PopCult

During my recent vacation to points South, I mentioned that I would be attending JoeLanta as a civilian. I took a few photos, more of which you will see over the next week, but I didn’t shoot any video, as I have at previous JoeLanta and ToyLanta conventions for more than a decade.

However, I did have my handy Kodak Zi8 with me. And it came in very handy indeed.

When we got to Atlanta (actually the suburb of Duluth/Lawrenceville), we stopped at the Sugarloaf Mills Mall and wandered around. While turning down one hallway, after the disappointment of discovering that one of the cool stores listed on the directory was no longer open, we stumbled across what looked like a castle, taking up quite a bit of space.

It was Medieval Times, a theme restaurant that has been mentioned or parodied many times in pop culture over the years. We didn’t even know there was one in Atlanta, let alone in the shopping mall we were visiting. They offer “dinner and a tournament,” which sounded a bit intriguing. When we got back to the hotel, we looked it up online and decided to go see what all the fuss was about.

It was a “What the hell, why not?” sort of decision.

So Saturday evening, after making our photo rounds of JoeLanta and doing some more shopping (It’s a big mall), we went to Medieval Times, and had loads of fun. And I took my little video camera with me and shot a few minutes worth of the action, which is what you see above, set to some music from Rick Wakeman’s The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of The Round Table (which I managed to misspell in the on-screen graphics at the end).

Because the whole idea of going to JoeLanta as a civilian was so that I wouldn’t be burdened with tons of video edit when I got home, I have to admit that this video was slapped together in twenty minutes while I was snacking on Goldfish crackers. It’s just my impressions of a fun time.

As for the whole Medieval Times experience, the show was terrific. There were no signs of animal cruelty (the show includes live horses and a falcon). The food was not horrible. Choices were very limited (available drinks were Pepsi, Sweet Tea or Water…with water being the only diet option). You are not given utensils unless you ask for them, and if you do ask for them, they are hilariously flexible, like prank items. The service was top-flight (and in-character), and they did offer a vegetarian option, in case you weren’t in the mood to eat half a chicken.

But the overall experience was a tremendous amount of fun. It was kid-friendly. There was lots of merchandise you could buy,including replica swords and also sparkly light-up weapons. The storyline was fun, pro-wrestling-level entertainment. And we’re still trying to figure out where they keep all the horses when the show isn’t going on.

I don’t know if we’ll make a repeat visit, but it was a lot of fun to go to at least once.

I can’t believe they had this giant facade, and behind it a huge arena,in side a mall. This is maybe one-fifth of the front.

Before the show, you could get photos hanging out with the King and the Queen.

The place was HUGE inside. This photo was taken as people were beginning to filter in.

There wasn’t a bad seat in the house.

It was a nice spectacle, with dinner, and a load of fun.

PS: We did get cardboard crowns to wear. There are photos. No, you can’t see them.

From June, 2010, this special FestivAll edition of Radio Free Charleston featured music From Brian and Nathan Diller, Evan Mack, Captain Crash and The Beauty Queen, Comparsa, and Alasha Al-Qudwah blended with art and animation from Joe Bolyard, Diane Martens, Leisha Angel, Kerry Bingham, and Frank and Rudy Panucci.

Over the next several weeks, expect more RFC at FestivAll right here in PopCult, as we look back at an incredible run of shows.

The PopCulteer
October 4, 2024

Okay, so I said I was going to JoeLanta this year as a civilian, and I did. I did not have a camera on me at the Friday early preview night and I did not shoot any video at the show.

But we did go back Saturday morning and I grabbed a few photos. Not a ton, but enough that I’m going to be spreading them out over the next week in a series of small photo essays.

The main reason for the smaller photo essays is that I’m still dealing with some technical issues with the graphics here at PopCult, and smaller photo essays are easier for me to wrangle into the blog.

The show itself was loads of fun. We saw some old friends and caught up and I did get several new additions to my already-oversized collection. The weather put quite a damper on attendance, understandably so. Several vendors and a few guests had to cancel at the last minute due to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. But the show was still fun for those of us who were able to make it.

The entire trip down South for Mrs. PopCulteer and yours truly was fun, but a little scary. The path we took managed to keep us just out of the path of the Hurricane, but we had lots of gloomy, drizzly weather to drive through. We stopped overnight in Caryville, Tennessee, before heading to The Alabama Dish Outlet, and then to Senoia, Georgia, before heading to the show, just outside of Atlanta. We managed to have quite the blast and even did something totally unscheduled, which you will hear about later.

I’ll be posting more photos and other stuff from our trip over the next week, in addition to our regular PopCult features. But now, here’s the first batch of JoeLanta photos…

The Gas South Convention Center, JoeLanta’s New Home For 2024

There was a cool view from the panel room, above the vendor floor. They could have done a better job of directing people to it.

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Sometimes you just can’t come up with a clever headline, so you go with a cheesy rehash of a really dumb one from the previous month instead. Yet there’s still  lots of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and the rest of the Mountain State over the next few days, and your humble blogger might even take the opportunity to rewrite parts of the boilerplate for this feature.

With the temperatures falling a bit below the tropical level, outdoor festivals are winding down, but there will still be outdoor events, so I will continue to implore you to not be a dick and vape or smoke around other humans who may not share your addictions. Lots of folks get really sick when exposed to that garbage.

As I have been copying and pasting for some time now, this a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. And if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook or Twitter.

There are several benefits in the works to help people who were in the path of the recent hurricane in the South. Be aware that these benefit shows are out there, and that the organizers are too busy to get the information out to me in time for this post. Seek and give.

Live Music is on tap at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  This week’s shows are not yet announced.

Saturday at 7 PM, Live At The Shop, on Ohio Avenue in Dunbar, presents a night of soulful music as Rick Perdue and Garden Park take the stage. This event promises to be a heartfelt celebration of music, blending unique sounds and styles. Tickets are available for $10.

As  always, The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week  to tell you about. Friday Tim Courts holds down the forts for Happy Hour. Check the graphics dump below for more weekend events at The Empty Glass.

Please remember that the pandemic is still not entirely over yet. It’s a going concern with the ‘rona still lurking about all robust and reinvigorated and now with Retsin™. Plus there are drought-fueled nasty seasonal allergies, Pumpkin Spice Zombies, Lizards wearing eyeliner, creepy paper and other damned good reasons to be careful. Many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order…

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Okay, it’s time for a little “Inside PopCult” info.

Some technical issues have arisen with the media uploads for PopCult, and I need to spend a day taking care of them. This might mean the blog is offline for short periods today, but it mostly means I need to spend a lot of time doing tedious file-management tasks. Nineteen years of a graphics-heavy blog makes for some serious challenges, and I’ve put off doing some basic things since I ported this blog out from under the auspices of The Charleston Gazette-Mail about four years ago. This was not how I wanted to spend my first day back after my vacation.

So…while I promised you “fresh content every day,” today’s content is this post that explains why there isn’t a new post for you.

Just to make it up to you, here’s a picture of a horse…

Somehow Tuesday has happened once again on The AIR.  As such, we have a sort of new episode of  Radio Free Charleston for you. To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

Like last week, this week’s show features two hours of vintage RFC, dredged up and resurrected for you listening pleasure.

This week our all-new first hour opens with a new single from Matt Berry (with Kitty Liv), which is a teaser for his next album. The rest of our first hour is a mix of old and new, local and independent music.

In our second and third hours, we transport you back to the second half of an all-local showcase edition of Radio Free Charleston Volume 1, from January, 1990.  This was originally presented as an episode of RFC International in 2016,but it hasn’t been heard in over seven years.  Here’s what I wrote about it then…

It was early in January, 1990, right after RFC had been the subject of a profile in the Charleston Gazette written by Michael Lipton that I decided to devote all four hours of the show that was then broadcast on 96.1 FM, to local artists.

In part one, on RFC (heard here last week), you heard blocks of music from Brian Diller and The Ride, Three Bodies, Zone 3, The Bounty and more, plus we had a mini-history of Go Van Gogh as of 1990. RFC International brings you music from World Without Fear, Blue Million, Delta Hum The Swivels and more, plus we play side one of the first Stark Raven album.

Setting the scene, the last song we played last time was Larry Groce doing a cover of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.” We’re going to pick up where we left off with Larry doing a Warren Zevon tune.

It is cool to bring back some of these blasts from the past, even if I am mainly doing it so I can forget about blogging and radio-ing while I’m on vacation.

The links in the first hour of the playlist will take you to the pages for the local and independent artists where possible…

RFC V5 196

hour one
Matt Berry with Kitty Liv “I Gotta Limit”
The Defectors “Easy Target”
David Synn “Ryden’s Madness”
The Settlement “Linger (live)”
Carey Ott featuring The Freaks of Nashville “No Front”
The Aquabats “The Ballad of Shapeshifting Pilgrim Boy”
The Dread Crew of Oddwood” Giant Demon Crab”
HARRAH “Pay The Piper”
Byzantine“Ancestry Of The Antichrist”
J Marinelli “Saturn of Clarksburg”

hour two
Larry Groce “Accidentally Like A Martyr”
Blue Million “Everything Inside Out”
Blue Million “I’ll Keep You Warm”
David Lanham Band “Rock With You”
David Lanham Band “Small Town Blues”
World Without Fear “Nothing”
World Without Fear “Please Don’t Love Me”
Delta Hum “Three Ring Binder”
Mad Scientist Club “Live Song”
Mad Scientist Club “Thunder and Lightning”
Mad Scientist Club “Doctor Owsley”
Still Portrait/Mark Scarpelli “Music that I don’t remember the titles to”

hour three
Stark Raven “Riding On A Wave”
“I Know You”
“Be With Me”
“Feel Only Love”
“He Loves To Limbo”
The Swivels “No Vaccination”
The Swivels “Mobile Man”
Tim Truman “Ten Dollar Dog”
Tim Truman “House Come Falling Down”
The Mystery Band “Mystery Songs”
Diamonds and Gold “No More Loving You”
Area 38 “Endgame”
The Amazing Delores “Rats In My Ceiling”
The Pudgy Young Upstarts “Uncontrollable Urge”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand. Ignore the date on the video. It’s messed up.

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we give you an encore of two classic episodes of The Swing Shift.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

This week’s art is a very small acrylic painting doodle based on a screwed up self portait photo I tried to take over the summer in a hotel.

I forgot to turn off the flash. BTW, I’m wearing a shirt based on the carpet pattern from the hotel in The Shining. The photo cracked me up and I decided to try to recreate it in paint in a small size. The whole process took less than half an hour, and much of that was mixing the colors.

It is, as is one of my life’s philosophies, quick and sloppy.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a recent edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.

At 8 PM you can hear an hour of songs from Dr. Demento on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we devote ten hours to the second five episodes of Prognosis. We will be alternating between Prognosis and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat for the next several weeks, because we’re going to be pulling the early episodes of those shows from the server soon to make room for newer programs. After they’ve been offline for a year or so, we’ll bring them back into rotation but for now, you can hear them Monday evening into Tuesday morning, and then those episode will go on hiatus.

Okay, I’m slacking off a bit by recylcing an old PopCult post this week, but I’m on vacation, and I have GI Joe on the brain because part of that vacation is me going, as a civilian, to JoeLanta, the annual GI Joe based toy show in Atlanta.

The original version of this post was bedeviled by bad links and missing graphics, so I’m just re-writing it and updating it for your renewed enjoyment. Remember that this was mostly written ten years ago. Hasbro had just pretty much ignored GI Joe’s 50th anniversary, and they were fairly well enmeshed in the “throw anything at the wall and see what sticks” mentality with the property.  It wasn’t until way more recently,  with the very successfull GI Joe: Classified line, that anything stuck.

This is the story of a reboot that didn’t stick, but really should have. What you see above is the “free” video that came with one of Hasbro’s Sgt. Savage GI Joe figures.

The Commando Sgt Savage, who came with the video you see above, and apparently no underwear

When you think of “GI Joe,” the first thing that pops into your mind is not “Sgt.Savage and his Screaming Eagles.” He’s the Joe that never really got his due.

One of the quirks of the hobby of collecting GI Joe is that there’s more than one hobby there. You have the collectors of the original 1964 12″ tall action figure, and you have collectors of the 1982 reboot, which shrunk America’s movable fighting man to 3 3/4″ and gave him more individual identities. Nowadays all the excitement and enthusiasm is for the six-inch, GI Joe: Classified line.

The original GI Joe from 1964

There are actually way more divisions than that, but we’ll take the basic route here. The two big lines each had a healthy twelve-year run, and during that run spent time as the top-selling toy in the country.

The collectors of each line have been so numerous and enthusiastic that, at times, they have convinced Hasbro to revive their beloved childhood toy so that a new generation can enjoy their favorite plaything. Continue reading

RFC 102 "FestivAll 2010 Pt. One" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

I hope you enjoy FestivALL, because for the next several weeks you’re going to see a string of episodes of Radio Free Charleston that I somehow managed to crank out on a more than  twice-weekly basis starting in June, 2010.

In this episode you will hear music by Smoke and Mirrors, The Spurgie Hankins Band, The Nanker Phelge, The Kanawha Kordsmen and The Bob Thompson Unit, and you’ll see and hear FestivAll events like the Buswater art exhibit, The Art Parade, The shows at LiveMix Studio, music from Haddad Riverfront Park and The East End Main Street Streetworks Art Auction.

These shows are meant to be self-explanatory, so the production notes were kept to a minimum. I think we wound up with six or seven parts of our FestivALL 2010 coverage…all of it pretty amazing.

The PopCulteer
September 27, 2024

The clarion call to dance has gone out, so  Mel Larch returns with a brand-new MIRRORBALL! You can hear this and more cool music Friday on The AIR.

The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear our shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch devotes her hour of Disco to a delightful and funky random assortment of classic dance tracks from the golden age of Disco. Just like last time, the focus this week is on extended mixes of some of the grooviest tunes ever created.  The show starts off with Quincy Jones and comes to an electrifying end with 5000 Volts.

It’s yet another tasty collection of Disco treats in the grand MIRRORBALL tradition. Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 106

Quincy Jones “Ai No Corrida”
Boney M “Sunny”
Chic “Everybody Dance”
Jackie Moore “This Time Baby”
Yarborough & Peoples “Don’t Stop The Music”
The Crusaders featuring Randy Crawford “Street Life”
Tavares “More Than A Woman”
5000 Volts featuring Tina Charles “I’m On Fire”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Sunday night at 11 PM and throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM plus there’s a mini-marathon that includes the latest episode Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM, it’s Big Electric Cat time as Sydney Fileen delivers a special NEW mixtape edition of her show that pays tribute to one of my favorite bands, Oingo Boingo. Truth be told, Sydney called on me to recommend a few tunes for this playlist.

Before Danny Elfman was an Oscar and Bafta nominated and Emmy Winning soundtrack composer, he helped mutate the theatrical troupe, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, into the trailblazing New Wave band, Oingo Boingo, and before his career as a film composer became his main creative outlet, his band was one of the definitive examples of West Coast New Wave Music.

You will hear the New Wave era hits, misses and deep album cuts from Oingo Boingo, and some tracks from Danny Elfman’s “So-Lo” album, in this fast-moving and mind-blowing mixtape special. I even tipped off Sydney to a few pre-fame rarities by the band.

Check out this killer playlist…

Big Electric Cat 120

Oingo Boingo
“Violent Love”
“Forbidden Zone”
“Ain’t This The Life”
“You Got Your Baby Back”
“Ballad of The Caveman”
“Only A Lad”
“Little Girls”
“On The Outside”
“Controller”
“Private Life”
“Nothing To Fear”
“Grey Matter”
“Who Do You Want To Be”
“No Spill Blood”
“Nothing Bad Ever Happens To Me”
“Good For Your Soul”

Elfman on stage with Oingo Boingo, circa 1985

Danny Elfman
“Gratitude”
“It Only Makes Me Laugh”
“Everybody Needs”

Oingo Boingo
“Just Another Day”
“Dead Man’s Party”
“No One Lives Forever”
“Stay”
“Weird Science”
“Not My Slave”
“Cinderella Undercover”
“Wild Sex (In The Working Class)”
“California Girls”
“Goodbye, Goodbye”

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon,  Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

That’s it for this week’s PopCulteer, check back for all our regular feature, with fresh content, every day, even when I’m on the road doing vacationing.