You Are What You Were. Celebrate Retro Pop Culture At Retroland.
Imagine if you can, the thrills of the circus with tigers and trapeze and clowns. Now imagine that instead of seasoned veterans, the performers are your favorite celebrities, each with little circus training but plenty of show biz chutzpah. And there you have Circus of the Stars – an evening of ringside spectacles and (not so) death-defying stunts. All you need is the cotton candy.
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Television and movies have long speculated about faraway galaxies through the eyes of fictional space explorers such as Buck Rogers and Captain Kirk. But TV viewers were eventually given an informative introduction to the real universe we live in, thanks to a visionary scientist named Carl Sagan, host and producer of the fascinating 13-part television series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Airing in 1980 on PBS, Cosmos was a provocative, visually-stunning exploration that left viewers on the edge of their seats as Sagan used his considerable charm to explain all that we know about the mysteries of space.
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If you were a disco fan in the late 1970s, there was one television show you could tune into to get your weekly fix - Dance Fever. This amateur dance competition was hosted by Deney Terrio, the disco icon who became famous by teaching John Travolta how to get down in the movie Saturday Night Fever. Let's take a look back at this fondly remembered show.
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Despite the curious mid-word contraction, Diff’rent Strokes certainly made its mark in sitcom history, appealing to a wide audience during its original run in the late 70s-early 80s and during syndication later on. Thanks to a cherubic young star, and aided by an incredibly catchy theme song, the series was immensely popular and still resonates in pop culture today.
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Nickelodeon brought green slime to the forefront of television with its 1986 program, Double Dare. A combination of quiz show and obstacle course, the kid’s network made sure to provide plenty of slime, jelly, syrup, and other forms of goo. Host Marc Summers started things off by having the two competing teams, decked out in [...]
Continue reading..."Life is like a hurricane, here in Duckburg…" "Race cars, lasers, aeroplanes, it's a duck blur, You might solve a mystery, or rewrite history, DuckTales, woo-oo!" (Oh, come on, you know the words!) With its ‘tales of derring-do, bad and good luck tales’ (A-woo-ooh!), DuckTales made its foray into daily syndication in the fall of [...]
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Plenty of television series have taken their viewers into suburban homes and urban metropolises over the years. For audiences more akin to something with a little backwoods country charm, however, The Dukes of Hazzard was right up their alley. With its rural setting, colorful and attractive characters, and a really fast car, this long-running series based on the daily lives of a couple of former moonshiners put aside cerebral themes in favor of fuedin’ schemin’ and car-chasin’ fun.
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Imagine a mysterious tropical island where visitors come to have their fantasies played out. If that sounds enticing, you are not alone. For seven seasons, television viewers checked in on the inhabitants of Fantasy Island every Saturday night, watching them live out their dreams, for better or worse, under the watchful eye of their enigmatic host, Mr. Rourke and his assistant, Tattoo.
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Pioneering puppeteer, Jim Henson, followed up the enormous success of The Muppet Show with another endearing endeavor in 1982, Fraggle Rock. Featuring a whole new wonderfully weird collection of his famous felt characters, and filled to the brim with silliness, the show has enjoyed a strong cult following ever since its debut. Let's take a [...]
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Garfield, role model for lazy cats everywhere, started out as a syndicated newspaper comic strip created by Jim Davis. And, as one might expect, the character proved popular enough to made the transition to TV commercials, which eventually led to his own Saturday morning show in 1988, Garfield and Friends. The kitty with an attitude endeared himself to many a young viewer, enough to stick around for a respectable 121 episodes.
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