I Saw the TV Glow

 Sat down the other night to watch this movie I Saw the TV Glow.  

It reminded me of the early 90's.  Which it's meant to, by and large...shout out to the Fruitopia machine in the background in a couple scenes.

In the early 90's my family lived back in the woods, too far from the main line to run TV Cable to.  So, we were an antenna family.  The only two things I really missed, TV-wise, were baseball and pro wrestling.

I'd been a WGN kid, so I was a Cubs fan.  We moved in the 1988 season.  Not having WGN for 1989 kinda sucked, but thew newspapers still printed line scores (at least) and box scores (some did), so you could still follow, if a day or two later.

But without cable, there was little pro wrestling to watch.  Occasionally, you'd find a WWF or WCW show floating across syndication on some fuzzy UHF channel.  Even more rarely, you'd find some local show that had managed some TV Time.  But scheduling was sporadic, and sometimes you'd set the VCR to record something coming on at 1AM on Sunday night, only to find that somebody at WFLI or some other channel had decided to show Zardoz instead.  

I found a friend at church.  We were ushers together.  Which meant that we opened doors for people needing to enter or leave the sanctuary, so the doors wouldn't make a noise when they closed.  We also took the offerings, and helped older or handicapped church members to their seats, though thinking back on it now, there were only a couple of those, and a guy named Jim, who was older than us, usually did that part.  Legally speaking, that was probably wise, though I don't think that was even in the thought process.

Anyway, one of the other ushers was a guy named Brett.  He was a couple years ahead of me in school, and we'd never interacted much, but one day I made an Undertaker reference in the vestibule when it came to how the aforementioned Jim walked.  And a friendship was born.  We talked a lot of wrestling, and it became something of an arrangement that Brett would start taping WCW Saturday Night (and later Monday Night Raw) for me.  In 1992 and 1993, this is how I watched a lot of wrestling.

We would usually pick apart the wrestling shows in intense conversations that even though I really liked pro wrestling, I was always taken somewhat aback at how intensely he was into the storylines, and how cool it would be if there were some cross promotional show where Vader and the Undertaker could have a match.

Brett's fandom, I never could completely sort out.  By 1992, I was 15 and 3 or 4 years past my true believer stage.   I always blamed a Saturday Night Main Event match between Hulk Hogan and the Honky Tonk Man for being a nail in the coffin.  HTM hit his "Shake Rattle n' Roll" neckbreaker on the Hulkster, but I said to myself "he's gonna get up" not in any sort of fannish exultation, but in admission of a tired storytelling trend.  I was never a Hulkamaniac.

But around that same time, another tape of a Clash of Champions match between Ric Flair and Ricky "the Dragon" Steamboat had popped into my hands.  The WWF was theatrical, my mind reasoned, diplomatically, but Flair and Steamboat were going at it for real!

Sometimes you just want to believe, I guess.

That was 1989.  By 1992, I knew it was all predetermined, but was still a fan of the theatrics.

Brett?  I'm pretty sure was the same way, but was just getting into the stories so much that he was like a true believer.

I never knew for sure, though.  I mean, he was Intense!

Now, it's not a lot like I Saw the TV Glow and their relationship to The Pink Opaque.

I mean, I don't believe I'm a wrestler.

(Admission:  I do believe with all my heart that I am Bret "the Hitman" Hart and I am forever locked in combat with Shawn Michaels).

As for the movie.  I liked it.  I felt like it hit its marks, and it made me uncomfortable, which was much by design.  I'm coming to like Justice Smith as a performer very much, but Brigette Lundy-Paine brought the weirdie angst.  I liked her very much.

We watched it a couple nights ago, and I keep thinking about it.....