Sometimes in my weekly Blast from the Past feature, I go on at length about each clip. Frankly, this week, I'm a little tired. And I recently watched several episodes of my favorite 80s soap, Dynasty. And I thought, hey there's a topic. . .and some of those theme songs were really catchy. Here then, with no further input from me, are the themes to the best 80s TV had to offer when it came to cat-fights, back-stabbing, fashion and fortune.
And that will do it for this week! Maybe next week, I'll have a little more oomph. Until then, happy Monday, and have a great week!
Back in the 80s, two of my favorite divas (before we even called them that) were Joan Collins and Joan Rivers. In the days since, both women have managed to hold back the hands of time, each in their own way. Rivers by openly acknowledging massive corrective surgery, and Collins by mostly denying it (but c'mon now. . .). The amazing thing is, they are both essentially the same age: 77 going on 78, only two weeks apart. And while Rivers has taken much bashing for looking plastic, I've gotta say, Collins looks fabulous. Up close, there may be cracks in the spackle, but in this article, she only looks slightly older than she did 25 years ago on Dynasty. Whatever work she nearly certainly had to have done, it was pretty spectacular.
Alas, Joan's age can't be erased. All the hoopla of the Oscars tuckered her out, and she got a self-described case of the vapors. I'm just glad somebody caught her!
[Excerpt]
Glamour Hurts!
Joan Collins usually exits a party on a velvet chaise carried by four shirtless pieces, but it was an entirely different scene at Vanity Fair's Oscar party on Sunday night. The most glamorous being who ever glamoured was led into an ambulance at about 10pm after she started to feel woozy. . .
Back in the early 80s, my best friend Keith turned me on to a show called Dynasty, a tawdry, trashy series about rich people in Colorado. I was hooked from the first episode I watched. Though I missed the (fairly tragic) season 1--only to catch in reruns a few years later--I never missed an episode after that. I even hung on after the fantastic Moldavian Massacre, and the unsatisfying resolution.
Krystle's evil twin couldn't scare me away. The fact that each Carrington offspring was played by two different actors couldn't do it. Stephen's "I'm gay!" "I'm straight" "I'm gay again!" storylines couldn't shake me. I watched until the bitter end, and beyond to the reunion movie. Aaron Spelling was the master of the "so bad, it's good" TV series, from Charlie's Angels to Love Boat, to Fantasy Island, T.J. Hooker and Hart to Hart, I was there. His shows are a huge part of my childhood. And it didn't stop there. Spelling recreated the trashtacular Dynasty in the 90s with Melrose Place, another show I watched until the (again) bitter end.
This re-imagining of the intro to Dynasty had me in stitches. I was literally in tears by the end. It just gets funnier and funnier. Given Dynasty's bombastic opening music, and lavish credits, the juxtaposition of different "stars" just hit my funnybone. Maybe you had to be there.
