It’s a funny thing about memories. Sometimes you don’t know why some remain so powerful, so ever-present, while so many others fade away, rarely to be recovered. They don’t necessarily follow any kind of logical rank, with the more important or momentous memories at the forefront, and the more trivial or inconsequential farther behind. Some of my most powerful memories are of the most mundane or simple of things, like a snapshot in time that would never make it into Time.
One of those peculiarly powerful memories has always bobbed just near the surface of my consciousness, teasing at my mind at the strangest of times, like when I’m driving the car, or busting my ass remodeling the house. I have no idea why it’s remained so near the surface, or why it’s such a powerful memory, but it’s often intrigued me, because there was a puzzle in the memory that remained tantalizingly unsolved. Until a few days ago.
The memory takes me back to my pre-teen years, to 1985 and elementary school life in the small California foothill town where I spent some of my childhood. Many of my friends lived outside of town, and indeed more of the local population lived outside the city limits than within, often down windy dirt roads, clustered in little hamlets or flung out alone, with no-one in sight. I can still feel the discomfort of being thrown about in one friend’s parents’ car or another, trawling the endless curves through the woods. Thinking back on it now, it sounds like the place was a shithole, and maybe it was. It didn’t seem that way to me at the time.
It was down one of these long, windy roads that this particular memory finds me, spending the night with a friend at his parents’ house way out in the country. I don’t remember what we did. I don’t remember what we ate. But I do remember — quite powerfully — lying on his living room floor and watching this amazing shot from the beginning of a science-fiction show, and thinking it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.
In this particular shot, one of the main characters falls into a swimming pool, and all these bolts of electricity shoot out from his body.
That’s it. That’s all I remember. Sure, a whole episode of the show followed that shot (which I think was part of the opening titles) but it’s that one single shot that managed to imprint itself so powerfully in my mind. So powerful, indeed, that it takes little effort for me to cast myself back to that night in 1985, lying on that living room floor in a strange house with its strange smells, and the feeling of excitement I had at seeing this amazing thing on television and wanting to know more, wanting to know why I hadn’t seen this amazing show before.
To this day, I don’t know why that moment made such an impact on me. Memory is a strange and mysterious thing. Perhaps it was that electric feeling of excitement coursing through me which induced my mind to really work at etching the moment into the library of my thoughts. There were a few other places, other times, when other tv shows and films had an equal impact on my susceptible gray matter — few, though, with the power of this memory.
Strangely, I don’t think I ever did manage to see another episode of this mysterous television show. I was a dumb kid; I’d probably flitted off to my next interest, and for the moment the memory was shelved, waiting to be dusted off years down the road, when it was too late. I eventually thought I’d never figure out what the show was, but the other day, while I was at Wikipedia looking something or other up, a word popped into my mind: misfits.
Within moments I’d had a fifteen-year mystery solved: the show was Misfits of Science , a short-lived science-fiction adventure that aired on NBC in the Autumn of 1985, chronicling the adventures of a group of teenagers endowed with superheroic powers. It’s now probably most well-remembered as an early vehicle for Courteney Cox, who played a young woman with telekinetic abilities.
You’re probably all laughing at me by this point; “Jesus, man, everybody knows about that show. What kind of wanker spends fifteen years trying to remember a show? Ever heard of Google, asshat?”
Okay, so it’s pathetic. I admit that now. Everyone else in the whole universe except me would have instantly known what this image in my mind was from. And there are probably tapes and torrents and everything else floating around with episodes from the show, that I could get if I wanted to.
But … I don’t. I’m afraid that if I go back and see it, it’s sort of going to, well, suck. And then this memory I have of which I’m quite fond will be tarnished by the grim reality of mediocrity and worldly lameness.
So, pathetic post that this may be, that little memory of that dude falling into the swimming pool and electrocuting himself is one of those “childhood memories” which we generally like to cherish, and it was great fun to so suddenly and abruptly realize, after all these years, which show I really was watching all those years ago, on the living room floor of my friend’s house.
It’s like solving a long-standing mystery.
Last December or thereabouts, on BBC2 — or thereabouts — an entire evening was devoted to the demise of the British situation comedy, and why. And then a bunch of other stuff celebrating this “dead” art form.