The Olden Days podcast
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Aww, I really loved Going Live. Live & Kicking was pretty good too, though never quite the same. (For one thing, those annoying leprechaun puppets were hardly a suitable replacement for the legendary Gordon the Gopher.) I think I must have stopped watching sometime in the late '90s, as the later stuff you described doesn't ring any bells.
I have no memory of Trevor & Simon being temporarily replaced! They are total comedy heroes in my eyes. Picklin' Time was hilarious, it so appealed to my sense of humour.
Wasn't The Raccoons on before Going Live, rather than during it? I remember that as being one of the very early morning programmes, along with the likes of Ovide, Mighty Mouse, ChuckleVision and Eggs 'n' Baker. (Hard to believe I was regularly awake that early on a Saturday!)
I also watched Parallel 9 and Fully Booked on Sunday mornings in the summer - I particularly liked the first series of Parallel 9, even though it was very strange. (I still remember all the characters with their weirdly-spelt names - Mercator, Calendular, Steyl, Skyn and Thynkso.) No idea why they changed it completely in the second series, scrapping all the cool stuff and introducing stupid things like the dinosaur puppet. I did like Lucinda Cowden in her caravan on Earth, though.
I wasn't keen on Ghost Train but I do remember seeing bits of it occasionally - I probably channel-hopped if there was something on BBC1 that didn't interest me. Pretty sure they used to show Trap Door, and possibly Count Duckula?
In later years I often saw or heard some of SM:TV Live while waiting for CD:UK, though I never watched it properly. I'm still gutted that I changed channels for a few minutes during something annoying, and found out later that I'd missed a fun U2 segment, never to be repeated or uploaded anywhere.
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Fortunately the Going Live uploads on YouTube confirm that The Raccoons is in the line-up, though it does seem it was always very early in the show. I remember I always wanted to hear the closing song (Run With Us) properly but Phillip and Sarah always talked over it (to be fair, it's horrendously long) so there's something else to thank 80scartoons.co.uk for!
I also found Feed the Dog and Feed the Frog in those YouTube clips; Rosey certainly described Feed the Dog to the letter, despite the haziness of her other Going Live memories. Now I remember the instructions ("Left, left, catch!") and the board games Sarah gave out as prizes to the lucky winners!
According to Wikipedia, it was actually the penultimate series of Going Live that Trevor and Simon didn't do, and their replacements' full names were Nick Ball and James Hickish. The only sketch I remember them doing was some kind of black-and-white schoolboy thing (Nicholas & Jamie) but I'm sure they were terribly disappointing compared to Trevor and Simon!
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Fortunately the Going Live uploads on YouTube confirm that The Raccoons is in the line-up, though it does seem it was always very early in the show. I remember I always wanted to hear the closing song (Run With Us) properly but Phillip and Sarah always talked over it (to be fair, it's horrendously long) so there's something else to thank 80scartoons.co.uk for!
I thought Muppet Babies was on before Going Live, too. Having consulted BBC Genome (how I love that website!), it appears we are both right... Muppet Babies was originally on at 9am when Going Live didn't start until 9:30, but Going Live then shifted to 9am in late 1988 and Muppet Babies started to be included within it. And you're quite correct that The Raccoons was usually part of Going Live... but! Apparently in the spring-summer of 1989, Going Live was replaced by a similar programme called 'On The Waterfront' (which I don't remember at all?!), and the cartoon immediately before it at 8:35 was either Muppet Babies or The Raccoons, so that's probably why I recall both of them being in that earlier slot. Muppet Babies was also shown at 7:50 in 1990, when the summer magazine show was something called 'The 8:15 From Manchester' - I have no memory of that one either! (This website mentions them both, along with the equally mystifying 'It's Wicked' and 'UP2U'.)
Run With Us was always my favourite part of The Raccoons - such a great song!
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Ah, Jurassic Park - I loved the first film (enough to purchase some kind of tie-in comic afterwards), and still found it just as impressive when I watched it again a couple of years ago. I never liked the sequels, though. Haven't seen either of them since they were in the cinema, but I was massively disappointed by The Lost World (which so underwhelmed me that I can barely recall a thing about it), and the third one just seemed completely pointless, rehashing all the same scenes they had in the original!
I quite enjoyed Jurassic World, and felt it to be a far more worthy sequel than the previous two. Like all modern 3D blockbusters it had too much chaotic action for my taste, and was somewhat predictable and silly in places, but I loved how they successfully recaptured the feel of the original - the believability of the park, the scary suspense and the little moments of humour. Plus the theme music still gives me goosebumps!
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Back To The Future is such a great trilogy. I haven't seen the films all that many times, but I love them, enough to get the DVD box set a few years ago. I kinda wanted to be in them when I was younger. The first one is the best but I also like the third one a lot, with that awesome train sequence. (I originally found the second film to be the weakest by far, but when I rewatched it as an adult, it was much better than I remembered. I think maybe I could appreciate it more once I knew the whole story.) Quite enjoyed the animated series as a kid, too, though I only remember the Benjamin Franklin kite-flying episode and I think a live-action experiment with a lemon battery?
Haha, I knew you were referring to Pirates Of The Caribbean when you mentioned good films with crappy sequels - I had the same thought!
Thank you for all the fun podcasts this year! Can't wait to hear your plans for 2017.
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Hey Annie, thanks for all your support and comments about our podcasts.
The live-action section with the lemon battery is definitely on one of my videos, though I can't at all remember which episode it goes with. That Benjamin Franklin episode (Go Fly A Kite) must be very memorable because it was the first one that sprung to my mind when I was talking about the series, as you may be able to tell. Verne becomes convinced he is Ben Franklin's son and this leads to Verne accidentally stopping Franklin from discovering electricity - very weird but fun!
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We are back with Warner Brothers cartoons: http://yourlisten.com/TheOldenDays/the-olden-days-episode-26-warner-brothers-animation
There will be a new release on the final Sunday of every month, so put February 26th in your diaries!
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We are back with Warner Brothers cartoons: http://yourlisten.com/TheOldenDays/the-olden-days-episode-26-warner-brothers-animation
I had a few of these cartoons recorded off the TV, which I watched repeatedly as a kid - The Bugs Bunny Easter Special (1977), Bugs Bunny's Looney Christmas Tales (1979) and The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie (1981). So they're quite deeply ingrained in my mind even though it's been a long time since I last saw them!
Was anyone else obsessed with collecting Tazos in about 1996?
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Oh my God, I went overboard for Tazos! I managed to get all except about 4 and put them in the presentation folder! The 4 I don't have are all Tasmanian Devil ones, which annoyingly only came with Doritos!
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I collected Tazos, although I wouldn't say I was obsessed. I originally saw them as a rather cheap attempt to capitalise on the success of POGs - which is, basically, what they were. But Tazos did have the slots for building, plus better designs than POGs, so they had that going for them.
My main collection of Tazos was around the time they did the Star Wars ones. I got (bought, actually) a Force Pack from Walkers to keep them in, and I still have it somewhere, with an almost-complete collection. I didn't quite manage to get all of them, but most. I even got the special edition trilogy Tazo (#40 in a collection of 40).
My main problem with Tazos was the name "Tazo" - as far as I can recall, their affiliation with Taz was temporary, and brief - by the end of their lifespan, the name seemed totally incongruous!
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The local newsagent must have got pretty tired of my friends and I going in every day after school and crushing all the crisp packets in our attempts to feel which ones had a Tazo inside.
I recall being particularly delighted to acquire the purple one with Sylvester on it. I think that was everyone's favourite and it was quite hard to find.
Still have the folder somewhere... don't remember how close I came to completing the collection!
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I did watch Fantastic Max (because I watched pretty much everything on CBBC) but I really can't remember a thing about it, apart from the titular space-travelling baby. (I thought he also had a toy dinosaur that came to life, but I seem to have been confusing it with Potsworth & Co.) The only specific thing that's stayed with me is one strange occasion when they accidentally broadcast the same episode twice in consecutive weeks!
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The only specific thing that's stayed with me is one strange occasion when they accidentally broadcast the same episode twice in consecutive weeks!
Oh my goodness, I remember that now and I was really annoyed! "Whip us up a flying carpet, FX!" Yeah, we've already seen that! I seem to remember Andi Peters being forced to apologise for the mistake.
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I loved Fantastic Max - I even had one of the annuals. (Probably still have - it may be in my parents' attic somewhere.)
Looking back now, I can see how clever some of the scripts were: the characters' names (A.B. Sitter, FX, XS...), the storylines which made sense, and the asides from some of the cast:
Magic: Gaa-goo!
Max: Magic says she's itchin' for some action too!
A.B.: All that in "gaa-goo"? What an economical language.
It's probably not as good as I remember it, but at the time I really liked the concepts, and I loved FX, and all the amazing things he could do with those odd protrusions on his head!
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I did watch The Crystal Maze from the start, when I was 6, and I have incredibly fond memories of doing so. That was back in the days when we only had one TV so we'd watch things together as a family (and make fun of the stupid contestants together, haha). The awesome closing theme was the last thing I'd hear before heading off to bed on Thursday evenings. Good times!
I can only really discuss the impressions it made on me as a kid, as I haven't seen that many episodes as an adult - I don't have an urge to rewatch the whole thing like I did with Knightmare, probably because it's less character-based, and of course I'll never be able to recreate that special experience of seeing it for the first time with my parents.
Richard O'Brien was a huge part of what made the show so enjoyable, so it just wasn't quite the same for me after he left. Ed was a perfectly competent host, but RO'B was The Crystal Maze - it would be like someone else replacing Treguard in the later series of Knightmare, you know? And it kind of felt like Ed was trying a bit too hard, without managing to bring the same warmth and charm to the role. If Rick was visibly fed up then I didn't notice at the time.
Similarly, Industrial was probably my favourite zone, so I was a bit gutted when they replaced it with Ocean, which I was never especially keen on. There was just something so atmospheric about Industrial, and I liked the game where they had to break into the house, and the metal detector, the spider's web, the murder mystery, and the one with the giant doorbell. (I could have sworn the terrifying bomb defusal game and the one with the giant plug were in that zone too, but the fansite says they were both in Futuristic. Hmm!)
I also bought the Crystal Maze gamebook by Dave Morris, having previously bought a couple of his Knightmare books. Ahh, school book fairs.
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If you find YourListen somewhat tiresome to use, you can now have an easier time listening to The Olden Days podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTwny-h6UXugIi6BvE1yXUlzoD3T0FM6B
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Hurrah - this is the first time since March that you've done a podcast about something I watched! Loved Maid Marian, it was definitely one of my favourite children's shows and one of those things you appreciate even more as an adult. I got the DVDs a few years ago but still haven't found the time to watch them all - I think I only got through Series 1 and 2 before life got in the way. Really must get round to that sometime...
I still have all my issues of Young Telegraph. Had forgotten there were Maid Marian comic strips in it!
A Game Called John was always one of the most memorable episodes for me, I found that hilarious as a kid. One of my lecturers at uni really reminded us of Snooker. Another memory associated with the show is a school lesson where they gave us one of the script books to read aloud in groups - I think it was the first episode, as I'm pretty sure I remember a tadpole being involved.
Looking forward to next month's The Mummy podcast, and the ones you mentioned for next year!
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We're really glad you're still listening, Annie!
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I haven't watched them in many years so I don't know if I would feel differently about them now, but The Mummy and The Mummy Returns were among my favourite films back in the late '90s / early '00s. I didn't like the look of the later films so I never saw them, and I had no idea there was a cartoon series!
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I haven't watched them in many years so I don't know if I would feel differently about them now, but The Mummy and The Mummy Returns were among my favourite films back in the late '90s / early '00s. I didn't like the look of the later films so I never saw them, and I had no idea there was a cartoon series!
I watched The Mummy just the other day. I was still amused. Brandon Frasier was great in it. It's certainly a lot better than the last Mummy from last year.
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