What If You Could Find Brand New Worlds Right Here On Earth...

Sliders
Fox (1995)
A science fiction television series that had potential to become one of the greatest of all time premiered thirty years ago today.

Sliders began its life on March 22nd, 1995 as a mid-season replacement on the Fox network.  It was an hour long show that starred Jerry O'Connell as Quinn Mallory, a young genius who accidentally invents a device that allows people to travel into parallel worlds.  He, along with his co-worker and love interest Wade Welles (Sabrina Lloyd), his college professor Maximilian Arturo (John Rhys-Davies), and a singer who was in the wrong place at the wrong time named Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) travel through the wormhole created by Quinn's device and end up getting lost in the multiverse.  Each episode featured the group "sliding" into a different parallel world in an attempt to finally get back home.

Starlog Science Fiction Explorer (June 1995)

The concept of a multiverse is a relatively common plot device after it has been popularized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe and in movies such as Everything Everywhere All At Once which won the Academy Award for Best Picture a few years ago.  However, this was rarely used on television or in movies thirty years ago.  The concept was explored in an episode of The Twilight Zone and several times on Star Trek, but it wasn't the kind of thing that people generally understood unless you were a sci-fi nerd.  I think this lack of familiarity with the idea of parallel worlds was one of the things that kept Sliders from being a big hit when it first aired.  A lot of write ups about the show back in the mid 90's compared it to Quantum Leap, which is another excellent show, but the only thing it has in common with Sliders is the fact that the travelers have no control over where they're going or when they leave.

This show will forever be linked in my memory with the days of dial-up internet.  I was 14 years old when it premiered.  Not long afterward, I got an IBM Aptiva computer from Radio Shack, and a 28.8k modem to go online.  One of the first things that I looked up was Sliders, and I came across a message board run by MCA Universal called the Sliders NetForum where I used the username neonrocketship for the first time.  I didn't post very often, but I checked the boards after every episode to see what folks were saying about the show.

 

I spent even more time back in those days working on my first website, which was a Sliders fan page in the Area 51 community of GeoCities.  I have long since forgotten what it was called, but I remember having a gadget called the Snappy Video Snapshot hooked up to my computer and my VCR to capture jpgs from the show to upload to the GeoCities page.

Computer Life (October 1995)
scanned and shared by Vintage Computing & Gaming

Does anybody else remember this thing?  I spent hours of my life as a teenager going through VHS tapes of movies and shows trying to pause it at exactly the right moment to get the perfect image on my computer.  Clearly I was one of the cook kids... not nerdy at all... no sir-eee.

The first three seasons of Sliders were broadcast on Fox.  If you're going to watch it in 2025, my recommendation is that you stick to these three seasons.  Network meddling began to rear its ugly head midway through the third season, which led the show's co-creators Tracy Tormé, Robert K. Weiss, and John Landis to drop out of the series altogether.  This left David Peckinpah in charge, who wasted no time in running the series into the ground.

Sliders was cancelled by Fox after the third season.  It was picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel for the fourth and fifth seasons.  At the time, I was happy to see that the show had been saved and hopeful that it would get back to its roots going forward, but that didn't happen.  The fourth and fifth season had a handful interesting ideas for parallel worlds, but the show had become an absolute train wreck.  The series finale at the end of the fifth season felt more like a mercy killing than a celebration.

Sliders is available to stream on Peacock and Fandango.  The series was also released on DVD, and new old stock of the box sets are still pretty easy to find on eBay for very reasonable prices.  I absolutely loved this series when I was a teenager and I strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction, but I just as strongly recommend sticking to just the first three seasons.  You'll see a sharp decline in the show from the start to the end of the third season, but I assure you, the worst episode of the first three seasons is still a lot better than what comes after that.

The Philadelphia Inquirer (March 22, 1995)

The Weil Keeps Rolling

Weil Antique Center
Allentown, PA
We discovered this place just over two years ago during the final days of the pandemic.  Both my wife and I loved the place, but we didn't manage to make a return trip until this past Monday.

There has got to be tens of thousands of different things for sale at this place, and it's all so random and disorganized that you could spend an entire afternoon going through all of it.

I don't think I'd ever want them in my home, but I've always thought that stained glass lampshades like these were kind of neat.  They remind me of going to Pizza Hut when I was a kid.

 

Just about every store like this that I've ever been to has at least a few different pieces of uranium glass.  It's supposedly safe, but dishware like this really is made by mixing oxide diuranate into the mixture that is used to make the glass, so they are radioactive.  They look pretty cool under blacklight, but I'm not taking any chances.

There's a lot of old grocery product packages and promotional material throughout this place.  The ones that I found to be the most interesting were these old cartons for ice cream and frozen foods.  These have got to be at least 50 years old, if not older.  I'm not sure who thinks to save an empty box of Armour Buttered Beef Steaks in pristine condition for a half century, but I'm kind of glad they did because I'm the kind of weirdo who finds things like this to be interesting.

These are old product packages that I actually had when I was a kid.  These little plastic heads filled with candy were common throughout the 80's, and every kid in school had a few of them.  I know that I had the Batman one, and Audrey II from Little Shop Of Horrors, but I'm sure I had a few others.  The candy inside was pretty terrible.  They looked like generic SweeTarts and I think were supposed to taste like fruit, but they just tasted like you were eating chalk with a little bit of sugar and food coloring mixed in.

The packaging was the real attraction here.  I remember that kids in my elementary school used to take them around to their friends and ask for "donations" to whatever character they had.  They'd end up getting random things, like a nickel, an eraser, or a paper clip, or whatever else the other kid happened to have in their pocket at the time.

 

This is one of the strangest things that I've ever found at an antiques store.  In 1977, Disney partnered with the company behind the Colorforms line of toys to produce seeds to grow a vegetable garden.  Each package included the vegetable seeds themselves, along with instructions for planting, and a plastic garden sign featuring a Disney character so that you could mark the location of your crops.  I'm not sure if seeds that were packaged 46 years ago will still grow, but the packets looked as fresh and new as any of the new merchandise that you'll find at Wal-Mart today.

My memories of The Smurfs in the early to mid 1980's are from the eyes of a child.  I watched the cartoon.  I had some Smurfs toys.  Hell, I even had Smurfs bedsheets when I was a kid.  I'm not sure what role The Smurfs played in the lives of teenagers and adults in the 80's, but this ancestor of the Beanie Babies suggests that they were the "Netflix and chill" of their day.  You've got to wonder how many people are walking around today whose conception began after one of their parents propositioned the other for a night of Smurfing around.

There's only two things that Popeye and Bluto can agree on.  They both want to "Smurf around" with Olive Oyl, and they'll kick your ass if you throw plastic into the ocean.

 

I'm 43 years old.  I'm not an old man, but I've reached the age where things in my everyday life tend to make me feel old more often than they make me feel young.  Seeing a Kodak Fun Saver being sold in a locked glass case at an antiques store is now at the top of the list of experiences that have reminded me that my days as a young man are over.

I thought I had found an old pay phone for sale at the Slatington Marketplace a few weeks ago, but it turned out to be a Jim Beam bourbon decanter.  This time, the pay phone we found at an antiques store was the real deal.  It's one of those things that would be cool to have if I ever converted a part of my garage into a home arcade like I had originally planned to do, but I haven't had a landline phone for about ten years, so this thing just isn't practical and would probably just end up being stored in a box if I were to buy it.

 

There are far too many oddities on sale here to document them all, so consider this an extremely small sampling of things that I found to be interesting.  If you're in the Allentown area and want to spend a few hours checking out some crazy stuff, check it out.

There Is No Escape

The Tacoma News Tribune
April 11, 1953
You've got to hand it to Mark R. Sullivan.  The president of Pacific Bell was spot-on with the predictions he made about the telephone industry in 1953.  This article from the Associated Press was published in newspapers across the country 70 years ago today.

When That Clock Radio Strikes Half Past Six, Babe

Mac Tonight
McDonald's (1988)
This incredible photo of a Mac Tonight store appearance was shared yesterday by Consumer Time Capsule on Instagram.  There was no source given for its exact date or location, or the name of the lucky winner of what appears to be a GE clock radio telephone, but if the late 80's in the United States had its own flag, it would be this Polaroid.

The Birth Of The Internet

Time Magazine
Volume 121, No. 1 (January 3, 1983)
For the first time in the history of the publication, Time Magazine selected an intimate object as their Person Of The Year for 1982.  The article discussed the ways in which computers have changed the world and are expected to continue changing the world in the years ahead, but one part in particular hit the nail on the head.

The article goes on to talk about some of the ways that people have accessed a network of computers that communicate information to each other.  One of the biggest leaps forward took place on New Years Day 1983 when a standard way for computers to communicate with each other was adopted.  The TCP/IP protocol was established as a universal language to allow all computers on any type of network to share information, and the internet was born.

Target Time Warp

Target Circular

January 1989
This circular for a sale that Target had during the first week of 1989 was shared on Instagram a few months ago.  As we enter 2023 with inflation that is absolutely out of control, it's interesting to me to look back and see the prices for some of the things that we only see today at flea markets or on eBay when they were brand new.

The ad on the left is the one that prompted me to write about this circular in the first place.  There was a company called New Age Video that released movies, cartoons and television shows that had entered the public domain on a series of affordably-priced VHS tapes.  That's not too unusual.  To this day, you can find DVDs at the dollar store of public domain works.  The thing that made these New Age Video tapes unique was the fact that each tape had a bag of microwave popcorn included in the box.  I had a Tobar The 8th Man tape from this series when I was a kid and it blew my mind.

Next is the 3 for $10 deal on Commodore and IBM PC software.  There are a few computer games in the ad, including Bump Set Spike Doubles Volleyball, Speed King, and Richard Petty's Talladega.  These were originally released from 1984 to 1986, so they were a bit antiquated by the time this ad was published.

On the far left is a three pack of blank Scotch VHS tapes.  You couldn't give these things away at flea markets and thrift stores over the past 20 years, but they're starting to become collectible among certain circles.  Give it time... maybe there will come a time when blank sealed VHS tapes sell for the ridiculous amount of money that we're seeing sealed vintage video games going for today.

Speaking of video game related memorabilia, this Target flyer advertised a sale on a video game organizer that could be used for an NES, Sega Master System or Atari 2600 console.  There was also a Nintendo cartridge carrying case being sold for five bucks, and Sega Master System games for $39.  I only had a few 8-bit Sega games when I was a kid, but I actually had three out of the five games in this picture: Alien Syndrome, Monopoly, and Spy vs Spy.  Even though the ad refers all of these as cartridges, the Spy vs Spy game was actually made on the Sega Card.

Here are some other pieces of technology that are vintage today, but were in common use when this circular was published.  I made plenty of mixtapes on cassette, and took even more photos on 110 film when I was a kid, but I never had a computer that took 5¼ floppy disks.  Even the Tandy that my maternal grandmother had in her office in the late 80's had a 3.5" floppy drive.

Last, but not least, are a few of the edible goodies from this flyer.  Sunkist Fun Fruits and Hi-C juice boxes were a massive part of my childhood.  My grandparents used to get them for me when they'd go grocery shopping, and I'd snack on them while watching Saturday morning cartoons when I stayed at their house on the weekend.  We'd also have microwave popcorn for watching movies or television in the evening.  I don't remember ever having cheddar cheese or sour cream & onion flavored popcorn, but I do remember that my grandmother used to pour the popped popcorn into a dark brown plastic water pitcher with a thick handle on the side.  Man... I haven't thought about that thing in over 30 years.  Memory is a funny thing.  Something as minor as the thing my grandmother used to hold popcorn encoded itself in the back of my brain, and then it just randomly comes to the surface, like an old computer file accidentally being moved to the desktop.

Fly Away, Tweety Bird

A billionaire purchased Twitter a few weeks ago, and it's looking more likely every day that he's going to run it into the ground.  Whether this is by accident or by design is debatable, but whichever the case, it seems like an awfully silly way to waste $40 billion dollars.  Hell, if I ever have one billion dollars, you could just go ahead and call me Neon Rockingchair, because I'd kick back and wouldn't do a single thing that resembled work for as long as I live.

I signed up for a Twitter account in 2009.  My first impression was that it was pretty much just the status update feature from MySpace or Facebook, but limited to 140 characters and with every other feature removed, so I really didn't know what to do with it.  I tried though.  Here is the first thought that I just had to share with the world on this new and exciting platform.

The first one is from March 25th, 2009.  I went back to college in my mid 20's and was in the second semester of my sophomore year.  It was posted at 11:02 am, so I'm guessing that I was killing time on my laptop waiting for my Biology professor to show up, and I decided that it was vitally important to announce my location, and the fact that I had a Physical Fitness class coming up next.  I still can't believe they make you take a gym in college.

Two days later, I used my second tweet to announce to the Twitterverse that I had tickets to see Lewis Black perform at the Kirby Center that night.  I then decided that this Twitter thing wasn't for me and promptly forgot that I had even signed up for it for the next seven years.

In 2016, I logged back in to learn more about the upcoming release of the NES Classic, and it was around that time that it occurred to me that this could be a halfway decent platform to keep up with news about the things that I enjoy: new movie releases, announcements of concert tour dates, upcoming video games, and the release of other random products and services that I might want to know about.  I still hadn't really gotten the knack of this thing as a communication tool, but I could re-tweet things so that I wouldn't forget about them.

I spent the rest of my time on Twitter that year re-tweeting life hacks and memorials to people who had passed away, and getting into the occasional debate over baseball or politics that I would almost immediately regret participating in.  It wasn't until The Last Drive-In in 2018 that I finally figured out how to use Twitter as a place to enjoy the company of a fun community of people.

 

Airings of The Last Drive-In on Shudder have become a community event, with members of the #MutantFam sharing their reactions to the movie that we're watching with Joe Bob, Darcy and each other.  It's a lot of fun, but I backed away from it after a while because keeping up with the conversation on Twitter often caused me to miss parts of the movie.  I kept in touch with some of the folks who I met through the show, but Twitter mostly just became a place to put photos from concerts and ballgames, and from a little place in Lehighton that has become my home away from home.

If you thought I was a paid shill for the Mahoning Drive-In Theater, I would completely understand how you came to that conclusion, but you'd be incorrect.  I don't work there.  They don't pay me.  Hell, I'm not even a volunteer unless you count picking up garbage that I come across while I'm walking Harvey around the lot.  It's just a place that I love and spend a great deal of my free time at during the summer, so it ends up being a large part of what I post.  The Phillies making it to their first World Series since the year I created this Twitter account have been another thing that I've enjoyed tweeting about.

Despite its positives, I find that I spend as much time blocking obnoxious politics and bots promoting OnlyFans pages that I do on the things that I enjoy.  In a world where there are more hours of streaming movies and music than I could ever experience in a single lifetime, the platform has mostly become a waste of time.

I think Drago perfectly captures my feelings on what people are calling the inevitable death of Twitter.

That being said, if GeoCities or MySpace ever make a comeback, sign me up!