In this Very Special Episode, Vic and Jonathan lament the death of shopping malls (Sonny: “Meh”), the Substandard honors Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and the legends of professional wrestling, and why do Vic and Sonny keep making fun of JVL’s Prada jeans? Plus, arcade etiquette and Shannen Doherty—all on this week’s Substandard!
This podcast can be downloaded here. Subscribe to the SUBSTANDARD on iTunes or on Google Play.
Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:
* So what counts as a ’90s power ballad? Vic and I couldn’t come up with anything on the spot, but The Google lists Bryan Adams “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You”, Guns N’Roses “November Rain,” and Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” as the top power ballads of the 1990s.
Which is lame. ’80s power ballads rule.
* Vic mentions the iconic General Cinemas “Feature Presentation” bumper—here are the 1970s and 1980s versions of it.
* If you care about malls at all, DeadMalls.com is like the Maya Lin Vietnam War Memorial for the shopping mall. It’s fantastic.
* Sonny is too young to have experienced the magic of Dragon’s Lair or Space Ace, but what I never realized was that those games were animated by Don Bluth—the overrated superstar artist of the 1980s who wrecked his career because he thought he was bigger than Disney.
* And so we move on to wrestling. First things first: If you love wrestling, you should treat yourself to David Shoemaker’s The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling. It’s the best book ever written on wrestling and one of the best books ever written about sports in America. Don’t miss it.
* If you want to sample the goods, here’s the archive of the wrestling obituaries Shoemaker wrote for Deadspin as the semi-regular column Dead Wrestler of the Week.
* RIP Jimmy Snuka. Here’s the start of his feud with Roddy Piper, which originated on a classic episode of Piper’s Pit. It might have been the high point of his WWF career.
* Speaking of great shows within shows, remember when Shawn Michaels put Marty Janetty through a plate glass window with Sweet Chin Music? One of the classic moments in the last 40 years of wrestling. Just remember: In any partnership, there can be only one breakout star. Hint, hint.
* I’ve pointed you to it before, but if you haven’t seen it run, don’t walk, to the Max Landis short film Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling. Possibly the single best thing on YouTube.
* An early correction: I said in the show that Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik were neither Russian nor Iranian. That’s wrong. The Iron Sheik actually is Iranian-American. Volkoff is originally from Yugoslavia.
* Finally, my three favorite long-form essays on wrestling are this Matt Labash piece on Christian pro wrestling is, which is amazing (and led to his voicemail from Ted DiBiase). This Weekly Standard cover story by the Paul Cantor on “Pro Wrestling and the End of History.” And this Ryan Vogt piece from Texas Monthly on the Von Erich family reads like a Greek tragedy. It’s probably 15,000 words long, so print it out and savor it. It’s good you won’t believe it.
* As always, you can download the episode
here and subscribe to the Substandard on iTunes or on Google Play. And you should go give us a five-star rating. We earned it this week.
-JVL
