Who doesn’t love a Yoo-Hoo? Okay, maybe it’s not for everyone, but next year will be the 100th anniversary of the classic chocolate drink if you can get your head around that. At one time in the long-popular beverage’s history, it was marketed as an “action drink,” long before there was such a thing as Gatorade, Frog Fuel, Liquid I.V. and BodyArmor. The consistency between them all? All huckstering a sugar-based drink as muscle fuel.

Way back in the day, Yoo-Hoo went to such lengths as employing glittering personalities from Major League Baseball, in particular New York Yankees legends such Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Elston Howard. Yoo-Hoo, the drink of champions, even the chocolate milky choice of Washington Senators first baseman, Moose Skowron. You remember those Senators, right? Well, you know them now as the Minnesota Twins.

The pitch coming with not-so-subtle mandate that baseball and Yoo-Hoo drinks are part and parcel of the American way of life. America’s conjoined pastimes. Baseball is still called that today with certain degrees of skepticism with the encompassing sports rating thefts by the NFL and NBA. Those leagues don’t tug on Yoo-Hoo unless an athlete shooting hoops or tossing around pigskins are caught guzzling one in the locker room. Or if they’re given a paid endorsement to do so. Yoo-Hoo obviously these days backs their play more on reputation and word-of-mouth nostalgia than hard money advertising dollars.

Baseball was once broadcast as an all-American lifestyle filled with transistor radios (no other sport can be recounted over conventional radio with the same passion and chess match acumen as baseball), hot dogs, apple pies and Chevrolet (remember that corny old Chevy jingle?) and of course, beer and cigarettes. Don’t forget your Yoo-Hoo, though. Not the cosmopolitan drink of choice, but the regular Joe’s. You know who you are, and you know you want that damn chocolaty goodness. Resistance is futile. So is trying to drop an inside on Mickey Mantle, who’d just as soon put the twined ball into the bleacher seats. Getting paid by Yoo-Hoo to endorse the stuff as the drink of a champion.

So grab a Yoo-Hoo bottle from the cooler, shake it, pound it and swish the stubborn chocolate dregs from the bottom of the bottle for the classic finish. Generations before you have been doing the same. Unless you’ve got one of those box drink versions that are just as fun to squeeze and squirt down your gullet.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

It’s easy to take a 50-year-old film for granted, especially before streaming took over our t.v. viewing culture. For a long time, Jaws was running interminably any and everywhere on cable networks, same as the National Treasure and Pirates of the Caribbean movies are today, played ad nauseum alongside The Day After Tomorrow and Armageddon. The groundbreaking (er, water breaking) Jaws from 1975 is being celebrated hard this year with a new retrospective documentary in honor of the horror classic’s five decades of supremacy. Yes, folks, skip the futile debate as to whether the original Jaws is a horror movie or not. It is. It simply is. For taking place on a beach called Amity Island alone, I’m just sayin’.

It’s slicker and more methodic than your typical horror fare, but no matter how many times you may have seen Jaws, there’s no denying the primal urgency when Stephen Spielberg locks in and makes us all piss ourselves with the threat of a great white shark tearing us to shreds on a beach getaway. Aided by John Williams’ halcyon score and that iconic opening piano and string death march (you’re bom-bomming it in your head right now, I can tell), no movie sent a palpable fear factor into an entire nation back in 1975 better than this one. Just the eminent artwork of our razor-toothed boy (on the set, a robot shark Spielberg and company loving called “Bruce”) is one of the most horrific concepts in cinematic history. I can only imagine Jaws author Peter Benchley’s savage delight to see his vision come to such visceral life.

I was five when my folks took me to see Jaws at Edmondson Drive-In on the outskirts of Baltimore City. I recall being awake for the opening sequence, wide-eyed, at Chrissie Watkins’ (Susan Backlinie) nighttime skinny-dip run afoul and shutting my eyes in fear of it. That shuddery reaction put me to sleep briefly, of all things, and when I woke next, it was the scene of the gored victim being rolled on the gurney. Talk about a memorable intro to a lifetime of horror addiction!

To this day, I marvel at Stephen Spielberg’s shrewd and attentive capture of the fishing village as much as I do the slow, painful sinking of Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw with the omnipresent threat of ol’ Brucie gnawing them into chum. No spoiler threats as we know Shaw’s grizzled sea captain Quint not only goes down with the ship but down the shark’s gullet, and his was one of the few onscreen deaths you feel genuine loss and remorse. More impactful after broing down scenes before with a nerd boy marine biologist and the overwrought, do-gooder town sheriff to the sloshed rendition of “Show Me the Way Home.” It’s a song my mom is fond of singing with friends over wine and generations later, it’s still a freaking hoot. Jaws fans get it. Nobody else does.

You gotta love it when a mechanical monster shark readily took down a mechanical monster ape, the ill-fated 1976 edition of King Kong, in special engagement re-releases. Those hapless sequels? Let’s not go there, even if Jaws 2 has a few tense moments and yeah, I was guilty of collecting that film’s trading cards back in the day. Ten years ago, I was fortunate to catch a 40th anniversary re-release of Jaws at a local Cinemark on its biggest screen and believe me, the wide-encompassing engagement through adult eyes made it a bigger, more awesome spectacle. Same as getting to see an anniversary reissue of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining from 1982 in the same movie house. An entirely new experience in both cases. You can get your chance to see Jaws on the big screen this year for its 50th birthday. No doubt this will be a 4th of July where the theaters possibly run wilder than the fireworks outdoors.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

We Eighties kids were there at the dawn of the technology revolution. O.G. video gamers. O.G. PC users.

Believe it not, the term “supercomputer” originates to 1929 in reference to grand-sized tabulators manufactured by IBM. Later, the second generation of computers were constructed as mammoth transistorized computers which flushed entire office walls in the 1950s and Sixties. The CDC 1604, the IBM 7090 and the Harwell Cadet being some of the earliest examples of multiprogramming and multiprocessing beast machines. You can get a farcical idea of one of these gaudy goliaths in the Twilight Zone episode, “From Agnes With Love.”

Today, computers rule our lives. The more compact and transient our metadata, the better. Cell phones, Bluetooth and portable tablets have molded society into a state of tech dependency. You can’t go anywhere without three-fourths of the available humanity in sight scrolling obtusely on their iPhones and droids. We’ve sold ourselves out. Game over. The seemingly unstoppable rise of AI technology is ushering us plugged-in meatbags toward a realistic fleshing of Blade Runner-styled replicants, i.e. artificial human beings designed to think for and carry the unwanted task loads of future generations. Blade Runner architect Philip K. Dick was a prophet by writing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?

The 1980s saw homogenization of the home microcomputer housed with an internal central processing unit capable of writing, calculating, data storage and, of course, video gaming. The most famous name to strike the decade outside of IBM and Apple (the latter, whose early version desk computers remain today a source of debate as to viability) was the Commodore 64.

At one time, the Commodore 64 was a Guinness World Record holder for most home personal computers sold at 17 million units. Today, retro stories and movies set in the Eighties almost always throw a nod to the Commodore 64. It was a one-stop shopping 64K, DOS-based system used by home consumers and businesses where you could balance your books, then play an insane number of available games (surpassing the Atari 2600 and Intellivision gaming consoles tenfold) like Aftermath, Elevator Action, Delta Man, Kung Fu Master and Spy vs. Spy. Assuming you shelled out for the add-on modem, printer and disk drive, which Commodore 64 bragged was still cheaper than their bruising competitor, the IBM PC Jr.

I never owned a Commodore 64 back in the day, but the same friend from yesterday’s post where we crashed to watch taboo movies had one. I have vivid memories of Motley Crue, Twisted Sister and Def Leppard cassettes giving our rapid finger motions extra verve playing games like Summer Olympics and Forbidden Forest, the latter being one of the earliest video games to depict primitive 8-bit gore. In Forbidden Forest you were an archer fending off monster-sized spiders, bees, frogs, snakes and dragons, even a wizard, armed only with four quivers of arrows per level. Assuming you hadn’t been chowed down into a riotous fountain of digi-blood to square off against the Demogorgon. By today’s vernacular, the boss villain.

My friend attested to playing on the Commodore 64 with nearly the same zealousness as his outdoor BMX bike tricks. He was a whiz-kid at both, even if he mentioned his parents were often chasing him off the Commodore 64 after hours on school nights. Ahh, the memories.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

You know I couldn’t let it get to Christmas without my annual posting of this classic MTV, Santa Claus, the Slam Dancer! I get all nostalgic every year thinking about when this first ran during Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes. I laughed so hard I woke my parents up at 1:00 a.m. It was the Christmas season, though, so all was right with the world regardless. When MTV was simply MUSIC.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

By chance, did you get yourself some fried chicken during the weekend sprint to the Christmas shopping finish line? Before online commerce, the mad rush to the malls and brick and mortar stores was the norm, especially toy shops, most hilariously roasted in the holiday comedy flick starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sinbad, Jingle All the Way.

Now those dudes were hyper focused as ultra busy dads thrust into the retail hell of finding their kids that elusive sold-out toy no parents wanted to be the ultimate letdown by missing out on, Turbo Man. In real-life, the bloodthirsty competition torched in Jingle All the Way would have Cabbage Patch Dolls and Tickle Me Elmos. Talk about your ghosts of Christmases past.

But I digress. I’m here to poke fun at Kentucky Fried Chicken and a back-then promise by Colonel Sanders’ corporate goons to offer stressed-out gift buyers a little relief from their cram, carry and shove modes of the holiday season. No, not a flask of whiskey which would make the most sense for some (you saw Sinbad had no shame in sharing his tuckaway stash with Arnie in one of Jingle All the Way’s moments of truce), but chicken. Then again, the still-fierce contests for parking spaces in modern times leaves room for calorie burns, given you’re lucky gonna get stuck in the annex lot. Thus, KFC is here for you!

I’m guessing by the ladies’ fashion in this silly ad it ran somewhere between the late 1960s to mid 1970s. A Mary Tyler-Moore type gives the Colonel her best googly eyes and a Lucille Ball wannabe (closer to the Colonel’s age bracket) drops her chin upon his shoulder with equal suggestion. They’re not after what the Colonel’s peddling here, sorry. Or so the corporate goons would have you believe. As it says inside the ad and as KFC has blasted as its totem for decades, it’s finger lickin’ good.

Christmas stress relief being where and how you find it, in this case. Oh, Colonel, you stud! You are the man for all seasons.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

The egg nog’s been consumed, all rounds dashed with nutmeg inside my glass Marty Moose glass (as you see in Christmas Vacation), a few with added rum. I’ve had the Christmas horror offerings on spin, ala the first Silent Night, Deadly Night, Krampus, The Nightmare Before Christmas and the Tales from the Crypt episode “And All Through the House” (even if the source material EC comic book story came via Vault of Horror issue number 35).

Yes, there’s been more innocuous holiday viewing material spread on the tube like A Mickey Christmas Carol, The Muppet Christmas Carol, Jingle All the Way, Christmas Vacation, A Charlie Brown Christmas, the 1966 How the Grinch Stole Christmas and many of the old Rankin Bass stop-action animation holiday gems I grew up with and still love. You know, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Year Without a Santa Claus.

Y’all know me well enough to know it’s the horror section which satiates my desire for dark delights. It’s been a while since I sat down with the original 1974 Black Christmas, and my opinion remains the same. There’s some genuinely terrifying stuff, especially the premise taken out of true crime events in Canada. Despite Margot Kidder and John Saxon checking in with some of their earlier roles and the finest Juliet on film, Olivia Hussey, Black Christmas always feels like it was missing something. Yet that final frame pulling away from Clare’s remains left undetected by the town in the upper window is creepy as AF and for me, is the film’s legacy. That, and knowing director Bob Clark would go back to the holidays less than a decade later and win immortality with A Christmas Story.

Even with two future remakes, the ’74 Black Christmas retains its dank intrigue and place in horror history as one of the first true slasher films.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

I remember seeing this ad in a doctor’s office sometime during the holidays in a doctor’s office. I’m snickering just thinking about it. My younger, more juvenile self thought the same thing my older, still juvenile self thinks about this vintage Eighties pitch for People magazine.

You just know Santa Claus has to take breaks on such a hectic night shoveling cookies, milk and other leftover goodies on his global mission to spread love, cheer and, of course, toys. At some point during the night, if not more than one, you have to figure ol’ Saint Nick has to relieve himself. I mean, all that compression of his bulk down one chimney after another worldwide has to do a number on his bowels. He’s not as lucky as his reindeer, who can simply drop bombs in mid-flight and keep on charging.

Thank God for People magazine, so Santa has something to read on those necessary emergency unloads! I mean, is that a kneel or a suggestive squat from Santa in this ad? You be the judge.

Sidebar, what fun if you were alive at the time to spot old famous faces on these issues of People from the celebrity circuit back then, like Willie Nelson, John Davidson and the bodacious divas from Dallas. Victoria Principal alone would’ve had me taking a trip to the bathroom, but for different reasons than dropping a deuce.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

What you see on these two pages represents my Christmas of 1977. I can’t believe I found these catalog scans of the toys that I got from my mom and dad that magical year. Only the Karate Men, Isis, the monster figures and the Batcave weren’t in my Christmas stash. The rest, heck yeah! All those DC-heavy superheroes (yeah, Marvel’s Spidey and Green Goblin were in the mix that awesome morning), the Batman exploding bridge, the Joker van with the squirting flower, Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Evel Knievel.

Not pictured but also dropping my way from “Santa” in ’77 was a fan operated U.S.S. Enterprise replica that lifted and spun around and an Enterprise bridge playset for the figures to frolic in. I remember the twist around “beaming down” apparatus I loved so much. You know I franchise clashed on the Enterprise deck with all those action figures! Sub out the monsters for superheroes and Planet of the Apes you see on the catalog page, yeah, that’s accurate. I also had a blast pretending the Joker had taken his van into outer space and squirted the Klingons out of the way for his hostile takeover of the Enterprise.

The double LP soundtrack of John Williams’ original Star Wars score was there that morning, and it landed on my turntable forever. A toy Happy Days guitar, Stretch Armstrong, a set of Hot Wheels cars, an army figure mountain playset called “The Guns of Navarone” and a set of Batman and Robin walkie talkies rounded out my haul that year. There was also an elasta-plastic dome “medical center” for Steven Austin that had a perforated section for him to blast out of. I loved that you could peek through the back of his head and see out, plus his roll-up forearm skin.

Sadly, the walkie talkies were busted that same afternoon when my childhood buddy, Donnie and I were playing with them long distance and the antenna on Robin’s got bent and out of commission. My mother was brokenhearted and being a parent myself for 17 years, I get why. Final note, I was talking to TJ about this incredible Christmas being the last one my parents would have together as the following year would end in divorce. I’ve made such a big deal about this Christmas because of my parents’ nightly fighting and how, for one day, everyone seemed so happy. My wife made the astute observation the blowout likely came with the knowledge they’d reached the end of their rope and wanted to give me one final hurrah together.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.