What I Remember

You know what I realized, beside the fact I’m so distracted I didn’t fully realize at first? I actually sort of grew up with Star Trek the Next Generation. It was one of these shows I used to watch regurlarly. Another show was Friends; it always seemed to be on. Other things I watched were more music related, like the top 40, a lot of MTV and later TMF. I remember being quite fascinated by MC Hammer. In some daily top he featured every evening with “You Can’t Touch That”. I thought it was highly amusing.


In that same period I started to educate myself more in popular culture. I started to check out pop music. I started to check out classic comedy shows like M*A*S*H and Blackadder. I remember being a bit at a loss with music. I had just lost my childhood love; Take That. I started to watch films, on which I’m still hopelessly behind. If only they stop making them for a while. I educated myself in Dutch pop culture skillfully avoiding certain genre’s and the Dutch comedy scene. Then I focused on British entertainment with Queen as my favourite band and Monty Python as comedy group.

That was all very entertaining and I’m finally getting a sense of what’s out there, in popular culture. Strangely, I’ve been systematically ignoring the things I used to watch when I wasn’t consciencely trying to satisfy my hunger to explore entertainment. A great deal had to do with influence from my family. Because I wasn’t stimulated to watch certain things (things being sci-fi), I didn’t realize I really enjoyed it. Yes, I left it on when I zapped by, but nothing told me I did so, because I really enjoyed it. And I certainly didn’t realize I had grown attached to the Enterprise’s crew. Revisiting I found myself feeling glad the cast was as I remembered. Hell, I didn’t even know I made an effort to remember all of them.

Geordie LaForge without and with VISOR!

I never had that with Doctor Who. Doctor Who wasn’t broadcast when I was growing a conscience. (Stupid question: when I didn’t realize I was alive, did that mean I wasn’t sentient?) I have a feeling I once watched Doctor Who, but I can’t actually remember it. I was probably too young to remember (and I was clearly not impressed). I do have memories from watching Star Trek. I do distinctly remember Riker being pulled into (what later turned out to be) black printer ink. I also distrinctly remember LaForge finally getting rid of his visor and being incredibly distracted by his eyes thinking it was not an improvement. I was glad when the visor went back on. Now I feel bad for Levar Burton; his sight was reduced for 75% when he had the thing on. And of course I remember the Captain; Captain Picard. My brother once had a teacher called Picard. I thought that was awesome, weird and funny in equal measure.
I don’t remember specific things from the others, I only remember who they were. Oh, no wait, I do remember watching Independence Day because I was curious what Brent Spiner looked like without all the makeup.

The weirdest memory is that of Galaxy Quest. Weird, because I can’t remember what happened in Star Trek, but when watching Galaxy Quest I did recognize all kind of things to my delight.

Yeah, I don’t know. I’m just sentimental.