MemeMachineGo!

Pocahontas and I rarely watch broadcast TV live; what TV we watch, we tend to tape and watch later when we can stop it at will and fast-forward over commercials. We've been using a single videotape for this for months, and its reproduction has been getting staticky.

I looked through a stack of videotapes for a spare, found an unlabelled one, and popped it in to see whether it had anything I'd want to keep.

Pocahontas realized it first, from the women's hair: "This is from the eighties!" The hair was either huge, or nearly shaved on the sides and piled up on top. It was notable any time a woman's hair didn't look incredibly dated.

It was a tape my mother had used to record soap operas. We narrowed the date down to October, 1987 -- a news update mentioned Baby Jessica. I'm not sure how I ended up with it; my guess is that I must have said something about how I could use a videotape, and my mother gave it to me, maybe during a visit for my birthday -- the timing would have been right.

We watched the whole thing. But this time, we fast-forwarded over the programs, and watched the commercials. Pocahontas found it scary how many she remembered, when she hadn't been watching much TV at the time. I recognized only a couple -- I almost never watched TV in college.

The people in the commercials were much, much more consistently white than I see today. A diaper ad featured a bunch of toddlers wearing only their diapers, engaged in a faux press conference. I'd be pretty surpised to see a topless little girl on TV these days. One ad for some diet product featured a woman walking on a beach in a swimsuit. So far it doesn't sound any different than today, but here's the thing -- she was merely thin, not emaciated. She wouldn't be in a diet ad now.

There were ads for exciting new products, some still with us -- fudge-dipped Oreos, Dole pineapple-orange-banana juice, some deceased -- Kentucky Fried Chicken's Chicken Little, Fresh Start laundry detergent. The National Enquirer was advertising about their coverage of how Liz was furious that Joan Rivers was dating her Malcolm Forbes, and something about Michael Douglas, but the only thing I remember was that in his picture, he didn't look old.

Police Academy 2 was making its broadcast debut, and there were ads for the River Phoenix vehicle A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon.

The creators of Family Ties had a new sitcom -- Day by Day, about a day-care center. Your lack of memory of it tells you how well that worked out. Pocahontas boggled at the reference to a sitcom called My Two Dads, amazed there was a prime-time gay couple that long ago. I'd never seen it, but had heard of its premise, so I explained it wasn't that. A mother never knew who the father of her child was; after her death, the two men it might have been agree to jointly raise the child. But, then again, a commenter on IMDB wrote:

Greg Evigan and Paul Reiser had this unspoken sexual chemistry, just like my father's, Stan and Randy (though sometimes their chemistry was more that just unspoken but that's a story for Dr. Phil!).

And Phil Donahue was covering the shocking topic of one-night stands.

We had so much fun with this, we thought we should start making time capsules -- each year, we could watch some TV of 20 years ago. So, instead of tossing the tape we were looking to replace, we've labelled it "Time Capsule 2007." (Of course, maybe it's time to set up a PVR, as I'd wager longer odds we could watch something recorded that way in 20 years from now than that we'll still have a working VCR.)