Music History*: Notes (both Major and Minor) from my childhood

On February 18, 2020November 22, 2020 By StevenIn Life At Home, Pop Culture1 Comment

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always liked comic books. When I was growing up, there were always comics around- old tales of the Green Lantern Corps, silver-age Superman stories with Jimmy Olsen, and even some Legion of Superheroes stories with Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl. The Greatest American Hero hit television when I was eight years old, and it was a foregone conclusion that I’d love it. With my nascent love of music already running strong, I also loved the theme song by Joey Scarbury. I remember sitting on the end of my mom’s bed, singing along to the song on the radio. Mom was super amused that I knew all the words.

Along with my love of superheroes, I have a long-standing fondness for all things Disney. One of my earliest Disney Music loves was the Main Street Electrical Parade. This goes beyond mere Disneyana. I used to have a tape of a 1983 album by Michael Iceberg, the composer of the theme, with all kinds of neat stuff like a Robot Revolt theme. One year, Michael Iceberg brought his pyramid-shaped synthesizer cubicle, the Amazing Iceberg Machine, to the South Florida Fair. I got to meet the man after the show, and I remember someone commenting that he was spectacularly drunk at the time. In any case, the original parade is long gone from Disney, but the music lives on as an amazingly persistent earworm. Mua ha ha!

Speaking of all things Disney, let’s talk about EPCOT. When I was ten, my dad drove both of us up to Orlando one weekend to go to the theme park for the first time. I brought back two souvenirs from that trip. The first was a brochure book about the park, detailing all of the pavilions, including the still unopened Horizons (coming soon!) and also detailing the planned but never built World Showcase pavilions for Israel, Spain, and Equatorial Africa.

The second souvenir from that trip was The Official Album of Walt Disney World EPCOT Center. On vinyl. I listened to that thing so much it’s a wonder the grooves didn’t flatten out. I can still sing large swaths of the original music from memory, and the vocals in the American Pavilion song “Golden Dream” are directly responsible for an ill-fated and poorly considered audition for the Voices of Liberty that I may or may not have attempted in the early 1990s.

https://youtu.be/_9tgxS6iXDY

Some of the album is very, very dated – “The Computer Song” specifically comes to mind- but I will always love it anyway. “Makin’ Memories” is another long-time favorite, left over from the early days of EPCOT when the pavilions were all sponsored by corporations. See if you can guess which mega-corporation sponsored this one:

https://youtu.be/4mnvT9a4520

As an aside- anyone who has ever gone on Journey Into Imagination with me can attest that I will always-and-forever sing the ORIGINAL version of Dreamfinder and Figment’s song, very very loudly, over the current iteration.

https://youtu.be/dZgzMjvNvCs

I’m skipping around my personal timeline a little bit, but I wanted to talk about 8-track recordings. When I was a wee lad, cleaning day was a family affair. We had an 8-track player in the living room, and we got those Columbia House shipments of new titles every so often. On family house cleaning days, we’d fire up the stereo, throw a tape into the 8-track player, and everyone in the family would pitch in to clean the house.

I suspect that a hefty percentage of my readers have probably never heard an 8-track tape, so you may not know that an 8-track splits the album up into four sections. Our player had no fast-forward or rewind, but you could switch between the four tracks, and the music would loop. If you let it play all the way through, our player would automatically switch from track to track in sequence. It’s because of the 8-track of the original Star Wars soundtrack that I whenever I hear The Cantina Band theme by John Williams, I expect to hear a fade-out, track change, and fade-in at roughly the middle of the song. That’s what it did on the 8-track. You can hear the fade-out at one minute and 40 seconds in the video below.

Here are samples of other artists that twisted the mind of proto-Steven from cleaning day 8-tracks- The Lettermen (Put Your Head On My Shoulder), Neil Diamond (America, September Morn), and John Denver (Country Roads, Thank God I’m A Country Boy).

(I just know I’m gonna get flack for the John Denver tunes.)

What music do you remember listening to with your family?

8/52

____

*This post is the second in a series on music throughout my life. Part one is here.

Tokyo DisneySea

On November 6, 2015November 6, 2015 By StevenIn International Travel - Japan

In my third weekend in Japan, I went to both of the Disney theme parks in Tokyo. I’ve already covered Tokyo Disneyland, but the other park was far more interesting to me: Tokyo DisneySea. There isn’t an analogous park to DisneySea anywhere else in the world. Many of the rides and concepts in this park are unique to DisneySea.

You still have to use the monorail to get there, however. I always love the monorail.

Tokyo Disney’s monorail is not that different on the inside than any other Tokyo rail car, except that the windows and hand grips all have that familiar Mickey shape. The little red shorts on each hanging ring are especially cute.

The entry courtyard of DisneySea has a giant rotating Earth. Hidden on the other side of the Earth in this picture is a line of people waiting for an official Disney photo of them standing in front of the planet. On the other side of these entry buildings, the rest of the park centers around an area called Mysterious Island, featuring a giant volcano.

The Easter celebration was going on here as well.

The ride wait times display near the front of the park was surprisingly analog! I would have thought that a digital display would be in use here.

First up is Mysterious Island, home of the Journey To The Center Of The Earth ride. I have no photos from that ride, but it was certainly fun.

There’s a 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ride in Japan, but it was closed on the day that I visited. Fans of the old 20,000 Leagues ride will recognize this submarine from the old Florida 20,000 Leagues ride. It’s just window dressing here, though- the ride inside is reportedly very different than the old Florida version.

This pyramid is part of the Indiana Jones Adventure ride. It’s really very strange to hear Indiana Jones speaking Japanese.

Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Crystal Skull is a fun coaster ride. It has no relation to the movie, however- this was named Temple of the Crystal Skull years before the development of the movie that shares its name.

It looks very peaceful, doesn’t it?

The DisneySea Electric Railway connects different portions of the park.

This is Aquatopia, a ride which uses the same trackless technology as Pooh’s Hunny Hunt over in Tokyo Disneyland. If not for a slight buildup of silt on the floor of the ride’s shallow pool, you wouldn’t be able to tell at all where the cars would go. There was more than one possible track as well, so your car might not go the same way as the car ahead of you, and you might finish slightly before someone who started first.

I stopped for lunch on the American Waterfront section of the park at a place called the Cape Cod Cook-Off. I walked to what I thought was the end of the line, and before long I was ordering my food. What I didn’t realize was that there was a much longer poorly organized line behind me, and that I had accidentally wandered into a character show meal. Since I was alone, I wound up right in front of the stage.

Minnie looks good in purple, don’t you think?

This is Duffy. The show I accidentally dined in is called “My Friend Duffy,” and it centers around this Disney bear. Duffy was created in 2002, but he’s most popular in the Tokyo parks. There’s a great deal of Duffy merchandise available there. He was reintroduced to the American Disney parks only about five years ago.

Tokyo DisneySea does have a Tower of Terror ride, but it has no connection to the Twilight Zone branding because OLC didn’t want to have licensing fees to CBS as well as Disney. Instead, the story is completely different than the Florida version of the ride, and involves a cursed idol.

While I was walking toward the StormRider ride, some of the Incredibles popped out to meet park visitors.

Elastigirl was very popular with the kids.

This is the facade of the StormRider ride. The StormRider attraction is closing next May to be replaced by a new Finding Nemo/Finding Dory ride in 2017, so I’m glad I saw it when I did. I have strong opinions about the constant remaking of rides to incorporate newer Disney properties- I understand why they do it, but I often dislike the changes and miss the original versions. (In other words, Dreamfinder got a raw deal.)

But I digress… StormRider is a ride in which you use a specialized aircraft to fly into and diffuse a storm system. The actual ride is a simulator, similar to Star Tours. This is the entry area, where the storm diffusion technology is explained to the audience.

One huge section of Tokyo DisneySea is built to resemble Aladdin’s Agrabah.

Jasmine’s Flying Carpet ride is basically the same as the Flying Carpets ride in the Magic Kingdom in Florida. Hi, Rajah!

Another large section of the park, Mermaid Lagoon, is built to resemble King Triton’s palace from The Little Mermaid.

Naturally, there’s a statue of Ariel.

And here’s Triton himself, trident in hand, being pulled by two porpoises. Honestly, the notion of using porpoises like horses never made any sense to me, unless he did it on porpoise to make some sort of political point.

Yes, the entire point of that last bit was to set up a dolphin pun. Don’t judge me.

I wanted to go into King Triton’s Concert, but if you look carefully in this photo, you can see that it has a 240 minute wait time. Two hundred forty minutes. I was not interested in waiting four hours to get into this attraction.

Instead, I waited on line for Raging Spirits. The premise for this ride is that it’s an archaeological dig, but the temple designs are based loosely on the Incan aesthetic of The Emperor’s New Groove.

I noticed this sign on the way out of the Raging Spirits coaster, and I totally agree. Life is an astounding journey.

As I was preparing to leave the park, Mount Prometheus started to erupt. I had no idea it did that!

Have you ever been to a Disney park outside of the USA? What did you think?

Tokyo Disneyland

On November 4, 2015November 4, 2015 By StevenIn International Travel - Japan

In my third weekend in Japan, I went to Tokyo Disneyland. This was my first visit to a Disney park outside of the United States, despite having been a stones throw from Hong Kong Disney and Disneyland Paris at other times in my travels.

Tokyo Disneyland had more than 17 million visitors in 2013, making it the world’s second-most visited theme park behind the Magic Kingdom in Florida. It’s also worth noting that the Tokyo Disney parks are the only ones in the world that are not operated solely by Disney. They’re owned and operated by the Oriental Land Company, who licenses the Disney theme and branding from the Walt Disney Company. You can’t tell the difference in person, though- the Disney experience is still the same.

Despite it being June, they were celebrating Easter. I’m still not sure why, but it did mean there were lots of adorable rabbit figures in the parks.

Tokyo Disneyland’s Main Street USA is quite a bit wider than the Orlando version, and it’s covered from the very frequent Tokyo rain.

This part isn’t all that different than it is in Orlando, except there’s a lot more space in front of and around the castle.

Ahoy there, little fellow!

This castle is a familiar sight to so many people.

One of the sections of Tokyo Disneyland is Toontown. There’s a Roger Rabbit ride that I wanted to see, but I ran out of time.

One side effect of the Easter celebration is that various Disney characters were set throughout the park in egg form. Egg-shaped R2-D2 is sitting in front of Star Tours.

The Star Tours ride line area here has no Imperial Walker, no trees, no cover at all from the sun until you get into the lobby. Luckily, the wait times for this one never get too long because there’s an enormous capacity inside.

The ride isn’t much different, except that all the C3P0 and all the other characters are speaking Japanese. I have some recordings from my phone, but they’re not clear enough to be blog-worthy.

In Tokyo Disneyland, Star Tours is right next to Space Mountain. There’s a certain logic to that, when you don’t have an equivalent of Hollywood Studios.

It’s A Small World really wasn’t any different than the Florida version. The egg version of a Small World character in front was part of the Easter celebrations.

I found the Easter parade. Seriously. It was kind of hard to miss.

The springtime themed Minnie and Clarice Chipmunk outfits are super nice, though.

In Japan, the costumed characters tend to wander out among the crowds more, instead of staying in one place and spontaneously generating lines of children.

More egged characters, around the corner from the Country Bear Jamboree.

The Jamboree was also translated (mostly) to Japanese. This was a fascinating experience.

The signs within the park weren’t very helpful for navigation, but the breaks between sections were quite clear. The ground was also painted a different color in each section, which helped me find my way quite a bit.

Haunted Mansion wasn’t any different in Japan than it is in Florida, and Pirates of the Caribbean was still Pirates of the Caribbean. Lots of Jack has been added since the last time I went on the Florida version, but I’m told that the Orlando version has the same Jack stuff added in now.

For lunch, I shall have a waffle and some lemonade! I wasn’t in the mood to wait for anything else.

Pooh’s Hunny Hunt is different than anything that exists in the Florida parks as far as I know. It’s definitely different than the Florida Pooh ride, which is basically just a retooling of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

The Pooh ride uses a trackless ride technology that I haven’t seen in any of the Florida Disney parks. Trackless rides are able to cross over existing paths, reverse, and rotate on the spot. This makes for a really fun ride experience.

In this ride, you sit in a giant Hunny Pot, and zip around. When Tigger dances, the entire room bounces. It’s pretty fantastic. YouTube has some videos that people have filmed going through this ride, if you’re curious.