Month: February 2020 (Page 3 of 4)

The PopCult Toybox

The Hess Truck has become a Christmas tradition over the last 50-plus years, even surviving the sale and rebranding of the Hess Oil retail outlets a few years ago. We’ve been including The Hess Trucks in The PopCult Gift Guide for several years. Now Hess has expanded the line into a new area—plush.

My First Hess Truck: 2020 Fire Truck is a squeeze-activated cuddly plush toy firetruck with lights and sounds that will thrill the youngest kids, and the oldest Hess Truck collectors.

Created as a way to provide a fun, high-quality, and affordable toy for families during the holiday season, the original Hess Toy Truck was introduced in 1964. Ever since, the annual release of a new toy truck is a highly anticipated event and a treasured holiday tradition for millions of families.

Now the perfect start to any Hess Toy Truck Collection is here. Earlier this month Hess introduced My First Hess Truck – a soft and cuddly plush toy truck created with younger fans in mind. It’s more than a truck – it’s a playtime pal and a comforting face at night. It’s a collectable connection to the past and a gift they’ll handle with love and never want to be without!

In classic fire-engine red, My First Hess Truck – 2020 Fire Truck is designed with soft, durable, multi-textured fabric that highlights fire equipment detail, and is stuffed with softness to make it the perfect snuggle buddy. A pair of warm, friendly eyes and smiling grill reveal the playful personality of this new and lovable character.

A tap or squeeze of the “nose” activates two delightful sing-along songs; “The Wheels on the Truck” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It”, that both feature cheerful truck sounds and flashing LED lights. The ladder, side exhaust pipes and tires are easy to grasp by little hands, making toting around their new best friend a cinch. And when it’s time to rest those sleepy eyes, a squeeze of the roof lights activates all the truck lights for an auto shut-off 15-minute night light

This newest addition to the Hess Toy Truck tradition is made in highly limited quantities! My First Hess Truck – 2020 Fire Truck is sold exclusively at HessToyTruck.com for $29.99 plus tax. Energizer batteries and free standard shipping are included.

I ordered one as soon as they went on sale last week, and had it in my hands two days later. It’s a great collectible, but also a great toy for toddlers that can work as a nightlight, as well as a beloved toy. Kids will love this fire engine. The music is not annoying, and the lights aren’t blinding. Collectors will want this to complete their collection, and kids will love what may just turn out to be the first of many plush Hess Trucks.

The features of My First Hess Truck include: baby-safe packaging; child-safe padded internal battery enclosure; Soft and durable outer fabric; Squeeze activated lights and sounds; 2 Sing-along songs (“Wheels on the Truck” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It”); Eleven (11) LED lights that work in flashing or steady modes; Night light – steady light mode with 15 minute auto shutoff timer; Mute feature keeps things silent for rest time; Easy-grab ladder; 2020 commemorative year license plate; Personalizeable keepsake detachable gift tag; 3 Energizer® ‘AAA’ batteries included, pre-installed and activated.

The Overall size is 11.75” long x 5.75” wide x 5.5” high.

You can order My First Hess Truck HERE.

It’s public service time here in PopCult.

In case you don’t realize it, Friday is Valentine’s Day. It’s that special day when you show that special person the special way you feel about them.

I’m reminding you so you don’t screw up and forget it this year.

Friday evening, in and around Charleston, there are a wealth of things that happy couples can take in to celebrate their love. You can listen to live music. You can attend an Improv comedy show, or two. You can witness the love story and subsequent assassination of our 16th president. You can go skating, like you used to in the old days. You can even watch some fine independent wrestling, if that’s what rekindles the flames in your messed-up little hearts.

And if you don’t have a special someone and think the whole holiday is a steaming pile of broken hearts, scroll all the way to the bottom of this post for a music and burlesque show at The Boulevard Tavern.

There are many, many more Valentine’s events than this happening in town, but these are the few that were hand-picked by yours truly because they had complete graphics with dates, times and locations, so I didn’t have to do more than swipe images from Facebook. Even in the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, your PopCulteer has pressing deadlines to deal with.

If you aren’t staying in for a quiet, intimate evening for two, then here are some good ideas to get you out of the house on this special evening…

Tuesday brings a new three-hour episode of Radio Free Charleston The AIR!  You may point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to this happy little embedded radio player…

We have yet another new three-hour Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  This week it’s another show jam-packed with great music from Charleston and the whole world.  Leading off the show we have the first of two tracks featuring The Swivel Rockers. The Radio Free Charleston cameras were on hand just three days ago at Sam’s Uptown Cafe (you may have read about it here), and we recorded what will form the basis for a special video episode of RFC, complete with interviews and live footage.

We’ll tell you about that show as it grows near. In the meantime, The Swivels anchor this episode of RFC, and kick off the second hour of the show. We also have new music by Rel-X and 4OHM MONO, plus classic local tracks from the RFC Archives, deep album cuts from major artists and new music from The Who, The Busters, Mika, Elvis Costello and The Alarm.  Since The Swivel Rockers open the show with a medley of Boone County legend Hasil Adkins tunes, I decided to close the show with the very first local record that I ever played on Radio Free Charleston, way back in 1989–The Haze doing “Big Red Satellite.”

Check out the playlist…

RFCV5006

hour one
The Swivel Rockers “She Said/Chicken Flop”
Maureen and the Mercury 5 “The Keepin’ Kind”
Paul McCartney “Nobody Knows”
Jerry Lee Lewis and Neil Young “Baby You Don’t Have To Go”
The Nanker Phelge “Mr. Creepy”
The Big Bad “Buried My Baby”
Sheldon Vance “Keep On Talking”
Mother Nang “Knee Deep In Wine”
Fletcher’s Grove “Mourning Mountaineer”
Junco Shakers “Sugar Coated”
Rel X “Believe The Lie”
Time And Distance “On My Own”
The Who “Detour”

hour two
The Swivel Rockers “Cinnamon Girl”
Transvision Vamp “I Want Your Love”
Hawthorne Heights “New Winter”
John Radcliff “Useless”
Peter Ivers “Eighteen and Dreaming”
Sparks “No More Mr. Nice Guy”
Scarlett Revolt “Bleed”
The Busters “Bust A Style”
Rasta Rafiki “Calypso Too”
Beggars Clan “Maiden Voyage”
Wolfgang Parker “The Heat”
69 Fingers “Pocket Full Of Change”
The Beat “Dangerous”
Madness “Idiot Child”

hour three
4 OHM MONO “Swandiver”
The Company Stores “So Good”
Stark Raven “Here Comes The Sun”
Elvis Costello & The Imposters “Unwanted Number”
Blue Million “Don’t Leave”
The Shoes “Stay The Same”
The Alarm “Brighter Than The Sun”
Strawfyssh “Netted Fish”
Dexy’s Midnight Runners “Incapable Of Love”
Crazy Jane “Echo Of A Season”
The Beautuful South “Blitzkrieg Bop”
Anthony Hoey “So So”
Mika “Tiny Love”
Hasil Adkins “Big Red Satellite”

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

The remainder of Tuesday will see hand-picked encore editions of our programming. Our Haversham shows are still being delayed by Brexit coverage plus some much-needed vacations, and your PopCulteer is a little too swamped by other assignments to do a new Swing Shift this week. Luckily, our reruns are way better than anbody else’s brand-new shows.

You can keep up with the schedule right here…

Above you see a digital watercolor painting called “She Said.” Of course, there is a story behind it.

Saturday night your PopCulteer and his wife did something we haven’t done enough of lately…we took the RFC cameras out and shot a great local band. In this case, the band was The Swivel Rockers, a Radio Free Charleston legacy band that I first played on the air in 1989. The band recently reunited, and for the last few weeks we’ve been planning to record them for a special episode of the video show that will combine their performance last Saturday at Sam’s Uptown Cafe with interviews that we will shoot in the next week or two.

It will be one of the rare RFC shows that includes interviews and devotes its entire focus to one band.

As a preview, you get the painting above, which shows a lovely young lady from the audience dancing as the band plays Hasil Adkin’s song, “She Said.” If you’re wondering what that sounded like, tune into Radio Free Charleston tomorrow on The AIR, because we’re going to open the show with the Swivel’s medley of “She Said” and another Hasil tune, “Chicken Flop,” and later in the show you’ll hear their take on Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl.”

Today’s art is a quick digital watercolor, done over a frame-grab from the raw footage I shot last Saturday. It was an evening of great music and fun times, and I hope this piece captures that.

You can click the image if you want to see a bigger version.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM, and extends the Sunday night marathon of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.  Sydney Fileen’s weekly two-hour tribute to New Wave Music normally airs Fridays at 3 PM, but today we’re giving your eight extras hours to keep riding that New Wave. At 3 PM, we will present an encore of a recent edition of Prognosis, because show’s host, Herman Linte and all our collegues at Haversham Recording Institute are all still tied up providing stringer coverage to international new agencies covering the Brexit mess. Sydney tells us that we may have a new Big Electric Cat this week. Keep your fingers crossed.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

In honor of Robert Conrad, who passed away yesterday at the age of 84, PopCult brings you an episode of the show that made him famous, and made a huge impression on your PopCulteer, The Wild Wild West.

The Wild Wild West was a hybrid show that took all the trappings of James Bond and the Superspy craze, and set them in the Old West Cowboy days. Later, Conrad would star in many movies and also make an impression as Pappy Boyington in the WWII action series, Baa Baa Black Sheep.

As James West, from The Wild Wild West, Conrad was set to be immortalized in action figure form by The Marx Toy Company, but at the last minute, a rights dispute killed the project. Still, Marx used the headsculpt, quite clearly based on Conrad, for their Captain Maddox figure in the Fort Apache Fighters series (seen at right). Later, the body and accessories intended for James West were used for the villainous Sam Cobra.

For his influence on toys and pop culture, we salute Robert Conrad.

This week we go to late April, 2014, for an episode of The RFC MINI SHOW starring Jody Herndon.

Jody Herndon is a very talented singer/songwriter, and he was also one of the driving forces behind Voices of Appalachia and New Appalachian Radio, which, as you may know, mutated over the years into what we now know as The AIR.

We caught up with Jody at a special evening of local music hosted by Little Nomad at The Empty Glass.  Jody left Charleston about a year after this show, but is still making music a little farther North in West Virginia. Other artists who performed that night wound up on later episodes of Radio Free Charleston and The RFC MINI SHOW.

Getting back to Jody, he’s written some striking tunes and we happily brought two of them to you in this RFC MINI SHOW. Lifting a bit from his bio page, “Jody started writing songs when he was fourteen years old and quickly learned that he had a passion for words. When he went to college he encountered a song writer that changed him forever: Mike Morningstar. Mike’s honesty and eloquence about the beauty of West Virginia, and even more so, the beauty of West Virginians has kept Jody in these mountains singing about life from a Mountaineer’s perspective.”

The PopCulteer
February 7, 2020

The big show in town this weekend, at least for your PopCulteer, is at Sam’s Uptown Cafe (28 Capitol St. in Charleston). The Swivel Rockers, one of the original bands that I played over thirty years ago on the broadcast version of Radio Free Charleston, have reunited, and are hitting up Capitol Street for a special show.

Well, it’s special for me, because the Radio Free Charleston cameras will be on hand to record part of the evening, and the plan is to do a full-length video episode of RFC, featuring the music and words of The Swivel Rockers. We’ll tell the story of how the band formed in the 1980s in Boone County, and how they recently reunited to make music together again.

I haven’t done this very often on the RFC video show. Back in 2008 I devoted an entire show to a one-night-only reunion of Feast of Stephen (who coincidentally share vocalist Bob MIller with The Swivels), and in the intervening years, I think I only did three or four other in-depth, documentary-style shows. I know I featured CYAC, Rubber Soul, and 4tet, but that’s not much out of over two-hundred full-length shows.

So we’re going to talk to the guys, and record the show, and with any luck, I’ll be able to get it all mixed and edited and posted here before the end of the month. I’m a bit out of practice when it comes to making video, but I’m confident that I can create a special show for longtime fans of the local music scene.

The Swivel Rockers still hail from Boone County and proudly carry the mantle of Hasil Adkins. I don’t do too many involved big-deal RFC shoots these days, so this will be a real treat for me, and I hope for the many PopCult readers who make it out for the show.

I even took one of their old flyers from the early 90s and updated it for the event…

That is our shortened PopCulteer for this week. We’re taking time today to gear up for the shoot, but you can still check PopCult every day for fresh content, even in the snow.

As many of our regular readers probably know, one of my other regular writing gigs is writing for Non-Sport Update, the Bible of the non-sport trading card hobby. I’ve been doing this since 1997, and my one informal agreement is that I don’t write about the same things in this blog that I do in the magazine.

However, I can tell you all about the latest issue of Non-Sport Update, which features a cover story by yours truly all about the Mars Attacks: Uprising Kickstarter campaign, which will see a new series of trading cards licensed from Topps and produced by Sidekick Lab.

You can find Non-Sport Update at many places that sell magazines. Locally that would be Books A Million. You can also subscribe and order back issues from our publisher.

My cover story in the new Non-Sport Update will tell you all about this trading card set and the Kickstarter campaign, but I can tell you that the campaign began just four days ago (as I write this) and it’s already met and nearly quadrupled it’s goal, so this set will definitely happen, and the only way to pre-order it and get Kickstarter-exclusive cards and bonuses is to head over now and buy in.

Check out the preview video…

As you can see, this is going to be quite an elaborate set that continues the sage of Mars Attacks with fantastic artwork and great insert cards and other bonuses. You can Kick in at this widget, if you haven’t already hit one of the links above…

Continue reading

Local filmmaker Jacob Fertig, a teacher at Riverside High, a longtime friend of PopCult and a contributor to Radio Free Charleston, has started a crowdfunding campaign to raise a small amout of money to make a warm and touching micro-budget movie about, as he describe it, “homicidal demon rabbits from another world.”

So of course we’re on board. I suggest you kick in a few bucks too.

The main purpose of this campaign is to finance a fun project so that Jake can work with friends and former students and make something that people will find entertaining. Isn’t that what the world needs more of these days?

Well, that, and homicidal demon rabbits from another world.

You can see Jake’s full pitch at the head of this post, and you can find the campaign at THIS LINK. Rewards are bountiful and realistic. A mere fifteen bucks gets you the movie on DVD, and higher contributions can buy props from the movie, rabbit puppets, and if you have a lot of money to spread around, you can even buy a producer’s credit. just like in Hollywood!

Check it out, and support the local scene…for homicidal demon rabbits from another world.

Tuesday on The AIR we deliver new episodes of Radio Free Charleston andNOISE BRIGADE and re-present a couple of recent editions of The Swing Shift to our loyal listeners. You may point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to this happy little embedded radio player…

We have yet another mostly-new three-hour Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  By “mostly-new” I mean that the first hour is all-new and all-local, kicking off with a brand new track by Charleston band, Rel-X.

However, your PopCulteer (and radio host) is a bit under the weather this week, or more precisely, under the Myasthenia Gravis, so I decided to use the second and third hours of this week’s show to re-present an episode of Radio Free Charleston International from 2016, which hasn’t been heard since early 2017.  It’s a little bit of a cheat, but it’s also a great show that I think new listners will enjoy, and old listeners have probably forgotten.

Check out the playlist…

RFCV5005

hour one

Rel-X “Whatever It Is”
4OHM MONO “Entertain Me”
Ann Magnuson “I Met An Astronaut”
David Synn “Sadie The Time Traveller”
Spencer Elliott “Yang”
Todd Tamenend Clark “Among The Manitous”
Chum “Six Feet of Earth”
Mind Garage “Paint It Black”

Continue reading