'30 Seconds' and half a lifetime

On Saturday night, after the rogaine, a bunch of us played the board game '30 Seconds'. Christo and I were the only ones in our 30's; the other five ranged between 20 and 22.

So the one guy describes an item to his friend as, "It's like the first kinds of soap on tv, the one the old folks watched". Yes, you've got it, Dallas. While I was more of a Falcon Crest girl, I certainly know the trials and tribulations of the Ewings, JR, Miss Ellie, Pam, Bobby (dead, then alive) and the rest of the family. I also still remember the old schoolyard song sang to the show's theme tune, "He's mean, he's rich, his wife is a b-ch, he drives a big limousine.... he lives in a palace on the other side of Dallas and his name is JR". Hahaha.

So then Christo gets a card and he prompts his young teammates with, "It's an old tv show with the guy who cleaned the house and his daughter and the blond lady; Tony Danza was the guy". "Who is Tony Danza?" was the reply. Anyone older than 7 in the mid-late 80's would know Who's the Boss? - classic tv programme.

We then giggled about watching programmes in simulcast (being Afrikaans, Christo watched the badly dubbed Afrikaans version; I tuned in to Radio 2000 to listen to the show's original soundtrack in English, while watching it on telly). A classic simulcast programme was Remington Steele, with a younger Pierce Brosnan.

Christo and I got chatting about all those old classic tv programmes that we grew up watching. They were mostly wholesome; people were less abusive to each other.

In the morning I woke up thinking about two of my animated favourites, which I watched in primary school - Robotech and ThunderCats (first aired in 1985). We would run around the playground being Lion-O, Cheetara and Wileykit and Wilykat - and if you flicked your hair just right in the swimming pool you could get your hair into a Thundercats' hairstyle!. Thunder-thunder-thunder-ThunderCats - Ho! I am soooo Cheetara!

I've just done a search on YouTube and, what do you know, I found the intro episode to ThunderCats and I've also discovered that a new movie was on the cards from Warner Bros, due for 2010-ish. Looks like it has been shelved.

Even more fun is this fan-made 'movie trailer' on YouTube, created by a graphic artist. It isn't a trailer from the real movie; this guy has spent a year and a half (on and off) pulling sequences from other movies to create ThunderCats characters from well-known actors. All the effects were done frame by frame in Photoshop. It is awesome! It's creator, Wormy TV (this links to his blog), has used Brad Pitt and Mel Gibson as Lion-O, Hugh Jackman as Tygra and my dream date, Vin Diesel, as Panthero. Watch this really cool Thundercats Movie trailer (fan made) - it is delightful.

Aside from all this reminiscing, my thoughts about this age thing is that we are so used to taking part in sports with people much younger (and older) than ourselves; we don't often notice the age difference. A simple game of '30 Seconds' was a light-hearted reminder. The reality is that Christo and I are 12-13 years older than our Abu Dhabi teammates. It's a good thing that questions about 80's (and early 90's) tv programmes are not adventure racing disciplines! hahahaha