There’s a popular meme which states “When I was a kid, I thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it really is.”
I grew up in the 80s. I had a Members Only jacket, one pair of parachute pants, an assortment of skinny ties, and some rocking velcro black Reeboks. I lived and breathed cheesy sci-fi, drank coke from my McDonald’s Star Wars glass collection, and went to bed under a sky-blue Empire Strikes Back blanket. I can still see Luke with his blaster drawn, Bespin behind him. I remember watching countless flicks where the hero sank into quicksand and I always made a mental note to heed his advice. Don’t struggle, it only makes you sink faster.
Thinking back, there’s a whole host of things which always happened in my favorite 80s shows that never materialized into problems in my future adult life:
- Getting sucked into a comic book and needing to fight my way back out
- Jealous computers
- Needing to dive at just the right time to outrun an explosion
- Knowing how to pick a lock with a bobby pin borrowed from a woman’s hair
- Outsmarting a killer computer in a dazzling display of logic
- Switchblades
- Anyone from the future
- Fights on ledges over lava
- Getting frozen by liquid nitrogen (or carbonite)
- Escaping by crawling through HVAC ducts
- Falling through the ceiling while crawling through HVAC ducts
- Meteor strikes
- Knowing how to close a demonic portal
- Ninjas
- Using proper form when swinging across chasms (kiss the girl, first!)
- Identifying cursed talismans
- Dealing with bounty hunters
- Crashing my car through a fruit cart
- Being recruited to fight in an alien war
- Getting trapped in the past
Well, okay, I suppose #20 did actually happen.