<\/p>\n
Once the dust and madness of my early 20\u2019s settled into the humdrum of workaday life, I looked back on the twisted avenue of my pathetic childhood and realized that certain elements from my personal pop-culture had been left behind.\u00a0 I began to seek these things, to recreate these particular episodes of childhood, to own them again and put them on a shelf:\u00a0 Movies, TV shows, short films and snippets used as filler in the days when cable networks were just a breath away from being weird-ass local UHF channels.<\/p>\n
Rapidly, the DVD revolution brought much of it to my doorstep.\u00a0 Planet of the Apes: The Series<\/em> and Space: 1999<\/em> were my first big successes, lovingly placed on a shelf after spending hours of my adult life having a booze-addled nostalgia fest. There are still missing shows even further behind the curtain of lost culture \u2013 I\u2019m looking now for Voyagers!<\/em> and Misfits of Science<\/em> — but I\u2019ve ended my search for those series with the knowledge that they, too, will soon be released.\u00a0 There\u2019s no doubt in my heart that everything will soon be on disc or otherwise attainable through the mighty fist of bittorent.\u00a0 The quest to recover these shows has prematurely expired and turned into a simple waiting game.<\/p>\n Some things, though, have been strangely elusive.\u00a0 For years, they existed only on dusty VHS tapes, or even Betamax, deep in the basement of the family home.\u00a0 Unearthed, as with all memories, only to make way for the major changes that rock a family, or a life.\u00a0 Or a central air conditioning system.\u00a0 Or missing cats.\u00a0 Actually, I think a lot more happens in the crawlspace than elsewhere in the house.\n<\/p>\n These last, difficult to locate elements of my youth become increasingly desirable as I spiral into permanent bachelorhood.\u00a0 Some of them sit on the EBay shelves, sure, waiting for some poor sap to spend money on a retired rental cassette from the late 80\u2019s.\u00a0 I\u2019m not settling for that.\u00a0 I have sold both mind and soul to 21st Century America and I fucking expect everything I desire to come to me cheaply and in modern format.\u00a0 Also, I don\u2019t know where my VCR is.\u00a0 It\u2019s probably out in the garden shed, but we don\u2019t go out there.\u00a0 Not since\u2026the incident.\n<\/p>\n These final missing links are: The softcore flick Young Lady Chatterley<\/em> starring Harlee McBride, and the sequel with Adam West;\u00a0 Michael Pataki\u2019s softcore version of Cinderella<\/em> with Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith; a 15 minute animation sequence set to Ravel\u2019s Bolero that, until recently, was unnamed; a short lived Britcom series titled Phil & Arthur Go Off.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n I take you now to the blossoming of my masturbation years.\u00a0 That magical time where explorations of my body finally paid off.\u00a0 The sticky, violent explosion of mind-warping freak-out followed by the immediate quest for something better than Dana Plato on Diff\u2019rent Strokes<\/em>.\u00a0 Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Cinemax and their Saturday nights, polluted with softcore cinema rolling across the screen in your darkened room.\u00a0 Popularly known as \u201cSkinemax.\u201d\u00a0 Upstairs, my mother could always be relied upon to drink herself into an early oblivion, sprawled on the floor, lights out until the wicked sunrise.\u00a0 Downstairs, on a moldy couch, with the door closed, the glow of the TV the only light, the sound down down, Cinemax fulfilled my every early adolescent need.\u00a0 Emmanuel went everywhere, slave girls danced, badly dubbed Italian movies featured round-assed Amazonian women getting railed in public places.\u00a0 Nothing, though, could match 1977\u2019s Cinderella<\/em>.\u00a0 First of my favorites, it\u2019s the musical comedy where a homosexual, cross-dressing, black fairy godmother grants Cheryl \u201cRainbeaux\u201d Smith (70\u2019s z-grade queen and drug-addled freak) a \u201csnapping pussy\u201d in order to win the heart of the bored prince who can\u2019t cum.\u00a0 Between molesting young farm girls (one of whom is a staggeringly beautiful redhead) and being raped by corn cobs (which produce popcorn thanks to the heat of Cinderella\u2019s pussy), the movie is filled with extravagant \u2013 and very well done — song and dance numbers.\u00a0 With laugh out loud lyrics, zany comedy routines, lots of sex, and a rare island (for the 70\u2019s) of hot women, Cinderella<\/em> still delivers for me, even after almost two decades of wall to wall anal-gaping, cum swapping, gonzo porn.<\/p>\n Michal Pataki is at the helm.\u00a0 He\u2019s a major character actor on TV, but hasn\u2019t directed much else.\u00a0 It\u2019s a shame, too, because the man\u2019s a genius.\u00a0 Sex, rape, music, dance, high brow comedy, self mockery\u2026?\u00a0 Cinderella <\/em>isn\u2019t just a skin flick, it\u2019s a strangely capable and enjoyable entry into the b-movie culture.\u00a0 If Pataki were doing this shit today, he\u2019d easily develop a wild cult following.\u00a0 Of course, he wouldn\u2019t be able to do that shit today.\u00a0 Ashes mixed with butter\u2026spreading it slowly over Cheryl Smith\u2019s breasts\u2026 Ah!\u00a0 It\u2019s a masturbatory epic that you can watch from start to finish as a proper film.\u00a0 Try that with Emmanuel In Space<\/em>!<\/p>\n Next on the list is one of the recently found on DVD:\u00a0 Young Lady Chatterley<\/em>.\u00a0 Also out of 1977, the tired old story is twisted into an unrecognizable softporn fuckfest starring the intensely delicious Harlee McBride.\u00a0 She\u2019d grow up to marry Richard Belzer and appear on Homicide<\/em> as the ME before the arrival of hot-headed Michelle Forbes. Otherwise, Harlee isn\u2019t well known at all, which I find to be a cult-culture oddity.<\/p>\n Harlee\u2019s winning trait is a killer body wrapped up in a short-haired, tomboy package.\u00a0 A sort of girl next door beauty that pulled you closer to the screen, pants around your ankles, whenever her character seduced a man.\u00a0 It was you<\/em> that she was seducing.\u00a0 Harlee wants to grab you and smile, camera trailing down her flank, as she grabs your cock and guides it into her.\u00a0 The gasp from the stable boy matches your own.\u00a0 Hers is a gap-toothed, flat-faced beauty that just screams:\u00a0 I am desperate, great in bed, and fully attainable because I don\u2019t think I\u2019m attractive.<\/p>\n You know the type.<\/p>\n Young Lady Chatterley<\/em> doesn\u2019t have the over the top sex of Cinderella<\/em>, with the exception of the sex-scene in the back of the car where you get some great between the leg shots.\u00a0 It\u2019s more of a straight tits and ass flick.\u00a0 The sex is mostly arty stuff \u2013 \u201cerotica.\u201d\u00a0 In Cinderella<\/em>, they\u2019re raping farm girls and they fucking know it!\u00a0 Embrace it!\u00a0 Now, finish each other off while I watch!<\/p>\n Young Lady Chatterley<\/em> is the type of thing you leave behind as you move on to larger, greater things \u2013 like Brittany O\u2019Connell\u2019s first anal scene.\u00a0 You leave a lot behind when you see that, actually.<\/p>\n But, despite that, Harlee stuck with me.\u00a0 She was my type of gal.\u00a0 That whip-crack attitude, the hair, the wicked smile\u2026the fucking tits.\u00a0 Her image burned into my young mind and the sex we had there, as I sat alone in the TV-light, feverishly masturbating, will never be forgotten.\u00a0 Your first porn is like your first girlfriend \u2013 violent, unpredictable, bipolar and too needy to say no to fisting.<\/p>\n Young Lady Chatterley<\/em> was followed by the off-kilter and wholly unentertaining comedy Lady Chatterley\u2019s Lover,<\/em> which was the Cinemax title.\u00a0 It\u2019s now called Young Lady Chatterley II<\/em> and, inexplicably, the first movie often gets the \u201clover\u201d title.\u00a0 The mysterious otherworld of forgotten films often sees shifts in titles.<\/p>\n The sequel was made ten years later, a new direct-to-video release when I was in junior high.\u00a0 I was introduced to the films through the second one, since it was getting the new release play schedule \u2013 every weekend \u2013 and was a bit more risqu\u00e9.\u00a0 Harlee, still in good shape, returns with the same shtick \u2013 tomboy next door who puts it in first \u2013 but this time she\u2019s married and carrying out her seductions behind the back of her clueless husband.\u00a0 Joining the cast for helplessly lame comic relief is Batman Adam West.\u00a0 You also get some Monique Gabriele action, a sci-fi scream queen who cut a wild path through the lowest grade schlock out there.\u00a0 1982\u2019s Penthouse Pet, she\u2019s one of those lovelies that late night horror geeks know well, but her only worthwhile roles were in Deathstalker II<\/em> and Emmanuel V<\/em>, where she gets a turn as Emmanuel.\u00a0 The fifth one is the one where she\u2019s kidnapped by a Central American dictator and forced to serve as one of his slave girls and\u2026Well\u2026<\/p>\n The second Lady Chatterley film features three Penthouse pets, all getting it off, which is very strange because we\u2019re supposed to be all about Harlee, right?\u00a0 She\u2019s Lady Chatterley, she\u2019s getting all the juicy sex scenes\u2026 But she\u2019s eclipsed by these super-girls who all get pounded to death throughout the film.\u00a0 It\u2019s a tough thing when your first girlfriend gets disrespected like that.<\/p>\n Right, let\u2019s move on.\u00a0 Next on my list is something a bit more arty.\u00a0 Back in those youthful days of mine, there were only a handful of cable channels.\u00a0 That\u2019s why I had time to fall out of trees and break my arm and get hit by cars.\u00a0 If we had the cable lineup there is today, I wouldn\u2019t have these metal pins in my elbow.\u00a0 When not watching porn, the only other pay channel I messed around with was The Movie Channel.\u00a0 Joe Bob Briggs is responsible for our subscription to TMC.\u00a0 Friday nights with Joe Bob spinning monster movies, or crazy Andy Sidaris flicks, made my week.\u00a0 I looked forward to his show and the guest spots with cursing, lunatic directors and penthouse pets who bared their breasts. \u00a0Joe Bob\u2019s off kilter, uncensored humor and commentary honed my love for z-grade cinema.\u00a0 He became my cult hero and, thanks to him, I found myself landing on TMC fairly often.\u00a0 The channel\u2019s overall taste in movies synced up with what I was looking for.\u00a0 They insisted on showing films on the hour, though, so they seemed to have an exhaustive library of weird filler to round out the time between movies.<\/p>\n A mesmerizing animated short popped up every month or so.\u00a0 It not only turned me onto classical music, it was a mystery.\u00a0 It was never named, never explained.\u00a0 My search for it began back there in the 80\u2019s and not until this year did I actually find the source.\u00a0 In the short, a coke bottle thrown from a spaceship lands in a pool of muck, sparking an evolutionary march across a wild and surreal landscape that starts with slime and ends with the horrors of apocalyptic humanity as a complete version of Bolero rises and, then, pounds along. Strange creatures, constantly marching forward, morph into others along an imaginary evolutionary chain, always haunted by a monkey who swings from back to back, tree to tree, ever observant until it\u2019s his turn to brutally take control. It\u2019s pulse-pounding and mesmerizing.<\/p>\n It\u2019s from Allegro Non Troppo<\/em>, a strange and somewhat pretentious Italian animated\/live-action comedy intended to be a high-brow mockery of Fantasia<\/em>, but it becomes more of a commentary on the foibles of humanity.\u00a0 The intellectual satire is probably grand and welcome, but lost on me as my purpose was a nostalgic drive to get to the evolution sequence and zone out.\u00a0 Even more than a glimpse between Harlee McBride\u2019s legs, it whips me back 20 years and surrounds me with nostalgic zen.\u00a0 Allegro Non Troppo<\/em> is, coincidentally, also a 1977 film.<\/p>\n I feel I have achieved some level of purity, of grace, in the acquisition of these lost items.\u00a0 The mental and spiritual exercise in seeking them gives my otherwise humdrum life a goal.\u00a0 In finding them, the goal is reached, a rare thing in these sad lives of ours.\u00a0 Cinderella<\/em>, I found out shortly before writing this, is on a fair quality fan-made DVD.\u00a0 Plans for the second Lady Chatterley are in the pipe.\u00a0 Everything has been found, except one.\u00a0 All that remains is Phil & Arthur Go Off<\/em>,\u00a0 an inventive British series that ran for only five episodes in 1985.\u00a0 Each episode is a mockumentary where the titular comedians head out in a journalistic style to deal with topics such as the Loch Ness Monster or, well, French people. Aired once, early AM New Year\u2019s morning, on the Discovery Channel in 1988, I was lucky enough to catch only one episode on tape.\u00a0 That tape, today, still exists, but the endless quest to find the entire series, in some sort of digital-friendly format that isn\u2019t turning to vampire dust, continues.\u00a0 With that acquisition, I\u2019ll be able to return, victorious, to Camelot, and my fair queen who\u2019s fucking everybody in sight.<\/p>\n I can hear it now from the nags and critics in my life \u2013 Nacho, your personal Holy Grail is an obscure British TV show and, before that, a bunch of softcore porn?<\/p>\n Yep.\u00a0 The simple life is one of freedom and power.\u00a0 I don\u2019t care if I\u2019m living in a narrow little trailer as long as I can jack off to gap-toothed 70\u2019s girls and laugh myself sick at gags hailing from the lower grade of Britcom.\u00a0 All hail, ye angels of mindless entertainment.\u00a0 Dance for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[403,353],"class_list":["post-2574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-cult-culture","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2574"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2654,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2574\/revisions\/2654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}