While flipping through a stack of TV Guides looking for enough suitable material to fill a new article with, I saw an ad and thought "oh hey, I have a recording of that now." Later in the issue: "that too." Later: "and that." It appears I've been collecting and digitizing VHS for so long, these TV Guides can actually serve the purpose they were meant for again.
In this VERY SPECIAL episode of TV Guide Advertising, we'll be looking at several ads from the period of October 1988, then checking out the ACTUAL AIRINGS of those shows to see if what the ads promised was honest. Hold onto your seats, folks -- we're going back in time!
SERIES PREMIERE OF SUPERBOY, 10-8-1988
Imagine a time long before superheroes took over all of everything, a time when TV shows based on comic books were incredibly rare. There might have been repeats of Adam West Batman on Sunday mornings or some Superfriends cartoon on cable, but that was about all the competition this had. It was "Superboy" or nothing.
This show uses the original Pre-Crisis Superboy who is simply Superman as a boy. He suited up and flew around in tights all the way back in Smallville, not Metropolis. All post-Crisis interpretations of a Superboy have been about a separate character.
This interpretation of Superboy takes a few liberties, though. For one thing Clark Kent and Lana Lang appear to be college students (and their actors look far older than that), and the show doesn't take place in Smallville, but a different town called Shuster (GET THE REFERENCE???)
An ultra-permed Lana Lang is awaiting the arrival of her professor father by private plane. Clark Kent is there to cover the event, of course, but when the plane's landing wheels get stuck, he has to slip into the crowd to change into SUPERBOY™! Once greenscreened into the air, S.B. simply nudges the wheel into place and the plane safely lands.
The plane was carrying mysterious ancient stuff for a museum exhubit in Shuster. Well, you know what that means. One of the objects has to be CURSED! When Professor Lang lingers in front of a crystal on display, he suddenly becomes very weak-kneed. He faints and the hospital can't figure out how to revive him.
Lex Luthor, who in this version is a snotty prep student, sees the museum event as an opportunity to grab the artifacts and sell them on the black market. Lex mentions the exhibit has no security whatsoever and....I guess so. He simply walks in there.
Maybe the museum curator thought Supeboy would be enough and wanted to save a few bucks. Joke's on him. The crystal's curse affects Superboy too. It does nothing to Lex because he was using a lead chest to steal it in. Superboy opens the chest and the crystal incapacitates him.
But because Superboy is super, he recovers far quicker than Lana's father, and gives chase while Lex attempts to speed away in his convertible. Trying to shake Superboy is so much of a distraction that Lex swerves off the road and wipes out in a lake. From there, Superboy grabs the lead chest away from Lex, and destroys it by...flying into the sun, I guess. It isn't made clear what happens because the right shot is all we see of how it's resolved.
The show has about a minute left, just enough time for Superboy to change back into Clark and make a comment that takes suspicion off him ("boy, it sure would've been great to see Superboy out there!") The Superboy show is only a half-hour long, which feels incredibly brief. Almost every other live-action superhero show that's ever been has hour-long episodes.
Oh yeah, and you really need to see the promo for Superboy, which doesn't have the title character in it anywhere:
DONAHUE, 9-7-1988
(A bit out of the range, but where else am I gonna bring this up? Also, this article turned out to be posted on the day Donahue died, but that wasn't intentional.)
Donahue's special guest is Brian Duffy, a sleazy-looking guy who wrote the book "The Poor Boy's Guide To Marrying A Rich Girl." Duffy is 38, single, and notably lacking in experience with bagging a wealthy spouse. Dating tips from his book are read aloud throughout the program and most are cliches stolen from Dynasty episodes. He simply wrote the book because "women have always been encouraged to marry wealthy men; why shouldn't it work in reverse?" Uh-huh.
Everything about this guy comes off as phony, up to and including his claim of being "poor" (he's an investment banker and Ivy League graduate). Phil asks if his suit is Cashmere, to which he ruffles a bit in his chair and utters "It....doesn't FEEL like Cashmere." Not a denial.
There are three other special guests that day: actual rich women. Two successful in business, and one Hearst who was born that way (but not the Hearst you're thinking of). It becomes quickly clear Phil has set up a lion's den and they're here to eat this guy for lunch, whether he's aware of it or not (and he never becomes fully aware). When he reads out some of his "tips" from his book, like "Impress her parents by helping to walk the ponies," Victoria Hearst asks, "Shetland or Polo?" He has no idea.
They have read the entire book, which is unfortunate for him. "I noticed in your tips for talking to us, you have 'always tell the truth,' but then right next to that in parentheses you have 'sometimes.' Why only sometimes, Brian?" Victoria grills. "You're a very good reader!" Duffy answers, laughing nervously.
The episode delivers a pretty persistent dose of cringe comedy, but nothing tops this one moment:
The expression that woman's face develops deserves to become a meme, but it actually looks a bit frightening in freeze-frame, so it'd have to be GIF-only.
HALF OF LADY MOBSTER, 10-16-1988
Susan Lucci plays the daughter of a mob boss who is killed. She takes over his operation and goes out for revenge. The first half is missing so we join this story in progress.
Oh, guess what -- the boss just died! We've only missed an hour of filler. Lucci has a hit taken out on the guys she suspect committed the deed. But then they kill someone else on her side, so she kills someone else on theirs, then she kills about seven more people up the chain of command, then the last guy turns out to be a red herring and the TRUE master boss is the man she's trusted her entire life (of course), so they have an elegant tension-filled dinner in an Italian restaurant before she whips out her gun and blows him away so hard he collapses backwards dramatically onto another table.
The final shot is Lucci sitting in front of her unfinished spaghetti, staring at nothing in particular with a stoic expression as police sirens come closer and closer. I'm guessing the reason she didn't just run was because the network censors didn't feel a main character should be able to commit that much murder and get away with it. But I kid you not, the promo for next week's movie turned out to be Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando.
NETWORK PREMIERE OF THE GOONIES, 10-23-1988
Well, I've definitely already seen THIS, so I don't have much to say about the movie itself. I will point out one thing: a lot of people think the TV premiere of this movie had the octopus scene in it. I checked....it's not there. Rumor busted.
Airings with deleted scenes HAVE happened, though. The octopus scene was edited into the Disney Channel airing. And back in the 90s I taped a syndicated recording of this from KPTV, where the water pipe scene is missing, but in its place was a non-theatrical bit with Sloth and Chunk.
The water pipe scene is also missing here, but nothing replaces it, and yet they show a bit of it in the promo for some reason.
HALF OF "JACK THE RIPPER," 10-23-1988
Because you could only tape one thing at a time in the 80s unless you were extravagant enough to own two TVs and two VCRs, this recording of "The Goonies" flips over to something else in progress on another channel once the movie is over. Because of this, just the back half of CBS's "Jack The Ripper" miniseries is preserved.
However, it's the last episode, so we get to see the most crucial moment -- the Ripper unmasked! And it's....some old guy! That'd be quite a twist if we knew who it was!
It is later revealed, in dramatic fashion with lots of yelling, that one of the other characters was doing experiments on him that resulted in a split personality. Turns out they put some Jekyll and Hyde into this Jack the Ripper story. And evidently they believe it. There's a scrolling message at the end that says the true identity of Jack was never confirmed, but "we believe our conclusions to be true." I mean, you can believe anything....
GERALDO RIVERA "SATANISM" SPECIAL, 10-24-1988
Speaking of which, it's been well-documented now how much damage the Satanic Panic did in the 1980s, and you can blame tabloid TV hucksters like Geraldo for pushing it so hard. I don't have the specific special, not that I'd want to watch it anyway, but I do have an Entertainment Tonight clip from the previous day where Mr. Rivera hypes it up.
Mary Hart asks Geraldo if Satanism is an isolated thing and he says "oh no, it's everywhere!" And so are the "gateway drugs." D&D doesn't take as much heat as you'd expect from something like this, but boy does he hate rock and roll! According to Rivera, if your 80s teenager is into heavy metal, there's a very good chance that next week you'll find him painting pentagrams on the kitchen floor and sacrificing babies! He interviews this guy in a red cap named "Lou" who claims he thought rock concerts were innocent fun, until about five hours later when he sold his soul and the next morning he woke up with a hideous pixelated face!
And now Eddie Munson is dead and you know who we can blame for that? Mr. Mustache here. Throw a chair at him.
WHEEL OF FORTUNE, 10-14-1988
Oh boy, a classic Wheel Of Fortune! This show was on every night in my grandparents' house the entire time both of them were alive. It's the original version where after solving a puzzle, the players' heads would detach from their bodies and float around over a rotating display of prizes they could collect.
Today's contestants included a middle-aged man from Buffalo and a woman from Hawaii who works as a first-grade teacher by day and a bartender by night. Only half of the episode was on the tape, but that was enough for two puzzles and a commercial break. The Buffalo man was slow to solve this one, but I got it at this point. Can you?
SALLY JESSY RAPHAEL, 10-14-1988
From the same tape and day. If you were a kid sitting at home on this day, you could watch Sesame Street and be taught the letter K, or with one flip of the dial, you could learn a LOT more about life.
These two "pharmacologists" talk frankly for the entire hour about which commonly ingested household items might decrease bedroom potency and which might improve it. Periodic shots of the audience suggest they're not very into this:
When the audience does speak, it's to throw out weird secondhand advice like "I heard asprin is a contraceptive" or "like, are oysters an aphrodesiac?" The man has some weird "facts" of his own; he claims licorice will lower sex drives in women. I don't claim to be an expert like him, but if there's one main thread throughout these recordings it's that any "fact" stated with confidence on 1980s TV is about as trustworthy as a chatbot is today.
UFO COVER-UP LIVE, 10-14-1988
This thing is two hours long, it's all there, and with so much to get through there's no way I'm watching the entire show -- sorry, guys, this is a skim. "UFO Cover-Up Live" is full of secrets so classified that the government would never allow a low-budget syndicated TV program to just blab them out...oh wait!
This time, they were smart enough to attach a legal disclaimer to what they were saying. "LBS Commuinications makes no claim in favor of or against tue truth and accuracy of this material," says the host before introducing a man in shadow with a filtered voice who only calls himself "FALCON" and says the US government is in contact with multiple aliens and one is living with them right now. "MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT THREE DIFFERENT TYPES OF ALIENS HAVE RESIDED IN THE UNITED STATES FROM 1948 TO THE PRESENT DAY," the filtered voice crackles out.
Since it's live, there's a hotline you can call to vote on your personal dealings with extraterrestrials. If you've had a Close Encounter of The First Kind you called the first 900 number listed, and up like that. In case you're wondering, a Close Encounter of The Fourth Kind is the one where they probe you. The results were posted in the final ten minutes of the program, most people just saw weird lights one time. But it's interesting of the folks that claimed to meet aliens, more people said they were probed than not.
The show is packed with insane claims, but the single most unbelievable part for me was from the credits.
SYD MEAD?? HOW DID THEY GET SYD MEAD??
PM MAGAZINE, 10-14-1988
Unfortunately, while I do have this local episode of PM Magazine, it turns out Dad recorded every story BUT the Magna Ears segment. I have no clue what Magna Ears do or if they work like this ad claims. The closest I can get are stills from the opening sequence to the episode:
I'm being denied the highlight of my evening here. But I guess a man can dream....
