Fair warning: I'm going to repost a clip I've used before (probably over a year ago), and yes, it features Lynda Carter.
No, no, it's okay. Let me explain.
My brother John and I always had a great fondness for terrible music, movies and TV shows. We (ironically) loved Rod Stewart's Blondes Have More Fun album, a stunning collection of sloppy playing, indifferent singing, lazy production and terrible, terrible songs. We'd paid money to see Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Starcrash and Message From Space, and naturally owned the Sgt. Pepper soundtrack--we'd hang up the enclosed poster of the be-jumpsuited Bee Gees and Peter Frampton every time we'd give it a spin. We'd scan the TV Guide listings, hoping against hope for a Granville Van Dusen TV movie or a particularly awful-sounding busted pilot. We even looked forward to the day Up With People would tour locally, just so we could add Bad Theater to our list.
We'd seen it all. We thought.
I can't recall why John and I were lazing around the living room on the night of May 11th, 1981. Mom and Dad weren't home, or at least weren't in the house, which seems rather odd--Dad never went out. So John and I had the house to ourselves, but we had no particular plans. The TV sat unwatched in the background, tuned to its default setting in the Cronkite era, the local CBS affiliate. A syndicated rerun of MASH aired, then the first offering of the network's prime time evening schedule: Lynda Carter's Celebration.
It was just on. John and I had no intention of watching this. TV variety shows could be bad, yes, but it was a routine level of badness, and we were immune to this sort of thing. Once you've seen the horror of Pink Lady And Jeff, how bad could this be?
Still, it was there, and eventually our attention drifted to the TV. We watched, first with indifference, then with a mounting sense of dread, until finally--
--something so mind-warpingly awful it forced us to reconsider everything we'd ever known. We thought we knew the essence of suckitude--Morgan Fairchild in a Brian Clemens-scripted knockoff of The Avengers, Ambrosia hosting The Midnight Special, Neil Diamond and Laurence Olivier acting side-by-side. Hell, we'd sat through The Star Wars Holiday Special with only a moderate level of pain.
But this--this fried brain cells and provoked tears, lingered in our memories through the decades, always there, always willing to make its presence known, a malignant tumor on the surface of all joy and goodness. This was reference-standard bad, and the pain could never go away.
