Cinematics, Pointless Nostalgia

A Thousand Clowns and Shep-Colored Glasses

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thousandclowns.jpgIn a recent edition of The Sound of Young America, Jesse Thorn interviewed Barry Gordon, who starred in A Thousand Clowns in its Broadway and Hollywood incarnations (1962 and 1965, respectively) as a young man. The play ran for years in New York, and the film was a big hit that won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Martin Balsam. (It was also nominated for Best Picture, among other categories.)

Nowadays, it’s a fairly obscure film, not in print in any home video format. Its general availability has hovered between “not” and “barely” for the last 30 years or so. Every now and then, you can catch  A Thousand Clowns on Turner Classic Movies, although if you blink you might miss it.

Listening to the interview with Gordon reminded me not only of how much I love this movie, but of how I first heard of this film: My longtime obsession with Jean Shepherd, who himself was obsessed with A Thousand Clowns, though in a not-quite-healthy way.

Some quick background for those in need of it (those who don’t, feel free to skip ahead a paragraph or two) Jean Shepherd is best known for writing and narrating A Christmas Story, but my love of him has more to with his radio show, which aired on WOR in New York from 1955 to 1977. It’s hard to encapsulate exactly what he did on the radio; something in the Venn intersection of improvised monologue, storytelling, and sardonic commentary on the day’s events. It was done completely off the top of his head, with no notes, outlines, or anything. It is better experienced than described, so I’d encourage the curious to check out some of my Shep-related posts, or The Brass Figlagee, a podcast that makes available hundreds of his old shows.

When he came to New York in the mid-1950s, Shepherd had an overnight show that garnered a huge following among jazz artists, writers, and other Night People (a phrase he claimed to have coined, and just may have). By his definition, a Night Person was someone who probably had a day job to get up for in the morning but preferred to stay up into the wee hours, just brooding, because they were “bugged” about some inexplicable something. His monologues were a stab at trying to get at that something.

At that time, among his many pals in the nocturnal, creative set was the future author of A Thousand Clowns, Herb Gardner. They appeared together in a neo-vadevillian revue, Look, Charlie: A Short History of the Pratfall (which also featured another erstwhile Shepherd BFF and fellow Chicagoan, Shel Silverstein). The exact content of the show has been lost to the mists of time, but peep this page from its program, in which both Shepherd and Gardner are listed with their respective credits. (Also, note the illustrations by Silverstein.)

Shepherd used to promote Gardner’s “Nebbishes” cartoons on his WOR show, embellishing the spots (as he often did to those who dared advertise on the program) with his trademark rambling. Shepherd did not have many guests on his show–he preferred to work solo–but Gardner was one of the few, and he came on the program to promote Nebbishes in person. Gardner in turn wrote the liner notes to Shep’s second LP, Will Failure Spoil Jean Shepherd?

Shortly thereafter, the two men had a falling out, and the reason was almost certainly A Thousand Clowns.

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Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia

My Best Laid Plans

redfoley.jpgAs a kid, I didn’t go to too many baseball games. My family lived a little too far away from the city and had just enough money to not starve, so games involved too large an investment of time and capital. We’d make it out to Shea maybe once a year, inevitably sitting in some of the stadium’s worst seats, way up at the highest reaches of the upper deck. The players looked like pinstriped ants, but I didn’t care. The experience was still special and amazing. I didn’t dream of going any more often, because that seemed so impossible to me

Whenever we went, I’d somehow scrape together enough cash to buy a program and score the game. No one taught me how to do it. I’d learned from Red Foley’s Best Baseball Book Ever, which my grampa gave me one birthday. Once upon a time, Red was the official scorer for the Mets and Yankees. I found the book really interesting, even if Red was unable to get MLB licensing, and all the stickers had bootleg team “logos”.

The last game I went to for a very long time came the day after opening day, 1993. My mom, two brothers, and grampa snuck in chicken cutlet sandwiches and sodas to avoid crushing concession prices. It would be a horrible year for the Mets–The Worst Team Money Could Buy–but we didn’t know that yet. It was also the second game ever played by the Colorado Rockies. They were shut out the day before, so I got to see the first ever Rockie run, home run, and RBI when Dante Bichette went deep against Bret Saberhagen in the seventh. I still was young and dumb enough to consider this Witnessing History. The Mets won anyway, 6-1.

Shea gave away Opening Day Weekend pins with little Mets and Rockies hats on them. I considered it a precious thing and put it with all my other precious things, in the top drawer of my dresser. It stayed there, untouched, forever. Years later, when my grandparents were both gone and I was cleaning out grampa’s dresser, I found the same pin, nestled against watches and retirement gifts.

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