TV GUIDE, December 18-24 1993 Vol. 41 No. 51

"A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life."

- Muhammad Ali

"Rubber baby buggy bumpers!"

- Jack Slater

And I thought 1993 was exhausting the first time around. Frankly I'm sick of it - it wasn't even that cool to begin with. I mean it had its moments but it was no '92 or '94... but I digress. Condensing an entire year into a single summer 30 years after the fact allows one to idealize and minimize and compartmentalize to the point that it all seemed like fun & games & SNICK and then we forget what those raptors did to poor Sam Jackson. Still though, I'm tired, and after more than two dozen(!) posts exploring all the bumps and grinds of '93, I certainly felt immersed in this specific past - as close as we could get to time travel, and as most science fiction has told us, time hopping can drain your energy. And then, whoomp there it went, and as our Summer series comes to a close, so does our 1993.

But wait, there's more! We're not gonna be dragged all the way around the 1993 sun without the reward of Christmas. Not in any full-blown capacity, we're not mindless and/or soulless, but we haven't really covered all of '93 unless we've at least glanced at its Merry end. And so that's what we'll do: I give to you a parade of imagery - a collage if you will - from the Christmas issue of TV Guide from 1993. I'll chime in occasionally as I have very little left to say, so otherwise enjoy this last dance to kill the pain. 

- Paul

As implied, TV Guide published its first issue in April of 1953. And now you find yourself in '93, forty years later as they celebrate an arbitrary anniversary with some lumbering televised event and a multipage "Super TV Trivia Quiz" that I think is pretty solid (the answers to witch I posted immediately following the quiz). 

I typically don't believe in the "shark jumping" theory that you can pinpoint a changeover in a show's quality, but Roseanne sure felt different once Sarah Chalke took over as Becky. The magazine gave her introductory episode a "Cheers" and rightly so, it was handled with admirable irony but what followed was never as clever. 

Halfway through the run of the entire series, they'd already secured their legendary descriptor of "Nothing" which may or may not've gone to their heads in future storylines. But with then-recent masterpieces like "The Puffy Shirt" and "The Lip Reader" just weeks prior, they'd earned their renown for excruciating minutiae.

How do you sum up a year? Determine what the most popular Christmas gifts are of course. This is a pretty shitty representation of such, but this cavalcade of cliché cable TV characters couldn't be mistaken for any other year. 

Always my favorite, the VCR Report. 95% of the new stuff I saw back then were New Release Home Videos, and by December I was able to catch up (through rental) on all the theatrical releases from early '93 that I missed. 

Apart from the regional-specific TV listings, your Local Guide always had space reserved for local ads, and around these here parts we used to have Strawberries Music and Video Store (which was an actual type of store that used to exist 30 years ago where one could walk in and purchase tangible art with their hands.) Typically, though ironically, there were so many movie/CD stores at this time that I had the audacity as well as the privilege to be prejudice against Strawberries for not being "as good as the others." Spoiled brat. 

To reiterate, this is our only chance to explore the Holiday Season of '93, and there are some timely titles: "Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean," The Harry Connick Jr. Christmas Special, A Cool Like That Christmas ft. Boyz II Men, as well as two Animaniacs Holiday Specials. Also The Flintstones made a transparent return (as their live action movie was roughly 5 months away from theaters) for A Flintstone Family Christmas, sparking the ongoing pop culture question, "What exactly are they celebrating?" 

In the end, these journeys into a specific past manage to transcend their superficial nostalgia and even hurtle beyond that point in time and cause me to think of the future. Not the current future as it exists now, but the then-immediate future; the past future, like 1994. When I amplify or celebrate a notch on the timeline, I can't help but think of all that's happened in my life between then and now, but especially all the things that were about to happen; like those first few frames of the Zapruder film, where the world is one way, and then suddenly it's this whole other way. I'm not analogizing the morbid angle, but rather how pivotal any moment in our own lives can be. I think of all that I didn't know then, and then how much I knew shortly thereafter - mostly in terms of Film & Television because that's what we're on about. What happens is less about reminiscing on the past and more about becoming conscious of the present and the future; today will eventually be 30 years ago, and you'll remember it as a day when you didn't know what would happen tomorrow. At least with the benefit of TV Guide we could say with certainty that Encino Man would be on HBO at least 5 times in the coming week.