(More Than) A Few Of My Favorite Things Part 2

Cars - Mustangs and Datsun 280Z.  The best time period for Mustang designs is the early 70's.  They're huge, cool, and badass.  Boss 302, Mach 1, with the stripes and big engines.  The only reason I wouldn't own one would be that there are a ton of them around.  Though that really applies to the newer ones more than these classics.

The Z was really my first favorite car.  I just love the body design.  There hasn't been much of anything like it since.  Don't think I've ever actually sat in one, but have always admired them.  Not sure I'd even fit in the thing.

Card set - 1971 Topps.  Some people like the psychadelic tombstones of the next year, or the dual color '75s, but for me, I gotta stick with the coolest.  The black bordered '71 set always takes it.

Comics - Deathlok, Spider-Man, Iron Man.  Of all the heroes, I've probably got the most Spider-Man titles in my collection than any other.  It helps that he had like five different titles at certain times - Amazing SpM, Marvel Tales, Peter Parker the Spectacular..., Marvel Team-Up, etc.

 

I followed Iron Man from just before issue #100 through the alcoholism issues, and beyond.

But my favorite character of all is Deathlok.  You could say that he's Marvel's version of RoboCop before RoboCop came along.  He's a cyborg assassin who has a computer embedded in his head (that he argues with all the time).  There have been several incarnations of his story over the years even into this decade.  I saw where he was a minor character in the Agents of SHIELD tv show, but I've never seen those episodes.  His are the only books I own that were produced after the mid to late 90's.

Honorable mention to Machine Man.  (There's a theme developing here, don't you think?  Two cyborg comic heroes featured on a blog with a Borg theme)

 

And these were the Guardians of the Galaxy, not the raccoon and tree people they are now.

Baseball Players - Luis Tiant, and Jim Palmer.  The bulk of my player collections are guys from the 70's.  So my favorite players from then will be the top few PC guys.  El Tiante is just the coolest guy, and Palmer won a ton of games for my home team Orioles.

Movies - Dirty Harry series, Three Days Of The Condor, Cannonball Run / Smokey & The Bandit.  The Star Wars movies go without saying, so I won't rehash that whole thing.

Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry in five movies from '71 to '88.  That's just good fun.

My other choice is a rather obscure movie with a stellar cast and director.  It's a spy thriller that was updated and made as a mini series on AT&T / Audience Network just a year or two ago.  That show was good too. 

And there were a few different movies that kinda blend together from back then.  Burt Reynolds stars in Cannonball Run (1 & 2), Smokey And The Bandit (1, 2, and 3).  All of them about cars, babes, cops, and living fast.  Not deep plots, but some memorable scenes.

Music - The 70's were the foundation of all the guitar based rock that I love so much.  Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Doors, KISS, Queen all started then.  I don't necessarily like some of their early albums, but all of them have classic tracks from back then that you still hear all the time today. 

And Dio with Rainbow just never gets old.  He's the godfather of metal, having enjoyed an illustrious career with Rainbow, Black Sabbath and as a solo act.

TV Shows - There were several hero action shows at that time.  Bionic man and woman, Wonder Woman, Charlie's Angels of course.  And cop dramas like Starsky & Hutch, Kojak, Baretta, McCloud, and the Rockford Files.  I remember all that stuff.  Especially the theme songs.  SWAT had the coolest one.  I even had the 45rpm record.

The funniest show on tv was the Carol Burnett show.  Used to watch it at my grandma's house.  Tim Conway and Harvey Korman were always cracking each other up.  Vicki Lawrence went on to do Mama's Family, which was a series based on skits from the show.  They taped live in front of an audience.

Cars - Mazda RX-7, Toyota Supra.  My Mom had a couple Camaros in the 80's.  She started with a '75, then traded that in for a silver one in the new style around 1983 or so, then a year or so later swapped that one for a white one that she put clear headlight covers on with cute little butterflies on them.
I always liked the RX-7.  A friend in college had an older one that he traded in on a Porsche 911.  The Mazda was much easier to drive.  Never learned much about the rotary engines or anything, but wanted one as my first car.  Test drove one around 1986 when the design changed, but I couldn't afford it at the time.

Also kinda liked the Supra.  My first car was a Celica, but not a Supra.  They were separate models back then.

Cards - My collecting stopped in 1984, so I consider anything after that to be inferior.  But '83 was a great year for designs.  Fleer and Topps put out one of their best efforts of the decade.

 

Honorable mention to 1988 Score, which I'd pick up much later.

Comics - This was the bulk of my comic collecting.  I was into a lot of Marvel books, Limited Series, Spider-Man titles, etc. Later, the universes were being revamped, and I read both sides.  Both DC & Marvel have done it all over again since, so I don't know much about current heroes or their legacies.

Baseball Players - Cal Ripken, Jr. and Julio Franco.  I watched a lot of Cal Ripken, being an Orioles fan.  I don't actively collect him as a player (there's WAY too much), but I've been snagging up his tribute sets and the like lately.  He's one of the most respected players ever and was on my home team his whole career.
I didn't know about Julio Franco until after he stopped playing.  It just fascinated me that a guy would play that long.  He played for teams that I have no connection to, so I'm probably into his cards more than being a dedicated fan.  So many of the other players I like started in the latter part of the decades, so they crossed over the 70's and 80's.  Franco is more defined as an 80's (and beyond) player to me.

 

Music - Sheena Easton to Huey Lewis to Dokken.  First album I ever bought (on cassette) was the gorgeous Scottish lass with the powerful sweet voice.  Sheena Easton was big in the 80's.  Catchy tunes that promoted girl power and love.  And gosh, those eyes.  She even made it into some tv shows - one time marrying Don Johnson on Miami Vice.

Still looks pretty good these days....

Then I got the first KISS album without their makeup and discovered how guitars could make music heavy and strong.  I was hooked.  I've been a metalhead ever since.  Dokken was my first favorite hard rock band.  They had great riffs and rhythms, but were still melodic and you could sing along.  Love their clean sound.  It always seemed like they were the most "natural" band I knew, which means if I was air-drumming along, and hit that cymbal at the end of a lyric line, it was really there.  They did a lot of mugging for the camera in their videos, but I think that was more the director than them being silly.

And of course, the best leather and studs metal band, Judas Priest.

Still into all these bands.  I live on the same few channels on SiriusXM in the car that play these bands.

Movies - Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Die Hard, Witness, Field Of Dreams.  Harrison Ford is great.  All kinds of great action and adventure movies in the 80's.  I watch Die Hard every time it comes on.  And we did a scene from Witness in one of my college film classes.  Copied it shot by shot.  And who in this hobby doesn't like Field Of Dreams?

We had a kid that looked just like the original.  Our Danny Glover actor didn't show, so we substituted with one of us white dudes.  The gun was even bigger than what Glover had.  (Warning - the scene gets a little bloody)

TV Shows - Dukes Of Hazzard, Miami Vice, Airwolf.  More action, adventure and pretty girls.  Nobody ever totaled a car or got hurt in Hazzard County car chases.  Miami Vice was just cool with Jan Hammer's soundtrack in the background.  And there were a few shows like Airwolf that were borderline sci-fi and just fun.  And they had cool theme tracks too.

Here's the musician incorporated into scenes from the show in a music video.  He's not quite as badass as Crockett & Tubbs.

An intro to Airwolf:

Whew!  These are marathon posts and they take even longer to compose.  But now I've got three decades left!