BROKE DOWN: BAD TRIPS ON THUNDER ROAD AND ROUTE 66

© 11/23/10. All rights reserved.

I don’t know if we have “all been there,” but one of my friends has taken the same bad trip on “Thunder Road” that I did, and he lived to tell about it. It’s an experience that at least a few married men have had from time to time.

I am talking about, of course, the way in which nostalgia can dim the memories and create marital strife. I bought a video of “Thunder Road” which is, as I declared to my (now ex-) wife upon its receipt, the “greatest movie ever made.” That is what my memory as a twelve-year-old insisted, so I insisted that she sit down and watch this “greatest movie ever made,” complete with one of the “greatest theme songs ever sung.”

That theme song from “Thunder Road” had been an integral part of the lives of most of my male friends as we were growing up. The movie’s story (starring the late Robert Mitchum and his son) is about moonshiners driving fast cars on twisty roads, outrunning the “revenooers” in hot pursuit. What twelve-year-old boy is not gonna like THAT stuff?

Robert Mitchum was the epitomé of masculinity, and the fast cars hauling illicit ‘shine were to die for (which he finally did in the movie). There was really nothing else that mattered to me at the time, and most of my friends have confirmed similar experiences with the movie, BUT—

The movie sucks. I am ashamed and sad to admit that, but as my (ex-) wife and I were watching it, I sensed a growing tension between us as the movie’s action and plot pathetically failed to live up to my nostalgia-addled memories. I felt as if I had become the Biggest Dork in the Universe, having intensely recommended—no, INSISTED—that my woman sit down and watch that dreck with me so I could, once again, bask in the reflected masculinity of Robert Mitchum. At least she had the grace to laugh afterward. I say “afterward,” because she also had the grace to sit through the entire thing (or had the spite to make ME sit through the entire thing). It was AWFUL! I was mortified that I had made such a big deal out of such a pile of crap! And the song was pathetic. It was not nearly as majestic as I had remembered. It sounded as if it had been recorded in a soup can. I may as well have sat down and just eaten a huge pile of feces. Maybe my credibility was so shot with her that it became grounds for divorce!

And, that was not the end of it. Several months ago I was leafing through the video catalogs and came upon the “complete” DVD’s of Season One and Season Two of “Route 66,” which were made in 1960-61 and featured Martin Milner and George Maharis cruising around America in a gorgeous Corvette. It was EVERY teen guy’s dream to get a car like a Corvette and go riding with one’s best pal across America, looking for love and adventure. At the time there was no concern at all about how one would support oneself, much less put premium gas in that Corvette. It simply did not matter. It was way beyond “cool”!

So, I proceeded to order that set of DVD’s so I could revisit another one of my strongest memories, having not learned any lessons at all from my wretched trip down “Thunder Road.” Well, I got the DVD’s out just this past weekend and started watching in black-and-white splendor (like “Thunder Road”). The first episode on Disc One is taken up with the guys’ encounter with various ill-mannered rednecks in southern Louisiana (WAY off the course of Rte. 66!), working on an oil rig out in the Gulf that did NOT explode. Pretty lame. At least, if the oil rig had exploded, it would have been more credible than the contrived brusque encounters with the locals, all worked up and neatly resolved in just 30 minutes, as that was the length of each episode made for TV back then. And, we wonder why attention spans are so short today!

I managed to finish watching the fourth episode on Disc One last night, though I was nodding to sleep before 10:00 PM and have little memory of what it was about. This is just pathetic. I think there are four discs in each of two albums per each of the two seasons with four episodes thereon, which seems to total about 64 episodes. That is about 32 hours of black-and-white TV-watching, all told!  With 30 hours left, I just don’t know that I want to burn that time that way.  It’s not like I can get anything else done while watching, either (other than sleep).

I also have the complete “Upstairs, Downstairs” PBS series and the comedy series, “Keeping Up Appearances.” I also bought a wad of Victor Borge DVD’s. What in the world am I going to do? I used to think he was funny, but now I am worried, because those memories are also ancient. I can no longer trust my adolescent recollections. Victor Borge may have been a fine comedian as well as a good piano player, but should I trust myself?

I can’t even believe I am putting this down in writing and daring to let someone read it who has seen those movies recently and will surely conclude that I am an idiot, just for having paid good money to purchase the DVD’s and watched it again!

I am doomed.