Today in the 90's

1994

I got married. Nothing of national historical significance today. Just that I have been married to my spectacular, awesome, wonderful, uber-super wife for 15 years.

Happy Anniversary, Babs!

I Love You,

Andy

Today in the 70's

1977

Smokey & the Bandit

Buford T. Justice was the name of a real Florida Highway Patrolman known to Burt Reynolds' father who was once Chief of Police of Jupiter, Florida.

The second highest grossing movie released in 1977 next to Star Wars (1977)

Near the end of the movie, one of the two Georgia State Patrol cars that block the entrance to the fairgrounds (the Oldsmobile) is equipped with an airbag (very rare for the '70s). The airbag did not deploy in that minor collision but did deploy when they purposely wrecked the car years later. That car is shown in an airbag safety film used in some traffic schools.

The dog chosen for Snowman's pet was picked by Burt Reynolds, chiefly because he refused to obey commands.

According to MapQuest, Atlanta to Texarkana is 665.2 miles, with an estimated travel time of 10 hours, 43 minutes (21:30 round trip). Atlanta to Boston is 1089 miles with an estimated travel time of 17 hours, 31 minutes. If driven the whole way, it would require an average speed of 121 miles an hour to do it in the 18 hours mandated by the "double or nothing" but the terms of the bet didn't specify how they were to get to Boston and certainly not how to return so they could have driven to the airport and bought round-trip tickets.

This movie made the Pontiac Trans Am a superstar. Trans Am sales jumped from 68,745 in 1977 to 93,341 in 1978. And just one year later that number swelled to 117,108 units sold.

Hal Needham asked Jerry Reed to write a theme song for the film. A couple of hours later, Reed presented "East Bound and Down" to Needham. With an acoustic guitar, Reed started to play it and Needham immediately stopped him. Thinking Needham didn't like it, Reed offered to re-write the song. To which Needham replied: "If you change one note, I'll kill you!" The song went on to become one of Reed's biggest hits.

When Hal Needham originally wrote the initial screenplay, he hired Jerry Reed to play the Bandit. But when Needham told Burt Reynolds about the film, Reynolds decided he wanted to do it and Reed was re-cast as the Snowman.

The Trans-Am used for the bridge jump was fitted with a Chevrolet engine, according to Hal Needham.

Today in the 80's

1983

Congo Bongo

Congo Bongo was an arcade game released by Sega in 1983. The game has come to be seen as Sega's answer to the highly successful Donkey Kong game that was released two years prior. The player takes the role of a red-nosed safari hunter who tries to catch an ape named "Bongo". The hunter seeks Bongo to enact revenge for an apparent practical joke in which Bongo set fire to the hunter's tent, giving him a literal "hotfoot". The game was a commercial failure when it was released but was popular enough to be ported to nearly ever major platform of the day including Atari's consoles, MSX, Intellivision, ColecoVision, Commodore 64 and IBM PC.

Today in the 70's

1977

Combat

The one that started it all. Combat is an early video game by Atari for the Atari 2600. It was released as one of the nine launch titles for the system in October 1977, and was included in the box with the system from its introduction until 1982. Combat was based on two earlier black-and-white coin-operated arcade games produced by Atari: Tank in 1974 and Anti-Aircraft II in 1975.

Today in the 80's

1982

Chopper Command

Chopper Command is a video game by Activision. The game was successful due to its perceived superiority to Atari's home version of Defender; Chopper Command shares many similarities in gameplay to Defender.

Chopper Command involves the player controlling a military helicopter in a desert scenario protecting a convoy of tractor trailers that are in position on the ground. The goal is to destroy all enemy fighter jets and helicopters that attack the player's helicopter and the friendly trucks traveling below. The game ends when the player loses all of his or her lives, or when the player reaches 999,999 points. The game also utilizes a type of radar in order to detect enemy craft not visible on the main screen.

Like many Activision titles, a player who achieved a particularly high score could receive a video game sew-on patch relevant to that particular game.

Today in the 80's

1982

Burgertime

The game's original title, Hamburger, was changed to BurgerTime before its introduction to the United States. The player is chef Peter Pepper, who must walk over hamburger ingredients located across a maze of platforms while avoiding pursuing characters.
While making burgers, Peter Pepper must deal with three enemies: Mr. Hot Dog, Mr. Pickle, and Mr. Egg. Enemies can be dodged, killed, or temporarily stunned. Killing occurs when an ingredient is dropped atop an enemy, or when support for an ingredient is completely removed and the enemy falls with the piece. In the latter case, the piece will fall much farther than normal, depending on how many enemies are on it. Scoring depends heavily on killing enemies. The more enemies killed with a single sequence of falling ingredients, the higher the score. Therefore, to obtain the best score the player must endanger Peter Pepper by allowing more than one enemy to move onto the ingredient the player is on, just before the player drops it.
Peter Pepper has pepper shots to shake on nearby enemies to stun and render them harmless for a few seconds. Extra shots are obtained by collecting bonus foods, such as coffee, an ice cream cone, or French Fries, which appear in the center of the maze when a certain number of ingredients have dropped.

Where's the podcast?

People have been wondering why the updates have stopped with the podcast. The simple answer to it is we've got too much on our plate right now. Work, school, scouting, soccer, housekeeping, yard work, you name it. Every time we try to sit down to do an episode, something gets in the way. Hopefully now that soccer just finished yesterday, we can get back on track. I do not want to provide Ben with too many distractions from school right now. He seems to be struggling a bit, and has had a few surprising disciplinary issues we are dealing with as well. Kind of funny now. We'll talk about it on the show soon.

In the meantime please keep checking out the site for daily history updates from the 60's, 70's, 80's, & 90's. We'll also be re-vamping the show a bit as well as a logo change. Stay tuned.

Today in the 80's

1980

Mt. St. Helens erupts

Remember this? As far as living in Ohio it didn't seem to have much of an impact here. The one thing I do remember is being able to buy baggies of the ash in the Dayton airport that they would clean off of the planes.

Today in the 70's

1973 - Skylab is launched

Skylab was the United States' first space station, and the second space station visited by a human crew. It was also the only space station NASA launched alone. The 100-ton space station was in Earth's orbit from 1973 to 1979, and it was visited by crews three times in 1973 and 1974.

Today in the 80's

1983 - Movies

Blue Thunder is released

When you're 13 years old, nothing is cooler than the Blue Thunder helicopter. Roy Scheider stars in this movie about a cop, a helicopter, and a conspiracy. Here's some movie trivia.

The television control room shown early in the film is the same control room set seen extensively in The China Syndrome (1979).

The helicopter used to portray Blue Thunder was a French-made Gazelle helicopter with bolt-on parts to change its appearance. Most notably the chin cannon assembly was too heavy, necessitating a weight attached to the tail to keep the nose from dipping forward in flight.

The control stick in the F-16 cockpit is identical to the one from the Viper starfighter cockpit in "Battlestar Galactica" (1978).

Although the city is Los Angeles and the action centers around the police department, the LAPD is never mentioned. The force is called the "Metropolitan Police," and their badges are silver, of a more generic style, instead of the distinctive LAPD bronze-colored badges depicting old Los Angeles City Hall. However, City Hall does figure prominently in several fly-bys.

Actual chicken was used during the "chicken rain" sequence. Four huge vats of actual barbecue chicken were lifted by crane and released over the police car and three other cars. When the scene was over, homeless people quickly appeared to help the film crew "clean up" the scene (in exchange for the chicken, of course). No rubber chicken was used, according to director, John Badham, because rubber chicken costs 4-10 times the cost of real chicken.

Today in the 70's

1978 - Breakout

Breakout was originally an arcade game relased in 1976. It was then ported to the Atari 2600 in 1978. In the game, a layer of bricks lines the top third of the screen. A ball travels across the screen, bouncing off the top and side walls of the screen. When a brick is hit, the ball bounces away and the brick is destroyed. The player loses a turn when the ball touches the bottom of the screen. To prevent this from happening, the player has a movable paddle to bounce the ball upward, keeping it in play.

Today in the 80's

1984 - Movies

The Natural is released

The best there was. That was the tagline for this all-time baseball classic.

The Bat that batboy Bobby Savoy gives Roy is called the "Savoy Special". Savoy Special was a brand of beer in the 1930s and was made by the United States Brewing Co.

Hobbs breaking the scoreboard clock with a home run was inspired by Bama Rowell of the Boston Braves doubling off the Ebbets Field scoreboard clock on May 30, 1946, showering Dixie Walker with glass. Though he'd been promised a free watch by Bulova for hitting the company's scoreboard sign, Rowell had to wait until 1987 to receive it.

Today in the 80's

IBM releases PC DOS 1.1

PC-DOS is a freeware DOS operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, sold throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The original 1981 arrangement between IBM and Microsoft was that Microsoft would provide the base product and that both firms would work on developing different parts of it into a more powerful and robust system, and then share the resultant code. MS-DOS and PC-DOS were to be marketed separately: IBM selling to itself for the IBM PC, and Microsoft selling to the open market. However, at no time did IBM acquire the ownership of the source code of the operating system for its own PCs.

So, IBM improved the product, shared it with Microsoft, yet only sold it to itself while Microsoft sold it to everyone else? Bill gates was a freaking genius.

Today in the 90's

Happy Birthday Chunnel!

The channel tunnel, aka Chunnel, was opened on this day in 1994. The Chunnel is a 31.4 mile tunnel underneath the English Channel linking France and England.

Today in the 60's

Alan Shephard is the first American in space

The Mercury spacecraft, named Freedom 7, performed a suborbital flight. It was piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard, who became the first American in space as a result of this mission. The flight lasted less than 16 minutes and attained an altitude of just over 187 km.

Shepard did not orbit the earth, but simply went up and down, which requires a less powerful rocket and simpler guidance. He did, however, become the first astronaut to safely return to Earth inside his vehicle.

Today in the 80's

Activision Boxing

Released in 1980, Boxing shows a top-down view of two boxers, one white and one black. When close enough, a boxer can hit his opponent with a punch. This causes his opponent to reel back slightly. Long punches score one point, while closer punches score two. There are no knockdowns or rounds. A match is completed either when one player lands 100 punches (a "knockout") or two minutes have elapsed (a "decision"). In the case of a decision, the player with the most landed punches is the winner. Ties are possible.

Glass-bottom observation deck?? No thanks!!!

Chicago's Sears Tower will be opening a glass-bottomed observation deck in June. These enclosures will extend 4.3 feet out from the building giving people a 103 story view straight down with just an inch and a half of glass in between. The attraction will be called 'The Ledge'.